Prime Video offers the best in entertainment. This should be fun. Jason Momoa and Dave Bautista go completely down in the hilarious new action film The Wrecking Crew. Inbegrepen by Prime. Yeah, I'm pumped. Find the new Game of Thrones series A Night of the Seven Kingdoms. Based on the bestseller of George R.R. Martin. Look by being a member of HBO Max. So be brave, be just. So whatever you want to find, Prime Video. Here you look at everything. Abonnement is revised. In-house conferencing is 18+. Algemene voorwaarden zijn van toepassing. Let's start with what you need to know with that big story. Ah, yes. The U.S. Department of Defense canceled its contract with Anthropic, or at least said it will cancel its contract with Anthropic, after a dispute over usage. DOD wanted to use Anthropic tools for any legal reason, while Anthropic's contract forbade using them for particularly mass surveillance or autonomous lethal systems. DOD was not prepared to immediately do either one of those, but it wanted the option. It didn't want the option ruled out. We don't know exactly how this turned into a big public fight, but it did. Bloomberg reported that Anthropic wanted to develop autonomous weapons, wasn't against that idea entirely, but it did not feel that its models were ready. So a six-month phase-out has allegedly begun, and Anthropic said it would work to enable a smooth transition to new providers. Department of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said he would declare Anthropic a supply chain risk, which would mean no company that does business with the U.S. military could also do business with Anthropic. That's usually reserved for foreign entities. And then OpenAI announced Friday it reached an agreement to deploy its models on the DoD's classified cloud networks. How did they deal with this? Were they agreeing to let the DoD do whatever it wants? Not exactly. Altman wrote that OpenAI systems could not be used for mass surveillance, autonomous weapons systems, and high-stakes automated decisions because, and I quote, we retain full discretion over our safety stack. We deploy via cloud, cleared OpenAI personnel are in the loop, and we have strong contractual protections. So the idea is they wouldn't be able to do that stuff even if they wanted to because we would be able to stop them. This is a source of a lot of confusion if you don't follow military contracts for a living. Thankfully, Jessica Tillipman does and analyzed OpenAI's agreement, noting that OpenAI could have standing to sue the military if it violates its safety guidelines. The contract requires the DOD to abide by current laws, even if Congress changes them in the future. I thought that was an important point. If Congress makes it easier to do mass surveillance, for example, that would not apply to this particular contract with OpenAI. But possibly more importantly, the DOD can use it for all lawful uses subject to operational requirements and, quote, well-established safety and oversight protocols. That means OpenAI can block any use for its own operational reasons, which gives it leverage. Kind of gives the DOD the space to say, OK, great, we can do whatever we want. But OpenAI can feel like if we ever felt like it went over the line, we have a contractual way to do that. Sarah Shoke notes that policies at foundational AI companies, however, are somewhat incoherent. And so this is a bit at the whim of the person making the decision at the top. And it is only because of the unique nature of this public spat that we even got to see its outlines. Both Shoker and Tillitman agree that the public is probably the loser in this fight, no matter what the outcome. As of Monday, Bloomberg's Dave Lee reported that, quote, no official legal order has yet been made to sever ties and anthropic according to his sources is still hopeful of a resolution so there has been no declaration of a supply chain risk there's been a statement saying that that would happen there has been no cancellation of the contract yet even though there have been statements on social media saying it would be canceled uh meanwhile kind of as a background to all this wall street journal reports that anthropics tools were used in connection with the U.S. bombing of Iran. And another side note, Foreign Affairs noting that China not having any trouble implementing AI and drone piloting and decision making, according to publicly available military procurement documents that Foreign Affairs looked at. China also using it quite effectively in cyber attacks and disinformation campaigns, according to, again, publicly available information. So, Rob, a lot going on here, and I think a lot of misunderstanding easy to fall into, given that there are people saying things quite loudly that aren't exactly the things that are happening. There's a lot. That was a long read. There's a lot of stuff going on here. And to be completely honest, it is not uncommon for companies to go back and forth with the U.S. government and various, even the DOD at various places on, we don't know if this is for us. We need you to add this. We need you to add that. That is not an uncommon thing. What is uncommon is that the government is saying, you know what, these break that, you know, we we've broken down. We're going to go another way and we're going to mark you a supply chain risk so nobody else can use you if they work with us. That is, you know, we don't want to get into the politics of it, but that is a very, very political thing that just happened here to where the U.S. federal government, the Department of Defense is saying that this thing that was good enough for us to use is no longer good enough to use because you're not, we're not using it. The thing that we're actually continuing to use in our ongoing military operations. So, and is it going to be declared a supply chain risk? It has not yet. That seems like, again, some public negotiation. I think the most unusual thing about this, and Justin Robert Young and I talked about it on the Friday Hangout, is that this is all happening in the open. This kind of thing does happen, but it usually happens behind closed doors and we rarely hear anything but maybe a leak or two about it. Yeah, it's like I've worked at organizations that had a very, very large public sector portion of the organization. In some cases, the public sector pieces were the biggest part of the organization. So this type of negotiation is not uncommon to let it play out in public, as you said, is very uncommon. And then the strong arm tactic by the government is like, if you don't if you don't get in line, you're not going to allow you to do business with anybody who does business with us. I don know that I ever heard of that happening before Maybe it has And it just always stay behind closed doors But that that is something that is very very different And it actually causing people to you know to to actually feel some kind of way about open AI for working with this. When you really look at it, my gut tells me that what open AI is agreeing to is probably what Anthropic would have agreed to. It's just, I don't know how we got here because they have an out and Anthropic probably would have had an out if they would have continued to the negotiation. So I'm not sure why this is. It really feels like Anthropic, you're trash to us now. And we're going to let the world know, but we're going to go with this other company that has a deal that probably would be structured very similar to the one you said you need to structure for you. In fact, OpenAI's Sam Altman said, I'm not sure why Anthropic couldn't have made this exact same deal that we made. And I think that we should remember what Bloomberg reported. Like, nothing has actually changed. They don't seem to have actually canceled the contract. They certainly haven't declared it a supply chain risk. They said they're going to. So it will be worth paying attention over the next week or so what trickles out, maybe not as loudly, maybe drowned out by some of the bigger world events happening as to whether Anthropic really has a change in contract. And if so, what are the terms? Do they maintain some relationship? But there's a lot of face saving that's going to have to happen because a lot of people have have made some very loud and angry statements on both sides about all of this. Yeah, Anthropic this morning has already come out and said that even though this hasn't happened yet, we've got lawyers on the ready that it would actually be somewhat foolish for the government for reasons we've already talked about. It's good enough for you to continue to use it, but you're going to block it from everybody else from using it. That doesn't make any sense legally. I'm not a lawyer. I don't play one on the internet, but that just doesn't pass the smell test to me. So there's a lot of posturing here. And I think we'll need some additional days and weeks probably to ultimately figure out what's really happening here. Yeah, I don't think, my gut tells me they will not be declared a supply chain risk, that that was bluster, that they probably won't continue to have the contract they have, but there's a possibility that maybe they get a reduced usage, maybe non-classified usage, something like that. As a bone and open AI ends up becoming the winner of this contract, which could also be bad for the military if Anthropic actually does have the superior product. You should be using the best product, right? So there's that aspect of it, too. Yeah, and we should also be clear that Anthropic is not washing their hands of this. They really, really want this deal. When you're talking about the Department of Defense and you're talking about just the federal government as a whole, it is the biggest single entity that any American company can sell stuff to. So you do not want to not do business. You don't want to lose the federal government. You do not want to be in that situation. So this is not anthropic thumbing their nose at the federal government. I absolutely believe they've got to try to get this figured out. If this deal doesn't go through, that's fine. But there are other deals that can be done and they want to make sure that they're at the table for that. Yeah. And we will keep you updated. DTNES is made possible by you, the listener, thanks to Jeffrey Zilks, Alo, a.k.a. Adam L, Philip Luss, and we've got new patrons, Amado, Chris, Jeffrey, Liz, Khaled, Joe, Sylvia, and Fallen in Sea is returning as a patron. Welcome back, Fallen in Sea, and welcome new patrons! All right, there's more. We need to know today. Let's get to the briefs. Apple began its week of announcements with a new iPhone 17 E and M4 powered iPad Air. The iPhone 17 E has doubled the base storage of a 16 E at 256 gigabytes and adds MagSafe Qi 2 wireless charging at 15 watts. It also upgraded the display to Ceramic Shield 2 and put in a faster C1X cellular modem. Everything else is similar to the previous model, including the $599 price tag. You can order March 4th, shipping on March 11th. The new iPad Air gets Apple's M4 desktop chip, which is one year older than the M5 and the iPad Pro. It also gets support for Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6 and the faster C1X cellular modem. RAM goes up to 12 gigabytes from 8 in the previous model. And yet the prices stay the same at $599 for the 11-inch and $799 for the 13-inch. You can order it on Wednesday, March 4th, and it ships starting March 11th. Yeah, man. I think the big news here is no price increase. Not only no price increase, but RAM increase and no price increase is going to surprise people. That's going to be a theme as we get to the rest of the MWC announcements. These, I understand now why Apple is not doing a big hour-long video announcement. These are spec upgrades. They're nice spec upgrades. It's good that they're holding the line on the price. And if you're in the market for a new iPad Air or a new iPhone mid-range model, the 17e is a compelling choice. But there's no fireworks here. No fireworks. This is a very standard update, which you would expect at models that have been coming out for as long as these have. but I would say that the $599 price hold almost feels like it's a price decrease because we know what is happening with RAM and memory in the world. To get twice as much RAM and you don't pay any more for it, that is something that perked my ears up. Yeah. And yet you're still only $200 away from the base model iPhone with the 17e. So for $200 more, you're going to get a lot more if you go for the iPhone, but $599, not a bad price. It's a high price for a mid-range, which you expect from Apple, but it's not a bad price. Finally, to MWC announcements, Motorola had a few. The mid-range Motorola Edge 70 Fusion is the new mid-range phone with a curved 144 hertz display, 50 megapixel Sony sensor. That has optic image stabilization starting at 430 euros. That'll be coming to Europe later this month. Motorola also announced a partnership with Graphene OS. Graphene OS is a privacy-focused version of Android that doesn't include Google services, Motorola will be selling phones with Graphene OS pre-installed. No word on when or what devices. Interestingly, the only Graphene OS devices you can get currently with it installed, unless you do it yourself, are on Google Pixel devices. So Motorola will be the next line available. Lenovo, or I'm sorry, Motorola also has a book style foldable, the Motorola Razr Fold with a 6200 nit bright screen. inside. It's got an 8.1 inch unfolded display and a 6,000 nit bright display on the outside. So 6,000 plus inside and out by comparison, the Pixel 10 fold has 3000 nit screens. These things are bright which is why they need a 6 milliamp hour battery They also have fast charging at 80 watts when wired You have to use Lenovo turbo power to do that That not a standard You can get 50 watt wireless charging 4.6 millimeters thick when open, which isn't too bad, but it's still about a half centimeter thicker than the Samsung Z Fold. And the camera is great. It is now the highest rated of any foldable camera on France's DxOMark. No price or availability, but it is headed to North America in the coming months. So I'll just say this. That's about 0.2 inches or, you know, about about a fifth of an inch for us Americans who have no idea how, you know, how thick a centimeter is. So here's the thing. We always talk about Apple. Clearly, we want to talk about the iPhone. We talk about Samsung and their phones. We even talk about the Pixel, which is a really, really nice phone. Tell you what, Motorola is making some nice hardware. They are really making some nice hardware. And I can only imagine we're going to start hearing their name more. It's not like they are infinitesimal here in the U.S., but these are some really nice phones. The screens are, I mean, this is like the sun brightness. I mean, these things are really bright as far as these screens are concerned. And the hardware is good. The, you know, their folding phones have been basically giving Samsung a run for its money for years now. And some people even prefer them because they're just they're really fun for a demographic that Motorola seems to have found like that. You know, those young millennials, you know, on down, they really like these phones. So it is interesting to see they just keep coming with it. And, you know, it's, you know, I would say Samsung especially, you got to step your game up. You just came out with a bunch of new stuff that seems old and slow compared to the stuff that Motorola just came out with. Yeah. Don't sleep on Motorola. They are always kind of the Avis to Samsung's Hertz, the Pepsi to Samsung's Coke. I don't know where Pixel fits into that analogy. But yeah, they're good phones, and these are great phones. Would like to know price and availability. That's going to make a difference in how I feel about it, but good stuff. Let's get to the chips. We've got a really important chip announcement from Qualcomm. Yeah, Qualcomm announced its Snapdragon Wear Elite chip meant for watches, but also smart glasses and smart pens. It was built on a 3-nanometer process and features lower power consumption, faster processing, and low power connectivity. In fact, it can do 5G, Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth 6, ultra-wideband GNSS for location, and narrowband non-terrestrial for satellite messaging. It integrates with the Hexagon NPU to support a billion-parameter model on the device. The next Samsung Galaxy Watch will be among the devices to use this new chip. And Qualcomm also announced faster 5G modems, a Wi-Fi 7 chip built on a 6 nanometer process, and it has begun work on its 6G chips for launch in 2029. Yeah. When I look at a new chip announcement, there's a few chip reporters out there that I watch to see how excited they are. ZDNepi and one of them, they're excited by this. They're like, this is a huge advance over the previous wear chip. And it's the kind of thing that can make your wearable device do things that are as good as at least a mid-range phone, if not better. So all of these wearable pins and smart glasses where you've been like, well, they're kind of good. This could be one of the things that makes them very good and makes you say, you know what? I can use this instead of my phone sometimes. Absolutely. And I think when you start to think, well, there's a lot of numbers. There's a lot of things that were said, but how do these things rank? How do they rank to what Apple puts in their devices? These rank very well. These actually, in some cases, outrank what Apple is doing, you know, with their M chips and their A chips. So these are really, really good processors meant for very, very small wearable things that we will just have on our person in the foreseeable future. All right, let's get to Lenovo, which had a handful of announcements as well. Let's start with the more grounded things. There were some new laptops, some new tablets. I'm going to highlight a couple of them that caught my eye. The Yoga 9i 2-in-1 Aura Edition, that's A-U-R-A, 14-inch Copilot Plus laptop with a 2.8K OLED touchscreen. It comes with two Thunderbolt 4 slash USB 4 ports shipping in March starting at €1,799. The Yoga Pro 7A has a force pad that doubles as a drawing surface, so artists might want to take a look at this. That one's shipping in June starting at €2,499. But the thing that's turning everybody's heads are the concepts. These might never arrive, but they're still cool to look at. The YogaBook Pro 3D would let a user view 3D without glasses and then convert 3D images or 2D images to 3D. That's just like a tablet that you can look at in 3D. The Legion Go Fold is a version of the gaming headset with a screen that unfolds from 7.7 to 11.6 inches if you want to. So you can use it in that standard 7.7 mode, or you can unfold it, do a vertical split screen, a horizontal full screen, or even an expanded desktop mode. There's also a wireless webcam that records in 4K Ultra HD, and its trick is that it can stream in real time to a yoga PC so that you can do instant video edits. the ThinkPad modular AI PC turned a lot of heads it has a second screen on the back of the lid that you can pull off and then you could put it where the keyboard is or use it as a separate display you can also pull the keyboard off if you put the second screen where the keyboard was you can pull the keyboard off and use the keyboard wirelessly gives you a lot of flexibility with one screen that always stays in place, but you can move the second screen and the keyboard around. And then there's the AI Workmate concept. That's a robot with an LCD face and a Pico projector. You can interact with it by voice gesture or writing. Yeah, writing is the new one. It can scan digital and physical documents and summarize them, but also use that Pico projector to project them onto the table in front of you. You could then write on the projection and it can scan what you wrote and print it. So you could do things like sign a document from the Pico projection. You have to project it on paper and use a pen. And then it would be able to like say, oh yeah, you signed that document. I'll now send it on its way, just like DocuSign. That is pretty cool. But the one that is standing out to me is this modular PC, because I imagine there's a lot of folks who use their laptop like I do. I've got a 15 inch Dell XPS here. This thing has been a workhorse. It comes off of the docking station, maybe six times a year. I usually use this as a desktop replacement, but there are times when I go out and I need to use it. And most of those times I'm going to be where I'm at for for multiple days. So I can actually set it up and kind of leave it sit. Like I'm going to, you know, visit my parents or I'm going to, you know, you know, one of our other homes or something like that. And I want to be there for a while. So if I can actually just have a device where I can pull off screen to pull off keyboards and make it feel almost like a desktop solution that I using right here with a laptop that is very very interesting to me Yeah it gives you flexibility which sometimes too much choice is a bad thing But I think this is limited enough where you can be like most of the time I just have a second screen because it comes with a stand. So you can put that second screen on a stand. But then if you want to pop out the keyboard, put that screen on, and then suddenly you've got a tablet. But you have a wireless keyboard, just all kinds of different ways you could use it. That one, according to some of the reports I read seemed like it was the closest to actually shipping. So I hope they're right. Yeah. Like I said, it's something I would take a look at if it was an actual thing. This is a concept. We'll have to see if it comes out, but it looks cool. It sounds cool. And I actually have a use case for it. So it could work. It's modular, but not too modular. Not too modular. Well, folks, we want to know what you want to hear us talk about on the show. And one of the best ways to do that is on our subreddit so submit stories and vote on them over at www.reddit.com forward slash r forward slash daily tech news show all right now some quick headlines that are just good to know these are the sorts of things that make you look smart if you know them xiaomi announced a partnership with germany's leica for the leica let's phone along with its new xiaomi 17 and 17 ultra flagship phones with no price increase over the previous model. Xiaomi also in the news for showing off a Vision Gran Turismo concept car, distracting from reports that its car deliveries dropped by 19,000 between January and February, which still wasn't as bad as BYD's 41% drop in February year over year amid declining domestic demand in China. Ouch, BYD, ouch. AMD announced its first three Ryzen AI chips for desktops the Ryzen AI 400 series meant for business PCs. TCL showed off the next phase of its next paper displays, this time incorporating AMOLED to combine high visual performance with the e-ink-like paper quality that is easy on the eyes. Honor showed off the robot phone it had on display as CES, now demonstrating the ability to dance to music and respond with personality as it shakes its head. Honor is also launching its foldable Magic V6 with 6,600 milliamp battery coming in the second half of the year. Samsung showed off digital home key that uses that Aileron protocol. We've been telling you about that in the quick hits here where the things that make you feel smart, now you know what it's good for. Samsung's digital home key will let you unlock any compatible home door lock with a Samsung device. China's MinMax, which also has a model that matches Claude Opus at a Genic task announced it's doubled its revenue over the year and it's at its first earnings report since listing its stock. Ah, so they are making money off AI over there. AWS Middle East announcing an outage after its data center was, quote, impacted by objects. This is believed to be related to Iranian missile launches against the UAE. Microsoft's co-pilot Discord server no longer lets you send messages to contain the word microslop, leading users to spelling it with a zero. Yep, and if they block that, they'll find another way. In a potential advance toward AI data portability, Anthropic just launched a memory import tool. This can bring in memories from ChatGPT, Gemini, and Copilot, and then integrate them into Cloud. It takes about 24 hours for it to work through it, but then now Cloud knows everything that you chatted to the other chatbot about. Motang tipped us off to a story on Tom's hardware about Marriott, one of the largest video game archives, shutting down on March 31st because it can't afford hosting expenses caused by increasing usage of the archive and rising cost of hosting. Madrid-based IMDEA Networks Institute and demonstrated a way to use the broadcast ID from your tire sensor to track your car. Software engineer Gabrielle Cohen has developed a version of OpenClaw that can be run in a container called NanoClaw to improve sandboxing and data security. That is interesting. That could be a way to make OpenClaw a little safer. Well, folks, we end every episode of DT Nestle from Share Perspectives. Today, Mike Austin has another use case for a touchscreen MacBook. Yes, Mike writes, I'm a software engineer and I use my MacBook to write apps for iOS and Android. I often debug my code using the iPhone slash Android emulator that runs on the MacBook. It would be awfully handy to be able to tap, drag, pinch and manipulate my app on the laptop screen in the same way I do on a physical phone. I remember years ago in the early days of the iPhone when MacBooks weren't all that common and the vast majority of Apple's revenue was for the iPhone. The common response to who needs such an expensive laptop was people who write iPhone apps. Maybe that's who needs the touchscreen MacBook. My two cents, Mike in Austin, Texas. Tom, my gut tells me that there's going to be a MacBook that's going to come out with a touchscreen. And within, I don't know, three or four hours of it coming out, everybody who was anti a MacBook ever having a touchscreen will talk about how useful the touchscreen is. And they can't imagine how they've gone literally for decades without having them. Yeah. It may or may not be exactly the same people in those cases, but there will be an overlap for sure. Absolutely. I have a touchscreen. I touch my laptop darn near, I would say every hour. there's something i just go and i'll just flip flip with my thumb i regularly do it yeah i have a chromebook with a touch screen and i almost never use the touch screen part of it i do use it from time to time but it's it's rare but your your daily driver is your macbook though right my daily driver is is this yeah is my desk setup where even if that was a touch screen it's like too far out of the way because i'm on a regular old monitor because even my monitor is you know my my plug-in monitor it can act as a touch screen i don't think i have it configured for that because but the fact that I can just go and like scroll, like for my vertical monitor, that's actually, I'll look at like code and comments. I'll just put my thumb and just, you know, literally I've got my thumb and I'll just swipe up and down. It's just easier to do. I mean, I could absolutely do it with my, with my mouse scroll wheel. It's just, I don't even think about it. It's just something that I do. The downside is that I got to, you know, I got to put Windex on my monitors and clean them off every couple of weeks, but I use the touchscreen, you know, but I've been using touchscreens. I don't know for, 10, 12 years now. It's been a minute. Yeah. Maybe that's it. I, it's not, I just need to get that critical mass of usage and then I'll start using it more. What are you thinking about? Got some insights into a story. Please, please, please share it with us at feedback at daily tech news show.com. Yeah. Big thanks to Mike in Austin for contributing to today's show. Thank you for being along for daily tech news show. If you're not a patron and you see one, thank them for keeping us in business. You can become a patron. It's easy. Patreon.com slash DTNS. The DTNS family of podcasts. Helping each other understand. Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.
