Does the Head of Xbox Need to Be a Gamer? - DTNS 5211

0:04Rob Dunewood: This is the Daily Tech News for Monday, February 23rd, 2026. We tell you what you need to know. We give you some important context and we try our darndest to help each other understand all this stuff.

0:15Andy Beach: Today, Andy Beach on OpenAI using ChatGPT for corporate counterintelligence. And does Xbox need to be run by a gamer?

0:23Rob Dunewood: Don't answer too fast. I'm Tom Merritt. And I'm Rob Dunwood. Let's start with what you need to know with the big story.

0:33Rob Dunewood: Friday, Microsoft announced the departure of gaming CEO Phil Spencer and the promotion of Asha Sharma into that role. Gaming president Sarah Bond will also leave. Gaming EVP Matt Booty will become chief content officer reporting to Sharma. Spencer reportedly decided to step down last year and has spent several months helping Microsoft plan the succession. The Verge reports that the announcements were supposed to happen today on Monday, but IGN got wind of the story and was going to publish it on Friday, so Microsoft just made the announcement on Friday. Sharma most recently was running Core AI for Microsoft.

1:13Rob Dunewood: That has caused a lot of people to have some concern about that. Her team implemented DeepSeek on Azure within days last year after it broke through to the mainstream. But previously, she worked as VP of product at Meta and the chief operating officer for Instacart, where she helped the company IPO and focus on profitability. Her reputation isn't as an AI person in particular. Her reputation is you need a competent manager who can get a product launch and convince users to use those products. Bring in Asha. It doesn't matter what the product is. She's good at managing teams and getting them to do things.

1:50Rob Dunewood: Now, doesn't mean there's a lot of common concerns about a new person running Xbox. For example, will Microsoft remain committed to the console? Sharma wrote of the return of Xbox in a memo to employees, writing, we will celebrate our roots with a renewed commitment to Xbox starting with console, which has shaped who we are. And then, of course, about those AI concerns, she wrote, as monetization and AI evolve and influence this future, we will not chase short-term efficiency or flood our ecosystem with soulless AI slop. Games are and always will be art crafted by humans and created with the most innovative technology provided by us.

2:33Rob Dunewood: But is she a gamer? She wrote that, well, she's no Xbox P3, that's Phil Spencer's gamer tag, but said her top three games were Halo, Valheim and Goldeneye and her gamer tag Amra Sasa unlocked its first achievement on January 15th. So she's been playing Xbox games since then. It has been used to play 30 titles most recently Forza Horizon 5 over the weekend. Collected the majority of achievements in narrative games so maybe she likes those. Firewatch, Gone Home, What Remains of Edith Finch. Apparently dabbled in Minecraft and Vampire Survivors. So Rob, how do you feel about the Xbox today?

3:17Andy Beach: Tom, as someone who has been a gamer for all of my memorable life, I have no concept of memory before having a 2600. I think that came out, I was five. I know my dad had a Pong game before that. So for literally for my entire life, I've played games, had consoles. I feel much, much better. that Xbox is deciding to continue to make Xbox because I honestly couldn't have told you if I would have I probably would have bought the next Xbox but I think I confidently before this weekend could have said that would have been the last one I buy because if I don't need to have an Xbox why have an Xbox if everything is about playing in the cloud and all this kind of stuff but I like playing on the Xbox I used to be a PC gamer but one of the reasons I was able to give up PC gaming is because I was able to buy a very high-powered Xbox and play all the games that I wanted to play on that device.

4:11Andy Beach: And I've liked doing that to the point to where it is extremely rare that I play games on anything other than an Xbox or a Nintendo Switch, whatever you, I'm a console player. So for me, this is great news. I thought that the direction Microsoft was going Xbox Anywhere, I never really bought into that, as many gamers didn't. And I think that this is a good day.

4:32Rob Dunewood: Yeah, I think a lot of the reporting I've read is that Sarah Bond, who is also leaving, that may have gotten lost in all the reporting, but president of Xbox gaming, Sarah Bond also leaving, that she was the person championing the Xbox Everywhere message. And it looks like Asha is trying to refocus on don't worry, we're focused on the Xbox. Honestly, I never thought the theory of what Bond was pushing was bad. In fact, I think that is the future. If you want to survive, you probably shouldn't just bet on the console. You should bet on being the place where you play all the games. And it's not a crazy idea to say like Xbox can mean more than just your console.

5:18Rob Dunewood: Anything could become your Xbox. but the way they marketed it led to your reaction right there's there's a way to say that that makes you go oh cool i will always have an xbox and yet i will also have more options for xbox right instead you got the oh you're taking my xbox away uh and i think that probably in no small way

5:37Andy Beach: contributed to her departure and it wasn't even that i felt like oh you're taking my xbox away it was more of you're making the xbox not matter yeah right and that's that's the problematic thing I mean, can you imagine Nintendo without a Switch or Switch 2 or Nintendo 64 or whatever console they've had? It's like the console is the thing. And then the games that they put out are the thing. And then everything else. You can you can cloud play some stuff a little bit on Nintendo. But but the game, the console is the thing. And that was the thing for me with being a console gamer. I wanted to get the next Xbox.

6:15Andy Beach: I wanted to get the next PlayStation. I wanted to get the next switch or whatever Nintendo device was coming out. And, you know, all of this, everything's going to be in a cloud. You can play on your phone. You can play this. That's all good. I think what Microsoft should have been doing, and maybe this is where the turnaround is, we're going to continue to push stuff into the cloud. But we are going to be about making pieces of hardware that sit under your television that are fairly high-powered computers specialized in playing games, which is what I think a lot of gamers want. Yeah.

6:44Rob Dunewood: And honestly, a lot of this stuff, like so many things these days, is about psychology, not reality. I don't expect that Microsoft is going to change their actual strategy one little bit. I never believed that they were abandoning consoles or hardware. And I thoroughly believe that they are not abandoning cloud gaming or making an Xbox service something that you'll want to get on other devices. but it's all about how you message it and how you roll it out that's going to change. And that's what Asha seems to be very good at in the other roles that she's been at. I mean, Instacart is a huge example of a company that went from, oh my gosh, Amazon's going to crush it to, oh, wait a minute.

7:24Rob Dunewood: That is a viable, they have turned grocery delivery into a viable business to the point that Amazon is struggling to figure out its grocery delivery strategy, even though it owns Whole Foods.

7:35Andy Beach: yeah this is like it's a good day for me because the other part of this is that i like being able to just put a disc into something and just playing a game now that's that's the announcement has nothing to say about that sure so we may not see those anymore but it is always kind of nice to be able to just have i have this piece of hardware i can put it in my truck and i can play games as i cross you know earth i don't necessarily have to have an internet connection to play not many of the games you do but a lot of games you don't you can just get on the console and just play the game. And I think that Nintendo has showed Earth that this is how you build game consoles.

8:11Andy Beach: They are ridiculously successful with it. I believe that the original Switch has just passed the PS3 maybe as the most popular gaming device in history. Xbox was never going to be that with the way that they were going. It still may not, even with all these new changes. but it does make me say, you know, like I was in a camp that I'm probably going to buy the next Xbox because it's me. This is what I do. I play Xbox darn near every day. I am a gamer, but you have somebody who plays Xbox every day. They're saying I can see a world where I don't buy an Xbox. And that's kind of weird because I am an Xbox gamer.

8:49Rob Dunewood: And you don't want that. I mean, the fact is I watch my nieces and they don't, they don't care what device it is. They just want to play their game. And I think that is inevitable, that we're getting to a place where people won't care about that. But along the way, you don't want your core audience saying, well, I'm not going to buy an Xbox because you know what that means? You're not going to be using Xbox to play your games. You're going to find your games elsewhere. So I think you have to acknowledge that core audience and you have to serve them. And so far, Asha is saying all the right things.

9:23Rob Dunewood: Of course, it's one thing to say them in a memo and it's another thing to carry them out. but I think she would be smart if she continues to make you want to buy another Xbox because you know who the best marketers for Xbox as a platform for gaming whether it's a console or not it's you it's the it's the console gamers exactly so the question is is she a gamer if she just got

9:46Andy Beach: her first gamer tag January 15th no she's not but here's the thing she didn't have to be as long as she has somebody that is a strong lieutenant right next to her that is and understands the ethos of of how gamers game and why we like what we like and why we do the things that we do. As long as, as long as she understands that, I think that she could be fine because this is just, as you said, you know, a lot of it might just be marketing on stuff that Xbox is already going to do, you know, you know, with, with new leaders. Sometimes, sometimes you have to, you just have to have new leadership because the old leadership is kind of, you know, they kind of have a stink around them.

10:20Andy Beach: And, you know, I don't want to say that Sarah Bond or Spencer had to stink around them, but they had you know gamers weren't really into what they were doing so it might have been time for them to move on and you put a new face there and if you can get back to making those people who ultimately made xbox what it is what it is if they're happy you're probably doing okay yeah i

10:39Rob Dunewood: think spencer uh leaves with better feelings uh amongst the gaming populace because he did some good things that that people enjoyed uh he was planning to leave a year ago so i think that's really him just saying you know what i'm going to move on and do something different uh i've been here for 30 years you know time to try something new whereas sarah bond i i don't know if she was forced out or if she got tired of it but that one feels more like yeah we we just need to make it

11:04Andy Beach: clean how about we give you an incredibly large amount of money to not come into work yeah well

11:12Rob Dunewood: what and what do you last thing what do you think of matt booty uh because he now takes on the mantle of the chief content officer, which Phil Spencer was a fairly good steward of, but not perfect. And a lot of people feel that booty is not better.

11:32Andy Beach: This is one we will have to see. We will just have to wait to see. I think what probably a third of the market wants, a very vocal third, is that they wanted you to go outside of the company and get somebody that's fresh to all of this, It's not somebody that's already, well, you can't possibly do any better because you were already there. And if you could have done better, you would have because you're already there. But sometimes when you do get put into a new position in the same place, you are able to implement things in a way that you weren't before. So I think this is going to be a wait and see.

12:02Rob Dunewood: And it's not impossible. They don't still go get someone. You know, this could be a Stephen Elop situation where, you know, Matt Booty is in this role for now. Right. And they don't want to overshadow Asha's takeover. They want to get that firmly in place. And then maybe Asha hires her own person. We'll see.

12:23Andy Beach: Could very, very easily see something like that happen. Yeah. Well, folks, DTNS is made possible by you, the listener. And today we got to thank Jeff Wilkes, Tim Deputy, Brandon Brooks, and our brand new patrons, Raj, Thomas, Patrick, and Joe.

12:38Rob Dunewood: Oh, love on Mondays. Amos always gets us the update on all the new patrons that came in. So big welcomes to all y 'all and other patrons. Please welcome them in at patreon.com slash DTNS.

12:54Rob Dunewood: All right, there's more we need to know today. Let's get to the briefs.

12:57Andy Beach: We've got to give a shout out to RWNash for posting this on our subreddit. The Wall Street Journal reports that laptops with system-oriented chip made by NVIDIA will hit the market this year from Dell, Lenovo, and others. NVIDIA announced partnerships with Intel last year and won with MediaTek earlier this year to design the chips. While NVIDIA, of course, provides the GPU, the laptops will be targeted at gamers who want powerful but power efficient devices.

13:21Rob Dunewood: I don't know what to make of this. I feel like it's being received as, oh, NVIDIA is making CPUs, which they kind of are. They're certainly getting in the business of selling them. But Intel and MediaTek are really making the CPU part of this suck. So it is, I think, a good indication that NVIDIA is not abandoning the consumer end of its market. Yes, it's going to continue to rake in loads of cash from GPUs that it sells to data centers and otherwise. But it wants to bolster up that side of the business that is consumer oriented. And it knows it's got the best GPUs in the game for gaming. so why not work with socks that are designed for that to take advantage of the power efficiencies of arm etc so i don't know why this wouldn't be a good alternative to other laptops when you're

14:14Andy Beach: shopping around when these come this was an announcement and it's telling me that we're going to continue to do the stuff that we were already kind of doing um is is what i got from

14:24Rob Dunewood: this now it's not an announcement it's wall street journal saying hey we found some insider stuff too So it's not even NVIDIA's messaging, right? I think that's important to point out.

14:34Andy Beach: Yeah, that is a good point. But to me, it seems like they're doing what they were already going to do. But if there's news around it, that's not a bad thing, you know, because this is not a bad thing. People are going to perceive this in a bad way that we are not abandoning, you know, things that don't have anything to do with AI directly. so that to me that's that is a good thing from nvidia because you know it is nvidia it used to be we thought of nvidia and and graphics cards for people who played games or did high power graphics that's not what we think of them today we think of them as a company that is powering pretty much every ai platform out there so this is just good news to let them say hey you know like it's not them saying it's the wall street journal saying it but they are still in the market to do stuff that regular people are using PCs for.

15:20Rob Dunewood: And, you know, the news is that Dell and Lenovo are going to make these, you know, to your point, I can't imagine NVIDIA is unhappy that that news leaked out. In fact, NVIDIA might be responsible for that news leaking. Finland's Donut Labs released the first independent test of its solid state battery meant to provide faster charging without the risk of things like thermal runaway. the promise here could be that if it all works out you could have an electric vehicle battery that could fully recharge in five minutes be safer at all times than current lithium ion batteries that use liquid electrolytes it could also retain capacity longer even with that faster charging you tried to charge up a liquid electrolyte lithium ion battery and you'll ruin the chemistry if you charge it too fast and they work better in freezing temperatures Your solid state battery isn't going to have its electrolyte freeze.

16:17So what did we find out?

16:19Rob Dunewood: The test was conducted by the VTT Technical Research Center of Finland. That is a government owned operation. It found that the battery could charge from zero to 80 percent in 9.5 minutes while retaining full capacity. It could charge from zero to 80 percent in four and a half minutes and still retain 99 percent of its capacity. and the tests were not using active cooling. With lithium ion liquid electrolytes, you have to have active cooling, a lot of the time anyway. These tests used passive cooling. They were either using two pieces of aluminum or just one metal cooling plate. Now, Donut Labs claims the batteries could deliver 400 watt hours per kilogram.

17:00Rob Dunewood: That would be a big increase from the current 200 to 300 that we get from EV batteries and last for 100 ,000 charging cycles versus 3 ,000. Those claims have not yet been tested. Also, VTT did not confirm the chemistry of the package. That doesn't mean we think they're lying about being solid state, but they're solid state and they're solid state. Are they doing a few things to work around this? And is there anything else in that chemistry that we didn't know about? VTT didn't look at that. It wasn't supposed to. They were just testing how fast these things charge and what the capacity did. They didn't also test the address the possibility of dendrites growing inside of a solid state battery that could lead to electric shorts.

17:40Rob Dunewood: Again, that's not what this test is for. But those are a couple of things we'd like to see in future tests and Donut Labs plans future independent tests. It's got a whole series underway called the I Donut Believe series.

17:54Andy Beach: So this isn't stuff that we're going to see in EVs next week. This is probably still years off. Even if this, you know, if everything here is, it does what they're saying is doing and all the other testing that needs to be done. It's, oh yeah, this, this is a viable replacement for what we've been using. If this wins, this is ground changing because the, you know, the, the, the problem that a lot of people who don't have EVs yet is that I'm not waiting for half hour to charge my car. We still think that you're going to go to the gas station on E and need to fill the whole battery up. That's not the truth, but it's how people who don't have EVs still kind of think.

18:34Andy Beach: So if you're removing that four and a half minutes, 99 percent efficiency on that, you know, on a four and a half minute to get you to 80 percent charge that removes that. And that will open the door to a lot more folks. And the other thing, too, if you're going to go from 3000 charging cycles to 100000 charging cycles, that argument that, well, are you going to have any resale value on your vehicle eight years later when you want to get something new? Can you still sell it? That kind of goes away if you can recharge this thing that many times.

19:06Rob Dunewood: Yeah, I don't know. Lab says this is production ready. They're just trying to convince people. I can't imagine they don't have behind closed doors meetings where they're trying to convince EV makers. But maybe the EV makers want public sign off on this. I don't know what to make of them. They were exhibiting at CES. They passed most of the sniff tests from most of the people that I talked to. But there were a lot of these questions of like, well, it could work, but I'd like to know about dendrites or I'd like to know about the chemistry. And so I think this series is meant to address all that.

19:44Rob Dunewood: But I'm like you. I hope it does. I hope this is, and I don't think it's any kind of scam or anything like that, but I hope this is everything it appears to be based on what they've promised, because of all the points that you said, it would be amazing.

19:58Andy Beach: A major reason why people still don't buy EVs is that I'm just not willing to wait. Like my parents live what you would call in the country. It is probably for them the closest gas station. is probably 11 minutes away from where they live. And that's getting on a freeway to drive to it. So I'm not going to the gas station, as they will still see it, and have to sit there for a half hour to 40 minutes to charge my vehicle up, even though they just drove away from a home with a ton of power where they could have charged up there. In their mind, it's just not an option. This would kind of remove that, because now you've gone from 30, 40 minutes down to four minutes to 90.

20:37Andy Beach: Yeah.

20:38Rob Dunewood: Well, and people who don't have garages, live in apartments and stuff like that, if you can charge up in five minutes, then you don't have to worry about charging it at home if you don't want to. Most people who charge at home never have to think about charging. But if you don't have that capacity, that can be a problem. Some people who have them in apartments say it's really not that big of a deal. There's enough chargers out there. But this would turn it into the same thing as gas, like you said earlier.

21:00Andy Beach: Oh, and then we've just gone through Snowmageddon. It seems like we've got part two that is at least on the East Coast today. Yeah, yeah. These things do better in cold weather. That is a that's huge because we see stranded, you know, stranded EVs all the time when there is enormous amounts of snow on the ground. And it's really, really cold. We know on this part of the country, in the eastern part of the country, we had a three week period to where it didn't really get above freezing. Yeah, that's that's not uncommon for parts of the Northeast. But when you're talking about from like North Carolina up, that that is fairly, fairly uncommon.

21:36Andy Beach: So so, yeah, I think that if these things can actually have a lot better performance in, you know, in cold weather, that's a good thing, too.

21:43Rob Dunewood: Fingers crossed.

21:45Andy Beach: Ahead of Wednesday's Samsung Galaxy Unpacked announcement, the company said it will pursue a multi-AI agent approach,

21:51Rob Dunewood: including offering the ability to launch perplexity with the phrase heyplex which will integrate with select samsung phones and third-party apps now why did they tell us that now it's they're going to tell us more about this multi-agent approach does it mean that perplexity is

22:07Andy Beach: getting shouldered off the announcement stage by open ai or gemini or somebody part of it is that why wait until wednesday if we can tell you today i mean it's part of it is that you know if we can get in the news and get people talking about it earlier it's it's always a better thing so it's like there's no reason not to announce it now let's go ahead and announce it now and then announce it again in a couple of days because folks are going to talk about it because that that's a big thing i mean you know samsung is kind of tied it's you know you know you know tied it's it's profit you know it's tied a lot to google yeah um so the fact that they're telling you hey you can say hey keyword you know that new keyword is not the g-o-g-l-e one is now a new keyword that is kind of big so this is going to make the news And a lot of people like us are going to be talking about this today and tomorrow and definitely after the announcement officially on Wednesday.

22:54Rob Dunewood: I don't think we'll talk about it as much Wednesday, though, because it's already been talked about is my is my thinking. And that could be on purpose. That could be if we held it for Wednesday, it would get drowned amongst all the other things we're talking about with the S26. And it could also be Google saying, we don't want you to make a big deal of it during the announcement. We want to be the star of the show.

23:17Andy Beach: that's that's actually really true because google they carry a lot of weight with samsung a lot of weight and it's like hey we know you're doing this little thing with perplexity just go ahead

23:27Rob Dunewood: and tell them that on monday yeah and perplexity is like actually that's fine we we want to not be put next to gemini in your announcement we want to have our own special announcement that makes sense yeah uh speaking of google anthropic and google are cracking down on open claw users that access their LLMs with OAuth instead of an API. Now, OAuth, in this case, pretty much means you log into your account and pay a monthly subscription. Or in the case of OpenClaw, your OpenClaw agent goes and logs into your account and uses your monthly subscription. This could be$250 or$200 a month at the top end for these if you want the most options and the fewest limits, which OpenClaw users probably would want.

24:08Rob Dunewood: The problem is that those accounts are based on a human pace of usage. Yeah, they're charging you$250 a month, but they're probably still breaking even or losing money on these based on how much you use them. Let an OpenClaw agent go in and use them at the pace of a machine, and suddenly they are definitely losing money on how much you are able to use this. Anthropic began enforcing its terms of service on February 20th, saying OAuth can only be used in Claude code and Claude AI. You can't use it in OpenClaw. As for Google, multiple people on Hacker News and elsewhere claiming that Google has restricted or banned their account from Gemini after using OpenClaw with it too much.

24:48Rob Dunewood: No explanations have been given and Google has not yet publicly commented on it. Some users are switching to API access where you pay per token and the companies aren't going to mind because that's how they're pricing that is like use more tokens, you pay us more. But that can get costly really fast. A lot of other OpenClaw users are defaulting to local models. In fact, a lot of them doing Chinese models like Kimi or Quinn.

25:13Andy Beach: This to me is kind of like, you know, have you ever go to the all you can eat restaurant? They base all you can eat legally off of what regular people eat and they have an average. This is what the regular person can eat. And we're going to go 15 percent above that. Totally. If you're not a regular person and you can eat significantly more than what regular people can eat, We've actually rented into our terms of service that we can kick you out based off the amount of time you've been here. And that's kind of what's happening. You know, you know, OAuth is all you can eat for people, not all you can eat for computers.

25:47Andy Beach: They can do things infinitely faster than people. So I think that this it makes sense. I get exactly why they're doing it. I know some folks are upset, but the folks who are upset knew that they were getting over because OAuth was never really intended. In fact, I won't even say that because I don't think that it was necessarily thought about. It was like, we're going to allow you to log in this way. But now that they're thinking about it, like, you know what, let's change these terms of service, which they have done. This is not this is not a new thing. They're now enforcing it because they're losing their shirts for people who are paying not per token, but paying.

26:17Andy Beach: Here's the account that you can use as much as you want for the month.

26:19Rob Dunewood: This is the problem with being nice, too. Right. Anthropic had this in their terms of service and people were taking advantage of it. But Anthropic wasn't kicking them off because they were like, we don't want to be the bad guy. If you're just experimenting and trying something out, then OpenClaw comes along and suddenly at scale, many people are trying something out. Anthropic has to say, OK, that's enough. We have to enforce our terms of service. And now a bunch of people are saying, why now? You didn't mind earlier when I did it. Why are you doing it now? And that's a no win argument that, you know, for either side, really.

26:54Andy Beach: Fat Joe says it best. Today's price is not yesterday's price. That's basically what it is. It's like, we know you were getting over before. Thank you for getting over before, but no thank you anymore. We're just not going to allow you to do this because it is costing us drastically to allow you to use it this way. When you want to hook your bot up to our bot, use API access. That is essentially what they're saying. And, you know, you can be mad that they changed what they're doing, but you can't be mad at why they're doing it. It completely makes sense.

27:27Rob Dunewood: Well, folks, if you want honest reviews from people who actually buy and live with technology, don't miss Live With It. I know a bunch of you have signed up and started watching it or listening to it. Sarah Lane hosting a weekly look at the tech she and others have been using in their daily lives. Good stuff on there, folks. Pet trackers. Rob did a review of one of his old webcams that he still uses. If you want that kind of product review, listen to Live With It wherever fine podcasts are found or watch it at YouTube.com slash Daily Tech News Show.

28:02Rob Dunewood: All right, now let's get to these quick headlines that are good to know, might make you look smart if you know this stuff.

28:09Andy Beach: Nintendo's release of Pokemon FireRed and LeafGreen for Switch is topping the Nintendo eShop charts.

28:15Rob Dunewood: U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth called Anthropics CEO Dario Mode to a meeting Tuesday morning over a disagreement about how Anthropics tools are allowed to be used under its military contract with the DoD.

28:29Andy Beach: Whisperflow launched its mutation app for Android, which hovers above the keyboard in a bubble you tap to activate.

28:35Rob Dunewood: Chinese smartphone maker Honor is going to show off its first humanoid robot at MWC in Barcelona this week.

28:43Andy Beach: Uber has launched Uber Autonomous Solutions meant to help other companies that have autonomous fleets to get insurance, roadside assistance, and AV mission control.

28:52Rob Dunewood: Oh, it's like their AWS. Ahead of its March 5th announcement, Nothing posted a photo of the back of the forthcoming Nothing 4A. So you get to see the partially transparent design and a new LED notification bar. PayPal has taken meetings with banks amid unsolicited interest in buying the company. Oh, I guess somebody wants to buy it. Do they want to sell? Bloomberg's Mark Gurman says Apple is considering a deep red for the next iPhone, but that a foldable phone, which we might get this year, would come in your classic silver, white or black options.

29:24Andy Beach: Wired has a good read about engineers pulling up the first trans-oceanic fiber optic cable, which went into service on December 14th, 1988 and went out of service in 2022.

29:34Rob Dunewood: And the conversation has a good write up of how nation states use the same algorithms meant to target advertising in order to sway public opinion in rival states to their own aims. If you're not aware of this, read it. And if you are aware of it, read it again, because it's important to stick that kind of stuff in your brain when you're getting algorithms feeding you stuff all the time. All right. Those are the essentials for today. Let's dive a little deeper.

30:00Andy Beach: A report from the information says OpenAI may be using chat GPT to help track internal leaks. Andy Beach explains why this is AI as corporate counterintelligence.

30:09Rob Dunewood: Andy Beach, thank you for sneaking back in with the intelligence. Tom, who is watching the watchers? The patrons of DTNS, I guess. I don't know. So, yeah, this is a fascinating story because I think you can over interpret it as as open AI being extremely paranoid. But the fact is, almost all the companies do this sort of thing. If they are at a certain size and at a certain value and on the cutting edge, you are going to see them have a policy for trying to stop leaks from getting out to their competitors. There's a lot of industrial espionage that goes on out there. And I'm sure OpenAI is probably trying to take advantage of some themselves.

30:56Rob Dunewood: But walk us through how OpenAI is using its own tools to help do that.

31:01Tom Merritt: Yeah, I think that was the fascinating part of this read for me, which is they're not only a tech company, they're in a business that allows them to potentially use that technology for its own sort of counterintelligence. So in this case, they are deploying a specialized internal version of ChatGPT that is analyzing publicly available news and information, but then it's correlating it with internal documents and communication metadata that it also has access to. So it has access to the corporate email identity, meaning that it can go look at things that are in published shared communal spaces, SharePoints or Dropboxes, what have you, as well as the emails that are going back and forth.

31:46Tom Merritt: And it's able to analyze that and align it with the news stories that are out there to see if there are particular cohorts or groups of people or individuals that are talking about a specific topic just before it got leaked.

32:02Rob Dunewood: I think this is fascinating because I think the creepier version of this is what I would have expected first, which is a machine learning situation that looks at patterns of behavior. And there's that kind of thing in security already to look for intruders on your network. And I could see them doing something like that, where you're suspecting people based on aberrant behavior that you wouldn't expect from someone in that role. this is more like gumshoe legwork it's just stuff that would take us a lot longer to do the llm can sift through in in an hour or so and go hey this leak got published and this person was the only person who accessed that document in the time period that it would have taken uh you can also

32:45Tom Merritt: look at things like language patterns so if there's language used in an internal communication and then that shows up it can draw a line between those because pattern matching is one of the things that an LLM is designed to be able to do. Yeah.

33:00Rob Dunewood: We often, at least I often talk about the limitations of LLMs because people get a little imaginative about what it might be capable of versus other kinds of models. But an LLM is just that. It is looking at patterns and saying these phonemes tend to associate with these phonemes. So asking it like, hey, does this leak over here look like anything anyone would have written internally. And it's like, yeah, it kind of looks like that. That, that seems like a really good use of the technology. If, if a bit creepy because it's surveillance, but yeah.

33:35Tom Merritt: Right. I think we all get a little creeped out by surveillance, but it is fascinating as a forensic tool and not one, you know, that, that we've necessarily seen before. Like totally agree with you. Like I would have expected the approach to be more of, you know, how are humans logging and interacting systems overall? This is much more about what are they talking about and how does that line up to publicly available information out there, which is not a way that I've seen this approach before.

34:06Rob Dunewood: It's using the language part of the large language model. Do you think this is the kind of thing that could be replicated outside of a corporate institution? Because one of the advantages here is that the corporation has access to all of your email and all of your patterns and all your file accesses and all the logs and everything.

34:24Tom Merritt: I mean, they obviously can be a first mover in this kind of novel use case of the LLM because they own it. I think depending on how successful this is and whether it bears fruit as something that isn't just a expensive compute cycle and actually helps them prevent leaks at some point, we may see it become a more productized thing for other companies to be able to then add to their system. In other words, any system that I can add the identity with a corporate, I now have the ability to add agents that can better scrub and understand that data. And then I just need to correlate it against public data.

35:07Tom Merritt: So in theory, it is absolutely the kind of thing that a Microsoft or a Google or even like a Salesforce could potentially put out in the world as a first party product if they have the right privacy and identity pieces in place to be able to deploy it.

35:26Rob Dunewood: That's the key though, is having access to all of that data. I guess where my head was really going with that question was like, can the government you do this like because they the government has access to a lot of data and we

35:41Tom Merritt: don't even know exactly what data they have access to sure yeah i mean uh who knows what a government is doing on top of it i would say inside of a corporation it is more difficult to expose this data without it being without them being implicitly turning it on i guess yeah so so i could see a corporation turning this on and having it as a product that they buy for security peace of mind this is like a chief security officer's dream uh to think about how you go uh run this kind of uh um service internally inside a company um but without their implicit permission it would become

36:23Rob Dunewood: very difficult i suppose within a government uh it's similar to a corporation or any other kind of enterprise where you could find out if your own employees are leaking it could be used that way uh i just i'm not sure i'm curious if there's there's other uses that could be put forth in in espionage and law enforcement to uncover spies or help keep your spies from being uncovered uh the only thing i could think of off the top of my head is an anonymous note becomes harder to stay anonymous when you can just set forth an llm on the internet and say uh find anything that looks like that and then tell me who it is.

36:59Tom Merritt: Yeah. Well, I think we've been slowly stepping into that world for a number of years anyway, where it becomes easier to unredact things that are redacted. And this is one more step. I think the difference between those two is here, it's almost a real-time action of being able to watch the data back and forth, whereas that has typically, what you were describing is more of getting a large dump data dump at one time where something has suddenly been publicly exposed either illegally or legally in some way and then churning it and mining it for information that comes out of it so it's more of a post-process whereas this almost becomes just constantly running in the background yeah yeah yeah sub-process

37:45Rob Dunewood: Well, Andy, thanks for going over with this. I know this was freaking some people out. So I'm not sure if you calmed them down at all, but at least we understand it a little better and appreciate that.

37:56Tom Merritt: Yeah, I mean, my first read of it was definitely on the creep factor. But I also see that there are legitimate reasons that you want to do this. And there are companies like we both have worked in around technology enough to know that there's always going to be highly secretive companies. and there are reasons you want to keep trade secrets internalized. So I'm sure there will be, again, I'm sure we'll learn more as we see it deployed. And it'll be interesting to see if we see a story pop up in the next year around how something was either exposed, like this was the leaker, or something was even potentially blocked because they were able to predict something in advance.

38:42Rob Dunewood: Pre-crime situation. Interesting. Yeah. And honestly, it's always been good advice to just assume that the company has access to anything you do as an employee of the company. I think Jesse Burst's anchor desk wrote about that back in 1997 or something. So that is as true today as ever. Andy Beach, if people would like to get your information as an email in their personal or corporate email, how would they do it?

39:09Tom Merritt: They don't even have to worry about there being any leaks there. But if you want to read about the intersection of AI technologies and media tech infrastructure, I write about it on engines of change.ai. That's my sub stack.

39:23Andy Beach: Thanks, Andy. Thanks, Tom. That was a good conversation. You like that one? I like that one. I was I was wanting to join in because I know CISOs and corporate marketing, corporate communications managers. They would love a tool like this, because if you've got a big company, it is just so hard to keep stuff inside the company. You got to go figure out, you know, big companies literally have a team of people that their job, their 40 hour a week job is to go figure out who said something. That is literally what they do. So this is a very interesting conversation for me. Folks, we want to know what you're thinking about.

40:04Andy Beach: So if you've got some insights into a story, please, please, please share it with us at our email at feedback at dailytechnewsshow.com.

40:12Rob Dunewood: Yeah, Charlie wrote in, I only ventured into Horizon Worlds on my quest a couple of times. They weren't for me, but I used the Supernatural app for a couple hours a day daily. And yet, what does Meta kill? Several of their very popular Quest apps. Can you tell I'm bitter? LOL. It's very frustrating to see what they're doing with their VR platform. And in my opinion, they're killing it with a thousand little cuts. I hope it survives, but I guess time will tell. What did you make of Meta deciding to move Horizon Worlds to mobile?

40:50Andy Beach: they're done with the meta. They're not done with it, but the metaverse is it's, it's one back burner. That is not what drives the company anymore. Um, they're, they're doing, they're doing other stuff.

41:02Rob Dunewood: Yeah. Uh, well, big thanks to Andy beach and that Charlie dude for contributing to today's show. Thank you for being along for daily tech news show. You folks keep us in business. Uh, shows winding up right now. So you got time to go become a patron, do it. Patreon.com slash DTNS.

41:22Andy Beach: The DTNS family of podcasts, helping each other understand.

41:27Tom Merritt: Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.