Meta Developing Virtual Mark Zuckerberg - DTNS 5246

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2:20Robb Dunewood: states.

2:31This is the Daily Tech News for Monday, April 13th, 2026. We tell you what you need to know, give you important context, help each other understand.

2:39Robb Dunewood: Today, if you didn't think real Mark Zuckerberg was enough, Meta's developing a virtual Mark Zuckerberg to give employees feedback. Oh, that's no one will have a problem with that at all, will they? Not at all. Not at all. I'm Tom Merritt. And I'm Rob Dunwood. Let's start with what you need to know with the big story.

2:56So Financial Times talked to four people familiar with the matter about the fact that Meta's Superintelligence Labs division is building a virtual version of CEO Mark Zuckerberg as a demonstration of a product that could deliver photorealistic 3D characters that you can interact with in real time. This isn't just to make a Zuckerberg. It's to make a system that would let any of us do this. You know, content creators, movie makers, museum operators, I don't know, whoever. But Zuckerberg is working on the project himself to help train and test it. In fact, Financial Times says he spends about five to ten hours a week coding for this and other projects at Meta.

3:37It is being trained on his public statements, his recent strategic thinking, and of course, his voice, his image, trying to capture his tone, mannerisms, that sort of stuff. One source said the avatar could be put in place to talk to and give feedback to employees. Sounds like that might be one way they try to test this out. Scaling the tech has been difficult, though, because it needs a lot of computing power. You're going to see that as a theme in today's show. There is not enough computing power to do the things that you need to do, that you have the technology to do with these tools. And one important thing when you've got a virtual avatar is you don't want lag.

4:14When you talk to it, you want it to answer you right away.

4:17Robb Dunewood: So here's the thing with this. It's not interesting to me that Meta is working on a photorealistic 3D character that you can interact with. Is that not interesting at all or just not as? Let me tell you, I'm not surprised that they're doing that. This seems like something that Meta would and probably should be working on. What is interesting, or I would say maybe a bit surprising, is that Mark Zuckerberg is so gung-ho with using his own self, his own likeness to be the face of this. I say that because there is an air in the night, so to speak. People are kind of pushing back against AI and things they perceive as being fake.

4:56Robb Dunewood: And when you are the CEO of Meta, the biggest social media platform on earth, you're going to get a lot of that angst pointed at you just because you run the company. So do you want to go and now put your face out and say, not only do I run the company where you're going to push your angst towards me, I'm going to be the poster child for this new thing that we're doing. I think that I would have maybe thought a different way because you could very easily do the work and just not necessarily socialize the earth like what Meta is kind of doing here. OK, but but who should do it then? I don't know that you I don't know that I wouldn't want to sign up.

5:32Robb Dunewood: I wouldn't want to be the exactly right. i would not want to be the face forward so i kind of think that's where he and i mean part of it is i'm not surprised that mark zuckerberg would love to talk to himself frankly like that i'm sure is a little bit of this as well uh he may or may not think very highly of himself i i don't know uh i don't know him that well i've never met him uh but i think there could also be just the idea of like well rob you know rob would you like to do it no thank you like maybe he's like well you know what let i will be the guy since you know everybody is a little queasy about maybe it being them or we don't want to use somebody without their permission zuckerberg steps up says yeah i'm the guy i can see that i can also see hey here's a dump truck of money we're gonna let you be the guy it could just be somebody who doesn't run the company doing it so and i just think that maybe i'm just i'm sensitive to the fact that there are people that's a good point pushing back against this so the fact that if there's any issue with it, he was going to get it regardless because he's the CEO of the company, but now you're going to get it extra because you are the face of the thing that the company that we have angst with is doing.

6:41I kind of feel like that's the reason though, is like, well, I'm going to get it anyway. Like what's, what's a little more.

6:47Robb Dunewood: I didn't think that far down the, uh, you know, experiment. So that could be part of his way. I want to get it anyway. Might as well go ahead and let me be the face. And I don't have to give a dump truck of money to somebody else do the poster job. So it could absolutely be that. But I just, I thought that was interesting. Um, and, but like I said, the fact that they're working on this, somebody has got to be first. Somebody has got, this is work that is going to be done. And even though there are a lot of people right now who are saying that we don't like it, they're going to build it and they're going to, they're going to figure out how to get it right and figure out if they can make it profitable along with people having the angst and just saying, I, you know, I want real stuff.

7:21Robb Dunewood: I don't want, I don't want to talk to a fake boss. I want to talk to my real boss if I can, since this is potentially targeted towards internal employees. So it'll be interesting. But as I said, this is something that I expect that Meadow would be working on. I kind of like, oh, that's interesting that the CEO is so gung-ho with it. And it's not even the fact that he's working on it for as much time as he's working. I would imagine that someone like Zuckerberg spends an enormous amount of time doing meta things, more than the 40-hour workweek. So this may not be the, you know, a significant percentage of his time as other folks who just, you know, work that 40 hours usually would think.

7:58Robb Dunewood: But that's a lot of time. And even doing that, there's going to be some angst. So just having your face on it, I kind of think that it's like, I don't know if it would have been me. But you know what? I'm not running a multibillion dollar company that social media hooks into billions of people on Earth. Neither am I. So we are we are both on the same side of that page. yeah, I think one of the dangers is having him be the test case. And granted, this is sources say, this isn't meta coming out and announcing it. This isn't their PR push or anything. But one of the dangers of that getting out is people will think, oh, this is meant to replace people in the workplace, right?

8:35Like, I won't get to talk to my boss anymore. And I doubt that's what they're imagining. I think they're just trying to make an avatar that will be useful for whatever somebody wants to use it for. And so my mind immediately went to like, ah, the customer service kiosk in the airport, the information desk at the museum. You know, you get to actually have a more lifelike interaction with somebody in situations like that. I'm sure there's hundreds of other situations that people listening are thinking of. Send them to us, feedback at dailytechnewsshow.com. But it does make me wonder, because that's the other part of the story that caught my attention is we just saw them pull horizon worlds out of vr i wonder if that's because this needs so much compute power that they realize well we're not even though this is what we wanted with our virtual horizon world is is video conferencing and chat with real avatars we are far away from that being something we have the compute power to provide to everybody.

9:37Because it struck me as dissonant. They're like, wait, didn't they just pull out an avatar chat and they relegated it to a phone? And maybe that's because of the fact that this needs so much compute power that it's going to have more limited rollouts, more limited use cases.

9:52Robb Dunewood: I think two things are true. I think that, yes, this requires enormous amounts of compute and Horizons just wasn't the thing any longer. So that was going to happen regardless of this. is just, oh, hey, there's extra compute. Let's go use that. I think that those two things probably came around around the same time. They might have initially been separate conversations, but at some point they became part of the same conversation. So that just makes sense. One thing was dying. Another thing we think we can grow in, let's take some resources from A and put it to B and see if we can't plant our flag there.

10:28Yeah. It's a good reminder that them getting out of Horizon Worlds doesn't mean they're getting out of making virtualization or anything like that. Not at all.

10:36Robb Dunewood: DTNS is made possible by you, the listener. Thanks to Chris Allen, Reed Fishler, Larry Bailey, Zayed Fuzan, our new patrons, Nick, Zayim, Julia, Fat MK, Carl, Gene, and David. We got a raise from Ed and returning as WTF was I thinking. What were you thinking? Leaving. We're glad to have you back. Good. And thanks for the raise, Ed.

11:02Robb Dunewood: This episode is brought to you by Capital One. Capital One's tech team isn't just talking about multi-agentic AI. They already deployed one. It's called Chat Concierge and it's simplifying car shopping. Using self-reflection and layered reasoning with live API checks, it doesn't just help buyers find a car they love. It helps schedule a test drive, get pre-approved for financing, and estimate trade in value. advanced, intuitive, and deployed. That's how they sack. That's technology at Capital One. You're a pro at running your life, at committing to your workout, at showing up every day. At Bombas, we're pros too.

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13:58There's more we need to know today.

13:59Robb Dunewood: Let's get to the briefs. Purported leaks of dummy models of the foldable iPhone show it using a wider format than most book style foldables. Well, Huawei is beating them to the punch if Apple is, in fact, planning this. Huawei released photos of the Pura X Max foldable set for release in China next week on April 20th. It didn't share specs, but it looks to be roughly a 1611 aspect ratio. Samsung and others are also expected to give us these wider foldables. And I'll be honest with you, Tom, I'm for the wider foldable. I don't know that I want to carry a, you know, like a phone in my pocket all the time.

14:37Robb Dunewood: That's a little heavier, has all these screens on it to use. And I don't have a keyboard and a mouse and all that kind of stuff. But I do know this. If I could actually have a, you know, a smaller device that maybe could fit in my pocket for those times that I want to use it in addition to my phone that I can open up and then put a keyboard and mouse in front of it. The wider screens actually kind of make sense. So I'm interested to see when Samsung and others get into actually making tablets foldable so they can just fit into smaller bags when you carry them around. Yeah, I think that this feels more like a tablet form factor, although it's splitting the difference, saying like, hey, instead of having to carry a big old tablet, you can have something that's closer to phone size, but get some of its tablet features on the front screen.

15:20I have the original Pixel Fold. It is 17.4 to 9 aspect ratio. So it's a little wider on the one part, but it's narrower than the 11, right? So it's a little taller than the 1611 aspect ratio to its width. I've never felt that the Pixel Fold, that that version of the Pixel Fold anyway, was too wide. I do think some people will think this is too wide if they expect a phone format when it's folded. But I think you made a good case for why there's a section of people who are like, yeah, I don't care about that. What I care about is having that tablet form factor, that tablet feature available and something that's a little easier to carry around.

16:10Robb Dunewood: even though I am an Android user, I have always really liked iPads. I've always, I have one now, I've always had an iPad. I do use Android tablets as well, but I really like iPads. And this to me seems like this is a foldable iPad, something that I can take with me literally everywhere because it, you know, do I carry two phones today? No, I don't. But there were times when I always had two phones on me. Sometimes I'd have even three if I was testing stuff. So I could very easily see myself getting to a situation to where I am an Android user, but I would get this iPhone if it folds out and it feels like it feels like an iPad and I can do iPad style stuff with it.

16:51Robb Dunewood: That is attractive to me. Now, I may be a much smaller use case than what Apple is intending this for and the thickness of it and the size of it might be a limiting factor. But for someone like me, I've already got ginormous hands anyway, so it's going to feel just fine in my hands. And if I can open it up and I just have more screen real estate, which is when I'm opening these things up, I want as much screen real estate as I can possibly have. And this seems like it's going to be a big tablet that folds in half as compared to a small phone that folds in half. Now, the news here, let's remind listeners, is Huawei releasing this foldable, but it's like the first in a series.

17:30Granted, Rob, probably not going to fly to China to buy this, right? So if Samsung does this, where does that put you? Like, yeah, we're probably going to get this from Apple as well based on that dummy model. But what about Samsung doing the same thing?

17:44Robb Dunewood: Same way. I actually had the opportunity to spend a fair amount of time with the TriFold. I thought the TriFold was a fine device. It was three grand. So it was, you know, extremely expensive. And I don't know that that device, like the Fold hasn't, Like the actual Samsung fold has not replaced my galaxy S 25 ultra. I like just the candy bar style phone, but if you can get me something that if it folds twice or folds three times, but it opens up and it's actually the size of like a, you know, 11, 12 inch, maybe even 13 inch tablet. That is just of interest to me for portability. I tend to carry a sling, like a shoulder bag with me, almost everywhere I go, a 15 inch tablet, a 13 inch tablet is not going to fit in that this would.

18:28Robb Dunewood: And you know, And it's also very easy to put a small folding keyboard in that bag as well. So the use case for me is entering in when this thing actually is more of a tablet size than an actual very small phone. Like even that trifold, when it opens up to a 10-inch tablet, I have a 10-inch tablet behind me that is 10 inches, the same size. But if I can get a little bigger than that, that is a plus for me. Yeah, same. The Pixel Fold use case for me was, you know, I'm on an airplane or in a hotel and this is my phone and I want to unfold it to watch videos, you know, or something like that or even do some work.

19:06And it kind of gets me there. But it always feels a little bit small, you know. And so I like the idea of giving me something a little bigger. Now, will I be okay carrying around that wider form factor as my phone interface will then become the concern for me there?

19:21Robb Dunewood: Yeah, I'm thinking of, you know, I just did a test with Dex. Go watch Live With It. It's the one that's up right now. Give me a monitor, you know, or give me something I can open up and put a keyboard in front of it. And I'm really doing some work. That is attracting me. Maybe that's why I'm kind of gung-ho for these wider form factors, because I can see where these things eventually could go. Yeah. Speaking of Apple, it's Monday, which means we get a weekly report from what Mark Gurman's Apple sources are telling him. And this week, the big news he's talking about are the smart glasses. Gurman's sources say there are four designs that Apple is testing.

19:58These are not going to shock you. Large rectangular frames, similar to the Ray-Ban Wayfarers from Meta. And then a slimmer version of that, which is similar to what Apple CEO Tim Cook wears, which, of course, they're going to want to test a design that the CEO would like. So that makes sense too. And then the other two are large oval or circular frames and a smaller version of oval or circular frames. Those are actually more similar to what Steve Jobs used to wear. And they're also testing a bunch of colors. Gurman's sources mentioned black, blue, and brown, but they're testing other colors as well.

20:31The idea is that the functions will integrate with Siri. So you'll be able to talk to the glasses, talk to Siri through your iPhone. You will have to have an iPhone connected to it for them to work. But they would use computer vision to feed info and context. as well as acting like headphones, taking photos and videos, all the things that you're used to smart glasses being able to do. But the camera being tested has an oval shape instead of a circular shape and is surrounded by lights, which I don't know if that is meant to help the image or to let people know you're recording or both. The plan is to announce them by the end of this year with a release in 2027.

21:07Robb Dunewood: Makes sense that Apple would actually put out glasses that people would like to wear. You know, people have been wearing glasses for hundreds of years. is probably not going to stop anytime soon. So if you're going to make a wearable, make them attractive like something folks would want to wear. That's really the thing that Meta has stumbled upon. They look nice. They look like sunglasses. They look like things that you would wear regardless of whether they had the computer in them. So this, to me, it just makes sense. These frames are the ones that are common. You and I are wearing the oval-ish, square-ish type ones, not necessarily the thicker frames, But I can see glasses that look like what we're wearing be something that they're coming out with.

21:50Robb Dunewood: I can see definitely the oval ones. People have styles. They like the big bulky ones. They like what we're wearing or they like them round or they like them oval. So this makes sense. It tracks. Yeah, it definitely tracks. The curious part that you can't tell from German's story and wouldn't be able to tell from German's story because he's not going to have photos of them. Or do they look like Apple? right he talked about how apple has this icon look that you know your your airpods pro and and everything they make fits into that look how do they make their glasses look like apple but not look odd you know look look like all the things that you're talking about i wonder if they'll look like apple um because the other thought is that people like you and i wear glasses because we need them to see there's something that they're going to be on our face.

22:39Robb Dunewood: And we're so used to having whatever style of glasses suits our aesthetic that if just because they're smart, I still want them to suit my aesthetic. I don't necessarily want the glasses that I'm wearing to look like Apple or to look like anything. I want them to look like stuff that, that I want them to look like Ray-Bans because I like Ray-Bans. I want them to look like Wayfarers because I like those. I want them to look like Gazelles because I like Gazelles. That's what I want them to look like so it'll be interesting if that's what apple does or apple being apple and say you know what we got so much juice that we can come up with our own salad glasses and people are going to like them simply because they're apple glasses so they're they are a company that can do that i don't know that google could get away with making a google style of glass i really want those google looking glasses on my face no but it's not crazy to get away with that yeah it's not crazy to talk about apple in the same breath as a ray-ban or a gucci or anything like that yeah so it'll it'll be interesting microsoft plans to simplify its windows insider program that lets users test out features before they are pushed out in general updates the release preview stays the same that's where you can test out builds of windows that are close to release the beta channel remains but will push out features to all users at once instead of doing gradual rollouts and the dev and canary channels are being merged into a single channel called experimental, users of that channel will be able to turn some features on and off, as well as choose the future platforms option that gives you the earliest preview of Windows in development.

24:07Robb Dunewood: And finally, you'll be able to switch between the three channels without having to perform a clean install, thanks to in-place upgrades in most cases. That last is probably the most attractive to me. I'll be more willing to dive into an experimental Windows install if I know it is easier to back out. No, not in every case, probably not in my case is what it'll end up being, but, but having that option is good. Uh, obviously this makes it simpler to know what you're doing and everybody in the beta channel is going to be happy that when a feature comes out, they get it. They don't have to guess whether they're going to be in the rollout or not.

24:43Uh, the, the big question in the register put it in their writeup of this is, does this make it easier for Microsoft to process the feedback from the users of these preview items and therefore try to avoid the bugs that they have been having?

24:59Robb Dunewood: I think there's that. I also think that the more people will use this, more people will essentially use this because it's easier to use. To be clear, it's not hard to be in the developer program, but you do have to pay attention to what am I installing? Okay, is it this? Is it that? Is it the other? So if now, if you just, I sign up for this thing because I want to get the updates and whatever they are, they're going to come my way. I can turn stuff on and off fairly easily. That just means that there are going to be more people who ultimately get into the program and do more testing. So I think two things are happening.

25:31Robb Dunewood: They're doing this because we have a lot of issues that we're rolling stuff back. But if we have more people who are doing the testing in the first place, maybe we'll have less that we'll need to roll back. So I think this is kind of, you know, it's a two things at the same time here. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And honestly, it's not lost on me that that experimental platform basically turned the Canary channel into the future platforms option, which I think is smart, too. So rather than at install deciding like, oh, do I want to go Canary or do I want to go dev? You just go experimental and then you can decide to turn on that future platforms option or turn it off.

26:03And that makes it easier as well. So I think all of these are good changes.

26:06Robb Dunewood: It makes it makes perfect sense because there are times I am someone who gets into these development programs. I don't always want to have all the stuff. So I don't want to do that. That messes up my workflow too much. This one seems kind of cool and it's not going to jack me up if I need to back out of this. So this makes me feel a little better about just, you know, just letting whatever comes come because I know I can turn it off within it and I don't have to do complete uninstalls. Yeah. Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI or Stanford HAI has released its 2026 AI Index Report. And among many findings, I definitely say if you want to get the full information from this report, you should read it.

26:44It's a great report. There's lots in it, way more than we could cover today. But these are the things that caught my eye as things that might surprise some of you out there who have certain assumptions about AI. And Stanford HAI does a really good methodology of looking at technical evidence, not just surveying people. They're like testing these things themselves, independent testing. AI capability is accelerating and reaching more people. 90 % of the leading frontier models were created last year. So if you are using a model from before 2025, you're not using the most capable models by far. Also, the performance on SWE Bench Verified, which is a coding benchmark, improved from 60 % to near 100 % over the past year.

27:33So if you've been wondering why coders have been raving even more over the past year, that's why. Also, 88 % of organizations have adopted some kind of model into their work, and 80 % roughly of university students now use a generative model. So lots of folks using this. I've got four others here that I want to point out. China has closed the gap. The US leads in top-tier models and high-impact patents, but China leads in publication volume, meaning they're doing more research. Patent output, meaning they're patenting more things. They may not be at the high impact level, but they're doing stuff.

28:15And industrial robotics installation, they're blowing out the rest of the world. South Korea, worth a note here too, leads in innovation density, patents per capita. Very good there. So keep an eye on South Korea in this race as well. The US hosts 10 times as many AI data centers as other countries. That's a huge advantage in computing capacity, which as we're talking about is one of the bottlenecks for being able to make good use of these kinds of technologies. Taiwan's TSMC, however, fabricates almost all the leading chips. That is a bit of a bottleneck. I mean, it's great for TSMC. And they do have factories in multiple parts of the world.

28:52So it's not so much about the logistics as they continue to diversify that supply chain, but it is one company making most of these. And finally, or not finally, second to last, the U.S. invests 23 times as much money into AI as anybody else, though much of China's investment is from the government. So it's hard to measure. But the U.S. probably invests more. It's just 23 times what we can tell China is investing. However, the number of researchers moving to the U.S. has dropped 80 percent over the last year. So there is a bit of a brain drain away from the United States, and that's going to impact its ability to do research.

29:30Okay, now finally, worldwide adoption of AI tools reached 53 % in three years. That's way faster than PC or internet adoption. Singapore, they called out as one of the highest adoptions. You might not have thought Singapore would be. 61 % of the populace has adopted it there. 54 % of the United Arab Emirates has adopted it. By comparison, 28.3 % of the U.S. has adopted AI. So a little bit of that AI pessimism you hear probably on the show is partly a result that this is a country that has not adopted it.

30:04Robb Dunewood: Yeah, so the stat right at the top, that 90 % of the models that we're using were built last year. Yeah, that is when you when you think about that, all the stuff that AI can do, but it's just been since last year that it can do it. That that really is amazing. And it shows you just how fast this stuff is moving. We talked about, you know, you talked about college students in university right now that are doing this. There are college students who are graduating literally next month and in June that when they started school, we weren't talking about this stuff at all. Yeah. So the the speed at which AI is moving is is is quite honestly, it's breathtaking in my career in tech.

30:50Robb Dunewood: I don't know. There's been a lot of things that have moved fast. I can't think of anything that has moved this fast for this amount of time. We're moving into year five now of this stuff. If you go back before, I mean, AI has been around for for decades, really. But, you know, but when we're talking about these LLMs and the way that we're talking about them, you know, we're just, you know, We're just four years into it, moving into the fifth year. It's moving so daggone fast. And I know one of the big questions people have is, yeah, but is it good for anything? Is there productivity? And that's where I would point you to this report from Stanford HAI because it depends on where you look.

31:28Overall, you could back out of this and go, man, there's not much productivity gain to be shown. However, if you zoom in on particular industries, you will find actual measurable gains. So it gets pretty wonky to dig into all that. But if that is your question and you want a good answer to it, read this report because it's going to give you answers depending on what industry you're talking about. But there are productivity gains happening. It's just they're not evenly distributed yet.

32:00Robb Dunewood: And they're lagging indicator. Yeah. Yeah, you know, absolutely. Stuff that was built last year. Well, you've got to use it last, you know, the end of last year into this year and then measure it at the end of this year to see if there was anything that happened in 2026 with the stuff that you just got in 2025. So we haven't even measured yet. Now, I know that we are, you know, we can consistently measure, but and those are going to give you some insights. But really, if you want to get a big, giant report on the stuff that we built in 2025, was it where people produce productive with it in 2026?

32:30Robb Dunewood: Well, when we get to 2027, we'll let you know. So it really is a lagging indicator. Yeah. If you tried a model more than a few months ago, your opinion of what that model can do is sorely outdated. It's as if it's 10 years old. I mean, that's how fast this stuff has been going. In fact, I went from using ChatGPT to format the show notes of the show to Gemini when Gemini got good. And I'm already wondering if I should be trying out Claude. And I've only been using Gemini for a couple of months because Claude's getting so much thought about like, hey, it's even better than that. So, you know, this stuff just bops around like that.

33:08Robb Dunewood: That's a good point, because when you think about it, it's like, you know what? I'm using PowerPoint and I'm using Word and I'm using, you know, I'll leave Excel out. Excel is something different. But I'm using Word and I'm using PowerPoint. Well, just because Google Docs comes out doesn't say, I need to go switch to this other thing and check it out. I want to keep using what I'm using. Same way. If you're you, if you, if you were a high school student or even going back into grade school and you just learned how to use Google Docs and you, you move into the future, well, you don't need to switch to something else unless the job just says, this is what we're going to use.

33:39Robb Dunewood: But when it comes to AI, we are literally thinking about every few months. Oh, I wonder if I should go check this out. Not because we're trying to just be, you know, you know, we're hopping from platform to platform, but you have advancements in platforms that are like, you know, this was a thing. three-year-old that I'm using, and you're now a teenager. That teenager is way more capable than the three-year-old. And by the time you get to the teenager, now you're talking about, you know, this is a college professor that's just gotten tenure on the next one. It's moving that quickly. So it's just, it's really interesting to me.

34:13Well, folks, I'm sure you got thoughts on, on how we do this show, not just thoughts on that particular topic, but the show in general. And we need your help. The yearly Daily Tech News Show survey is happening right now. It really helps us understand what we're doing well, what we need to improve at, what tweaks and small things we need to change. So please, if you could take five minutes to answer a few questions, it'll help us make the show better. Head to dailytechnewsshow.com slash survey.

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35:44Robb Dunewood: Hey everyone, it's Farnoosh Tarabi from the So Money Podcast. If you're self-employed or running a small business, tax season can feel overwhelming, especially if you're doing it all on your own. TurboTax Experts for Business is here to help. They match you with an experienced expert who understands your industry and works with you to save money by finding every deduction and maximizing your savings. They're there to help you every step of the way, virtually or in person, to help you prepare and file your taxes. Plus, you get unlimited year-round tax support at no extra cost, along with audit protection and seamless integration with other Intuit tools like QuickBooks.

36:20Robb Dunewood: This tax season, skip the stress and get expert help. Learn more and find a tax expert in your industry at TurboTax.com slash business.

36:33All right, let's do some quick headlines that are just good to know. Might make you look smarter in the future.

36:38Robb Dunewood: Following mandatory age checks in January, Roblox is adding two new types of accounts. Users aged five to nine will get a kid's account with access to games with minimal or mild ratings and chat off by default. Nine to 15 year olds get a select account with access to games rated moderate and chat with others in the same age group. And if you're 16 years or older, you get standard accounts with access to all the games and all the chat features. The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, which attempts to preserve the history of what's on the web, is blocked by 23 major news organizations because those publications are trying to block scrapers that do other things and the archive is getting caught up in it.

37:16Robb Dunewood: Man, I certainly hope they get this figured out. The Internet Archive is so valuable. Even the people who are blocking it use it to get information. Yes, exactly. So, yeah, I hope they get this part figured out. 9to5 Google found indications in Android APK that Google is working on a new tap-to-share feature that can send files, contacts, and more with a tap. So they're continuing to copy what Apple does and vice versa. Yeah, and copy what they used to have and then deprecated and then moved to the QuickShare menu and now bringing it back. Microsoft will stop supporting the Android app called Outlook Lite on May 25th.

37:51This is not the Outlook app for Android. It's Outlook Lite. That was a version of Outlook for low spec phones.

37:57Robb Dunewood: the ai security institute published an independent evaluation of claude mythos and said it had a 73 success rate on expert level capture the flag challenges which no model could finish as of april of last year there's another example of what we were talking about uh wired has a write-up on the byd z9 gt that's the ev that can charge fully in nine minutes if you're using byd supercharger It's coming to Europe for 115 ,000 euros. The same car sells for 55 ,000 pounds in Australia and 45 ,000 pounds in China. That's interesting pricing. Adobe has reached a patch for zero-day exploits in Acrobat and Reader that have been exploited in the wild for the past several months.

38:42That's an important one to put on there. Linux kernel release 7.0 was announced Sunday. Lenis Torvalds wrote in the notes that they continue to find small fixes that are pretty benign. So he just went ahead and pushed it. But he suspect, and I quote, it's a lot of AI tool use that will keep finding corner cases for us for a while. So this may be the new normal, at least for a while. Only time will tell.

39:05Robb Dunewood: The Wall Street Journal has a story on the increasing demand for computing power. and notes that renting an NVIDIA Blackwell chip for one hour cost$4.08, up 48 % from the$2.75 two months ago. See, it's not just us that has to pay more for stuff. It's also the people using the data centers as well. An advertising researcher firm eMarketer projects that Meta will pass Google in net ad revenue this year. That would be a big deal if this happens. They're projecting$243.46 billion for meta to 239.54 billion for google when i first saw that i thought it was fake news i didn't believe it i had to actually dig into oh wait this is actually real that that is that's pretty impressive of meta well folks we end every episode of dt ness with some shared perspectives in our episode about drones this weekend dr nikki was wondering about drones flying on mars samir might have the answer yeah samir says we nasa actually did it it's called ingenuity about 1.8 kilograms, was functional from 2021 to 2024, along with the Perseverance rover.

40:10You can find more info at NASA. We'll put that link in the show notes as well. Thank you, Samir, for letting us know about that. It's good to get that answer right away.

40:19Robb Dunewood: We want to know what you're thinking about. So if you've got some insights into a story, please, please, please share it with us at feedback at dailytechnewsshow.com. Thanks to Samir for contributing to today's show. Thank you for being along for Daily Tech News Show. You're the folks who keep us in business. If you can and you're not already become a patron, you can do it right now. It's super easy. Patreon dot com slash DTNS.

40:49The DTNS family of podcasts helping each other understand. Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this broker.

41:01Robb Dunewood: Hey everyone, it's Farnoosh Tarabi from the So Money Podcast. If you're self-employed or running a small business, tax season can feel overwhelming, especially if you're doing it all on your own. TurboTax Experts for Business is here to help. They match you with an experienced expert who understands your industry and works with you to save money by finding every deduction and maximizing your savings. They're there to help you every step of the way, virtually or in person, to help you prepare and file your taxes. Plus, you get unlimited year-round tax support at no extra cost, along with audit protection and seamless integration with other Intuit tools like QuickBooks.

41:38Robb Dunewood: This tax season, skip the stress and get expert help. Learn more and find a tax expert in your industry at turbotax.com slash business. This episode is brought to you by Capital One. Capital One's tech team isn't just talking about multi-agentic AI. They already deployed one. It's called Chat Concierge and it's simplifying car shopping. Using self-reflection and layered reasoning with live API checks, it doesn't just help buyers find a car they love. It helps schedule a test drive, get pre-approved for financing, and estimate trade-in value. Advanced, intuitive, and deployed. That's how they stack.

42:15Robb Dunewood: That's technology at Capital One.

42:22Thank you.

42:54Thank you.