Siri has been around for almost 7 years, but it still kind of sucks. Personal assistants like Google Assistant and Amazon's Alexa are constantly improving. Here's what's wrong with Siri and some simple things Apple can do to make it a lot better. Following is a transcript of the video.

Steve Kovach: Hey Siri, what time is Westworld on?

Siri: Here are matches for Westworld. Westworld, Westworld, Beyond Westworld, Westworld on a Budget.

Steve Kovach: Siri has been around for almost seven years, but it still kinda sucks. Google Assistant and Amazon's Alexa keep getting updated with cool new features, but Siri feels outdated and stuck in 2013. Here's what went wrong with Siri and what Apple can do to fix some of the problems right now.

Siri felt revolutionary when it first came out in 2011 on the iPhone 4S. While it wasn't the first digital assistant ever created, it felt almost magical to be able to talk to your iPhone and have it respond. But the magic didn't last very long. Within a year, Google had a similar answer called Google Now. Google Now tapped into Google's vast knowledge of the internet to get you exactly what you asked for. You could ask things like, "How old is Tom Cruise," or, "show me cute pictures of corgi puppies," and you'd get exactly that. Siri started to look pretty dumb by comparison and it never caught up. Now we have three major digital assistants fighting for your attention. There's Apple's Siri, Google's Assistant, and Amazon's Alexa. And Apple could actually look to those rivals for inspiration to fix Siri now.

The biggest problem with Siri today is that it doesn't integrate with third-party services very well. There are a few categories it does work with, like messaging or ride-hailing, but for the most part it's a closed-off ecosystem. This turns out to be Alexa's greatest strength. There are thousands of third-party skills and apps that work with Alexa, meaning it's a wide-open ecosystem where anything's possible. You can check your bank balance, you can order a coffee from Starbucks and have it waiting for you when you arrive, and it works with a lot more smart home appliances than Siri does. And it's the same story with Google's Assistant. Think of it like this. How terrible would your iPhone be if you couldn't download any third-party apps from the App Store? That's the state we're in with Siri today.

Another huge problem with Siri is that there's so many fragmented versions of the service. Siri on the HomePod is mostly just to ask for songs from Apple Music. It can't even do basic stuff like checking your calendar appointments. Siri on the iPhone is different than Siri on the Mac, and that's different than Siri on the Apple TV and the Apple Watch. Apple has failed to give you one consistent version of Siri, no matter which Apple device you're using. If a digital assistant's going to be successful, it needs to be the same, no matter where you are, in the home, in the car, in the office, and no matter what gadget you're using. This is another area Amazon's Alexa and Google Assistant excel. Today, Siri is a fragmented mess when it should be the same everywhere. Apple should unify it so there's one version across all of its devices.

The final major problem with Siri is updates. While Google Assistant and Alexa constantly get better over time, Siri only gets significant updates once a year with new versions of iOS on the iPhone. Apple should really start looking at Amazon and Google's strategy here and update Siri throughout the year as soon as the updates are ready. The bottom line: Siri has a long road ahead of it, and Amazon and Google aren't going to quit. But there are a lotta simple things Apple could do right now that'd make the experience a whole lot better. It's not too late, but Apple needs to act fast.

Siri: Here are shows available on iTunes. Vanderpump Rules, The Last Ship, Turn, Washing--

Steve Kovach: Shut up.

Sitting low on the horizon, a full moon sometimes look close enough to reach out and grab. But our worldly perceptions deceive us.

The airless chasm between Earth and the moon is so vast, stretching an average of 239,200 miles wide, that it'd take a 747 jet airplane flying at top speed more than 14 days to arrive. Even traveling at several thousand miles per hour, it took Apollo astronauts three days to arrive after launch. (Driving a car would take about a year.)

That's an enormous stage for human spaceflight history, fleets of thousands of satellites, and strange natural phenomena.

Business Insider wanted to illustrate the scale of the Earth-moon distance, and all of the fascinating stuff in between, so we consulted dozens of sources to create the interactive graphic below. (Note: Best viewed on a laptop or desktop computer.)

Advertisement

Don't get discouraged by how long it takes to scroll from the moon to the Earth — you'll make it back home eventually — but if you want to skip ahead, click or tap the waypoints on the left side:

If nothing else, the graphic shows just how many objects and points of interest exist just a breath away from Earth.

This includes the demarcation between Earth and space itself, called the Karman Line. NASA and the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale, the organization for international aeronautical and astronautical record-keeping, recognize this line as the point where space begins, your aeronautic feats become astronautics, and you become an astronaut.

If you find this distance oppressive to navigate, then try scrolling through a to-scale virtual solar system where the moon is just 1 pixel large.

Advertisement

Sean Kane contributed to this post.

A previous version of this post misstated the travel time to the moon at the speed of a 747 jet airplane. We apologize to all future lunar adventurers for the error

This tiny blue rock upon which we hurtle through the vastness of space is the perfect home for us.

We can breathe the air and drink the water — both of which are essential to life as we know it. Our atmosphere protects us from radiation that could mutate our DNA and cut our lives short. We and the other creatures on Earth have evolved to function according to the planet's gravity, which affects our bones, muscles, and the fluids inside our body.

NASA and other space agencies — as well as individuals like Elon Musk— are actively working towards creating settlements on Mars. But before humans can attempt to establish long-term outposts on Mars or elsewhere in space, we have a lot to consider. Beyond the logistics of space travel, food, water, breathable air, and radiation, there's the question of human reproduction.

A paper newly published in the journal Futures describes just how complicated that could be.

Advertisement

Since Mars is the likely first location for a long-term populated outpost, the researchers behind the paper decided to analyze some physical and social problems that we'd encounter in trying to have babies on the red planet.

"A manned mission to Mars and the establishment of the first human settlement in outer space was once a mere figment of science fiction but is now being planned and expected to take place in the following 20 years," the authors wrote. "We assume that human reproduction in a Mars settlement will be necessary for the long-term success of an outer space mission."

NASA-JPL Caltech

Could there ever be new generations of Martians?

Any human settlement on Mars will be initially populated by crews from Earth. But at some point, if we truly want to have a large long-term Martian colony with a sustainable population, kids are going to need to be born there.

Whether or not it's possible to have children in the Martian environment is still unknown.

Advertisement

We know that when astronauts spend time in space, it has serious effects on their bodies. A lack of gravity causes body fluids to shift, which can change and impair vision as pressure changes affect the eyeball. Bones become less dense and muscles can atrophy, though regular exercise can help reduce these effects. People get taller as they stretch out, uncompressed. Then there's radiation exposure, which affects DNA and could increase cancer risk.

The International Space Station (ISS). NASA

Being on Mars wouldn't be exactly like being on the International Space Station, which is where most of this information comes from. But Mars still only has about 38% of the gravity we experience on Earth.

We don't know how these changes would affect reproductive cells, fertilization, embryonic development, the developing fetus, or growing children.

It's possible that children born and raised on Mars might have an easier time adapting to the requirements of life there, since it would be the world they would grow up in. But what those adaptations would look like are anyone's guess.

Advertisement

Many of these questions can be studied, especially with animal models. But they'll be important issues to investigate before any Mars colonization plans take shape.

Ethical questions

Assuming humans do someday try to reproduce in space, a host of other intriguing questions arise.

One is how big a population needs to be to truly sustain itself. According to the paper's authors, accepted estimates of the minimum size for a self-sustaining group range from 5,000 to 5,800 individuals. But they write that a Martian colony may need to have a larger population due to the extreme nature of the environment.

Then there's the issue of reproductive rights. Since living on Mars isn't going to be easy, the authors write that there should be genetic counseling available for couples to make sure that traits that could help people survive on Mars are encouraged in the reproductive process. At the same time, they write that liberalized abortion policies would be important, since pregnancies could pose high risks to mothers and environmental conditions could make serious birth defects more likely.

People who do choose to have children should be carefully supported through that process, according to the paper. That support system would need to extend beyond birth to help parents cope with the stresses that come with Martian children.

Advertisement

The authors also bring up an even bigger question: how much we should use technology to transform humans living in space.

YouTube / SpaceX

Potential solutions

It's possible that some of us carry genetic traits that make us better suited to life on Mars than other people. Such traits may make it easier for our bodies to adapt to reduced gravity, for example, or make us less susceptible to cancer or disability caused by radiation.

A Martian colony might encourage people with those genetic traits to pass them on.

But it also might be possible to use genetic editing technologies to give people these traits and to modify DNA in other ways that make it easier for humans to survive in space. Genetic editing tools like CRISPR, which can find and replace sections of DNA, could allow doctors to modify embryos conceived via in vitro fertilization to give them these space-life-friendly traits.

Advertisement

Eventually, it might turn out that the "humans" who thrive best on Mars don't much resemble people on Earth.

Science fiction authors have wrestled with this idea. In "The Expanse," authors Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck (pen name: James S. A. Corey) describe how "belters," residents of human settlements in the asteroid belt, are different from Earth-born humans. They have elongated bodies uncompressed by gravity, and their bones can't support human weight when exposed to the crushing pressure of life on Earth. It's possible that people born and raised on Mars would have a similarly difficult time adapting to life on Earth.

It's even feasible that humanity might speciate: develop new species that evolve out of Homo sapiens, according to the authors of the paper. They say that's unlikely to happen naturally, but could happen if humans wind up heavily genetically engineered to better survive on different planets.

NASA

Is escaping to Mars really a possibility?

In the paper, the authors quote Stephen Hawking, who once said: "I believe that the long-term future of the human race must be space and that it represents an important life insurance for our future survival, as it could prevent the disappearance of humanity by colonizing other planets."

Advertisement

But this paper shows how complicated that insurance policy would be. And that analysis is yet another reminder that we need to ensure that humanity can continue to survive on its home planet.

Astronaut Mae Jemison leads an organization called 100-Year Starship, a NASA- and DARPA-funded project that launched in 2011 to tackle the questions involved in making humans capable of voyaging beyond our solar system within the next 100 years.

But as Jemison explained to me in 2016, most of us are already on the starship that's best suited for carrying us through space: it's Earth.

"We're going to be on this planet," she said.

That's not to say that we shouldn't settle on Mars — it's important to understand how we could survive on new worlds. But we shouldn't avoid tackling simpler issues like climate change in order to keep humanity's first home habitable, too.

For most people, setting up your iPhone to erase itself after too many failed password attempts sounds like a frightening idea — but there's a very compelling reason why you should enable the feature.

Hidden deep inside your phone's settings is the option to erase all the data on your phone after 10 failed passcode attempts. This option stays turned off for a lot of people, and for an obvious reason: if someone in your life tries to unlock your phone and fails too many times, there's the risk of losing everything.

But as Daring Fireball's John Gruber points out, it's not that simple. Here's how he explains the feature (emphasis ours):

"After the 5th failed attempt, iOS requires a 1-minute timeout before you can try again. During this timeout the only thing you can do is place an emergency call to 911. After the 6th attempt, you get a 5-minute timeout. After the 7th, 15 minutes. These timeouts escalate such that it would take over 3 hours to enter 10 incorrect passcodes."

Advertisement

So while it seems scary in theory, it's highly unlikely that a child, significant other, or friend could accidentally erase all your data. On the flip side, turning this feature on could protect your phone's sensitive data from falling into the hands of the bad guys if it's lost or stolen.

Here's how to turn it on: open Settings, then scroll down to Touch ID & Passcode. You'll be prompted to enter your passcode, then scroll down to the bottom until you see Erase Data and toggle it on.

Box may have made its start in cloud storage, but the $3.7 billion company wants to round out its offerings.

Toward that end, the company on Friday announced its acqui-hire of the 12-person team at Progressly, an operational performance management company. Box plans to use Progressly's team to help build out its workflow management features.

"We're doubling down on workflow within Box as the result of ... customer requests and customer demand," Jeetu Patel, chief product and strategy officer at Box, told Business Insider.

The companies did not disclose the terms of the deal.

Advertisement

Box won't be using Progressly's existing service. Instead, it will integrate the company's team, which is headed by CEO and cofounder Nick Candito, into its own operations and have them design a new workflow automation process from scratch that will be built into Box's own service.

"We want to make sure that the experience is integrated into Box, so we're building the capabilities rather than going out and buying a technology and patching it," Patel said.

When it comes to building out its service, Box has done acqui-hires in the past and also "organically built out the teams," Patel said. Box chose to bring Progressly on board because it checked "all of the boxes" that company executives look for when bringing new teams in-house.

Box officials ask themselves a series of questions whenever they come across an interesting company, Patel said. Among them:

"When you start looking at those things, it was a fantastic fit," Patel said, adding that the Progressly team was so excited to start at Box that they forewent taking a couple of days off during the transition period.

Advertisement

Box hasn't set a timeline yet for when the new features will be available. But Patel said to expect big announcements at BoxWorks, the company's annual user conference in late August.

The large crossover SUV makes a whole lot of sense.

It combines the user-friendly nature of passenger cars with the utility of a minivan and much of the off-road prowess of a traditional SUV.

And for those looking for a more plush crossover experience, the luxury brands have that covered. Two of the best large luxury crossovers we've ever tested are the Audi Q7 and the Volvo XC90.

The Volvo arrived in 2015 just in time for the 2016 model year while the Audi debuted in 2016 as a 2017 model.

The Volvo XC90 was a revelation for us when we first tested the car in late 2015. It was the first new model to arrive in showrooms following the Swedish automaker's acquisition by China's Geely Group.

We loved the second generation XC90 so much that we gave it our 2015 Car of the Year award over some stiff competition like the BMW 7-Series and the Lamborghini Huracan. Amazingly, with the impending arrival of the new S60 sedan, the XC90 will soon become the oldest model in Volvo's lineup.

And then there's the Audi Q7. In our review of the second generation Q7, Matt DeBord referred to the Audi as the luxury SUV perfected.

In spite of the presence of the A8 luxury sedan, the Q7 is effectively Audi's luxury halo product. The original Q7 debuted back in 2007. In spite of early criticism of its aesthetics, the big Audi eventually developed into a fan favorite.

Both crossovers are built on modular platforms and share their underpinnings with passengers cars. The Q7 is built on VW Group's MLB Evo platform that's shared with the Audi A4 sedan and Bentley Bentayga SUV. While the XC90 is built on Volvo's SPA platform that underpins the company's entire passenger car lineup.

Here's a closer look at how the Audi Q7 3.0T Prestige and the Volvo XC90 T6 Inscription matches up:

Diets that sound too good to be true are often just that. But a plan called intermittent fasting that frees its followers from calorie counting and carb cutting is quickly gaining traction in Silicon Valley. Scientific research suggests its followers are onto something big.

Popularized by Bay Area health nuts who don't mind being guinea pigs for science, intermittent fasting (or simply "IF" among fans), involves limiting the time you eat to a specific time period each day. While most of us snack somewhat regularly from the time we wake up until the time we go to sleep, intermittent fasters only "feed" within a strictly defined window, often from morning to afternoon or afternoon to evening.

Silicon Valley loves it. One Bay Area group of enthusiasts called WeFast meets weekly to collectively break their fasts with a hearty morning meal. Facebook executive Dan Zigmond confines his eating to the narrow time slot of 9 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., and many other CEOs and tech pioneers are sworn "IF" devotees.

Despite not requiring followers to count calories, ban carbs, or restrict their eating to celery and juice, intermittent fasting has been shown to be just as helpful for weight loss as traditional diets. And animal studies hint that the plan could have a range of other health benefits from curbing cancer risk to even prolonging life.

Advertisement

But there are problems with intermittent fasting, too. Besides leaning heavily on animal studies, the approach may have several benefits that only arise as an incidental result of the fact that it tends to lead to weight loss.

With that in mind, researchers have recently been trying to pin down whether some of those benefits could emerge even if intermittent fasters don't lose any weight.

And for the first time, a rigorous, but small study published last month has hinted at a positive answer. They discovered that people who tried the IF approach but were given enough calories to prevent them from losing weight still saw boons like reduced blood pressure. That's a promising sign for future studies of the plan.

"We found that there were benefits to this approach that were completely independent of losing weight," Courtney Peterson, the lead researcher on the study and an assistant professor of nutrition science at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, told Business Insider.

How intermittent fasting works

Erin Brodwin / Business Insider Intermittent fasters can eat whatever they want, within reason — there are no strict limits on carbs, fat, or anything else. In general, most intermittent fasters stick to their normal diet; all they change when they begin the eating plan are the hours in which they eat. Having temporarily tried the IF lifestyle myself, I can tell you it's not for everyone. That said, I also understand why some people love it. When I fasted, I found myself thinking about food less, working out more, and even unintentionally curbing my caffeine intake.

So far, the most well-researched benefit of intermittent fasting is weight loss. Krista Varady, a nutrition professor at the University of Illinois who wrote a book about IF called "The Every-Other-Day Diet" in 2013, published a study last year in the Journal of the American Medical Association showing that obese participants who intermittently fasted lost roughly the same amount of weight as those on a traditional diet that involved strict eating and calorie counting.

But a handful of recent papers suggest that in animals, intermittent fasting is linked with other more vital boons like improvements in blood sugar control and some antiaging effects. With that in mind, some researchers have been hard at work trying to suss out whether those benefits might also apply to people. At the same time, they also want to know something even more important: whether those perks are just a result of weight loss, or if they might have something to do with intermittent fasting itself.

The first intermittent fasting study of its kind

Shutterstock Nutrition studies are hard to design and even harder to carry out. In many cases, scientists must rely on self-reports from participants, who often vastly underestimate the amount of food they actually ate.

So for Peterson's recent study, she and her colleagues decided to take a far more intense approach: they supervised everything their participants consumed, and only allowed them to eat the food that was given to them.

These sorts of studies are called supervised controlled feeding trials, and because of the difficulty involved in designing and performing them, they're rarely done. But the sort of insight they provide into a specific diet or eating plan is unique and high-caliber.

"Aside from locking up people in a hospital room and not letting them leave that room for weeks, supervised controlled feeding trials are the most rigorous type of nutrition study," Peterson said.

The difficulty of this kinds of research also means that large pools of people often get whittled down to just five to 25 individuals. After receiving interest from nearly 400 people who wanted to participate in the study, Peterson and her colleagues ultimately ended up with just eight men.

Still, the paper is the first study of its kind, and it hints at some surprising potential perks of fasting.

Fasting appears to improve blood pressure and our body's response to sugar

Although Peterson's study was small, some of its results were surprisingly positive. After doing intermittent fasting for five weeks, all of the eight participants showed improvements in blood pressure and insulin sensitivity, the body's response to sugar.

Notably, the participants in the study who had the worst sensitivity at its outset saw the biggest improvements, Peterson said. The blood pressure findings were also significant: many people showed drops of roughly 10-11 points, a difference that's roughly equal to the benefit someone might get from trying out a blood pressure reduction medication, according to a 2008 study published in the Cochrane Database.

"These were huge differences for a 5-week study," Peterson said. "I was very surprised by that."

To do the study, Peterson and her colleagues had eight men who showed early signs of diabetes restrict their eating window to just six hours. During this time, they ate only food provided by the researchers, and only while under supervision. Importantly, in order for the researchers to home in on the potential benefits of fasting that were not linked with weight loss, the study participants were not supposed to lose any weight. With that in mind, they were given just enough food to maintain their current weight.

Advertisement

Over the course of nearly four months, the men dedicated several weeks to a specific eating schedule. The first 5 weeks involved eating for just 6 hours a day from 7am to 3pm; after that study period, they all took a 7 week break. Then for a control period, the participants spent the next 5 weeks eating normally.

Before and after the study period, researchers measured participants' insulin sensitivity, the body's ability to process sugar, as well as their blood pressure, cholesterol, and blood glucose levels.

A the end of the study, all of the participants saw improvements in insulin sensitivity and blood pressure. No improvements in cholesterol or blood glucose were observed, something Peterson thinks might be a sign that those perks are closely tied to weight loss. Some people also experienced negative side effects like headaches, drowsiness, and increased thirst.

Those takeaways point to key places to start other studies, Peterson said.

"Our data suggests that no matter where you are [in terms of when you're eating], as long as it's a restricted window, there's a benefit."

Sometimes, all you need to do is follow the money.

This week, Japan's SoftBank announced a total investment of $2.25 billion in GM's Cruise self-driving car division. GM said that it would add another $1.1 billion to the deal, taking the full deal to $3.35 billion and making Cruise worth $11.5 billion on its own.

The San Francisco-based startup was acquired by GM in 2016 for $581 million and has been operated by the automaker as a semi-stand-along entity, with its own CEO — founder Kyle Vogt — a home-office in the Bay Area, and supervision from GM's President, Dan Ammann.

By any reckoning, it now looks like a tremendously foresighted investment for GM. So good, in fact, that SoftBank is matching GM's own funding two-for-one. In exchange, SoftBank gets a nearly 20% stake, so if you're following along at home, GM effectively sold a fifth of Cruise and revealed over $10 billion in value in GM itself that was sort of trapped in the carmaker's $51-billion market cap.

Advertisement

What we're starting to see now in the gestational self-driving-car world is that some business models assigned to technological innovation. Last week, Waymo deepened its partnership with Fiat Chrysler Automobiles. SoftBank has also bought into Uber (obviously, a clear link now exists between GM and the biggest ride-hailing service in the world).

But what about Tesla and its Autopilot semi-autonomous system and Self-

Autopilot isn't yet a serious business

Daniel McMahon

In this context, Autopilot looks malnourished. SoftBank's Cruise investment represents nearly as much money as Tesla has in the bank — $2.7 billion, as of the end of the first quarter. But Tesla will need that capital (and likely more) simply to operate its reliably unprofitable business for the next year.

GM, by contrast, has made over $70 billion since its 2010 IPO (Tesla also IPO'd in 2010 and has never posted an annual profit). It has plenty of cash on hand and can deploy it ambitiously, given that its main business is taking care of itself.

Advertisement

In the two years since the Cruise acquisition, GM has moved aggressively to get it to market. The master plan is to have fully self-driving all-electric Chevy Bolts with Cruise's laser-radar-based technology forming urban fleets to serve up rides by next year.

Tesla's Autopilot, on the other hand, is more of an expensive option for retail customers. If you buy or lease a Tesla, you can get the tech, which isn't fully autonomous (far from it) and uses a computing system based on sensors and cameras. Autopilot has been involved in a number of accidents of late — accidents that are being investigated by the National Transportation Safety Board — but Tesla and CEO Elon Musk have continued to sell it as a safety enhancement.

Even when Tesla has talked about Autopilot as a way for owners to make money off their vehicles when those cars would otherwise be sitting idle in driveways, the idea has been contingent on the retail channel. Yes, Tesla could keep some vehicles itself and create a self-driving fleet at some point, but those would be lost sales — and right now, Tesla needs every sale it can get.

Business creation isn't the same thing as following trends

GM

With this logic, if Cruise is worth $11.5 billion, then Autopilot as an independent business is currently worth zero. But what about Tesla's $50-billion market cap? Well, on paper that's made up of automaking, energy storage, and solar, if you think of Tesla as a holding company.

Advertisement

But in that framework, Autopilot is simply a feature that can be added to a Tesla vehicle. And even a Tesla car could drive from coast to coast in fully autonomous mode — Musk has promised this event, but it hasn't happened yet — I'm still not sure that would mean Autopilot has any meaningful spinoff value.

The challenge for Tesla is that while Musk was wise to recognize, about three years ago, a pivot away from electric cars as the new cool thing to self-driving as the exciting new opportunity, he failed to realize that companies such as GM and Google (Waymo came into existence in 2016, before which it was the Google Car project) would think of full autonomy as a distinct business opportunity and direct their design-build-investment strategies accordingly.

This isn't a disaster for Tesla. Far from it. The company will hold an annual investor meeting next week, and if any of those folks bought in around the time of the IPO, they'd be looking at a nearly 1,ooo% return. With electric cars making up only about 1% of global sales, Tesla has monumentally outperformed any reasonable expectations.

But that doesn't mean it can be everything. And trying to move the needle big-time of EVs while also being a player in the still-evolving autonomous space might be too much to ask. The bottom line is that although GM's Cruise and Tesla's Autopilot might be seen as competitors, they're actually quite different.

And the biggest difference is that Cruise is now a valuable business in its own right.

A senior Google scientist warned in an email that winning a military AI contract would spark a controversy which would be totally out of the company's control.

The email was disclosed in a detailed New York Times report, which charts the backlash against Google, both internally and externally, after the firm won a slice of the US Department of Defense's "Project Maven."

The Pentagon program will use artificial intelligence to interpret video images. The Department of Defense said machine learning is critical to "maintain advantages over increasingly capable adversaries and competitors," but critics say Google's involvement could help improve the accuracy of drone missile strikes.

Fei-Fei Li, the chief scientist for AI at Google Cloud, issued her warning in an email exchange last September about how to publicise Google's role in Project Maven.

Advertisement

In the message to Google's Head of Defense and Intelligence Sales Scott Frohman, she reportedly said: "Avoid at ALL COSTS any mention or implication of AI. Weaponized AI is probably one of the most sensitized topics of AI — if not THE most. This is red meat to the media to find all ways to damage Google."

In a statement to the New York Times, Li doubled down on her email: "I believe in human-centered AI to benefit people in positive and benevolent ways. It is deeply against my principles to work on any project that I think is to weaponize AI."

Furious staff flood message boards, create anti-Maven stickers, and resign in protest

Her remarks turned out to be prophetic, with Google's involvement in Project Maven stoking strong feelings, as many pointed to the company's "don't be evil" motto.

Around 4,000 Google staff signed a letter to CEO Sundar Pichai urging the company to end the controversial contrac t with the Department of Defense, while around a dozen employees resigned in protest, according to Gizmodo. More than 200 academics and researchers also demanded Google pull out of the deal.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai. Greg Sandoval/Business Insider

The New York Times reported that Project Maven has "fractured" the workforce, leading to several internal meetings where staff around the world have listened to explanations from senior management. Internal message boards have also been flooded with comments about the deal.

Advertisement

One outgoing engineer petitioned to rename a conference room after Clara Immerwahr, a German chemist who killed herself in 1915 after protesting the use of science in warfare. "Do the Right Thing" stickers have also appeared in Google's New York office, according to the New York Times.

"Even within this free-expression workplace, longtime employees said, the Maven project has roiled Google beyond anything in recent memory," The New York Times said.

Google to come up with military AI "principles"

Google declined to comment when contacted by Business Insider.

The New York Times said Pichai addressed the matter at an all-staff meeting last Thursday, telling employees that the firm intends to come up with a list of principles about its use of artificial intelligence for military means. These will stop the use of AI in weaponry, Google said.

Separately, Diane Greene, the chief executive of Google Cloud, has reassured staff that its Project Maven involvement is "not for lethal purposes" and the deal is only worth $9 million.

There are dozens of production companies in Los Angeles promising some sort of unique knack for making shows that connect with those younger consumers who live on digital platforms.

But one startup claims it knows exactly what people want to watch, and how get it in front of them - thanks to artificial intelligence.

The venture-backed Fresno Unlimited has built a platform that pulls data from social media and other digital outlets to help content creators figure out what genres and topics are ripe for potential series. So far, it's raised $8 million, with investors including famed ex-Facebook engineer Chamath Palihapitiya, via his firm Social Capital.

Fresno also uses that same AI platform - which it calls PCH - to help isolate individual consumers on social media platforms and push that AI-informed content straight to them.

Advertisement

It's the kind of pro-machine, Silicon Valley thinking that would seem to be at odds with Hollywood, known for its dedication to artists, as well as the many gatekeepers who use connections, research, experience and their guts to decide which shows and movies get made.

To help bridge that gap, Fresno is tapping someone with experience speaking both languagues. The firm has just tapped Jean-Paul (JP) Colaco as its new president, revenue and media. Colaco spent six years building Hulu, before leaving the web video outlet for stints at the now-defunct short form video startup Vessel and, most recently, the virtual reality entertainment venture Jaunt VR.

Despite its less proven premise, Fresno Unlimited says it is attracting serious Hollywood interest. Last year, the company produced a Facebook series featuring Jimmy Kimmel, and it expects to announce three more original series featuring name talent sometime this summer.

"We think we've found a better way," said Fresno founder and CEO Rob Goldberg. "We can use machine learning, data and insights to minimize the failure rate and even predict what people want."

Advertisement

Goldberg said he can't yet fully explain exactly how Fresno's AI works, or where it pulls all of its data from without spilling secrets. Some of it comes from publicly available source and some is proprietary, he said.

Okay, but how does AI help make a better show exactly? Goldberg mentioned a series that is in the works with a popular actress who was originally interested in producing a web show about art collecting.

Fresno Unlimited's tech found that only few people were predisposed to watch something that niche. But a much larger potential audience, while intimidated by the art gallery world, associated art with cool Instagram images and the like. So the company is now working with the actress to produce a show with a broader appeal.

For his part, Colaco said he was drawn to Fresno by the idea that data and science can actually make content more predictable, and distribution more precise.

"You're potentially increasing the likelihood that you can create a hit. you're making it easier for people to consume," he said. "It's harder and harder marketer and creators to find audiences. If we do this right, brands should be able align with super premium content and the engagement for their ads should be higher."

Spotify's chief executive Daniel Ek has said he regretted the way his company banned musicians R Kelly and XXXTentacion without really explaining why.

The company removed R Kelly from its playlists earlier this month in the wake of allegations that he had run sex cults involving young women. It also banned and then reinstated XXXTentacion, who is awaiting trial for charges of domestic abuse and witness harassment, to which he has pleaded not guilty.

To be clear, neither artist was banned entirely from Spotify, but both were removed from its playlists.

Speaking at the Code Conference on Wednesday, Ek didn't give an update on whether R Kelly would be reinstated, but did say he regretted the way the whole incident was handled.

Rapper XXXTentacion.XXXTENTACION/Facebook

The ban came from two new internal policies, he said.

Advertisement

"One was about hate speech, and I think that's less controversial," Ek said. "Then there's the other one about conduct and, just being very honest, we were very vague."

Here's what Spotify has to say officially about hateful conduct:

"We don't censor content because of an artist's or creator's behavior, but we want our editorial decisions — what we choose to program — to reflect our values. When an artist or creator does something that is especially harmful or hateful (for example, violence against children and sexual violence), it may affect the ways we work with or support that artist or creator."

Ek said the company could have handled the communication around this policy better: "The whole thing was to make sure we didn't have hate speech, it was never about punishing one individual artist or even naming one individual artist. So I think coming back to my responsibility as a leader, I think we rolled this out wrong and we could have done a better job."

He said it was difficult for Spotify to act as the "moral police," adding that editorialising music took the company into tricky legal turf, like whether a musician had been charged with an offence. "We're a platform, we want art, we want a lot of diverse opinions," he said.

Advertisement

There are some things which are obvious hate speech though.

"There are certain things where I think the rules should be pretty clear," Ek said. "If you are talking about being KKK [Ku Klux Klan] and doing that stuff, it's obvious we don't want that on the service."

Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said he would fulfil a career-long ambition in securing investment from Warren Buffett — but the deal is not top of his priority list right now.

Bloomberg reported on Wednesday that Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway came close to taking a $3 billion (£2.2 billion) stake in Uber, but deal the fell apart because of disagreements over the size and terms of the potential investment.

Soon after the news broke, Khosrowshahi and Buffett confirmed that the talks did take place. The Uber CEO told CNBC that "we did have discussions" and, although not all the details of the Bloomberg report were accurate, the deal was a very tempting prospect.

"One of my business goals in life has been to get Warren Buffett to invest in something that I'm involved in and, so far, I failed," Khosrowshahi said. "His brand, his smarts are unparalleled. I'm a Warren Buffett fanboy."

Advertisement

The feeling was mutual with Buffett saying on Wednesday that he is a "great admirer" of Khosrowshahi. The Uber boss said it's "always possible" that talks could resume, but there "has to be a match."

"We are a company that has an enormous growth trajectory, but at the same time, that comes with considerable risk. I don't think we necessarily fit in with the typical Warren Buffett investment. Maybe we can be a different kind of an investment, a portfolio diversification play for him," Khosrowshahi explained.

The former Expedia CEO said, however, that doing business with Buffett is not his "first priority" right now. "First priority is to continue building a management team, continue to invest in the brand and get us in a position where we can build a big business and, along the way, go public," he added.

Khosrowshahi confirmed that Uber remains on course to IPO in 2019. "Lots of things can happen in the world but we have a reasonable buffer as well, so I think we're in a pretty good spot," he said.

Dara Khosrowshahi, Uber CEO for nine months, is attempting to rebuild some of the burned bridges that former CEO Travis Kalanick left for him.

Khosrowshahi told the audience at the Code technology conference on Wednesday near Los Angeles, that he has entered into talks with Google's Waymo about joining Uber's network.

Not only were Uber and Waymo rivals in the nascent self-driving car category, but the relationship seemed irreparable after Waymo alleged in a lawsuit that the then Kalanick-led Uber stole some of its tech secrets. The case was resolved earlier this year.

"I had a long relationship with Google," Khosrowshahi said. "They're serious about autonomy. It's up to them."

Advertisement

Kara Swisher, the Recode cofounder and longtime Silicon Valley journalist, asked how Khosrowshahi brought Google to the negotiating table. Khosrowshahi said: "Economics."

The issue might come down to money but it's hard to see how Google would have ever considered such a proposition while Kalanick was still Uber's chief executive. When Kalanick was at the helm, Uber was dogged by numerous controversies. Khosrowshahi is now attempting to clean up the mess.

Khosrowshahi also revealed that he hopes to make Uber's technology available to other companies, adding that Uber plans to branch out into other forms of transportation beyond cars. Among them: bikes, scooters, and a platform that helps users find rides on buses and city trains.

"You wanted to build your own BART?" Swisher asked jokingly, referring to the Bay Area Rapid Transit system.

But what about autonomous cars? He made it clear that the fatal accident in Arizona in March, involving one of Uber's driverless cars, which Khosrowshahi called a terrible tragedy, has not sidetracked the company's ambitions in that sector.

Advertisement

"We got to get back on the road," Khosrowshahi told the audience, "but we must do it in the safest manner possible."

He said Uber's autonomous cars will hit the streets again sometime over the summer.

Nintendo

Good morning! This is the tech news you need to know this Thursday.

1. L egendary internet stock analyst turned investor Mary Meeker of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers released her annual Internet Trends Report. This year's report delves into data and personalisation, e-commerce innovation, and China's rising intensity and leadership in internet-related markets.

2.Google's new Pixel smartphone is reportedly taking a page from the iPhone X, according to Bloomberg. The Pixel 3 could feature a bigger screen, two front-facing cameras, and its very own notch.

3. Legendary investor Warren Buffett reportedly tried to invest $3 billion in Uber. The deal fell apart due to disagreements over the size and terms of the stake.

4. Snap chief executive Evan Spiegel said he regretted that his company invited scantily clad women dressed as the Snapchat deer to attend a party last year, and blamed an internal events staffer. He said mistakes like this were "frustrating" but that a young workforce should be expected to make mistakes.

5. Nintendo has 4 new Pokémon games coming to the Switch, including one that's free. The first, "Pokémon Quest," is already available on the Nintendo Switch, two variants of "Pokémon: Let's Go," will arrive later this year, and a fourth "core" game will launch in 2019.

Advertisement

6. A developer who worked on bitcoin early on,told Business Insider he exchanged hundreds of emails with the person or team known as Nakamoto in 2010. The experience, he said, was mostly weird.

7. Consumer Reports magazine has changed the Tesla Model 3's rating to a "recommended buy" after the company made improvements to its breaking system. The magazine had originally criticised the vehicle.

8. Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg hit back at Apple CEO Tim Cook, reviving the ongoing spat between the two companies. Sandberg dismissed Cook's earlier comments about Facebook's privacy issues, saying "Mark and I strongly disagree with their characterisation of our product."

9. Uber's CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said the firm is on track to go public next year. He said the firm was ready in terms of its margins and profitability.

10. Amazon has given Whole Foods employees Prime-branded outfits to wear, as it rolls out Prime discounts in stores across the US. The outfits come with an apparent new slogan for the Prime discounts: "Savings to smile about."

Nuseir Yassin didn't intend to become one of Facebook's most successful vloggers.

Growing up in Arraba, a small agricultural city in northern Israel, Yassin, an Israeli-Palestinian, came from a modest middle-class family. Yassin is the middle child of four; his mother, a teacher, and his father, a psychologist, valued education and hard work. In many of his videos, Yassin confesses he was shy and socially awkward as a kid.

The first glimpse of his future as a global citizen came at age 19. Limited by his prospects in Israel, he set his sights on Ivy League colleges in the US.

Yassin says he was "hungry" for an education at a prestigious university. He applied to Harvard to major in aerospace engineering, and once accepted he was offered a scholarship to offset the cost.

Advertisement

He graduated with a degree in Economics and moved to New York City to work his way through the ranks in the tech industry. He began coding for the PayPal-owned money-transfer app, Venmo, where he says his salary was well above $100,000 per year.

By modern standards, in terms of education, career and income, Yassin had made it.

But he was tired of the routine, and felt he was wasting time at his very cushy desk job; time he felt could be better spent traveling the world.

"My job was overpaid. It wasn't satisfying enough," he told Business Insider.

So Yassin spent a year and a half saving up $60,000. In 2016, he quit his job, bought a camera, a plane ticket, and committed himself to traveling the world full-time.

Yassin adopted the moniker "Nas"- Arabic for "people" - and setup a Facebook page called Nas Daily, where he committed to documenting every day of his travels. He pledged to make a single video every day for 1,000 days; As of this writing, he's more than three-quarters of the way to his goal.

Advertisement

"I don't usually take risks," he told me, as we sat at a rooftop bar in Australia, now his 65th travel destination, "But I decided to make use of every single day, I didn't want to waste a single minute," he said.

His first destination, Kenya, proved to be a fruitful one. A Russia-owned media company operating out of Nairobi saw one of his early videos and offered to pay him to create content for their Facebook pages. The company paid him $3,000 a month for his services, which Nas says allowed him to continue traveling comfortably and granted him the exposure he needed to build an audience.

"I make videos about people's stories in a way that is human," Nas said of his filming style. He decided to document his days through the lens of one-minute video clips.

"We live very busy lives. But everyone has a spare minute," he explained.

Slowly, his audience grew. His videos document was he calls "real life," and they resonate with millions of viewers around the world. As of this writing, he has over 6.3 million Facebook followers, and growing.

"My success came from the fact that I'm not a typical blogger," he said, explaining that his ethnicity and the one-minute format of his videos set him apart from other predominantly white vloggers who have found success on video-hosting sites, like YouTube.

Advertisement

He added that he purposely sets his sights on less-popular tourist destinations, like Rwanda, Tanzania, and Malta, to give his audience a broader worldview.

"There is a lot of the world that is undiscovered. I went to the places that most other bloggers don't go to," he said.

Nas has created a business off of his personal mantra of self-fulfillment. He sells themed T-shirts that spell out what percentage of your life is already over. Nas consults for businesses and people looking to produce multimedia content. He earns revenue from Facebook ads embedded in his videos. He puts his total net-worth at roughly $250,000, which he says is far less than what other travel vloggers earn.

Still, he understands he can't travel forever, and his plans extend beyond day 1,000.

Facebook/Nas Daily

"I have this fear that if I die today, tomorrow I am nothing. If my work consists of making one-minute videos, the minute I die, my project dies with me. I wanted to start a business that has employees that will outlive my daily grind, he said."

Advertisement

Nas plans to employ a collective of content producers to target several specific audiences, and hopes to pass along his expertise and own a partial stake in their productions.

He says he'd be interested in writing a book and creating a television series. He's even considering a foray into local politics.

"I personally am sick of old white men running people's lives," he said.

He offers a word of advice to young entrepreneurs, or people tired of living the 9-to-5 life: "The cheesy answer is 'work hard, don't quit." he said. "Traveling can get lonely, and you will have no base and no friends. You really need to get into the mentality of really enjoying every new experience, and that's real success."

He says he is privileged to have started his journey with a substantial nest egg that allowed him to travel without worry.

Advertisement

"I would have never quit my job without having stability. I trusted myself to get a better job in a year or less, so I could focus on what I do best."

Still, he says taking risks was his biggest motivation.

"When you land in a new country, make videos. Everyday I found myself with a summary of the day of things that I've never done before," Nas said.

"I don't do this for money, and I am lucky to be doing something I enjoy and making money from it."

Poor AT&T.

The way CEO Randall Stephenson describes the competitive environment in the pay-TV sector, one might think his company, the world's largest telecommunications company, is an underdog.

On stage at the Code Conference at Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif. on Wednesday, Stephenson bemoaned the massive forces lined up against his company — as well as against Comcast, and Verizon— as omnipotent internet players move into their turf.

"You're going to have a hard time competing with these guys," Stephenson said, describing the challenge facing companies like AT&T. "The FANG market caps (Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and Google) have gone up $1 trillion dollars. You better figure out how to vertically compete."

Advertisement

Not surprisingly, this is the same argument that AT&T's lawyers have made to regulators who are trying to block AT&T's proposed $85.4 billion acquisition of Time Warner, parent company of CNN and HBO.

AT&T, Comcast and traditional cable providers face more competition from the likes of Google's YouTube and Netflix. They are looking for ways to adapt to the new competitive pressures. The tech guys have cut into their market share by supplying consumers with alternatives to traditional video entertainment.

The cable and telco companies are eyeing film and TV companies as the solution to the problem and almost instinctively moving to acquire these media assets to fight the internet threat. But it's not clear that that's the right answer.

As Peter Kafka, the Recode Senior Editor interviewing Stephenson, pointed out, many of these media conglomerates have seen their revenues decline for quite some time now. Media tycoon Rupert Murdoch is selling a large chunk of his empire, including the Hollywood film studio 21st Century Fox.

At at time when more experienced media players are getting out of the business, why does Stephenson think he can make it work for him?

The Roseanne challenge

ABC For starters, Stephenson said that consumption of premium content, like Hollywood films, is going up. He also said that Time Warner is sitting on a pile of valuable ad inventory while AT&T possesses a large cache of customer data. This, he suggested could help with ad sales.

This could benefit consumers too, he said. He cited as an example that AT&T would like to improve the TV-viewing experience and one way the company might do this is to charge advertisers more while requiring viewers to watch fewer ads, making his service more Netflix-esque.

Netflix charges a monthly subscription fee and does not show viewers any ads.

And what about managing creative types and building streaming-video services good enough to compete with services such as YouTube TV?

Kafka asked whether Stephenson would fire actress Roseanne Barr for posting a racist comment to Twitter had she worked for him.

"I can't imagine how you would not," Stephenson said.

Cable and Telco companies aren't tech companies

AT&T As for building technology on par with the current streaming-TV services, Stephenson suggested that it wouldn't be a problem. Others aren't so sure.

In a report published earlier this month, analyst Toni Sacconaghi Jr.of research firm AllianceBernstein, praised the low price and high quality of YouTube TV.

He wrote that he reduced his cable bill from $250 per month to $135 after cutting the cord and signing up with Google's multi-channel service, YouTube TV.

He wrote that YouTube TV "remains a shockingly good deal. And remember, this is with no yearly contract, and no hidden fees."

Sacconaghi said that while his former cable provider tried to offer him services similar to those provided by YouTube, he noticed something was very different.

"Cable companies are not tech companies," the analyst wrote. "Their apps never work quite right. The user interfaces lag. The streams don't buffer properly. Cloud recordings mysteriously fail to record."

Perhaps Stephenson's underdog self-opinion wasn't so far off of the market after all; AT&T has its work cut out for it.