Is that $20,000 Modular EV for Real? - DTNSB 5006
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Guaranteed to fit every time. eBay. Things people love. This is the Daily Tech News for Friday, April 25th, 2025. What do we do here? Well, we try to tell you what you need to know, follow up on context of stories, and just help each other understand. Today, Bodie Grimm tells us about the new cheap modular EVs coming to the U.S. and why YouTube may be Google's new hope. Maybe. Just maybe. Maybe.

But for sure, I'm Tom Merritt. And I'm for sure I'm Wynne Twedow. Let's start with what you need to know with the big story. Alphabet overall reported a net income increase of 46%. If that sounds high, part of that was driven by $8 billion coming in from an investment in a private company that Bloomberg sources say is SpaceX. Something that's probably a little more indicative of Google's quarter is a 12% year-over-year revenue increase, which is still good.

Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said Google now has 270 million subscriptions driven by YouTube and Google One.

Subscriptions are an important alternate revenue source in the face of potential future declines in advertising revenue. Yeah, everybody keeps saying that the ad revenue is going to go down, but ad revenue still up for now, 8.5%. Pichai said Google AI overviews, you know, the little summaries at the top of your search results, now has 1.5 billion users per month.

partly because it has rolled out more widely and is available on more queries. That helped boost search revenue. Search revenue itself rose 9.8% ahead of the pace for overall ads. Another hedge against ad revenue is Google Cloud. So we always point out that Google Cloud saw its revenue rise 28%. That's going to be bigger because it's coming from a smaller base, but it's got momentum.

But the shining star for Google right now is YouTube. Its ad revenue didn't rise much, but overall revenue jumped 10.3%. That's a faster growth rate than advertising, implying YouTube could be a resilient business unit. YouTube Music and Premium topped 125 million subs during the quarter. Yeah, the ad revenue wasn't flat, but it was a very small growth for YouTube. Mm-hmm.

But I feel like that's because they're doing better with subscribers. They're getting more people that want YouTube premium or YouTube music, which gets rid of the ads when you do that. I'm a YouTube music subscriber because I have YouTube premium, which gives you YouTube music. So that increase is probably a little bit

It's not apples to apples to Spotify or Apple Music and things like that. But the subscription revenue is really good for YouTube. And I think when people worry about the decline of search, whether that happens or not, I think Google is right to rely on YouTube as a vastly solid and resilient and growing part of its business.

No, it makes a lot of sense. I mean, it's kind of funny given that we've covered so much of the ad antitrust cases lately. It kind of makes sense that, I mean, Google is so huge. They have so many different products, like as you said, like Google Cloud, like everything else. And YouTube is not just like a great product for them, but obviously it's for better or for worse, like a huge force in our modern life, like culturally, politically, everything else. Yeah.

It kind of makes sense that, you know, it is something that could keep them going. Just because it's a driver for so many things, good and evil and otherwise. YouTube is becoming television for more and more people. You know, I think I think I don't think that's crazy to say. I don't think Google is going to be forced to divest its ad business completely.

And it does seem like they're doing a lot of things to make sure that you can still monetize search. But I do agree that at some point, search revenue is going to be more diffuse and it's not going to be dominated by Google as it was in the past. Things just don't stay that way no matter what happens. And so having YouTube not only as a place for more ad revenue, but also as a place for subscriptions, I think is something that shouldn't be underestimated.

I wonder if this is also part of why they're pushing for certain things. Like, I mean, this is like a very small example, but they've really been pushing, for example, to YouTube and YouTube Music for podcasts lately, which is... I mean, it's a little bit...

I know the technology is a bit different. My co-host on Android Faithful, Ron Richards, loved to rant about how podcasts on YouTube Music aren't real podcasts, but it really does seem like they're trying to integrate so many things like, you know, the live experiences, like, you know, as you said, television. And I mean, even just anecdotally, I think to be perfectly honest, I spend most of my time, media time on YouTube, whether that is a show, whether that is, you know, more like essays or even like silly videos. I

I can't imagine how I can't actually like say that I spend a significant amount of time on any other like proper quote unquote streaming service. I spend a lot of my time on YouTube. So, yeah, I think they're blowing it with podcasts right now, though. It was it was not smart for them to get rid of a traditional podcast client for this because this isn't podcast.

Not every RSS feed works on YouTube for lots of different reasons. And because of that, not every podcast is on YouTube. Now, YouTube seems to be gambling like, well, this is where people want to listen to podcasts. So podcasts are just going to have to adapt.

But I don't think a lot of podcast listeners are going to think of it that way. And I think they could be dominating podcasting if they treated it more like they treat YouTube music, which is do a traditional YouTube podcasting approach that honors actual RSS feeds and then roll that into YouTube so that it's easy to get to when you're in YouTube. They're being a little greedy about the ad revenue and they don't want to do that.

That's really, really good point. There feels like there could be something that, and I know I'm not very good with this stuff, just being an engineer, but there feels like something that, you know, the whole point of this story honestly feels like it's like,

Apart from ads, there's a lot more like solid, more resilient thing that they're doing like subscriptions to drive their business. And you saying that just makes me feel like, oh, well, they feel like opportunities there to drive more subscription based or subscription adjacent revenue, both for Google and, you know, podcasters and content creators with that. Like rather than, as you said, being greedy and trying to slurp up all the ad revenue by kind of.

whatever they're doing, like the weird kind of collective, I don't know. They make you upload and host it on YouTube. Even if it's coming through an RSS feed, it's not really hitting your RSS feed anymore. And then if you look at what Spotify and Amazon are doing, that does not work. Spotify uses RSS feeds. Amazon uses RSS feeds. So,

I don't know. I hope YouTube changes its mind about that eventually. A few other announcements came during the earnings call. Pichai said Gemini will come to cars, so Android Auto, tablets, headphones, and Wear OS for watches later this year. So basically Gemini across the Android platform. Pichai also said, quote, there is future optionality for personal ownership of

of cars with Waymo self-driving technology. I'm not sure when that's going to be, but it sounds like they would like the option to sell you a Waymo car if you want one for yourself. And...

Speaking of YouTube, YouTube is testing AI overviews in its search. It would take the form of a carousel highlighting the most relevant clips from videos tied to your search query. YouTube said it will be focused on products like, you know, product reviews, travel and local discovery, at least at first. Oh, I'm not sure how I feel about AI overviews in YouTube. Although I guess YouTube is a little bit different just because you can literally see the results, question mark. Yeah, no, you're right. Like it's not generating videos.

videos. Yeah. It's just generate, it's figuring out what clips are appropriate. So maybe that's not so bad. Yeah. Actually, I think I prefer that. I wish that, I wish that the Google search AI reviews were more like that, where it shows me the actual, this is obviously not a whole nother conversation about like the business ethics of AI overview, honestly. But yeah, no, that's what I kind of want all of them to be. Google, you listening? Like suggestion box over here. Thank you.

Well, DTNS is made possible by you, the listener. Thanks to Larry Bailey, Michelle Serju, Kirk Stephenson, and welcome new patrons, Arne and Brian. Yay! Arne and Brian. Picture this. You're in the garage, hands covered in grease, just finished up tuning your engine with a part you found on eBay. And you realize, you know what?

I can also use new brakes. So where do you go next? Back to eBay. You can find anything there. It's unreal. Wipers, headlights, even cold air intakes. It's all there. And you've got eBay guaranteed fit. You order a part, and if it doesn't fit, send it back. Simple as that.

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There's more we need to know today. Let's get to the briefs. Intel had its first earnings call with Lip Bhutan as CEO. So revenue was flat, which is better than expected, largely due to companies stockpiling chips. Intel expects revenue next quarter to be lower than previously estimated. The company saw a rise in demand for older, less expensive chips because of the economic uncertainty. Tan said he has talked with TSMC about some kind of partnership.

and noted his long friendship with TSMC CEO Cici Wei and founder Morris Chang. Tan also announced that employees will be required to work in the office at least four days a week.

Intel did not announce layoffs this week, but workforce reductions will begin in Q2. The company has not yet set a headcount reduction target, so the reports of 20% may or may not be accurate. Yeah, I'm going to guess it's probably close to accurate. That's probably why it's floating around out there. But it was interesting to see that that was not announced at this point.

None of this is the thing that turns Intel around. You wouldn't expect that. Tan just started in March. Give him a minute. But yeah, Intel not doing great, but at least this isn't negative. None of this stuff is horrible. Financial Times reports sources tell it that Apple plans to shift all production of iPhones bound for the United States to India by 2040.

By 2026, it's easy to misunderstand this story. They're not shifting all production of iPhones out of China, just the ones that have to head to the U.S. in order to escape the 145 percent tariff. That might go away. It might not. But you know what? They're just going to shift production to India anyway, because India would like them to produce a bunch more iPhones there as well. And the U.S. buys about 60 million iPhones a year.

Out of this messy, very confusing situation, this does seem like a great opportunity for India to become a much bigger production center for all of these different companies. Because, yeah, its tariffs are probably one of the lower out of all the Asian-dominant manufacturing kind of like – sorry, the dominance of other Asian countries. Yeah.

Yeah, because Vietnam has also been getting a lot of manufacturing, but it's got a, while it's in talks with the U.S., it's got a little more uncertainty around it, I think. Yeah, it's got 46% tariffs. Sorry, I'm Vietnamese American, so I pay a lot of attention and I was like very sad to see that just because they've been trying to play ball very hard and then got hit 40%, 46% tariffs. But it could be an opportunity for India. Yeah.

Well, a couple of big announcements from the big players in the chatbot space. Baidu upgraded its flagship Ernie model to 4.5 Turbo and its reasoning model to Ernie X1 Turbo. Ernie 4.5 Turbo is 80% cheaper and X1 Turbo is 50% cheaper.

OpenAI launched a lightweight version of its deep research tool for all chat GPT users, including free users. It's powered by O4 Mini and its response may be shorter. Paid users with access to the full deep research model will default to the lightweight one if they reach the limits on the full model. And those usage limits were also raised for paid users. Yeah.

Yeah, DeepSeek may not end up being a model that we ever use down the road, but it's definitely leaving a mark because both Baidu and OpenAI are trying to say faster, cheaper models available now. Come and get them. No, no, look over here. No, really. No, no, no, no. Like we've got it. We've got it. We've got it. Yeah.

Starting with the fifth season of You, Netflix users will be able to choose to see only spoken dialogue in subtitles rather than both dialogue and audio cues, you know, like ringing bell. It is only available in English for now and will roll out to all new Netflix originals.

Facebook announced Thursday that it will begin lowering the reach of spammy content and make it ineligible for monetization. Spam comments are determined by several behaviors, including unnecessarily long captions and excessive hashtags unrelated to the content. It will also target networks that create hundreds of accounts to share the same content.

Comments deemed fake engagement will get limited reach and users will be able to report comments that are off topic or irrelevant. Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas may not realize podcasts are recorded and people listen to them later. He said on the TBPN podcast that the company is creating a browser to get data even outside the Perplexity app to better understand you.

As an example, he said that included things you buy, hotels and restaurants you go to, and more. And he doesn't think people will mind this because it'll let perplexity serve them more relevant ads. He said, and I quote, we plan to use all the context to build a better user profile. And maybe, you know, through our Discover feed, we show some ads there. Microsoft announced it has mitigated an issue.

Sorry, sorry. It's just like, yeah, what do you say to that? Right? No, I was like, I'm making both of us were just like, just okay. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Sure. Gosh. Um, I think that's all right.

Well, Microsoft announced it has mitigated an issue with its machine learning models that mistakenly flagged emails from Adobe as spam. The problem crept up in Exchange Online on April 22nd. It said it improved its machine learning logic to make sure that legitimate emails won't be inaccurately classified as spam. Let's get to a more understandable story. Quantum mechanics scientist at Toshiba Europe is...

used quantum key distribution cryptography to send messages over a commercial network for the first time. A paper published in Nature described the demonstration traveled over 254 kilometers of optical fiber in Germany on three different networks. It's also the longest transmission of quantum communications yet. So this is a big advance because quantum cryptography is the thing we will need to prevent communications from being broken down by quantum computers in the future. So this is a big advancement.

And finally, Microsoft has released its now optional and encrypted Windows Recall feature to all Copilot Plus PC users. All of them, whether they run on an Intel, AMD, or Qualcomm processor. Recall, which we talked about before, is that feature that takes screenshots of your PC regularly so you can ask it questions about what you've done on your PC.

Yeah. If you're still wondering, like, is this safe? It's safer than it was. A lot of the people who had concerns are now OK with the way it's being implemented. And I think that's why Microsoft is finally now saying, OK, it's ready for everybody, especially because you don't have to use it. It's not going to turn on by default. You know, all of that stuff. Those are the essentials for today. Let's dive a little deeper into an ongoing story. This is actually less of a follow up and more of a little bit of breaking news.

Well, China is leading the market for affordable EVs, but a U.S. company called Slate has announced a small EV truck that you may be able to get for $20,000. Tom caught up with Bodhi Grimm from the Kilowatt podcast to talk about the details. Bodhi, thanks for joining me on short notice. We actually have some breaking EV news today.

We do. We do. Slate Motors, which is a new startup that just kind of they were in stealth mode, sort of stealth mode. And then they just kind of popped out with their announcement last week that, well, the announcement was the preview announcement was last week. The main announcement was yesterday. Yeah. So tell us about the blank slate and then all of the options that you can pile upon it. Yeah.

Yes. So the Slate is a pickup truck. It's an EV pickup truck. It reminds me of a really cool 1990s Ford Ranger, which I'm nostalgic about. A friend of mine had one of those. We did all sorts of stupid stuff in that truck. But the Ranger, this vehicle is modular. So think of like the framework laptop where you can just kind of add and customize it as you see fit. That's the whole idea with the Slate. When you buy it for $25,000, it's

It comes with nothing. It doesn't have a radio. It doesn't have, it has a speedometer because I think it's legally required to have one, but it doesn't have. It basically has the things that you're required to have to meet safety standards, right? Absolutely. Absolutely. And, and, you know,

The whole idea for this vehicle is that you could either have the company add some cool things that make it the vehicle that you want it to be, or you can do it yourself. It's for the DIY person out there who wants to really modify their vehicle.

Yeah, it's bare bones. It does come with AC, I saw. But then, you know, anything else you want to pile on top of that. It also has a dock, which this I thought was actually pretty great. They're like, there's not going to be a radio in this on the base model, but you'll be able to plug your own phone or tablet into it. Yeah. And they said one of the reviews that I was watching one of the videos because they had an event for the press. I think it was last week, but everybody released it last night.

Um, the, the actual dock for your phone has been, uh, crash test safety rated. So that was just kind of an interesting thing. Yeah. A lot of people are comparing this thing to the K, uh, cars, the KEI, uh, Japanese trucks. Cause it's, you know, it's small, uh, and you know, it's, it's useful and it's inexpensive. What, what are the specs? What are the base things you get? So, uh,

It's exactly that. It is base. So in terms of, you know, autonomous features, you get cruise control and that is it.

Uh, you don't even get, you have to add the modification if you want the cruise control, uh, features on the steering wheel. Like there, there's just so much, this is like, this is as basic as basic. Yeah. But the, if, if you want to use it for a truck, it is a four foot by five foot bed, which is around the same size or the exact same size as the Rivian. It's got a nice big frunk and you can fit two carry on bags in the frunk if you want.

And the reason why it has this nice big frunk is because it's rear wheel drive only. There's no front wheel drive on this. There's no all wheel drive for this vehicle. It is rear wheel drive only. And then when you're looking at battery specs, you get a 52.7 kilowatt hour battery, which gets you around 150 mile range. And then if you want to bump that up, you can go to the 84.3 kilowatt hour battery, which is 240 miles of range.

You get, let's see, Tesla's got an NACS port on there. Excuse me, it's got the Tesla NACS port on there. And then 120 kilowatts max charging speed, which is...

Not super fast. It's I think it's 10 to 80 percent in about 30 minutes if you're if you're fast charging. Yeah. And we mentioned the price. We've mentioned a couple of different prices. Explain that you can obviously raise the price by adding options and we'll get to that in a second. But if you buy the base model, how is it either going to be twenty five or twenty thousand dollars?

Yes. So I, there's a lot of, there's a lot of headlines that say a truck for under $20,000. Maybe you have to qualify for the 7,500 federal tax credit, which I think you need to make under $300,000 as a family, or I think it's $150,000 as a single person to qualify. But the truck

The truck qualifies. You have to qualify to get that $7,500 federal tax credit if you're interested. Gotcha. And then if you go to slate.auto, I know you can start playing with your imagination and configuring options. How does that work? So...

I think their configurator maybe needs a little bit of work, but it gives you the exterior, the interior. You can basically just kind of like customize it from, you can make, you can say, well, I want to, I want a regular pickup truck, but I want it to be red. Right. And we didn't mention this, but the body is composite kind of, you know, like a Saturn. If you, if anybody remembers. Oh yeah. I had a Saturn. Yeah. I did too. I did too.

Um, so that's going to be dent resistant, you know, it's a little bit more durable, but also they're not going to paint it. So if you want to add a little pop of color, you have to put a, you have to add a wrap and they have these custom wraps that are easy to install. So you can do it yourself or you can have the manufacturer do it. Um, but you can, you can

It's not an infinite amount of options, but it's a lot. Like there is, there might be a little bit of paralysis and there's how many options. Choice paralysis there. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Gotcha. Yeah. Yeah. It doesn't have a radio, but it does have a spot to put speakers if you're interested in that. And then you just Bluetooth from your iPad or your iPhone or whatever. I guess just say phone or tablet if you want to listen to music.

Yeah, I think that's genius. The other thing that you'll see in the headlines is that this is a Jeff Bezos-backed company. There's not a listing for either Slate or its previous company, Recar, which is what it kind of spun out of on Bezos Expeditions. But TechCrunch seems to think it's got it on good authority that Bezos Expeditions invested in it. TechCrunch also said that

There is no evidence that Bezos has ever stopped by the company. So it's probably true. My guess is it's probably true that the Bezos Expeditions folks kick some money into this. There's a lot of former Amazon folks involved with Slate, but it doesn't sound like he's really involved in it. So it's a little misleading, I think, to put it in the headlines. I agree. You know, Tim Stevens, if anybody wants to go read Tim Stevens Verge article this morning, it was a really good, very detailed article.

But he mentions it briefly. And I think it is worth mentioning that his name is probably attached to this, but he may not even know that he invested in this. That's right. Like that's how far away he probably is from this company.

company. So what do you think? You know, again, this is a U.S. company, U.S. made. So that's going to get a lot of attention in this world of protectionism and tariffs and all of that, because, you know, we've been talking a lot about BYD and others selling affordable EVs that you can't get in the United States. Is it a good vehicle in your opinion? Well, good vehicle.

Don't know yet. That remains to be seen. But in terms of an idea, this is a great idea. Um,

Let's just put it this way, Tom. If you bought this truck when you were single, right? And then you're like, oh, I just got married. I have a kid on the way. You would be, it's a two seater truck. You'd be like, oh, what am I going to do now? I got to get rid of the truck and buy something bigger. This truck will convert to an SUV. Like you can put a top on the back and put a bench seat in the back. So now you have a five seater vehicle. Yeah.

I think this is a really cool idea. I do have concerns about the company long term in terms of offering so many different options because you have to have all of that stuff in inventory. You have to pay companies to build all that stuff for you. And that's very expensive.

But I do think they'll probably start partnering with aftermarket companies to maybe take some of that burden off of them, you know. But in the beginning, Slate has to do this. Otherwise, nobody's going to do it. Nobody's going to invest millions of dollars on a unproven startup. Yeah.

Well, and there's a little bit of talk that you would be able to create your own mods. So hopefully they would encourage that and make kind of a maker marketplace for stuff, which could fill in a gap as well. I think that'd be kind of cool.

I did see one creator mentioned that there would be an Etsy marketplace for this, but I have not seen anybody else mention that. So, but it makes sense that they would. It's a little early. So right now, $50 deposit gets you the chance to buy it whenever it's available. Do we know anything else on Timeline?

Looking at the end of 2026. End of 2026. Bodhi, thanks so much for hopping on this right away and helping us understand it today. I really appreciate it. If folks want to find more of your reporting, I know you're going to go deeper on this. Where should they go?

Yeah, if you go to 918digital.com, you'll see my podcast, Kilowatt. The amount, I'm going to wait a little bit until later today to release the episode because I want to hear what other people have to say because I did not get invited, sadly, to the press event. I think maybe there's some other cool things that might come out.

but I might be wrong. So you might get exactly what we talked about right now. Sure, sure. There might not be anything more, but if there is, Kill a Watt podcast. Thanks, Bodhi. Appreciate it, man. Thanks, Tom. What do you want to hear us talk about on the show? One way to let us know is our subreddit. You can submit stories and vote on them at reddit.com slash r slash Daily Tech News Show. ♪

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Well, we end every episode of DTNS with some shared wisdom. Today, Caleb is helping us understand. Yeah, this is in response to the story with Blair from earlier in the week about understanding dolphin speech using generative models and machine learning and stuff like that. Caleb says, hey, DTNS crew, although a departure from using machine learning slash LLMs, there's some very interesting work being done in communication with our pets.

It's using the talk buttons. So very different. Yet it does seem to get at the heart of the issue, communicating with non-human consciousness. Anyway, Helen Zaltzman of The Illusionist has two episodes diving deep into the topic called Lexicat Part 1 and 2. Very worth a listen while on a long walk. Thank you, Caleb, for that. These are the ones where you teach the dog to...

step on buttons or I think you can teach cats to, to step on buttons when they want something. And then the buttons play English words that make it sound like they're talking. And when you said you have a friend who has done this. Yes, I do. So my very good friend, who's one of my bridesmaids, Christina Lee, she's actually a software engineer over at Pinterest and

And she's been doing this with her dog, Cash. By the way, Cash is like an LRU cash, like a chip cash. Oh, that's amazing. I love that. Yes, yes, engineering people. And she's been doing it. She actually has up to 130 buttons now that she uses to communicate with Cash. And so what happens is, you know, kind of gradually over time, she didn't start off with 130. You are basically able to program each button with a word that you say. So hers might say, for example, mom, to mean her name.

walk outside and even emotions like sad or mad and even question words like where or like why I think I'm not 100% sure and then basically she takes the time to kind of

try to build, you know, cash is, I guess we'll call it understanding of what each, each word is. And, and, and if you go to her Instagram account for cash, cash, C H C E cow adventures, you can kind of see like different situations where cash is like putting things together. Like we know what, when her dad came over and then played with cash for a bit and left at some point later, she, and she records everything, I guess, just to catch these moments.

I think Cash put together like grandpa where, and then she said, oh, well, grandpa went home. And then he even put like sad. Yeah. So it's really fascinating. And it's, it's really interesting because I think there's still some debate about whether this is like true communication or not. Right. Or whether it's just like a, I don't know if Pavlovian stuff, but just like a more like a train. Like the horse that did math. Exactly. Exactly. But it's, it's really fascinating. Yeah. It's, it's a thing. That's very cool. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, what are you thinking about? Got some insight into a story? Share it with us. Feedback at DailyTechNewsShow.com. Big thanks to Bodhi Grimm. Bodhi had just done an all-night shift when he recorded that interview with us. So big thanks to Bodhi Grimm and to Caleb for contributing to today's show. Thank you for being along for Daily Tech News Show. The show is made possible by our patrons at Patreon.com slash DTNS.

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