Yes. It is. Friday.

Google warns staff about using the very AI products they’re peddling, GitHub claims 92% of developers are using AI to code, and Apple builds a Zoom killer.

Let’s dig in.

ONLY 8% OF DEVS ARE NOT ON THE AI TRAIN

Last summer, way before the chat GPT hype began, Microsoft’s GitHub unit rolled out a generative AI coding product called Copilot, touted as “your AI pair programmer.” (Not to be confused with the parent company’s “Copilot” offering, a generative AI tool for Office 365 and owner of the laziest tagline ever: “Microsoft 365 Copilot – your copilot for work.”)

Copilot is marketed somewhat aggressively in-app to anyone using GitHub, which is most developers, and works seamlessly as a plug-in with Microsoft Visual Code studio, also used by most developers.

So it’s not really a head-scratcher that a GitHub sponsored survey of 500 developers (that probably use GitHub) found that 92% use AI coding tools.

But even if this number is high, this is a lightning fast change—less than a year—in the way developers work. The full survey findings are here.

NO SMOKING AT THE TOBACCO COMPANY

In a move reminiscent of Facebook execs forbidding their own kids from using Facebook, Alphabet is warning its staff not to enter confidential information into chatbot conversations.

The issue is that LLMs, like Google’s Bard, are under active development by humans who often review the conversations in order to improve the product.

"The Google parent has advised employees not to enter its confidential materials into AI chatbots, the people said and the company confirmed, citing long-standing policy on safeguarding information.”

If that’s a yikes for Google, it’s a giant yikes for the rest of us. Tread carefully in your chats. More on this story at Reuters.

APPLE VISION PRO, ANTHROPOLOGY, AND MODERN WORK

Not that you need yet another take on Apple’s foray into “spatial computing,” but we’re most impressed with Scott Galloway’s reaction. Scott argues that as humans, our brains are wired to pay special attention to facial features as cues for reproduction and survival. It’s unnatural to cover our face like this when we’re around other people.

Can you really imagine wearing these things with your kid at breakfast? Or watching a movie as a family? Or on a date? The shared in-person use case for this toy—no matter how good the in-device experience—is really hard to fathom until a decade or so when we manage to squash this level of in-device tech into fashionable glasses.

That said, compared to Meta’s lackluster “Horizon Workrooms” virtual meeting offering, the potential for a high-performing headset in a B2B context is huge in the short term. A 3D, high-resolution interaction with another human in another time zone is a game changer over a Zoom/Google/Teams flat screen (or legless VR) meeting. Not to mention specialty uses in manufacturing, industrial design, and healthcare.

In modern work, meetings are massively expensive, so $4k/head to add even a fractional boost of meaningful human-to-human collaboration is probably worth it. We’ll see.

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See ya next week

— 💬 The EiT Crew at Status Hero