Technology

Plex today announced itshutting down its troubled Plex Cloud service, via a forum post that hasn&t found its way over to the companyofficial blog — likely a choice the company made in order to downplay the news, or avoid media scrutiny. Plex Cloud, launched in fall 2016, was meant to serve as a way for Plex customers to save their files to online storage services like OneDrive, Dropbox and Google Drive, instead of having to host their saved files locally on their own machines or network-attached storage devices.

But now that will no longer be an option, as the service will stop functioning on November 30, 2018, Plex says.

Plex Cloud had struggled from the beginning with technical issues.

Almost immediately, its debut launch partner, Amazon, stopped working with Plex Cloud. Users were complaining that Amazon Drive files couldn&t be accessed and wondered if Amazon was imposing upload limits. There were also concerns that Plex Cloud users whose libraries included pirated movies and TV shows could be putting themselves at risk by publishing those files to the cloud.

Unlike PlexCloud Sync, which syncs select local media to the cloud to access when the local server was offline, Plex Cloud is a full-fledged Plex Media Server in the cloud. That meant the media was hosted independently of local storage, and was transcoded for compatibility with Plex player apps, as needed.

This led to some technical challenges Plex hasn&t been able to overcome, though it sometimes declined to explain what exact challenges Plex Cloud was facing.

The company admitted last March the problems it was having were very difficult.

&Itdefinitely not a trivial thing to take the best media server on the planet and make it work seamlessly as a scalable cloud service, load-balanced and clustered across multiple geographic regions. It turns out a lot can go wrong,& a blog post then admitted.

In February 2018, Plex announced it would disable new server creation for Plex Cloud users — something it said it had to do while &working to address challenges with performance, quality, and overall user experience inherent with cloud provider integrations.&

At the time, it said it would &evaluate the long-term plan for the service.&

The subtext, of course, was that Plex Cloud may be shut down if Plex couldn&t figure out how to overcome the technical issues.

Todaythat day, unfortunately.

Plex says it tried to address the issues that came up while keeping costs under control, but hasn&t found a solution.

The announcement states:

We&ve made the difficult decision to shut down the Plex Cloud service on November 30th, 2018. As you may know, we haven&t allowed any new Plex Cloud servers since February of this year, and since then we&ve been actively working on ways to address various issues while keeping costs under control. We hold ourselves to a high standard, and unfortunately, after a lot of investigation and thought, we haven&t found a solution capable of delivering a truly first class Plex experience to Plex Cloud users at a reasonable cost. While we are super bummed about the impact this will have on our happy Cloud users, ending support for it will allow us to focus on improving core functionality, adding new features and content, and delivering on our mission to provide a world-class product that we can all rely on and enjoy.

On November 30, 2018, Plex Cloud users will no longer be able to access their cloud server. That means customers who want to continue to stream those files through Plex will need to download them locally on a media server or NAS device on their local network.

Plex, of course, will not delete the files you&ve uploaded to cloud services, like Dropbox or Google Drive. They will remain there as long as you have a subscription to those services.

While the loss of Plex Cloud will be upsetting to Plex users who were happily enjoying the service without issues, the companydecision to shutter instead of solve the problems is indicative of the new direction Plex has been headed in recent months.

Originally a software application designed for hosting users& personal media collections, Plex has since launched its own tools for watching live TV through an antenna and recording shows to a DVR in an effort to attract the growing number of cord cutters. It has also launched support of podcasts and rolled out personalized apps in order to bring in more mobile users.

Itunclear how well Plexshifts have been working to attract new users and paying subscribers, as thecompany doesn&t break out the latter figure. As of May, Plex said it had 15 million registered users.

After a two-year hiatus, Gawker is coming back. Peter Thiel, be damned.

Bustle-owner Bryan Goldberg, who paid $1.35 million for rights to the defunct gossip site in a bankruptcy auction in July, wrote in a memo to Bustle staff Tuesday that Gawker would relaunch next year with Amanda Hale, the former chief revenue officer of The Outline, as its publisher.

A spokespersonfor Bustle confirmed the hiring and upcoming launch to TechCrunch, adding that Hale &will be responsible for building out the sales and marketing teams, and developing the overall strategy for the brand. Her first project will be to solidify a plan to ensure the Gawker archives have a safe and permanent home. We will be investing significant resources in this relaunch, and we will continue to make further announcements as plans progress.&

According to the memo,the new Gawkerwilltake advantage of Bustleresources, technology and business platform.

&We won&t recreate Gawker exactly as it was, but we will build upon Gawkerlegacy and triumphs — and learn from its missteps,& Goldberg wrote. &In so doing, we aim to create something new, vibrant, highly relevant, and worth visiting daily … completely distinct from our other properties and sit within a separate corporate subsidiary,&

Herethe full memo, obtained by The Wall Street JournalBen Mullin:

Goldberg, a man, is the founder of Bustle, a site that creates content for millennial women. Heraised some $80 million in venture capital for the site, which appears to have found its footing after a rough start. In 2014, one year after Bustlelaunch, Goldberg penned a painfully tone-deaf blog post announcing a $6.5 million round:

&Isn&t it time for a womenpublication that puts world news and politics alongside beauty tips& he wrote. &What about a site that takes an introspective look at the celebrity world, while also having a lot of fun covering it How about a site that offers career advice and book reviews, while also reporting on fashion trends and popular memes&

Google Ventures pulled out of that round for ethical reasons following the blog post. Goldberg went on to ink deals with several VCs, includingGGV, General Catalyst, Saban Capital Group and Social Capital.

As for Hale, she left The Outline in May amid struggles at the digital media startup. Just last week, The Outline announced it was laying off its remaining staff writers and would rely solely on freelancers. Itlikely nearing a shutdown, despite having raised $5 million in venture capital funding earlier this year.

The Outlinereported struggles don&t hold a candle to Gawkertumultuous past.

Gawker parent company Gawker Media was forced to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcyprotectionwhen a Florida court ordered it to pay $140 million in damages to Hulk Hogan, who had sued Gawker for publishing his sex tape. The lawsuit, and two others against Gawker, was bankrolled by Peter Thiel. The PayPal co-founder and Silicon Valley billionaire had a long-standing vendetta against the site since it reported that he was gay before he had come out publicly.

In its heyday, Gawker attracted 23 million visits in a month, according to Wikipedia. Based in New York and founded in 2003, Gawker Media also ran Jezebel,io9,DeadspinandKotaku— all of which were acquired by Univision for $135 million following the infamous lawsuit.

Knowledge, to paraphrase British journalist Miles Kington, is knowing a tomato is a fruit; wisdom is knowing therea norm against putting it in a fruit salad.

Any kind of artificial intelligence clearly needs to possess great knowledge. But if we are going to deploy AI agents widely in society at large — on our highways, in our nursing homes and schools, in our businesses and governments — we will need machines to be wise as well as smart.

Researchers who focus on a problem known as AI safety or AI alignment defineartificial intelligence as machines that can meet or beat human performance at a specific cognitive task. Todayself-driving cars and facial recognition algorithms fall into this narrow type of AI.

But some researchers are working to develop artificial general intelligence (AGI) — machines that can outperform humans atanycognitive task. We don&t know yet when or even if AGI will be achieved, but itclear that the research path is leading to ever more powerful and autonomous AI systems performing more and more tasks in our economies and societies.

Building machines that can perform any cognitive task means figuring out how to build AI that can not only learn about things like the biology of tomatoes but also about our highly variable and changing systems of norms about things like what we do with tomatoes.

Humans live lives populated by a multitude of norms, from how we eat, dress and speak to how we share information, treat one another and pursue our goals.

For AI to be truly powerful will require machines to comprehend that norms can vary tremendously from group to group, making them seem unnecessary, yet it can be critical to follow them in a given community.

Tomatoes in fruit salads may seem odd to the Brits for whom Kington was writing, but they are perfectly fine if you are cooking forKoreansor a member of the culinaryavant-garde.And while it may seem minor, serving them the wrong way to a particular guest can cause confusion, disgust, even anger. Thatnot a recipe for healthy future relationships.

Norms concern things not only as apparently minor as what foods to combine but also things that communities consider tremendously consequential: who can marry whom, how children are to be treated, who is entitled to hold power, how businesses make and price their goods and services, when and how criticism can be shared publicly.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock

Successful and safe AI that achieves our goals within the limits of socially accepted norms requires an understanding of not only how our physical systems behave, but also how human normative systems behave. Norms are not just fixed features of the environment, like the biology of a plant. They are dynamic and responsive structures that we make and remake on a daily basis, as we decide whether or when to let someone know that &this& is the way &we& do things around here.

These normative systems arethe systems on which we rely to solve the challenge of ensuring that people behave the way we want them to in our communities, workplaces and social environments. Only with confidence about how everyone around us is likely to behave are we all willing to trust and live and invest with one another.

Ensuring that powerful AIs behave the way we want them to will not be so terribly different. Just as we need to raise our children to be competent participants in our systems of norms, we will need to train our machines to be similarly competent. It is not enough to be extremely knowledgeable about the facts of the universe; extreme competence also requires wisdom enough to know that there may be a rule here, in this group but not in that group. And that ignoring that rule may not just annoy the group; it may lead them to fear or reject the machine in their midst.

Ultimately, then, the success ofLife 3.0depends on our ability to understand Life 1.0.And that is where we may face the greatest challenge in AI research.