Bytes: What’s new in tech

A successor for Jeff Bezos?

An heir apparent has emerged at Amazon in recent weeks, said Jay Greene in The Washington Post. Andy Jassy, the 52-year-old head of Amazon Web Services, had been “one of two No. 2s in Amazon’s corner offices.” But his spot in the corporate hierarchy behind founder Jeff Bezos got bumped recently when the other deputy, Jeff Wilke, announced plans to retire early next year. Bezos, 56, “has given no indication that he plans to step away from the company,” but he has gradually added “extracurricular interests to his portfolio,” including space exploration. Jassy, an Amazon lifer, has led the company into a wholly new market, cloud computing, that’s become central to Amazon’s business. One former Amazon executive says Jassy “has adopted a lot of Jeff’s personality,” while Bezos has “left Jassy to run AWS with little interference.”

Misinformation made easy

How easy is it to make a deepfake video? asked James Vincent in TheVerge.com. It takes time, but it is accessible even for someone with no coding experience. “The basic mechanism is tantalizingly simple: All you need is a video of your subjects and an audio clip you want them to follow.” A website, Wav2Lip, created by some AI researchers, provides an interactive demo you can plug in and experiment with. After running into several setbacks on Google Colab, and watching a YouTube tutorial, “I finally had a working model.” Such algorithms can be “used by anyone willing to put in a few hours’ work.” It does take effort, though, to get the details right; if “your aim is to spread misinformation,” selective editing is probably still the faster process.

Silicon Valley builds a stock exchange

A new stock exchange opened up last week in Silicon Valley, said Biz Carson in Protocol.com. The Long-Term Stock Exchange was originally conceived “as an epilogue” in CEO Eric Ries’ 2011 book, The Lean Startup. In it, Ries proposed a public exchange “designed to promote long-term value creation” rather than obsess over short-term returns. Ries started working on the LTSE in 2015 and received approval for “the 14th public exchange” in the U.S. from the securities regulators in 2019. Backers— who have invested $90 million—have labeled it Silicon Valley’s exchange, although Ries stresses it’s open to anyone. But it is starting by only “soliciting listings from companies that commit to policies around diversity, sustainability, and long-term planning.”