I just want to start by asking you why the till now? Why didn't you do this sooner? Hey, and thanks for having me. You know, one of the things is we're at a pace at Mach V in the industry where we now have the power to build this type of technology tool and make it practical for consumers. Part of that is what we've developed. There's a rapid investment of innovation in McAfee, but also new technology in the industry. So for example, McAfee Deepfake detector that we launched last week, it takes full advantage of the neural processors that are in the latest generation of PCs, and it's that hardware plus software combination that really makes this practical so that users can run the analysis on the audio, looking for whether something is real or fake continuously without impacting power performance. Okay. I we there are some constraints on the rollout of this is limited to a certain extent. But I just want to say again, it's an analysis of the audio in a video and it

took me a while, Steve, to kind of get my head around that. Why is that approach important? Audio review on a video. Yeah, we looked at this very closely when we started our research into deepfakes. And one of the things that we found was almost every fake video has fake audio, but often there's no fake video element of it. So sometimes it's going to be real. Sometimes it's just using the real video of somebody and having fake audio. So we by tackling audio, first, we're able to cover the most scams and disinformation that's really harmful to consumers. Now we know that Deepfake audio is used for all sorts of purposes, some of it not harmful. There's a lot of AI parody videos out there. That's fine. But what we're really trying to help consumers detect is when they're looking at something like an investment scam that has a celebrity or a well-known individual making statements. And it is that deepfake audio that then

they can detect out like that's actually generated by AI and be a bit more careful. And especially, you know, as we're two months away from the U.S. election, anything that we can do to help arm consumers with powerful tools to detect disinformation? It's super helpful. It's really quite interesting, almost fun, basically going on your website and looking at how you're helping people know Taylor Swift won't send you a free Dutch oven. And it's showing that there's a lot of B-roll of Dutch ovens used and apparently it's Taylor Swift. It's not. When you check the audio and you look at all the ones of Gwyneth Paltrow, for example. Steve, though, going back to what Ed said about the limitations, how can we broaden this out? How can it be that anyone with any computer, any phone can start to use your technology? So this is our initial launch.

And one of the things that you'll see from McAfee is this is the first inning in a long game, and we're not stopping here. We have a lot of great technology that's in the pipeline that's looking at all sorts of other elements around helping consumers detect air-generated content. We announced some partnerships with Intel a few months ago, and you're going to see some great things from us in the future. So while we're super excited about what we launched this week because it's a real product that we can get in the hands of consumers to solve a really difficult problem, it's just the beginning, and there's a lot to come. We've got an audience that loves the nitty-gritty of the problem. How difficult is it? What technology have you used yourselves to uncover these deep fakes? Yeah, it is a difficult problem, but it's one of the reasons I'm so proud of the technologists, the data scientists

We have here at Mac. The reason we tackled this is that we invented a lot of new technology, but we also worked with our hardware partners. The great folks at both Qualcomm and Intel have been working with us for months. We've been working with our OS partners with Microsoft, and we built new AI algorithms that are basically detecting AI-generated content. So you can almost think of it as we're building good A.I. to detect A.I.-generated content that could be harmful to consumers and really giving them the tools that they can use in conjunction with a better education of understanding that threats and scams can be generated to protect themselves. And one of the ways that we're doing that is in conjunction with the launch; we're also launching an AI hub, which is a website that really focuses on the education side. So it's this combination of technology and educating the general public to keep themselves safe from this new wave of cybercrime that can be really damaging.

We've seen some of the AI scams can take anywhere from $250 to half a million dollars. Steve When I was a kid, I had McAfee on my personal computer either to clean up or for some sort of protection in this day and age and sorry for the sort of washy statement. What's the business model for you guys in trying to fight deepfakes in an election cycle? So McAfee is committed to keeping consumers safe from digital threats. And that means all sorts of digital threats. So the classic digital threats with malware, dangerous websites, we're still heavily invested in that. And that's a big part of our business. But we know that keeping consumers safe is much, much more. It's protecting consumers from disinformation, from scams, helping them protect their identity and really all of the things that are going to be the forward-looking challenges for consumers in 2024 and beyond.

McAfee Launches AI-Powered Deepfake Dectector

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