CES 2026: Part Two (Tuesday) - podcast episode cover

CES 2026: Part Two (Tuesday)

Jan 07, 20262 hr 1 min
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Episode description

Welcome to Better Offline’s coverage of the 2026 Consumer Electronics Show - a standup radio station in the Palazzo Hotel with an attached open bar where reporters, experts and various other characters bring you the stories from the floor. 

In Tuesday’s first episode, Ed is joined by Ed Niedermeyer of the Autonocast, Henry Casey of CNN Underscored, Gare Davis of It Could Happen Here and Ed Ongweso Jr. of The Tech Bubble newsletter to talk about smart glasses, wireless TVs, and the big lie of consumer robotics.

EXCLUSIVE CES SALE! Get a *permanent* $10 off an annual subscription to my newsletter through January 13 2025: 
https://edzitronswheresyouredatghostio.outpost.pub/public/promo-subscription/cue848p5sc

Ed Ongweso Jr.: https://bsky.app/profile/bigblackjacobin.bsky.social

The Tech Bubble Newsletter: https://thetechbubble.substack.com/

Gare Davis: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:jm6ufvsw3hg5zgdpnd3zb4tv

Henry Casey - https://www.cnn.com/cnn-underscored/about/henry-t-casey 
https://bsky.app/profile/henrytcasey.net

Ed Niedermeyer of The Autonocast: https://www.autonocast.com/https://bsky.app/profile/niedermeyer.online

Donate in Sean-Paul’s honor: https://www.perc-epilepsy.org/

LG’s robot: https://www.cnet.com/home/kitchen-and-household/lg-brought-a-robot-that-cooks-folds-laundry-and-empties-the-dishwasher-to-ces/ 

The Aura TV with a soundbar built in: https://global.dreametech.com/products/dreametv-s100

Displace Wireless TV: https://displace.tv/

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Transcript

Speaker 1

Also media, you are bearing witness to a great becoming. We're back.

Speaker 2

It's better offline.

Speaker 1

That's right. It's our second day of coverage of the Consumer Electronics Show here in beautiful, scenic, rustic Las Vegas, and we're here for two two hour long episodes today, this being the first, of course, and I am, of course your host ed Zeitron and the King of Pigs, the Dale Cooper of podcasting. We've got an open barb, we've got tacos and places to relax with journalists and

good lord, have we all seen some cramp. Our first contestants are the remarkable Edward On Guaser of the Tech Bubble newsletter ed Hello, And of course we've got ed Niedermayer, the author, and of course he's the co host of the autono Cast. Howdy, And we've got Gay Davis. It could happen here. Yeah, how are you doing?

Speaker 3

The only non ed present.

Speaker 1

Yeah, We've got three ads and one gear and I think that that the mathematics works there. I was at the convention center today. I power walk through two holes in the space of a morning. I pray for death, but I'm going to start with the fact that I think smart glasses are evil. I tried several ones of them, and there was one where I put them on and it's meant to be you meant to look at your photos in there, you meant to listen to music and

all this, and it was blur. I just go, yeah, it's really blurring, and go goes yeah and just looks at me. I'm like, you know, He's like yeah, you know. I'm like, how much is it twelve hundred dollars. I'm like, oh great. He's like yeah, but that's with discounts, And it's just like, who the fuck. I know that there's the whole thing about assistive technologies that's cool nor but it's like, who the fuck is this actually for? I'm just kind of lost.

Speaker 4

I had a similar feeling. There is a lot of times I would come across assistive tact that I'd be like, this is interesting, and then I get introduced to the rest of the ecosystem, which itself is dubious, or there are other there are other additions or features that don't

really seem to need to be grafted on. I mean, I think similarly with smart glasses, you know, I feel like the only ones I saw that I was interested in were some that allowed you to hear better and functioned as like a hearing aid, but then almost yeah, it's like, you know, okay, if you if you really don't want to wear a hearing aid, you know, if you're really self conscious about that, even though we have

invisible on ones. But I saw these eating there's an app and the and an ecosystem you have to get locked into.

Speaker 1

The worst ones I saw and I hate to chit talk specific company. When they were is the even G two a's and what the word you put them on and they had like a look like the pit boy. It was like green and black. Yeah, and I had this ring yet to put a ring on and control them, and the ring didn't work, like you had to like violently smack your smack your finger like you you can't see this, you're listening to a podcast. But I'm just like smashing my aura ring with my thumb and it

wasn't working. And I turned to them went yeah, it's not really working. They just went, yeah, you know, it's just it rocks about technology. We're just like a mate, you know, it just fucking so, I don't know, mate, what to tell you.

Speaker 5

But like technology is not cutting edge unless it's janky, right, I mean that's kind of part of the deal. Like, like cutting edge has become this term that we think of as just like good, but really the definition of it is that it's like not fully developed.

Speaker 1

Yeah, and it's it used to be. Maybe I'm just I'm having some nostalgia here. Maybe it's not true, but it felt like about ten years ago CS you'd see something here and then when it came out, it'd be complete. Now it's just they release everything in alpha. Yeah, we're living in the world that that Elon must create. I mean wasctive, but I was literally gonna say, you're an Elon musk head, a big a big Elons Elon stan Yeah, and yeah he really has in the ear of just bullshit.

Speaker 5

Yeah, Like like I mean, if we live in a world where you can promise, you know, specifically, like your car will be able to do level five attime, this is like a very specifically you know, defined thing and you can get away with We're saying end of the year ten years in a row, which is where we're at now, it'll be it'll actually be the tenere anniversary in the fall. That's nice, Like these are things people people see these things happen and they're like, well, why not me?

Speaker 1

Yeah, why should I fucking bother? So, Ed, you've been on the floor. What you see today? What kind of what kind of cramp? I mean?

Speaker 4

I saw a lot of stuff that was uh categorized around let's say age tech. You know. So the so the goal here is you have AI companion bots or chatbots that you speak to. You have smart homes and surveillance systems that constantly log your information and give people away from you, Yeah, insight into your home. You're generating as much data as possible to feed into something that can analyze it.

Speaker 1

I saw this tech I still like a Boston Dynamics looking ass dog right boat thing, and it was by this very I think you should leave style thing of like a guy you'd fallen out of a hospital bed. I'm gonna pull this up just so you can see this. So if you like, this guy has fallen out of his bed and the dog is just looking at him, and it says, de cloak brain, He's just just lying

on the floor. Now, I get that there's probably a reason like this, but are you saying that every hospital is just gonna be stalked by Boston Dynamics stocks going, yes, he's dead, he's fallen out of it. Is that cheaper than a person? I am? So?

Speaker 5

Is this is this being aimed at hospitals or is that like costs?

Speaker 1

It was not clear because there were tons of other use cases as well that were very vague, like old person, a neighborhood. Watch, what's that dog gonna do to me? I'll kick it so hard it flies, Yeah, well I'll send it to hell. Yeah.

Speaker 5

I mean, like the whole thing of selling robots to consumers is really interesting because you know, all of the successful robots that that exist really are are not consumer facing. They exist in factories, these very like controlled environments. They do the same task over and over and over again.

Speaker 1

We know how to make straight forward right, yeah.

Speaker 5

Exactly, And like a human home is not, you know, a constraint. I mean it's constrained, right, but like a lot of random stuff happens, they're relative to say a factory, and like a rumba is something that you can kind of work if all your floors are perfectly flat and you don't have transitions, and you know, but even that, like that's a successful product class relatively speaking, and it's really the only one in in consumer facing robots and actually a robot went went under, So.

Speaker 4

Right, why do you think why is there this constant term to reinvented or to reh you know, rediscover this path that ends and that goes down to dead end.

Speaker 5

So well, so I think what the reason the reason that that robots are being sold to consumers is because they know that consumers don't understand them. I think, you know, you mentioned all this age tech like selling sophisticated data driven technology to old people. Why do you do that? Yes, there there are some needs there, but also you know, wealthy people will will buy it without really thinking too too hard about it.

Speaker 4

Yeah, when I talked with them, they were you know, with a lot of these firms, they're like, well, actually it's supposed to only be sold to like nursing homes and larger business U. But yeah, sometimes people buy them individually because they're really concerned about their family members. So I think, so, yeah, that's similar dynamic where it's like, you know, if you know it, and also if you want to take advantage of you probably just can't buy

one for your you know, for your home. For your grandparent.

Speaker 1

Okay, did you see any robots, any anything robotic tap?

Speaker 6

I walked past the robot that you showed. But I've not really been looking for products and show floor but mostly been going back and forth to panels and keynotes.

Speaker 1

What'd you say? Tell me about some panels?

Speaker 6

I went to the like the ct A is a super technology association.

Speaker 1

Sure, I'm a professional. And I also don't know.

Speaker 3

I know, I know who runs this convention.

Speaker 4

I went.

Speaker 3

I went to their keynote this morning, and they.

Speaker 6

Brought on like a few like CEOs from other other other companies, like they had They had Navidia guy on at the end.

Speaker 1

What he's anything interesting or is it just like a lot of woods Low? No, he was.

Speaker 6

He was talking with the CEO of I'm going to say Siemens. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I And they were talking about like digital, uh, the use of digital trends and manufacturing for like like these large these large like the complex simulations.

Speaker 4

Yeah.

Speaker 3

So they talked a bit.

Speaker 6

They were also talking a lot about the movement towards quantum how this is this is, this is the next thing, because we're kind of getting tired with the AI stuff, right, So quantum is where they're going to be moving to, like the new hype thing. I'm guessing next CES we're going to see a lot more quantum stuff. But they have this CEES Foundry event space to set up specifically about merging AI and quantum and then that opens on Wednesday,

so we're gonna have to check that out. But no, they they did mention smart glasses during the ye One of the few one of the few products that the actual like the CEES like guy like Gary I think is the name who like actually mentioned was a persona smart glasses for tutoring. And like I've tried on smart glasses at this show before, I haven't tried not this year yet. Like the auto translation ones were always kind of interesting.

Speaker 1

Those ones always seem like useful, but it's like you never really fucking see them in real life.

Speaker 6

They're very limited. You don't see them in real life. They're usually the resolution is pretty low. These things are

gonna get better over time. But there was another CEO that they they brought on and I apologize I can't remember his name, but it was during the first keynote Tuesday morning, and talking a lot about how wearable tech is gonna make a big is gonna make a big comeback because all of these wearables are now smart enabled and you're gonna have the AI in your ring, in your glasses, in everything you're you're wearing your watch, these you're gonna start learning more about your life and those

AIS are gonna learn about how the real world actually works, which allows them to be smarter and more useful and help us out in a whole bunch of new ways. And so they were talking about how, like you know, fit bit first was the cees like you know, a thing years ago, and wearables since then, you know, some success, but have kind of kind of become has kind of

been more gimmicky. And they're talking about how wearables are gonna become like a major, major, a major thing now with with that's with the smart enabled stuff, right, But yeah, and it's the other thing that both both Gary, the the CTA guy and the and the Semens guy reiterated on a lot was like electricity defined the last last generation, that fucking AI will illuminate the next.

Speaker 3

And this was this was I've heard this a lot this morning.

Speaker 1

So electricity defined the lost generations.

Speaker 6

Like like like the lastic century, like the last hundred years, like innovation was was was because of technic electricity. This was this was like the thing, right, the next thing is is AI And the coolest thing happened during during this the Semens opening keynote where he was like, you know, one hundred and twenty or however many years ago, there was no electricity and then all the lights in the convention center like turned off like for for the for

the show. Everything went black, including they didn't think about this, including the telepropters.

Speaker 3

So it was this like real, like big dramatic. It was this big dramatic moment.

Speaker 6

And like and then he like paused for like thirty seconds because he didn't know what to say next, and someone ran on stage with a binder of his script so he could read the paper as he introduced how electricity like entered the world and like illuminated everything. And then the lights came back on and it was just this, It was this beautiful CES moment.

Speaker 1

See, I would have just if I was there with you, I would have been like, quick, I'm gonna lie on the ground. I need you to scream at the top of your lungs. He's dead, he's been murdered. Who did this locked the doors. There's a murder. That's that's really good though, And no one thought this through. Yeah, it wasn't even remember the fucking fifteen words he needed to. He's I just and I love I love that.

Speaker 5

It also just proved that, right that, like electricity is still actually quite important. It's very important. Also, the AI is gonna keep as.

Speaker 3

Useful as all these AI things are. Sometimes you need a binder with paper on it.

Speaker 1

Also, I just can't cannot remember what you have to say next. It's not like it's not like you was saying anything that matted. It's just you. He went on. Electricity defined the next generation AI will.

Speaker 3

This is the industrial AI revolution ed.

Speaker 4

Uh huh, physical AI, right, he.

Speaker 6

Said that that's what there is is like a mobiles. This is one of the interesting things though. Actually I'm seeing is beyond beyond like the you know, lofty things about quantum We are seeing I think a movement back towards the material in the way that AI is being talked about here, because like the past two years, AIS was what was much much more speculative. Now that in

some ways they kind of had this cultural dominance. You use, you have this emphasis on like manufacturing and this is something that like the CTA guys like I talked about during their keen out, is like this for the first for the first time in a few years, we're really emphasizing like the manufacturing side of things and trying to like bring this these like lofty AI things pretty down to earth on like house is actually gonna help on like like industrial like these.

Speaker 1

Cases and could they explain an, well.

Speaker 6

See that's the beautiful thing about c Yes, that's something that we get to all discover together throughout this WEEKND.

Speaker 1

And that's just the this world model ship, the.

Speaker 6

Digital twins thing that that that's that's really like, that's really what they were talking about specifically with like the Navidia and Siemens, like a conversation between their two guys specifically about the digital what is.

Speaker 4

Spurring the is spurring the interest in world models, this idea that Okay, there are limits to LMS, even if we are a savior are fanatics and we think it's going to save the world, we need to find another way to embody it without embodying. Yeah.

Speaker 5

Essentially, so Yan Lacun's whole thing is is like yeah, like language is not like sufficient to create real general intelligence. Like the whole thing is animated by the idea that a GI is is a thing that we can achieve and and and that basically lms have proven that like language alone can can create a like a similar acrium of intelligence up to a certain point, but like child understand and the world around it, which is not just made up of language.

Speaker 4

It's so interesting that in the response to being like, oh, we reached all these milestones that we thought would open up the doors, the solution isn't that we raga, we need to radically rethink, and it's like, actually, we need to. We just need a little bit more juice.

Speaker 1

Well, here's the thing. I think this world model bullshit. In the digital I've been hearing so great thing about running pr from in texcause you hear a lot of terms repeatedly. I've had world models for ten years. I've heard sorry, not world models. Digital twins. Digital twins was like and like it was a simulation thing kind of yeah, But then then during the metaverse time, it was just like, it's a space that's the same. World models are just they're a scam. Like I just like faith a Lee.

Everyone talks very fondly about her spatial intelligence and all that. Well, the fuck it, Like, where's her product, where's the thing she's done? Because World Models the reason they're pushing these in digital twins is because it's another use for GPOs. Was talking to an analyst.

Speaker 3

Oh yeah, that's that's in the video.

Speaker 1

Was on stage. Please God, keep buying the GPUs, please God. And Jensen one needs another leather shiny.

Speaker 3

It was so shin.

Speaker 6

So he had the shiny and it was firm skills, Yeah it was.

Speaker 3

It was the skilly one.

Speaker 5

It was.

Speaker 3

It was very hard looking.

Speaker 1

Yeah, it's yeah. It's just very sad as well, because they're not saying that though, because with with other lambs, they're like GPUs, we need more of these, we need more power. With world models, they're just like digital twin copy simulation. And then the Information mentioned this. Yes, they put out a story saying that M Video's omniverse software.

Yeah I love saying it. That it was not making much money and they had to shut down the cloud because nobody wanted it and the software sucked, and it's just like they're running, they're out of ideas, but they're just getting up. It's like watching a pair of parents stay together for the kids. Like, yeah, we all love world models. Digital twins. Yeah, that's those are good, right, we both know what this means. Yeah, we could model a warehouse, couldn't we miss the same And.

Speaker 6

They modeled an HD HUNTI shipyard.

Speaker 5

Yeah. So in the auto industry end is microft.

Speaker 3

Every nutt and bolt.

Speaker 5

Yeah, but like this is not the problem is is that is that these digital twins for manufacturing, like you only there's only so much demand for it exactly right, Like when you design a factory, like that's a big effort and you take one and then you usually you know, reproduce it, and so you're not doing that design like a bunch, right. You want to get it right the first time because the tooling is.

Speaker 1

But they say to answer actually a question, you aren't with robots, that what their thing is. And they kind of showed it with the Nvidia Press yesterday where it's like, oh, you could put the robot in the digital simulation and then you could do that, and then they stop talking. They just stop describing because they're like, and then the robot will be smart and able to deal with the real world. They don't really seem to link those two things together so precisely though they talked a.

Speaker 6

Little bit about that specifically for the manufacturing though, and being one of the uses for the for the digital twins stuff is that, and and even putting AI in all the wearables, and once they have enough data both in the digital manufacturing, the as will know how to do it enough that we can make them run all physical manufacturing. And you have AIS building robots, who are

building robots and like all all of that. That's sort of like automation stuff, right, is kind of how they referred to it, but it wasn't something that they like emphasized.

Speaker 4

Also to your point, I hadn't thought about this until you said it, But yeah, what is actually the composition of demand going to look like? Where it's like, yeah, I actually just need to do it once because these are highly like I need to know how to my robot should operate in this specific circumstance. I need to know what the factory looks like, and then after that I'll just copy and past it. Why should I use the software more than.

Speaker 1

But that's actually a good point, Like what happens when you program the road? Surely once the robots done, bam, programmed did they have.

Speaker 5

So that's that's the whole point with with with the humanoid thing. The whole idea behind the humanoid thing is that you create a physical embodiment that that has the versatility that a human body has, and then you can continuously evolve the software for it so that it can eventually do anything. Really in a lot of ways, it's it's a way to write, like you know, with LLMS, people find the limits of what right, the hall hallucinations, the unreliability, all those problems. This is a way of

sort of repackaging the dream of universal capability. But like in this physical.

Speaker 1

Form, it's a dream though, it's it's a dream.

Speaker 5

Yeah, general general robotics is not a thing. Generalized robotics is a big talking point right now, and like robots are getting more generally capable.

Speaker 3

But like people again, you know, that's how they're talking about it.

Speaker 6

It's like how do you how do you get like AI driven innovation? Like how how can AI like find new solutions that we wouldn't think of without the hallucination problem? And specifically using these models are like if when when when these models run long enough, they'll be able to improve how these like factories are shipyards function in ways that LMS simply like can't as adjust to language models.

Speaker 1

It always seems like it's just they will like it's there because I feel like we've heard this robot just a twin thing for a while. I feel like we've heard about robots. Everyone's shifting to robots now. Even China just actually was Hong Kong, Mate, is the Hong Kong How Yeah? I know, just yeah, I'm gonna get killed by someone. No, they just delayed a robot ipo ing over there because there's a bubble growing. The ship hasn't even launched, and they're like, yeah, mate, were already at

a bubble. We speed around this one. Motherfucker. I just think I saw the LG robot and they wouldn't they didn't have the demo ready, And they showed this video of this woman being like, hey, robot, how are you doing? Because I'm great, you should work out. It was just and it was like thank you, thank you, Glaubo or whatever it was called.

Speaker 2

No, No, it was funny.

Speaker 1

It was like it walked over with like two pound dumbbells and it was like, yeah, you should do see these lately. Yeah, it was close and she was like, oh, if I didn't have you, I just laying around all day.

Speaker 6

Should I order more laze potato chips for you?

Speaker 1

You? Oh hog, you look new, sweaty hog, Get up off your app And then it was doing the squats with it was like a little bit more depth and it's just I swear there is regulation against lying like that, and LG is a public company, but it's just what the fuck are you do? Like when is this thing kind of come out?

Speaker 4

What is the plan with it? And also it's a forward looking vision.

Speaker 1

It's it's what we talk about Yesterday's like who the fuck actually needs this? If I had a robot walk up to me in my house and go, you need to lift some weights, I beat the ever living shit out of it. I'm not a violent person, but if like a machine decided to impose its will upon me with pathetic two pound dumbbells, I'm at fives and just yeah, it was so strange. And I tried to talk to someone over there about it and they didn't really have any answers, and they couldn't even tell me when the

demo would start. Very sad well, I.

Speaker 5

Mean, I don't think it's a coincidence that like the leading sort of seller of right again, Elon Musk with optimists, like as a South African and a racist, and like he's selling the idea of slavery, Like like that's that's literally the vision, right, It's that that we create these things,

the software evolves to the point where it's human. It's essentially a mechanical human and it just does everything for us and it transforms our economy and everything, and like it's like you are just this is this is slavery. I wonder how much of sort of the political tides that are happening right now or are sort of are sort of hided to this.

Speaker 1

I feel like, what with the AGI conversation, no one ever wants to talk about the fact that it is just slavery.

Speaker 3

It's like what if we had except they're not people?

Speaker 6

Yeah exactly, I mean I will, I'll be like yeah, but like they are people though.

Speaker 1

Yeah no, It's like if you make a conscious being, well yeah, but it's not conscious. But if they made a conscious being with AI, event eventually they can't do it. But if you ever mentioned this to a GI people that get really upsex like it's not slavery. I'm like, you trapped a conscious being and bent it to your will? What do you what would you call that? And they're like computer and but with robots, I just think that

they're just starting shit at the wall. They're just like I guess because the actual robot you'd want is something that can handle anything, which is an impossible idea. And also I will train it to be articulate and competent like a human. Have you met more than one person? Because people vary in their abilities to do stuff humanoid the humanoid form is also not particularly efficient for the every task.

Speaker 5

No, and like creating a human I mean, like the engineering of a human hands, which is where we get a lot of our versatility from, is like absolutely insane.

Speaker 1

Well, I mean I have a coordination disability dyspraxia. And it's like, yeah, I don't know if you're doing a bunch of training data, which they are like, oh, that's how we're gonna do it. Training data. Great. Are you gonna make what's a perfect human? Are you gonna get like eugenics level data?

Speaker 4

Like what the fuck?

Speaker 1

How do you get perfect day? Or are you going to get very day? Or what is good data, and no one ever asks these questions at the panels, and no one ever gives an answer anyway, I.

Speaker 5

Think I think the way to think about like the consumer market or like the attempt to develop a consumer market for humanoid but other other robots in general is like slop because like it the whole thing with ro it's really hard to sell a robot to a car company. Like I went to Toyota and I went to the

place where they test all of their robotics. There is a few years ago now, but like they're like, yeah, we buy every time a company comes out with a new robot whatever, almost any kind, like we test the shit out of it. Yeah. And the thing is is that they think and I'm just like, like, how many robusts you adopt? They're like, well, not that many, really,

I said why? And there's like, well, once you start a car factory operating, if something breaks down, one piece breaks down, like the whole thing just stops all of a sudden, you're burning like millions of dollars a second, and then you have to fly someone from the other

side of the word. So like robustness, to get value out of automation, it has to be really really robust, and you know that's why it's really hard to sell this stuff to companies is because they don't want to come depending on something that's just going to break down and then they can't operate for like days. With a consumer, you can sell them slop because if part of it is the spectacle, the prestige. I'm an early adopter. I have the new tech thing, the fact that it's jinking,

it doesn't work. This is exactly what's happening with Tesla autopilot. It's something that looks self driving and has this pristide, but it doesn't actually deliver the robustness and safety that you know you need to like take a nap in the backseat.

Speaker 6

This is the real, the real tension of the consumer electronics showcase because you have half of it trying to be directed you know, for for industries, right, a lot of these lot of like you know, AI automation stuff is like for manufacturing, but it's it's the other side is the consumer electronics part where they're selling kind of kind of janki things that don't work to a little bit like gullible people or people who want to believe in this, like Jetson's vision, and you have both these

things kind of working in tandem, and when they rub up against each other, it creates these like these like cognitive frictions.

Speaker 4

Yeah. One thing that's also been interesting this year and last is seeing the stuff that would not be able to snap past the sniff test for business to business or even regulatory oversight that is sold to consumers with almost you know, like we're getting up to the edge of what might be a therenose in the sense that they're saying, Okay, with digital information, we can approach the limits of what's physically impossible and deliver that to you with a little bit of analytics, with a little bit

of artificial intelligence, instead of relying on really sophisticated technology that are biomedical tech that we just don't have.

Speaker 1

I just think it's funny though, because if the robots did what they said it they did, it'd be kind of cool. I'd love a robot butler. I think I think we can all agree. I just want to robe what that brings me a diet coke and be honest, but like.

Speaker 3

You could have a regular butler.

Speaker 1

I don't want to, like, like that's the thing we get into the AGI conversation. I just want to I just want to wrote, But even then it's like it's even an.

Speaker 3

Aristonta black butler.

Speaker 1

Not that. Oh no, I have actually seen black butler. Yeah, yeah, I would love you know what, a butler that would kill people for being people out for me, that'd be fucking sick. Yeah, and specially didn't expect me to have seen black butler. I think we baby, But this is the thing as well. It's like, even though I'm like joking and oh that'll be fun, it's like not really, I can get I can get off my arse and grab it that. Oh no, I've got a vacuum. It will take me fucking five minutes.

Speaker 5

Is not that bad.

Speaker 4

There's something I was seeing on the floor. It felt like a lot of use cases that people were offering for agents were actually oh you know, it was just like convenience via a chat thought interface. You know, we talk to people. They'd be like, this is ai agentic cooking, and it's like, what's the part of it? Not you, but I know that's what I said. You know, I

was like, what's the agentic part? And they're like, oh, well, like it had you know, there's a camera inside and it can see what food you have there, and then you have a list of recipes. I'm like, that's not an agent, but worried. Okay, Uh, you know we have other agents that are saying we do you know, agentic health analysis. And it's like, what's the agent part. Well, it's like, well, you can talk to it about different things.

Speaker 6

It's like, oh, that's not the I will I will not be happy until there's an AI in my vitamics that tells me how to make this movie, what this mooth is gonna.

Speaker 3

Do to my body? Yeah, and what ingredients I need to get from I.

Speaker 1

Need a robot to tell me I'm fat. I saw this. My mind doesn't do that already.

Speaker 4

So one of my mortal enemies, well or recent mort enemies, it's you know, the makers is the omnipod and what's the omni pod?

Speaker 1

Uh?

Speaker 4

It's it's for it's a diabetes piece of a wearable tech that you know pomp uh yeah, insulin. And they were you know, they didn't off, they didn't say, you know, we got AI in here. They were just there to advertise themselves, right. But you know one reason I hate them, But I also think of them in contrast with everyone else is you know, my partner's diabetic, and I see up close how often the device fails every single.

Speaker 1

Fucking day, And that feels like a thing that we know about and should be able to solve.

Speaker 4

But it's also like I, as far as I can tell, they are never going up and saying with AI, we can make it a little bit better. It's nice, you know, but with every single other you know, not not to be a fucking insolent show, but you know, with almost every single piece of biomedical tech I saw this year so far and last year, I mean, I'm saying, well, yeah, you know, like there are a lot of inaccuracies. There are a lot of physiological limitations. There's some physical limits,

there's some chemical limits. But with artificial intelligence and with enough data collection, we can transcend those.

Speaker 1

That's the thing. How much data? How much that next time, like if you all listening to this in you're at CS or any of you, and next time someone says with enough data, ask them how much and ask them to get specific because they don't have a fucking answer, And the answer is they also don't know what day they need, well.

Speaker 5

So and the amount of data that you have is only part of it. The other part is constraining the problem space. And we know that from the autonomous vehicle space, right like where Tesla says, well, this is gonna work everywhere, and we have all this data from all these cars and so it's gonna wear and people buy it. It's a narrative that makes intuitive sense.

Speaker 1

It makes sense to a person even though it's not true.

Speaker 5

But it really isn't. Whereas you know at Zookes, they're now last year, I got a ride on the strip and yeah, and now they're like all over the place, and they do they're able to do that because they constrain the operating space. And especially with driving where it's like safety critical, like you have to be able to validate that safety to like a high degree. And if

it's just operating everywhere, how do you do that? Like, you can only do it by constraining the level of complexity, by constraining the problem space, and so and so like for all of these AI things, the question to ask is like, right, like if someone is saying like we're just gonna solve all the problems, you can solve it none, right, And and for me, like The test of any AI product is like how focused are you?

Speaker 1

And that's the thing. You can't really you can't solve every problem with every the Nvidia thing yes day, the panel whether go is like one one robot for all things.

Speaker 4

I mean yeah, like we were talking about with these generalizer robots.

Speaker 1

And you can't generalize anything unless, of course you're listening to the following advertisement. This will solve every single problem you have ever faced. Don't be mad at me if it doesn't, be mad at them. All right, we're back and we've got of course, the great Edward Geislo Junior of the Tech Bubble newsletter, Ednia Meyer of the Autono Cast, Hello, and Geah Davis. If it could happen here, now here's the thing. I was also seeing some terrifying AI children's products.

Speaker 3

Oh I love those, Yeah, I love those.

Speaker 1

There was one. I'm just gonna pull this up because there was one that just all I could think of it was kicking. You know, aim Land, you.

Speaker 3

Should put a AI in child into your search.

Speaker 4

Bar right now.

Speaker 1

I'm not, No, I'm not. I don't use egg for some.

Speaker 3

Great news stories.

Speaker 1

AI plus love a live AI me can listen, speak and thing powered by advanced AI. Its senses, your voice and presence, reacts to emotion and learns through real interaction. Over time, sometime something begins to grow inside am Aime, tiny feelings, gentle awareness, and thought shape by the world it shares with you. Until Aime starts to feel alive. Brackets lean in and listen to Aime's in a voice.

I could not get close enough to one of them, but I would love it if they just sit and they go fucking kill you, just like muttering, cereal, I will kill them all. And I watched the demo of this woman and they were doing they were really like the hogs watching be like ooh, because the woman just did this demo that was so It's like, wow, how did you remember that? That happened so long ago? And it's just again, I thought I saw that last year.

Pretty sure. We saw a lot of this stuff. And it's just this idea of handing a child in l M is insane as a parent. And also there was the one we talked about yesterday, was like, it's like saying that Taiwan isn't part of China. It gets upset.

Speaker 5

It's it's so fucking yeah, exactly it's like teaching your child poisons.

Speaker 1

It's just and they keep saying these things like, oh, it will grow over time.

Speaker 3

They won't, especially if the company is defunct.

Speaker 1

When they run out of money in a month, they spend it all on.

Speaker 4

The booth, letting your kids just talk to themselves and their little figurine. I'm curious about how they offer.

Speaker 1

I'm curious about shareholder value.

Speaker 6

This is the this is this is that. That's the kind of upsetting to me though, because like in the conversation about how AI is getting get into all these wearables, like these people really want AI basically in every action figure they want. They want like agentic AI in every single toy, so that like it becomes like a normal thing that you're not. You're not just going to get like a bare piece of plastic.

Speaker 1

Ever again, they can subscribe you.

Speaker 4

They won't mind if my cards talk to me.

Speaker 1

The thing though, it's like it's device is made for people that don't use stuff Like here's the thing I use my ur ring. I have an Apple Watch, I've got fucking eight sleep bed and I've got like things that measure my sleep. I have years of sleep data and I cannot tell you anything, just more data. No, but it's just that's the thing.

Speaker 7

It's like.

Speaker 1

All of this time, they're like, well, when we get all this date, we'll be able to do this. When motherfucker I have the data now, can you not tell me when my best sleep times are? Can you not tell me how what I could do? Differently, Like, I'm not sure what to do with this information? And then like, what with the power of AI you could do something? I'm like, what is it? Uh No, we're not there yet.

The apparently Aura is here showing something off and it's like and Luna and Luna, It's just like and all these rings, it's what could you do with them? We're having victorious song on later and she put it where it's like, yeah, if you use an LLLM connected to it, you can sometimes get a useful out. Just fucking just stop stop stop pretending.

Speaker 4

I asked them. I was like, what is the different are there are few rings? I stop by, and I was like, what is the difference between me collecting all this data myself with a bunch of jinky things and I'm putting it into some literally and then asking a chap out about it, versus whatever you guys are doing. They're like, well, well, you know, like we have other people's data that we are look.

Speaker 6

Like that.

Speaker 4

I don't know if that's there, so you should.

Speaker 5

Have told me.

Speaker 1

But it's also like human bodies are varied things. Certain things work for different people. I imagine that there should be trends within workout data that could do nothing, nothing, nothing that I would love it if they could tell me what would be the most effective workout, what would be the best.

Speaker 5

But like, but see, this is why you make products for children, and they don't ask questions.

Speaker 4

Why isn't it worth?

Speaker 1

Yeah, they're like, what.

Speaker 5

Your data is not providing enough actionable insights.

Speaker 4

It's time your kid says that your data does not work for the father.

Speaker 1

I fix it, father, the analytics father, father, my analytics. Papa, Papa, Please can I have some have.

Speaker 4

Enough actionable insights before I go to bed?

Speaker 1

It just feels like I really think they're just trying to work out ways to give us subscriptions to everything. Yeah, I can't play just Pokemon regularly. I got a subscribe to Pokemon Plus.

Speaker 4

I mean, oh my god, I forgot with the AI agentic kitchen or oven. One thing they added it's not just an oven. You can't actually get it to just cook the food. You have to have a delivery subscription.

Speaker 1

You are, Oh yes, is that sov? That's one of those During during COVID I had father, No, I really shouldn't say, briskets off.

Speaker 4

Terrible s E.

Speaker 1

Oh yeah, I'm just going to look up this company. Oh one hundred and fifty thousand articles. I yeah, that's fucking good. I bet that's one thing you can't cook it in.

Speaker 4

But then I also asked them, who are your delivery partners? I said, are We're not there yet? Are you?

Speaker 1

Are you? Are you?

Speaker 4

That was so sick. I said, okay, it's.

Speaker 1

Just like I do wonder why there is no legal recourse with people going to this, Like its just like you get lied to for several days.

Speaker 4

Market is the legal recourse. You don't go to market if you don't. So true, So true.

Speaker 1

I also think we need less electronics and things as well. I still, I know Matt Bender likes the Lego Brick, and I can see it's it's like, I don't need a fucking market trip in the Lego brick. Yeah, I know, if it needs to go, you can just do that with your mouth.

Speaker 4

I don't want my extra visors to talk to me. Part of the fun is as a kid was talking for them. Absolutely, you know.

Speaker 3

We're gonna spoil the next generation of voice actors.

Speaker 1

It's really devastating what we're gonna turn to. Like I I'm like wishy washy when it comes to how bad scream Time is. But you know what, I actually think it is bad making every single toy and some individualized autonomous a even though that's complete bullshit, some LLM driven bullshit, and like they make the noises for you because it's like one of the joys of being a job was like having an imagination, and it's like, I don't know what, like they want to take that way so they can

put subscription into it. But it gets back to the thing we're saying yesterday as well, where it's like these are just products made by people don't interact with anyone. It's like one of my biggest problems. Fuck, my kid keeps want to talk to me.

Speaker 5

I was gonna say, what better way to tell your kid that you hate them? Giving them a chap pop?

Speaker 6

I mean, like this makes sense because like they're they're selling it to people who are like upper middle class, upper class. They don't have time to spend with their kids like these. That's these products are targeting, is is you know, both parents are working, they probably have some kind of like living nanny. The kids probably relatively isolated

like that. That's what these it's really for. It's it's it's it's it's for these like relatively wealthy parents to buy for their kids because they don't spend time with their kids.

Speaker 1

Right Like, that's like.

Speaker 6

Because people who are like working class aren't aren't buying these, can't afford them because they're insanely expensive.

Speaker 3

Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 5

One of the most unexpected use cases for autonomous vehicles actually now is people putting their kids in waymos No. Yeah, and like.

Speaker 4

This is this is a real thing and a whole thing for this super and left now right, Yeah, they have advertising but now you can just send your kid off and they're safe.

Speaker 1

Your kid will be safe.

Speaker 4

But they had to massively market safety passengers.

Speaker 6

Goodness, No, we need we need, we need like a new q Andon to shut this thing. Yeah like way far like wayfair trafficing children in way most.

Speaker 1

The right wing is just like that, we need to.

Speaker 5

They're straight to.

Speaker 3

They're setting these kids in waymos tomorrow ago.

Speaker 1

Take it to Comet pizza. Like, yeah, it's so it's oh wait wait okay completely off ces for a seconds. So you put your child in the autonomous vehicle, at which point your child is alone in a car and it drives around. Yeah, what if something goes wrong?

Speaker 5

That's a great, great question. This is for you know.

Speaker 3

Like aren't you a journalist. You should you should be asking these questions.

Speaker 1

Yeah, I am among the podcast.

Speaker 5

I mean I think I think the magic of of like cs and and stuff is that like technology does make people turn their brains off. Like people are so conditioned to believe that a machine is somehow better than them. We're so surrounded by machine, like you know, the and and I think this is like a perfect example, right, like like why pay someone who is like trained to take care of your child when like a robot will be just as fine.

Speaker 1

Yeah, you know, I still think we need My big socialist thing is I think we need to create like a state funded nanny system and like for like working families and just make it the best paid things.

Speaker 4

Yes, I agree adible economy because it's a good one on.

Speaker 6

Well, hopefully they'll do that in New York. But like you're you see you see parts of the tech industries Seese that kind of want but they want to fill it with with like agentic childcare or whatever.

Speaker 4

Right. I mean that's also the thing with the age dech Right. I mean it's like, okay, so look, we have a large scale problem in our society where a lot of people aging, they don't have support infrastructure. A lot of ways we can handle this. How are we gonna handle it? Well, since we don't really do technological innovation, we're gonna do the lowest bottom denominator thing, which is, you know, we let the private financiers drive the development

of what the care infrastructure is gonna be. Yeah, and a lot of that just means bullshit so that they can scale up to then get into some other business model. Right. So it's just not it's just it's same with the childcare, same with the elderly care. All of this shit sucks. And it's also not even seen as the end point. It's like a stepping stone so that they can get into some real business. Yeah.

Speaker 1

Thing is I don't think that there's as much intention behind it, is My thing. I don't I don't think there's a master plan. I just think they're like, fuck, what my biggest problem My old fucking dad keeps calling me my kid claude, won't stop asking me for things. My home is sometimes dirty between the eight cleaners, What do I do? What a robot? What do people deal with in regular life?

Speaker 5

What? Dirt and old And by the way, I mean, Japan has been, you know, because of their demographic situation, the aging population, they've been and you know, technological prowess. They've been developing robots for seniors and various kinds of you know, aging assistants. And the reality is is that, like, despite huge investment and huge support from the government and like everything that they could possibly want, the results are not like that impressive basically.

Speaker 1

Because the ultimately, you know what helped my poor grandmother once she passed, like ten or eleven years ago, nine four year old Granite Palse Marion, she liked being called on the telephone people. Yeah, it's like someone's my dad going and visiting her. Like it's like, what's gonna help your talking to them and asking questions or if they're curious about something, you can use Google, but you can talk to them about it.

Speaker 5

And there's another piece too. I saw you in the past life. I was actually a caregiver for development too disabled people, and you know, it's one of those jobs where like there's a lot of time where you just sort of sit there, you know, and there's just like nothing happening, and then there will be you know, I mean, like I had a client who would you know, smear pieces every once in a while, right, and then you had then and that was when you were really you know,

earning earning the pay. The point I'm getting at is that, you know, the majority of work, of the value of the work that people do, especially in service type jobs like that, is in what you would call an edge case, right, you know. And and again like following the autonomous vehicle space has been really useful for understanding this stuff where ninety percent of driving is just like boring and just

sit there and anyone could do it. And what what makes someone a good driver is how you deal with it when shit goes sideways, right, yeah, which is very rare and very sudden and very challenging to negotiate. It's the same thing with a lot of consumer customer service jobs and then other kinds of just like service caregiving

type jobs. The value is created in when when things start to break down, and that's when automation doesn't work, and and and no matter like no amount of like large large models is going to change that because ultimately, like as soon as you see something out of out of distribution, right out of your training set, you know it's it's useless. Yeah, and that again, that's where caregivers like make earn their money.

Speaker 1

Right, Yeah, it's it's just deeply sad as well, because there are very straightforward problems that people have. It's just you can't really solve them with technology. Oh well, we have the ede cases in customer service You want to

know what increases customer service calls? The fact that products fucking suck Now, the products aren't very good, that they get released in alpha or beta stages, the fact that they require a subscription for certain features, or the support documents of dog shit, or the guide to put them together is dog shait. It's like, the actual problems are the companies are fucking things up regularly, and they're like, well, if we had more customs, well no, no, no, no, no,

actually that would involve paying someone. What if we just had an AI. I guess maybe it could say it slower occasionally, but sometimes it could even answer a question.

Speaker 5

SoftBank had a robot called Pepper, called Pepper that was are you familiar with Pepper?

Speaker 1

No? I just love soft so and.

Speaker 5

You're supposed to call it Yeah, of course anything they touched, but Pepper was this. It was a customer service robot and it was like, you know, sort of vaguely humanoid, but it sort of rolled around our wheels and they use it in like shopping centers and stuff. Anyway, I don't remember how much money SoftBank sunk into this. I think it was a French company or something. It didn't

it did like, it did not work. I loved it because everyone expects the headlines of like the robots are taking their jobs, and like every everywhere this Pepper robot went,

it would lose its job. It was like the headline was always like robot fired, replaced by humans because and again it's because customer service is fundamentally about helping people, right, like if everything is in its right place on the shelf, you know, maybe and certainly badly like laid out in large stores, maybe someone needs a little bit of assistance finding like where the section is, where their thing is.

But for the most part, like when people have a problem that they require customer service help with, like it's because something has gone wrong, the shelf is not stopped like something is bad. And and again like if it's an abnormal set of circumstances, the robot is almost never and like that's where that's where the value should be created and the rubbles can't do it.

Speaker 6

I saw this good post on x the Everything app Lately, which was.

Speaker 5

This could go so many directions.

Speaker 6

Well, good engineers are building like an AI bar and they program every single possibility for someone ordering drinks at it, at the bar, ordering other things at the bar, ordering a horse that bar. They have everything everything figured out for for for people to to go to this bar, and then a customer walks in and they ask where the bathroom is and the whole model breaks.

Speaker 1

Yeah, that's the thing. Though, I love the idea of also a robot bartender. No bars are about ambiance and available diet cokes for me, and it's like I like how it feels, and I like there being a person there. You have like a no conversation or some conversation. Each bar is a different bartender. That's part of the joy of going to a bar. I don't need a fucking robot arm to go here.

Speaker 5

You go well, and then and then the other failure mode is right. It's like did you see the Wall Street Journal thing where they have the vending machine.

Speaker 1

With random Everyone's I love Johannaston. I think she did a good job. But the whole thing is like, why are we not just like straight up saying this is broken dog ship? Why do we have to couch everything with? But it might work in the.

Speaker 5

No, yeah, no, the idea is right, you put it, you put a agentic yeah, Claude sort of on the.

Speaker 1

You know agent, it's nell.

Speaker 5

But but right then, like oh, this will just magically cover all the edge cases. Well it sort of did, but like people were able to get it too, like the.

Speaker 1

Buy yeah, like make everything.

Speaker 5

It basically just like burned all this money because people were able to say, like, just get me this thing.

Speaker 1

I would have literally just stood by it all day. I would have I would have had that thing.

Speaker 3

This is a physical vending machine, yes.

Speaker 4

With this software on. I mean I remember what one of the part they already perfect.

Speaker 3

Perfect machine.

Speaker 1

Just go to Tokyo it's perfect go to like a guess station some type Like.

Speaker 4

What was the rationale actually for.

Speaker 1

Yeah, what if we invented the machine that could vend things Like it's just like what if you could service things using like queens and cash?

Speaker 4

Again, you know, I would have kind of expected to do like surveillance pricing, Like what if we were able to make something like yeah, it would a little bit and then figure out how much you.

Speaker 5

Like, it's the search for like surely there must be some use and you know.

Speaker 6

I mean it's it's part of like we're trying to like ground quote unquote AI into these like physical things now now that it's not just hype, and then yeah, you can see stuff like yes for like they're trying, but it's like, yeah, come on, and.

Speaker 5

It's a convenient bandy to slap on something, right, you can sort of develop a robot to do certain things and and it's like, okay, well, as soon as we get out of you know, out of our training set, we'll just have an LM just sort of swoop in and sort of magically solve it. And the reality is is that either it can't often or or it solves it in ways they create like other totally unexpected problems.

Speaker 1

Like the idea of them being like what if we did Oh yeah, it doesn't work, just like obviously broken doesn't work. And this is the second time Anthropics done this. They did a store and the way they wrote it was like I'm doing air quotes because it was like, we had it run a store. Could it work?

Speaker 6

No?

Speaker 1

It made up meetings, it made up this, it did that, and it was just like, yeah, guess this doesn't work. But if it did, we'd have a vending machine.

Speaker 4

There are also people who like will use. They take all the models that pay for the premium uses of them and they let them loose on the stock market, and they're like that, this is great, let's see who does best eat shit.

Speaker 1

We already had that with night Capital in twenty twelve.

Speaker 4

I think it was they had.

Speaker 5

I mean algorithmic trainings thing. For a while, I haven't I have not heard about the l M trading terrifying.

Speaker 1

I love that idea.

Speaker 4

It does not work.

Speaker 1

Well. It's it's because most stock advice online is bullshit. In fact, almost all stock advices bullshit, because if you actually knew what you were talking about, you wouldn't ship it.

Speaker 3

Would not be talking about it, would just trade.

Speaker 1

Yeah, it's just it's really good that they're working on ways to to do vending machines.

Speaker 4

Jesus. Do you guys feel over the past two or even three years that you're also seeing a lot of times there's a product that actually has maybe some interesting improvement and how it functions and and it's and and maybe and how a consumer can use it, But they just feel I cannot actually get people interest in this unless I say there's AI and to graft it onto this. I've been trying to understand because I feel like I keep seeing products where it's like, I don't actually understand

what the AI here is. I talk to you, you don't really seem to.

Speaker 1

Have televisions TV. That's my answer.

Speaker 3

Yeah, the smart TV thing.

Speaker 1

Every I've been walking around, it's like, oh, does it help with the picture? No? No, No. If you ask it what what the capital of Washington state is, it can sometimes answer it's like great. Anything else, like could it control the TV's funk? Oh? God, No, you can't turn the volume up, And even if it could, it would be like volume up, volume messed up.

Speaker 6

It's honestly, I think that the thing for me actually to circle back to where we started maybe the smart glasses.

Speaker 3

Yeah, smart glasses were kind kind of kind.

Speaker 6

Of the same like three four years ago, and they're now trying to keep selling them by by framing them as you know, AI powered smart glasses, when the practical functionality is almost identical and you have you had that one like New York startup, it was like that cheating smart glasses clearly clearly Oh yeah right, So like they're trying to find these these ways to like make smart glasses, to like find fine find ways to convince people to tactually buy these things.

Speaker 1

It's just like what freak would use them?

Speaker 3

And that's the problem.

Speaker 6

And the only the only thing that's actually think got people to buy the smart glasses is the covert recording. That's the only thing that's actually gotten people to like buy and wear these things is that you can secretly record people.

Speaker 3

And that's that, more than the AI thing has actually been the thing that sold these glasses.

Speaker 5

I wonder if there's gonna be more. I mean, like I remember, I'm old enough to remember the glass backlash.

Speaker 3

How is that not New York people break them?

Speaker 1

Yeah, there was this amazing video of someone on the subway and he's got just like exactly the kind of white guy know you're going to do something you can do, And the woman is just staring dead eyed at the camera just kind of like come over here, see what happens.

Speaker 4

Doesn't got in trouble?

Speaker 1

They should they should get the key to the city, Donnie Caliphate should elevate them.

Speaker 4

Yeah, we're looking into it.

Speaker 1

No, it's I just also like who is walking around? I was saying, It's just like who's walking around being like what the fuck is going on? What the fuck? What is that? It's good? Who was sitting around being like what kind of tree?

Speaker 3

That would be a great? That would be a great? Tim Robinson care that is just what the fuck is going on?

Speaker 4

A friend of the show case Newton once, I think, promoted something about how it was like this AI thing you could talk about and ask questions as you were on a drive about like maybe you're driving over a bridge and you're asking like, okay, like how old is the bridge?

Speaker 1

What does it mean?

Speaker 4

And so I was like, well you also can just like ask yourself those questions or look it up.

Speaker 6

Or like yeah, it's taking away the American the American right to be driving while scrolling on your phone.

Speaker 4

It's not, which is also funny because they sold it as like a safety thing. I feel like it would be have better standing than Actually, haven't you ever just want looked at something? How are they not going on there?

Speaker 6

How are they not marketing it as like a safety thing for like for like how like like a you know, like hands free enabled like like search while driving.

Speaker 4

You want to ship post while you're driving?

Speaker 5

It has Yeah, they have to do that.

Speaker 1

I just don't walk around thinking things like that. Like I don't do walk around and be like walk maybe if I'm like in a botanical god, right, what kind of flowers that?

Speaker 3

But I mean, I I do.

Speaker 5

I just I just write the Wikipedia all day.

Speaker 3

I write I working around, you know, I I do.

Speaker 6

I just would either remember to look it up later or like or take down notes to it because so I can enjoy the thing in person when I'm there and then if I want.

Speaker 4

To, Yeah, I don't want to disembodied being like if I.

Speaker 6

Want to learn about it, I can get like a coffee somewhere and like look it up. And that's that's like a separate, a separate experience.

Speaker 4

It's just what And it's a good one too. It's also good, I think, like the thing I'm always surprised by is they're always trying to paint any non AI mediated experience as a bad, inefficient, inferior experience, and that actually what you really want, which you don't really know you want, is you want to have an interlocutor that is not real.

Speaker 6

This reminds me of the very first product that I I that was mentioned during the ct A keynote. And this is something that I have not found on the show floor yet, and I I have to.

Speaker 3

I have to look it up.

Speaker 4

I have to.

Speaker 3

I have to find it and talk.

Speaker 4

To these people.

Speaker 3

It is you're you're love to set.

Speaker 6

Yeah, it is an AI holographic wind shield display for your car.

Speaker 1

Wait wait, wait, let's talk about it. So I know, I'm actually not going to be as syne as you expect, because this is a fairly standard thing like BMW has that look like heads up heads up display, which is.

Speaker 6

It's it's it's it's a digital interface on on the windshield.

Speaker 3

So it kind of already got those on the windshield.

Speaker 6

So the whole thing, all across the whole thing, Oh my god.

Speaker 3

Yeah, And so you have, you have like you have.

Speaker 6

Like you know weather, you have maps, you have all all these random things. If you could you compare it with some kind of smart glasses that you can search and you can see results there. God, And so I need to actually find the company. I need to find the companies like location and they ask them about it, and like to expect like the you know, the obvious like safety problems of like if something goes wrong and the screen gets blocked.

Speaker 3

But but yeah, it's.

Speaker 4

It's it's so funny.

Speaker 1

Is led by the car crash industry, like you.

Speaker 6

Said, like there is there is versions of this thing which which kind of work. I think keeping it away from the windshield probably a good idea. Keep keep the display on like the dashboard, but having it directly on like on like the borders and emerging onto the center of the entire y and.

Speaker 1

Your eye level, so you take your off the road.

Speaker 6

And you have to look to the courner and specific on the on the because there was like one picture of it during the keynote, and they have information like all across the board.

Speaker 3

So yeah, your eyes are gonna be darting to the.

Speaker 6

Other side to like the corner of the road to read some kind of like pop up thing on the screen.

Speaker 1

I love being on my phone. I want to be kid. I love the computer so much. I have so many screens, but I don't know. When I'm driving, I quite enjoy not having that. I enjoy I can listen to a podcast drive back from girl friend. Listen to last podcast on the Left the other day that was lovely and all about Casey Anthony, horrible, truly awful stuff. Didn't get that in England. But it's like that, and like the time when I was just facing forward and listening and

spending some quality time with someone I love. Like when I'm driving on my own, I get chruts to listen to podcasts or listen to music.

Speaker 4

I don't want to bleep, I don't what's.

Speaker 1

The way Like I can look at the window and I imagine I sound like fucking Dennis Larry.

Speaker 4

Like driving it's a beautiful road up state, and you get and you get an intrusive thought, what year did Genghis comment? And you ask it and you and the screen lights up like someone threw a flash bang inside, because every surface gets illuminated with information.

Speaker 1

Genghis Calm was born in nineteen eighty two twelve fifty eight.

Speaker 5

For ten years, though, like the auto industry has been coming to CEOs and trying to do what I think like all of these AI companies are trying to do, which is ultimately either replaced like Google or really like your phone as like the portal to the digital realm. Yes, and there was and and like to to this day, there's still this like battle inside these OEMs of like of there's factions believe like that car should be cars and they're actually sort of you're seeing sort of like

physical buttons come back. That pendulum is swinging back, and I think that's because the reality is is that your phone is still the best way to do all this stuff.

Speaker 1

But they're working on making that was I will say it was exciting when it was at the Renaissance Hotel. I saw Faraday Future. Oh they're still here. Yeah, They've got like these weird like dad wagons. Now, so that's a lot and story. Tell me if I'm wrong. Faraday Future is a company that sometimes makes cars but sometimes goes bankrupt.

Speaker 5

So they've managed amazing. They're one of these companies that like no one is quite sure how they haven't gone.

Speaker 1

Bankrupt they did. I'm thinking of Fisco.

Speaker 5

Yeah, Fiskers. We've gone through two Fiskers. Yeah yeah, No, there's a lot of different ones to one.

Speaker 4

They've gone bank wept and then they're like we're back.

Speaker 5

It was this guy started a second company sick I think was.

Speaker 1

The one with all the weird Chinese money market.

Speaker 5

Yeah. So, well so the first one was one that was sort of like it was like a kind of like sexier model s sort of it, but it was like a hybrid, so it wasn't quite like that electric. So that was sort of you know, twenty thirty fourteen fifteen something that went bankrupt, and then he came back and made this car, the Fisker Ocean Boy Future though, the fair Day Future. Okay, so it's like it's like this Chinese I think money laundering operation. I'm really you know,

I'm not entirely sure. I'm not comfortable calling them an automaker.

Speaker 1

Well, they have costs them and they have like three screens.

Speaker 4

No, I remember they have a car.

Speaker 5

I think was it twenty seventeen that they there was a there was a they they were one of the in the peak sort of like post or sort of like Tesla fueled like car car hype era. They had like a legendarily them it was them an Eco. I get the two of them mixed up, but there were both of them had like legendarily like like bad but like expensive and massive like spectacles.

Speaker 1

Here that like did not go well my kind of call.

Speaker 5

And then like the next year they were like they didn't even have a booth, but they would just sort of like brought their car and just sort of like parked it on the curb and people would see it. And like I think they have they're supposed to have a factory here that I think there's like three different places where they're spposed to have factories. We're supposed to be one in southern California and one here, and then I feel like they pivoted to AI at some point

there too. But I genuinely like there's only so much you can pay attention to.

Speaker 3

So it's the it's the Hoyundai mobis Mobius.

Speaker 6

I guess it's more holographic windshield display, which is a transparent display system that transforms the vehicles windshield into a digital interface.

Speaker 1

I don't I want to win.

Speaker 6

The technology enables to display of navigation, driving data, and digital content while maintaining cockfit openness invisibility.

Speaker 1

Someone's watching Porno on that immediately.

Speaker 6

Just my uber drive for being projected onto onto the windshield.

Speaker 1

Nice, I mean I already like everything we do it.

Speaker 5

Guys, look at the road. Have you seen the size of screens in modern cars too?

Speaker 1

Like you.

Speaker 3

Like why you can see? Why?

Speaker 6

Why are they projecting a fucking movie on the on the right side of the windsheet avatar.

Speaker 1

It gets where like these people don't have human experiences because these people all get car service one hundred. You think these people like getting in that car to drive other than like the.

Speaker 4

So you think they're trying to be like, how do we create what you want from first?

Speaker 1

No, it's like what do those fucking pigs who drive around all day?

Speaker 5

I don't.

Speaker 1

I don't look at my driver, but like when he drives, he seems to be looking at that transparency.

Speaker 6

He's just looking off into nothing. Yeah, he should be maximizing his efficiency.

Speaker 1

What if he was maxim what if he was content max.

Speaker 3

Why don't we have linked in on the windshield?

Speaker 6

But like you know, they did like parts of this, like like having having like the navigation map like right above the steering wheel. Maybe not a bad idea, maybe not a terrible idea, kindly happening having a movie having digital content displayed on the right side of the windshield.

Speaker 5

Like why, well, so, I'll tell you I think that I'm guessing. Knowing the auto industry sort of the the thinking behind this is probably that this is like a software addressable thing, right, so, in the same way that Tesla took all of these controls that used to be with knobs and buttons and dials and menus and this and that and put it all onto basically like an iPad, this is sort of the next generation of that, where then you have you're no longer constrained to one's screen.

You can create like almost infinite variety. If it's sort of a projection based system, that's projection. That's how I so so. And again it's you know, I think you know in the auto industry, you know, you want to make an investment in in in hardware that you can then maximize over a lot of time. And so you know,

software addressability is like the or software defined. Software defined vehicle is like the buzzword, right yeah, And and the idea is that you can do what Tesla has done, which nobody in the industry thought was possible, which is make the same car for ten fucking years and just you know, throw throw the plubs some like fresh software updates every every six months or so, high.

Speaker 6

High brightness, full color images directly onto the glass.

Speaker 1

I love this, and we have to cut this up. Well, we're cutting this the you said minutes. The next for us is from Glunt, the slot for hogs. What if you hear anything else, it's for Glunt, I promise you, But yeah, catch you in a minute. We are back on the show. It's the Consumer Electronics Show. I am, of course ed Zitron. I didn't identify myself from the

last ones, but you know, I think you worked. Start by now we've got ed Niedermyer of the Autonic Cast, Hello, and Edward on Greater so Junior of the Tech Puble newsletter. I'm a joined by Henry Casey CNN Underscore. Henry, thank you so much for joining us again.

Speaker 7

And thank you for having me with here.

Speaker 1

So I actually I'm going to start off by saying I saw something I kind of liked. Maybe it's kind of like there's a specific use case for this, like show flows whatever. I saw a company that's doing wireless TVs, like it's a wireless bracket. You put the TV on it and charges that you can charge it, and they sell their on TVs. I thought it was cool. I thought it was fun that somebody did something new. And maybe this is just how beaten down I am from

years of CS. I'm like, what if a TV was wireless? I guess, and it's like, yeah, I saw that. I talked to them for longer than I think they expected and then just walked off. And I think they expected I was gonna get a business cards. I didn't.

Speaker 7

So it has like a battery packing of it on a charge. Again, you pull it somewhere else, or how wireless is it?

Speaker 1

You have to You can put any TV on the thing, you click it in and it powers the TV and they o their own ones as well. I thought it was fun. I thought it was fun, And now now saying it out loud, I see the kind of dead eyes of everyone looking at me. I'm like, maybe maybe I slightly had more fun with this than anyone else. Ever will it.

Speaker 5

Sounds like it would kill with those people who are like obsessive about cable management.

Speaker 1

No, they did. They also may have did. They didn't laugh when I said this, even though I thought it was very I was like, they were like, oh, yeah, you got the you can do one hundred and ten inch with four TV screens and they were like yeah, sort of like trade shows. I'm like, yeah, that's useful. Or you could be like one of those insane gambling guys with TVs. And the woman just stared at me, just fucking I'd love to watch four sports games I love, like that's part of the fun of Vegas.

Speaker 7

Or the Oultimate Mario Kark Tournament.

Speaker 1

Marricot Tournament, Land Party Brothers, Smash Brothers. I did also see. Actually, and this is a genuinely good thing. It was a company called aura At a Mini Led four K TV. It was eighty five inches fifteen one five hundred ninety nine dollars, sorry, fifteen hundred dollars, and it came with the soundbar built into it. That's nice, Mini led big TV. Again, we're describing the things like it's just the thing that exists, but slightly better.

Speaker 4

It's all big as outdoor TV. Or it was one hundred hundred I mean, I don't know it felt like one hundred inches, but I have no idea how large it was. But at the same time, I do think that when I saw the marketing and outdoor TV, I was like, I think they should be illegal for an individual to buy it, but maybe we can let the businesses, you know, they let them buy these outdoor TVs.

Speaker 1

I mean, if you've got you have a TV in the garden.

Speaker 4

For the have the garden in the hot tip, the garden of.

Speaker 1

The hospitals, you want to have to smoke outside.

Speaker 7

You don't think there would have been an outdoor television but side Tony Sopranos Pool like, come.

Speaker 1

On, they also had them for a long time.

Speaker 4

I'm just saying, I'm coming in from New York. We're we're looking into it, and we're gonna ban them into mom Donnie Telephant, Okay, we're looking into outdoor television.

Speaker 1

Donnie's struggle sessions for outdoor TV. Hey, listen, we're starting there for landlords. It's the good Ship, Henry. What have you seen at the show? Now that now that my two things I like to bummed.

Speaker 7

Well bounce off the wireless TV stuff. It's not exactly wireless. You can see the one wire connection going to it. But LG's new Wallpaper TV is their new kind of take on what if an art TV was also an old led TV. Art TV is for the uninitiated. Samsung's frames you can put this is like an old ledge, So you don't really want to have a static image

because you're gonna ruin your television that was burning. Instead, you can have a slideshow mode of your art, but it's it's like a nine millimeters thick and there's one power coming out of the back corner. You can hide it. And Samsung has been doing similar with the Frame Pro. But the thing I'm most excited about is it an eighty dollars ten thousand million power bank from Nimble. It breaks in half and one half has a USB connectors

that unfolds. The other half has a USBC cable. So my best friend when we go out, he never brings a portable charger. I do now share the wealth, don't have to sit next to each other. And it's like actually solving a problem, which is like the CES question of like is this solving a shareholder dilemma and capitalism growth or is it doing something that like my parents will really like because one of them will remember to bring it and the other one will never remember.

Speaker 1

Yeah, that's the thing. Like, oh look I saw an LG thing where it was again another wireless team. There's a few of these things, but it was basically you have the TV in one plug and then you could plugle the hdmi shit into it. It was low latency, no latency. That's cool. But again it's like every we're describing doesn't feel like the future. Like I'm just I'm saying these things out loud. I'm like, yay, what if something was like uh, but that's right.

Speaker 5

That's like the bifurcation of the show is that it's either right these like small iterations that are actually useful, or it's these like wild behind the sky that will never.

Speaker 1

Apply, just don't work.

Speaker 5

Yeah, and you kind of have to have both for a show.

Speaker 1

I mean, do you know what I actually you don't have to have the vapor West stuff. It would be nice if because I don't know, maybe we're just out of ideas, but I don't I know that it may seem like I'm a huge synic. I would love to be wowed. I would love to be amazed, and I would love to see stuff that maybe go, Wow, new thing that I like.

Speaker 7

I'll be the positive guy again because okay, vaporware that becomes actual product and it wasn't vape word to begin with. We see the words concept product a lot of Yes. I think I might have mentioned last year that Lenovo had a laptop that would rotate it screen to try. Yeah, that's actually going to be for sale. They announced they showed off the finished version of it this year. That much the price escapes me. I'm not even sure, but that's the thing.

Speaker 1

That's the thing they I.

Speaker 7

Didn't write the article. My coworker CNN underscored he's got a video on it. We but no, it's it's it's

like you knock on the lidden. It opened up on its own, and if you're in the kitchen and you're wanting to watch to read a recipe on your laptop screen and you're moving your head around, I could see that being useful also, content creators, Twitch people like all the sorts of people there is like it's a weird, you're gonna figure out who needs this, But it's something that was seemed like vaporware one year and actually is on sale and it's gonna come to sale the next

So it's sort of like saying, hey, I don't think Cees is just for the next version of the humane human, the friend pendent like stuff like that.

Speaker 1

You have you seen any friend pendants? Though I'm looking, I'm looking for anything like that. I won't I want Oh.

Speaker 4

I think I saw, I saw. I did not get to go to the pendant. But there's there's a pendant on the Venetian Expo floor that I have to I have to chat with them about. I was a little too taken with all the biomeds.

Speaker 1

To Okay, No, I I really want to. I want more AI. That's hostile towards you. I want Look when Victoria was on a few months ago, where it was just like, no, that's not true. Just gaslight me. It's like, fuck me up, because you know what, stop pretending this is gonna be my friend, because I know it won't be. Yeah, I mean.

Speaker 4

I do love when they're like, hey, you know, like we're gonna have robots in these workplaces and they're just gonna be your buddy. Yeah, I'm not gonna be your worker, You're not gonna be your colleague. They're gonna be your slave. They're gonna be your buddy.

Speaker 1

So I was going through my photos as well, trying to find something useful. But I did find a booth where I could not work out what they did. It was just called wow Now and the tagline was make your inside outside, Make your inside outside.

Speaker 7

David Cronenberg.

Speaker 4

Thinks, but actually that is actually the plot of Shrouds.

Speaker 7

It's one of the best movies of the year.

Speaker 4

Yes, yes, exactly.

Speaker 1

It's a defense against fairies when you turn your clothes inside out. That's the only way they don't get.

Speaker 4

We will talk about that after.

Speaker 1

I saw a comebody called Palm where the logo kind of looked like you said, pawn. That was nice. Yeah, it's I really, I really did. Look. I've been looking for stuff. I saw a company called Zeus that was claiming they had the only GPUH designed for high performance workloads.

Speaker 4

And it's like they got love sense again, what's love sense? Sex toys? That's nice, but a little you know, maybe yeah, yeah, just got some software power hat, power hat.

Speaker 1

You put the hound it's like and it gives you power one of those floppy hats. It connects to like a solar charger. I guess. Yeah, And dual USB A and jew USB seaports. You know what's a bit that's that is the only permissible one is like if you're

like long distance hiking or a fisher. But the people buying this might maybe they'll be outdoors people like Robert Evans, I know, does a bunch of a bunch of like so I think he's done solo stuff where he's just like when he goes into the woods for a few months, like to hunt the Sasquatch. I'll ask him about that later, but it's like that makes sense, But I just I see this. I'm like, I want to believe man, but probably I.

Speaker 4

Believe them when they do a solar bonnet when they do from my people, then I know this series about this.

Speaker 7

The Solar par Real Canadian mouthy hat. He's always gonna be the Brandon Bastard every other year, Like come on.

Speaker 1

That big ass hack could probably fit fit PlayStation five on there.

Speaker 7

We won't get granted six anytime soon.

Speaker 1

But you know, will we get another pop banger like Happy? Well, not like we're getting any this year. Oh Fly or Die is a perfect album and he never made anything better than it. Farrel Williams come on my show and talk specifically about two thousand and five's Fly or Die Classic album. Great album. You should all listen to it. Email me if you've listened.

Speaker 4

We're talking about his beef with the Neptunes.

Speaker 1

No, not interested, just the album, and then he can explain to me why he hasn't made anything good like that.

Speaker 4

Since you don't think the Lego movie soundtrack was gonna be good.

Speaker 1

I think the Despicable meath had a pretty good soundtrack. I'll give it. I will give him the fact that Despicable Me despoakable me too. And to speak, three, no banana fucking. I had not thought about nano banana all day.

Speaker 5

It's not my fault. So one of the going the things that that makes this like absurd stuff so so interesting and so extra absurde to me is that there

is like legitimate technological innovation going on right now. Like one of the big announcements is not kind of arguably the bigges announcement in the mobility space as this company called Donut Lab, and they're they're basically beat all the major automakers and battery companies to the punch on a or at least they say they have to a solid state battery and this something that means yeah, it just means so. Uh, it just means that it's it's solid.

So it's a completely the rather than using a liquid or gel in the in the anode. It's it's just the whole battery is solid state.

Speaker 1

Yes, so just to be stupid, because I really don't know. Regular batteries are full of like liquids.

Speaker 5

Yes, I know, it's a it's a an electrolt yeah, fluid electrolyte.

Speaker 1

And and the solid state is just a break of something. Yeah, that's cool.

Speaker 5

It is, and and it has like really specific advantages. So like they claim four hundred water hours per kilogram, like you know, not much denser than like modern you know, uh, like the current state of the art. But they say you can charge it in five minutes. I think what they said, like.

Speaker 1

Oh that's why the liquid ones charge slow. Yeah.

Speaker 5

So and what happens too is with the liquid ones, like they form dendrites and things, and so it's it's not it's I know, I get I get above my own pay grade really fast with this battery. Technology is like really complex, but basically you can think of it as like sort of almost like crystalline structures.

Speaker 1

Okay, so things full insight and slow them down.

Speaker 5

Yeah, and and and it creates friction and heat and then fire the solid the solid state does not have that issue. So it's like unaffected by temperature cool and and you can charge it really really that's actually.

Speaker 4

Like really good. And that unlocks does that unlock new to use cases? Then if it's like you don't have to worry about the internal temperature, maybe you can run it a little bit hotter than well.

Speaker 1

I mean it would it would be.

Speaker 5

It's so, I mean, I like, ideally, this is this is the future, right, and and so like all the major automakers are are doing this, and they all make kind of somewhat similar claim. So like right they say, like, uh, you fully charge in ten minutes, sixty kilometers will combined range per minute of charging and up to see six hundred kilometers on a single sorry for the metrics.

Speaker 1

No, No, this is great. No.

Speaker 5

So I think like it's this is something that that right, Toyota has been working on talking about for a long time. Hyundai's doing it, like the Chinese battery supplies as well. I think this is like a little British consulting firm and their first use case is a motorcycle, so it's a little questionable show it. Yeah, so apparently the motorcycles are going to be shipping this year so like or like first quarter of this year.

Speaker 4

So they should have a guy just doing the six hundred klometers around.

Speaker 5

Well, and with all this stuff anything automotive you got evalidated over so many miles, and the idea that they're going to be able to build this at at the quality and then and carelessness.

Speaker 7

Yeah, but this is the city of traffic and the frustration beating around. How you talk to any journalists doing ces this year, you will see somebody who has been frustrated about how long it takes an uber. Yeah, and that is the kind of thing where hands on or hands off demos are the thing that would really sell it and have like even.

Speaker 1

Like an e bike would be Yeah.

Speaker 5

Yeah, I just read about it. I wasn't at their event or anything. I haven't been in touch with them, so they may be getting down something. But I think that what I've read about it, like there's a little bit of like how are these guys like kind of the.

Speaker 1

First that's my first thought, Like it's a little British consultancy, never ever trust the British and also just is Britain a hub for battery technology?

Speaker 5

It has been more so?

Speaker 1

Okay, yeah, so like I don't want this to be fake, I want this to be real.

Speaker 5

No, no, like there are incredible British engineering outfits, especially in the odd motive space. So like a lot of Formula one engineering work takes place in the UK, right of course, yeah and so, and that's all heavily electrified now and becoming more so with the new twenty twenty.

Speaker 1

You were in the car section as well, right, do.

Speaker 5

You see anything just very briefly unfortunately, Yeah, I had to go to uh I've listened to the then administrator uh talk, which is how was that? I mean, honestly, like for this administration, it was like sort of surprising.

Speaker 1

That's the National Highway.

Speaker 5

Traffic Safety Administration.

Speaker 1

Yeah, I remembered all those words. Yeah, but anything good or just well.

Speaker 5

From that conversation, it was like a much higher level of sophistication than I expected from someone who works for Sean Duffy. Okay, yeah, this was like a pleasant, pleasant surprise and and like clearly like, uh, you know, I think I think the administration wants to be seen as doing something to help autonomous vehicles. Right, The problem is that like regulation is not actually preventing autonomous vehicle deployment, Like that's not it's.

Speaker 1

Kind of like AI. It's like they're like, oh, we need less regulations around AI. It's like that is we don't have those. Yeah, oh we got one guy think that fuck off. The problem is you don't have enough power, and no one wants to pay for a dickhead with the problems, cause it seems like the problem is the edge cases, like you were mentioning, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 5

So he was talking and this is interesting. So kind of the big challenge with avs is that, right, like you can't just create a right, we have a driver's test, Right, you go out and you do some basic things and you prove that you have the sort of like general capability and they sign off you didn't almost kill anyone,

and you can be a driver. Now that doesn't work with this technology because all you do is train for the test, yeah, right, and then you get vehicles to train for the test, and then they pass the test and they go out and they're like totally useless in the real world. So this is actually like a non creating regulation for a V is actually much less trivia of a problem than people think it's.

Speaker 1

Right.

Speaker 5

People are very quick to say, oh, we'll just regulate it. Well, when you get into the weeds of how to do it, it's actually quite complex. And again I was shocked that that the guy at NITZA is actually has like a

an ar secular level. Yeah, and like a kind of a sophisticated sense of like, Okay, you need to have a test, but you can't have it be some static thing, and and like the fact is like you know, we have this sort of self certification system anyway, and that like if you're faking compliance with the safety standard that that's sort of illegal already and stuff. So it was

like sort of encouraging. The problem is is that is that this is also being used as like a paragraph at the federal level because states, right, so like historically cars are regulated by the federal government, drivers are regulated

by the state the state DMV. Well, so that's a huge problem, right, Like the av companies absolutely do not want the patchwork of regulation, and so they're trying to get a test at the federal level so that they can kind of preempt the state's right to regulate interesting systems.

Speaker 1

I guess it's regulating technology, but kind of regulating a driver as well.

Speaker 5

These two separate things have become one, and in a real sense it is much more of regulating a driver.

Speaker 1

Calculates something when you have the because from my understanding with these autonomous cars, you actually have an overlord watching is what you have a customer service rep. How does that play into them?

Speaker 5

So, yeah, this is one of the most misunderstood and you know, different companies do things differently. Different companies have different levels of transparency around this, so you know, no one description is going to be true true of everything.

But like for example, with way Mo, what they say and I think that have like pretty good credibility on it, is that right, Like for a vehicle to be autonomous, and this is sort of the established like you know, engineering view of and for a vehicle to be autonomous, when it encounters something that it cannot deal with, it has to perform what's called fallback autonomously. It has to return to what's called a minimal risk condition. And this

is like not a defying thing. It just means the safest place to sort of pull over and if you're not doing that autonomously. It's not autonomous. And so like Tesla's are not autonomous because when they fail, the human has to step in and intervene. A lot of people believe that, because there there is this link that every av has to either a remote operator or the ability to send new guidance to the vehicle, that that is somehow remotely intervening to prevent a crash.

Speaker 1

That's that's physically not it's not possible. That's what's not possible because I didn't imagine they had the joystickers.

Speaker 5

Yeah, I mean, I'm sure that folks have tried it, and it's it just doesn't work. So so what happens is that right system, when counter something you can't deal with, it performs a fallback autonomously. The new guidance is just to sort of get it through.

Speaker 1

You have to get it out of that little.

Speaker 5

And then and then it takes back over it.

Speaker 1

Okay, so changing gears, Henry, What if if you see anything interesting laptop wise, and you mentioned a concrete keyboard, which sounds good for hitting people.

Speaker 7

Yeah, key kron actually is doing really fun stuff with the materials that they're keyboards, wireless keyboards are made out of There was one that was porcelain like in one of those concrete. I was thinking, even the most angry redditors won't be able to move this by typing, Like you might use it for self defense if you're that kind of person, but like I was, but you were. What I was just talking about that made me really

think was building some for the test. And while okay, laptop said, yes, there is a big story sort of happening with Dell and pricing, but did people see the LG laundry folding robot thing?

Speaker 1

No, it I saw the robot. I didn't see it fold anything.

Speaker 7

I didn't see it folding anything. I thought moving one thing to another. And I was like, is this being designed to beat the to do the test of the conventions?

Speaker 1

Yeah?

Speaker 7

And then do every sound like SU's why. I'm just like, it's also doing at the slowest the It's the the sloth in the Zutopia Like, I'm like, so that's the thing. But so in laptops. One of the most interesting things is a year ago Dell said the XPS brand was dead. It was replacing Dell XPS fourteen with Dell Premium fourteen and Tech journalsts everywhere were like, what are you doing?

Speaker 5

I love my XPS, people love it.

Speaker 7

And then this year they literally an exact came out and said, I owe you an apology. You guys were right, and then they released the dogs ps' is back. And here's the weird thing. Though they got rid of all the things we hated about it. The function keys are actually physical keys. Again that had a weird capacitive touch thing. God, but it was light up. It wasn't no let like the touch bar on the Max. But the problem is

that I believe, let me just check me. I believe it's they had a last second price change on it, and I believe it's gonna be two thy fifty for the starting price at first for the fourteen inch XPS. No, and it's gonna in February. There will be lower price, much lower price under two thousand dollars versions. And they didn't say why this is. We can all assume one of two things. What is it tariffs or memory shortage?

Speaker 1

Yeah, the RAM thing is fucking everything up. I don't know if you've talked to anyone else at the show, but I've been hearing from quite a few people that this is just fucking up everything now because of AI. That is just smart for the Samsung mentioned they're going to raise the price of phones because of because of fucking AI and RAM kill me.

Speaker 7

People are saying that the iPhone eighteen not coming until next year supposedly is due to that because Apple wants to wait for the lowest costing phone. They want to wait to wait out this freaking memory shortage problem, because that's the rumor at least right they're moving to a spring year cadence for the main phone. But like it's laptops from here on out, we're a little bit concerned about what if there's gonna be a good amount of RAM,

or it's gonna be overpriced. Like it's yeah, I'm glad I have my m one fourteen inch MacBook Pro and that's gonna last me forever, perfully, But.

Speaker 1

It kind of feels like it's gonna price people out of electronics soon because Tariff's already raised things and now RAM is gonna raise things. Also that we can generate sexy of wifus, I guess like it's very strange and I don't think I've never seen anything like it in the history of tech, Like we've seen shortages around COVID and then post COVID, but I don't remember. Just like the I remember the price of everything going out. The

thing's becoming hard. It's to get in general, but not like one thing within the computing world.

Speaker 5

And to be fucking up a business that makes money in order to build a business that doesn't.

Speaker 1

Well, this is making tons of money, sure, yeah, but every other business. That's That's when I'm saying, like devices broadly are going to take a hit because of the PC sales already down.

Speaker 7

I think I did not keep track of that, thankfully.

Speaker 1

Yeah, it's just it's I just ah, I keep coming to the show expecting the future, but it just kind of feels dystopian, but not in like the cyberpunk way, but just in a everything's more expensive and slowing down way. Yeah.

Speaker 7

Well, okay, this is the funniest part of all things. I never expected to get faster. Amazon's revealed that the fire TV interface is getting an update and it's getting faster.

Speaker 1

They're making you find a TV's Amazon store.

Speaker 7

They're just updating the OLS basically, and they've updated a couple of things. But they showed I was watching it today and it was loading smoothly and it looked a little cleaner.

Speaker 1

Yeah, if you use these TVs, they off fuck it. It's like you you hit the button, it takes like three seconds for the post to move.

Speaker 4

For five years. That broke only because I was I had a bunch of people in my room and one of them rammed up into it because it was getting routed. Then it smashed into the floor. Indestructible.

Speaker 1

Otherwise, yeah, you you what you mean is you were wearing your freezer costume, ballowy and the tail and I may.

Speaker 4

Have been a little lit and then yeah, yeah, and.

Speaker 7

It gets worse if you just bought the Prime day cheapest fire TV stick and who knows how low powered that is trying to run whatever. But they said every one they they showed it off on a demo on a regular TV that was running their fire os, and I was just like watching going. I've been recommending Roku to my parents and for a lot of people for a while. It's simple and it's easy for people just want a grid of tiles like nobody can afford. Not

everybody can afford Apple TV. I wish they could, and I think a lot of people think Google TV is content overload?

Speaker 6

It is?

Speaker 7

And it's like you're just getting U Black Mirror episode two? I think?

Speaker 1

Is that is? Is there a black mirror of time?

Speaker 4

But that? Or no?

Speaker 7

Just see all the ads? No, I remember it's the million credits episode and not Uh, I wouldn't.

Speaker 1

Seen any of it. Sorry, Charlie, Charlie does readmore. I'm sorry, Charlie, but yeah.

Speaker 7

No, Amazon actually is answering the critic I've been writing in for a year. It's like, why is this so slow and stuttery? And so I can't wait to update the Nike shoe box of streaming six I have at home because I've been reviewing this stuff for how many years now? I've collected everything just to make sure I can cross reference in back reference.

Speaker 1

Do you see anything you really like though, Anything exciting? Anything good?

Speaker 7

Okay, I don't have the space for it in my home. But if you're a projector nerd watching stuffy, Samsung's Freestyle Plus that keeps auto adjusting to whatever space you put it on. It projected against curtains and c It was clear first of all, but it took a second you saw it like ripple, and then it auto corrected around to a rectangle on top of the curtain.

Speaker 1

That's actually cool.

Speaker 7

But it gets better because they had two different size projector screens that it was on, and if you moved it from one to the other, it recognized the black outline of the projection screen and it really automatically like it automatically resized.

Speaker 1

I like that.

Speaker 7

And then they did it on a three corner corner of a wall and it resized like I would go to Samsung's villa of its forever first look every year. It's like they have a minor city almost if you think Caesar's is a state, this Vegas, this is a minor city, and like the Freestyle plus projector is the thing that was.

Speaker 1

Like, whoa again, how much?

Speaker 7

Though I don't even if they have announced pricing because a lot of the stuff the don announce pricing. But the other weird thing from Samsung and I'm still trying to get to the bottom of it. In the corner of their experience, there was this s ninety five h o led TV that their claiming is can be an art TV and a regular but they had one static image on it for the entire multiple hours I was there, and I was like asking everybody, did you guys beat Burnin?

What is going on here? How is this happening? I haven't gotten an answer yet. I don't know if it was just for the show of it all, like showing it can do it, but if they've somehow done it and they were quietly not explaining it. I have more questions for their PR team and that the process than I do their technical team.

Speaker 1

Good luck on those though, because they don't look from what I hear that piant and they're not particularly helpful with answers the question.

Speaker 7

They're responsive to email there. They're nice group of people.

Speaker 1

Okay, maybe they've changed over the years, but.

Speaker 7

No, everybody's had trouble with different PR, a different outlet. It's not that's it all depends on who's your history of who.

Speaker 1

But that's the thing though, with these AUNT TVs, they're always a lovely idea, but it's like, I don't fucking know if I want some AUNT on my wall, I just put up ah And even I saw one of these e INC things as well, and to show there was like an entire hole of e INC things that just broke. It's just it's very artistic. Actually, it's like, yeah, that's yeah, it's just it's like a nice idea that you're like, okay, but again at the club last night, Yeah,

that was just too late for you. No, it's really it's frustrating as well, because some of these ideas are like, all right, that's a nice one. How much, Oh, just out of the range of most people. Oh, an e ink screen? Okay, I guess, but how much? Hundreds of dollars? Fucking I just they should have a cheap section. They should literally have a cheap section of this show, like a below three hundred bucks.

Speaker 5

I looked up the projector that I think they typically have cost around nine hundred bucks that they haven't announced.

Speaker 1

It's not particular worst I've heard for a projector. Yeah, I mean like the Nebula X one pro, the toll things like five grand and the X one little boxes like and yeah, it's.

Speaker 7

Like a small tube like like it is a cute looking I want to call it pixar esque, but like, yeah, he is a nicely designed I was like, this is fun to use. I just haven't I have a TV and I don't care that it's a black rectangle something else. I'm not the audience for the art TV. I'm not really a projector audience. But while we were watching this freestyle plus and doing, I was like, Okay, this is cool. This is the article headline, this is like the actual.

Speaker 1

But also that's something you could use in an apartment potentially because it adapts to any surface. Finally, something that sounds useful.

Speaker 5

Yeah, well I think Also it's like a I think a little bit of a premium thing too. I feel like screens TVs have gotten so cheap and so big that it's like having your TV like having it be either like disguised as art or like hidden as a projector like it's sort of like a I'm too good to even have a t TVs er for like.

Speaker 1

Yeah, yeah, I did see like the most limped stories like Amazon's used TVs have rounded corners. I'm just like at this at this point, they just just don't. You don't need to post about it, mate, who cares? It's got round Corners's nice? Yeah, it's just like and also I went and look, they look pointy. They looked, they looked actually pointing. Not a circular TV around, Give me a circular to Yeah, I want to round. I want I want a re a rhomboid television.

Speaker 5

Everything has to be filmed at the Fish Islands.

Speaker 1

Yeah. I just though, if you want to do something weird, great, send it my way. Don't pretend like it's for everyone. If you just want to This is for perverts. The pervert section's Pervert TV, pervert TV. I think we have that. I think we have perverts.

Speaker 5

Television.

Speaker 1

Perfect you from YouTube.

Speaker 4

My name is ryand Upalm. I've been watching pervert TV even the past forty years. I'm proud to induce it to CES. Yeah.

Speaker 1

I was gonna make a liquid television joke, but that could get gross real quick. Well, we're going to wrap up this thirty minutes and semens Yeah, there we go, semens Ai Television, pervert television, it's physical coming up next, and ad from Pervert Television, new streaming service by perverts for perverts. And if you're the advertiser that comes next, I am very sorry. I'm very sorry. And if this is one of the ones where it's my voice recorded,

that's even better. I'm not I'm not running pervert TV, I swear. And we're back, and we're back with an incredible group of people. Ledward on Gueizo, Junior of the tech Bubble newsletter Edniedamyer of the Autonocast and Henry Casey of CNN Underscored, And we've just been looking at fake stuff for a few minutes because I wanted to talk briefly about this thing called the pickle. Now, the pickle, the Pickle is yet more fucking smart glass bullshit. But

what it is is it? They call it a soul computer, and I think just I think we can start at this point. If you call anything a soul computer, straight to jail, straight to jel, just to fucking write down you go. But what's great is this thing? Is this? It is these glasses that project images across the across the glasses, the transparent o leads, and then it has some mystical AI in it that remembers everything. I'm just

gonna read this. For a better life in every dimension, we need an intelligence that sees with you, remembers your life, and learns to understand you. And you saw you soul. It talks to you. It can teete like guitar stuff, and it claims it has like memories of stuff you've seen before. Now this has caused some sort of scandal online. First of all, because it's blatantly fucking fake. And there's Matt Doward I think has gone completely nuts about it. It's just like this fucking fake And now the CEO

of Pickle is now arguing with him. I love that. I just got to say, the CEO of Pickle, why is the company called Pickle? I don't fuck it to be extra special annoying? And Alex Heath was like, it's completely fake, it's stupid, it's wrong. But wouldn't it be cool if it was real?

Speaker 5

What if your soul was a pickle?

Speaker 1

What if? What if you Well, first of all, if you make a company called Pickle with a fake device, you probably don't have a soul.

Speaker 4

I have such a negative association with pickles because I had a roommate who would buy so many pickles and I touched them that they would fill up the fridge and it broke all the shelves.

Speaker 1

Just the compound weight of pickles.

Speaker 4

Yes, they opened the door and it's like an apple literally literally, and the and then glass also and pickle juice.

Speaker 1

What was the justification for purchasing so many of them?

Speaker 4

I like pickles, but would get so fucking how they again, all the pickles and how do you forget? You smoke a lot of weed, and then you go onto our basement, very spacious basement, right, and you smoke more weed and you just you get to the pickle dispensary, your fridge and you see your pickles. Splend No not your mind was like also one of their pickle.

Speaker 5

The answer is he didn't have a smart device.

Speaker 1

Remember, you don't need to buy more pickles. You have more pickles than you can ever desire. Yeah, but this is now a scandal because basically everyone's saying this is fake and bullshit and the guy is just on X the Everything app just fucking going to town with people. It's so cool. I'm fine with that that this existing. But he has the post is it? Is?

Speaker 5

It sort of like a people are trying to do like a Marcus Browne with what was the device that he sort of like the human pin human pin.

Speaker 2

Yeah.

Speaker 1

The reason I bring this up though, is I like that every last two CS is we've had oh no, maybe it was twenty twenty four. We had the Rabbit all one.

Speaker 7

That was twenty four, Yeah, twenty four Rabbit.

Speaker 4

That show is there?

Speaker 2

That one?

Speaker 1

No? It was before better Offline. I was a much largest sad of person. So I didn't really have as much fun as I could with it. But that was the one where like everyone fell for it because it was kind of real, and it's just like that company is still rolling around in its own filth.

Speaker 7

Didn't get acquired by like HP or somebody.

Speaker 1

Oh no, that was the Human pand HP bought another company to put it with the Palm Prex. I guess like, like it's just really I think every year we need a fake thing. We need we need something that's like aggressively.

Speaker 4

Just got handed a bunch of handed fake that.

Speaker 1

What's you got there there? It just look like boxes.

Speaker 4

Yeah, they're boxes that hold things that remind me now that you said they look like the rabbit agents that can they AI agents, but they're in cardboard cardboard boxes that look like fridge magnets.

Speaker 1

Well you got in there because I'm quite curious to know what's in this box. And there's an AI agent.

Speaker 5

In that looks as a visual medium.

Speaker 1

Okay, I see some paper, I see I see it.

Speaker 4

There's two boxes and I'm also one right now.

Speaker 1

This is it's like a little green box.

Speaker 4

Little green magnet. I said, what is the it's an agentic Ai, I said, what's the agent? Party is like, oh, you know, if you want a girlfriend? Can I see this? Can I see this? Thank you? Ai Pie.

Speaker 1

Okay, this is just a box with a connector on it.

Speaker 7

That is the memory.

Speaker 1

This is just a battery. Man, I'm gonna be no, it is. There's no agent in that. Well, I'm disappointed down now. The rabbit R one was an NFT project that I wrote like a huge piece about because they're fucking fake and te thing, but I like that we have we should have you. If you want to do fake, you have to go all the way because this is Fickle has the most glossy website. It's like the most like sheen Field website. It looks so professional on mobile.

Speaker 5

It just keeps going, Yeah, it's an.

Speaker 1

Endless and they're just like yeah, it'll do everything now if you fucking pig. But it's it just made me look at it. You look at that, like, wow, this looks very.

Speaker 4

This is another again and there's just there's something.

Speaker 1

It looks like another battery, but it's blue. It's got a screen. Tiny. Okay, so this thing is I'm just going to describe this to it, says X.

Speaker 4

X origin Origin.

Speaker 1

Yeah, Origin, they're calling its z origin. There's zurrigein. Okay. I hit the button and it's like flashing blue and it is doing nothing else.

Speaker 4

Oh, you have to you have you gotta put them together.

Speaker 1

I put them together.

Speaker 4

Okay, you put them together. And then when A P I A I P I, when the AI pie AI pie is connected only to the battery module, pressed the power button briefly.

Speaker 1

Okay. I pressed the power button briefly, and after the white light turns on, white light turns on. Okay, So this is great for a audio medium, I realize. But the thing is about this is it's like this is just two It looks.

Speaker 4

Like we're playing with smart legos. Yeah, which is a thing.

Speaker 5

Hard to describe, how underwhelming it is, just like a.

Speaker 1

It's just the crap show now because but when you read about the pickle, it's funny, especially after a day of looking at actual smart glasses where everything is just blurry. And the guy was like, oh, what are you seeing? And it was I think, what were those ones? Where is that the TCL booth? I think I saw them because that one was it was like twelve hundred dollars

and it didn't really work very well. You had to control it by these people don't use products, I think, because it's like, yeah, you just like rub your finger across the top right part of it, and it was like a picture of Leonardo da Vinci and it's like photos and you could take video with it. And I had to walk away because all I could think of the back of evers, I just want to ask him

what the fucking point of any of this is. But I think I would have turned into Werner Herze and make Peo put this device on my face and it takes me away from humanity and then you steal my money for it. But I was just decided not to do the bit there. It's just I'm I'm really this whole time, I've been trying to rack my brains of why I would ever want because I like the idea of a heads up display. I think the idea of

walking around being able to pull one up. But all of these things seem to run into the same thing, which is they want to be constantly on. They don't want to they don't seem to want to be like things you briefly look at. They want to absorb your attention fully and it just doesn't feel like any device does that other than the phone, and the phone doing it doesn't seem to be for good reasons either or with good results.

Speaker 7

Yeah, so I've been using the x real one sel. Okay, it's the newest and it's good. It's what I like about it is it will meet you where your posture is, especially if you're a pasture is Like let's say I'm in my hotel and I might want to play a video game on my like whatever portable. The lead didn't go s demos, But I don't want to hold this thing. So I was just going to flight for a while, right tired. But I put these glasses and I.

Speaker 1

Have and it's just a TV screen effectively.

Speaker 7

It puts the screen above you and you can move it and you can just have the controller in your hands. And sure, I feel like I'm in Wally's Origin stories at that point. But in that case, and if I had managed to pack it correctly on the airplane, which I couldn't because everybody goes to see s overpacks, it's the problem. But like no, I think x Rayal is one of these companies and they're doing a bunch of

different partnerships. They're working with seemingly everybody possible, which you sort of want if like you want cross compatibility, right.

Speaker 4

I wouldn't.

Speaker 1

But I went to the X Real booth and I was I was kind of excited to go over there because I thought these are just gonna be glasses that little TV's in your eyes, and I'm like, way less. There are way more offensive things on the show. And I get there and there's just a fucking thing that says Vibe agent. And I try and they're like, you could book a demo. I'm like, you don't want to see you don't want to put me in a box with this fucking thing. Only one of us is I don't know.

Speaker 7

I don't know.

Speaker 1

It's a Vivans Vivan's agent. It's a Vivan's agent. I take metal Fen today and it's fine. I'm trying to find this thing because it was so bizarre to me that they're just putting these words to It's like vibe description at this boy like AI agent glasses, fucking fucking slap and.

Speaker 5

Then it's just take slop.

Speaker 1

And I saw a guy, one of the demo guys, very overly eager fella was like yeah. I call these my Tony Stark glasses, and I tried to use them as like, sir, there's a line, and there was like a twenty five person line. I'm just like, oh god, this is just I don't lining up for anything feels deranged here. And I always think the same thing, which is if you had double the amounts of these, you

would be fine. Maybe they're trying to do like they're trying to make it so that scarcity is that you're like, oh, why is everyone lining up for this? Maybe they're just trying to put friction between people and the products they They just don't fucking work that well. Is there?

Speaker 5

Right?

Speaker 1

There must be AI shit in this, I said agents No.

Speaker 7

No, I wonder was there were there? Where was this? Because were there two.

Speaker 1

Boots in the It was in the what's it called the South Hall?

Speaker 7

I believe because I've been going, because I've been that's affair like they are. I will say the words a slab as many times as I feel like it, and I don't think i've seen that much AI. If any ready.

Speaker 1

Reddit thread here saying the instant translation the Visual Assistant Object Recognition Productivity BOO boost quickly access shots remind us or instructions while you do something else.

Speaker 7

Yeah, it's and it's an ex real product.

Speaker 1

Here we go, Project Aura. It feels like tomorrow. Jesus fucking Christ. It's on Android x A hands free control tomorrow.

Speaker 7

Oh yeah, I see it. Yeah, it's an unlocked early access. Yeah, this is not something I have gotten my hands on yet.

Speaker 4

Why didn't they say it looks like tomorrow?

Speaker 1

I don't know.

Speaker 4

Wouldn't that be.

Speaker 7

Because feel is something you feel.

Speaker 4

Yeah, I see, looks could be deceiving, Yes, it might not look like tomorrow.

Speaker 7

And then also look is the signature weasel word when you're not really able to commit to anything yet. Yeah, it looks like it open, it looks like it could be a company that isn't lying to us.

Speaker 4

But then why doesn't feel that?

Speaker 1

It's just like I keep seeing this thing of like this, they have this imaginary person who's just looking around, going what's that? What's that? What's that? What's that? Dude? What's that? What's that object? What's that?

Speaker 4

But then you come here and you do see that person, but the person is on the floor.

Speaker 5

Or hordes of that that photo that post of of just like the Horde trying to like break in at ten A.

Speaker 4

M Oh my god, yeah did I did I send you guys a picture like that?

Speaker 5

You posted the photo of the people like trying to break into the show floor.

Speaker 1

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 4

The same thing. I was like, is it always like this?

Speaker 1

No? I and I said out, I'm like, what are you so excited about?

Speaker 4

I saw a crowd, the largest crowd I've seen yet in any CS around a room a new roomba device that wasn't a room but like a room room but s and I was like, what the.

Speaker 1

At least that's approving party, Like you said, that is something that works every year, and like last year. I didn't check out the robot vacuums this year, but I remember last year they were like, we've got little arms that can pick stuff up. I did. That actually led me to one of the funniest things. I'm sure that this was for like legitimate reasons. There's a robot vacuum company where you could pick up a cleaning struggle. It said, one,

pick your struggle to drop your coin. Three get your magna.

Speaker 4

You're a now entering the cleaning struggles.

Speaker 1

And then it just had a dust always hides under low furniture. Hair always gets tangled in the brush. Too busy, no time to clean, Cleaning requires too much disassembly. I there are times when I want to know more, and there are times when I just read something. I'm like, yeah, that's all I need, you know.

Speaker 5

But I like, this is the issue is that you can fully automated task, but like the robot will need to be maintained.

Speaker 1

Yeah, like do you want to?

Speaker 5

You're sort of trading one thing for the other. And again with like consumers, people will buy the thing because they're like, oh, I'm lazy, I don't want to.

Speaker 1

I don't wanna you know.

Speaker 5

I totally get that, but they don't think that what they're doing is they're trading like the occasional sweep or vacuum of their floor for like, you know, maintaining this complex machine.

Speaker 1

With like light ar and like I have a fucking robo rock. If you're listening from robo Rock, your shit sucks.

Speaker 4

That's what it was. It was robo rock. It was a big giant black and red pavilion.

Speaker 1

Yeah yeah, yeah, I have a quite expensive robo rock. And the dust that that ship doesn't pick up, I undo that ship with a fucking sweat the fact I have to clean up after my robot at this point. Just make it through little turds. Make it a game.

Speaker 4

Some an AI lawnmower.

Speaker 1

An AI lawn mower isn't that interesting. See, that's one where I'm like, I could almost imagine the industrial applications if you just take AI away, because robotics has been doing AI for a while. That's fine.

Speaker 4

Another one of the things where it's like, you know, what might be an interesting innovation that I could be sold into A pitched the AI onto it, and then I'm like, I don't know, yeah, I even.

Speaker 1

Though it was already out because if you already had like ey rob doing like anything Gutta cleaners and ship you know, yeah.

Speaker 5

I mean any anything like that, whether it's a like the lawmowers or like pool cleaners and another classes like actually useful robot now that they were I mean that's that was AI before.

Speaker 1

Yes, they just didn't have to they didn't have to say words.

Speaker 4

Yeah, So hearing aids that were just they were literally just hearing as and they made some improvements and they are throwing AI. But then you ask them about it and it's like the technology that like you said, last generation, they're already using. Yeah, you know, I grew systems to try to improve your ability to hear things.

Speaker 1

At this sense, it's just like I'm now thinking, you just chop the word AI off and it would be fine. But did you see any robot vacuums? So I'm gonna have to chase these fuckers down myself.

Speaker 7

I am not the one covering the robo vacuum on a team. I just saw the dancing a GI robot.

Speaker 1

Yeah, okay, talk to me about this goddamn thing poop.

Speaker 7

Dance like me at my the first wedding I ever went to when I was ten years old, and it was unfortunately named a g I bot And I'm like, no, this isn't Actually this is doing a pre rehearsed routine, like why are we words have meaning, or at least they should.

Speaker 1

So it's like, I will that thing so hard it flies.

Speaker 7

There were two of them, so they might try to come at you from.

Speaker 1

Both, and I've been boxing for years. I'll take those fuckers out, no problem. Me and my weapons.

Speaker 4

Yeah, robots don't have weapons.

Speaker 1

Robots don't have weapons, and they don't have friends.

Speaker 5

They don't have dance moves apparently.

Speaker 7

But the Boston Dynamics people have made people afraid, which is the whole thing where this.

Speaker 1

That's the way most some people afraid.

Speaker 4

Well, no, that's the.

Speaker 7

Thing where most people engage with the idea of like the robot that will do anything? Is it one social VideA? They solve a bost Dynamics thing three years ago, right, and then that's informed them to think, ah, shit, I gotta be careful about everything from now on. Yeah, but when you look at it's like, oh, it's trying to serve a press demo.

Speaker 5

Yeah, those are all highly as well.

Speaker 1

What's it the demo for? What is the purpose of the dancing robot?

Speaker 4

It to disarm you, I'll.

Speaker 7

Impressing you and getting your money to invest in it.

Speaker 5

So the very first chatbot was created in the in the sixties and Eliza, Yeah, and so there's Eliza effect. I think so much of what we see here is driven by sort of different versions of that, which is where you show people something doing a task that they've only ever seen a human do before, whether I'm dancing or mowing a lawn or whatever else. And because like our only metaphor for intelligence is humans we automatically leap to.

This must be a human level of intelligence, right, this is what this is what has fuel Tesla's autopilot.

Speaker 1

Does that makes sense that Yeah, it's like if we make it seem human adjacent, they'll just fill in the gaps.

Speaker 5

That's what they've done with LMS and exactly right. And what this does is this it locks you into this mode. Again, We've seen ten years of this with Tesla autopilot, where it's like it's getting better, it's getting better, it's getting better, it's getting better, it's getting better, but like what's getting

better is the illusion? Yes, and what is completely like left out of this entire framework for engaging with with any kind of automation technology is the is the fact that at some point it becomes actually useful, there's actually real value. And with the autonomous vehicles, it's really simple. When that point is it's when the company says we take legal responsibility for this system.

Speaker 1

And they never will.

Speaker 5

Well, WAYMO does did.

Speaker 1

They actually take that?

Speaker 5

Of course?

Speaker 1

There's no.

Speaker 5

Yeah, there's no, there's no there's no human in them. I mean the zukes is that are running around the strip, and and the waymos that are all over the Bay. There's no there's no human in them to take responsibility.

Speaker 1

It's it's oh, I suppose that's right. Yeah, I mean what about the robotex season in Austin. They still got people in them.

Speaker 5

Those have someone in the in the passenger seat. But no, I mean in Texas, like those are technically considered to be autonomous vehicles.

Speaker 1

By Texan autonomy laws.

Speaker 5

Yeah, which are essentially non existing.

Speaker 1

Nice, that's good, that's really It's.

Speaker 5

Funny when you actually pull up the Tesla Robotaxi app, it says if your ride is in Texas is autonomous. If you're ride is in California, it's not.

Speaker 1

And it's the same experience.

Speaker 5

I mean, it's the same thing.

Speaker 1

Yeah, very fucking Have you used Zekes Yeah, so I'd ride with Zokes a year ago at CES, right, So I haven't so so that was cool, But I was, you know, it.

Speaker 5

Was with with the ct Yeah, it's like the start of a whole thing. H And to be perfectly honest, at the time, I was like this, it's a very It's it's the only product that you can kind of ride in right now that is designed from the ground up to not just be a car.

Speaker 1

Yeah, because it's like an empty room with wheels. Yeah, and so that's good. That's kind of cool the Docklands light railway, and.

Speaker 5

It's perfect for the strip. And like for a long time the AV space was like like AV companies were like, we can't like market on the novelty of this because it's like such a serious thing. We're going to conquer the world. And and like one of the cool things that's happened is that there's been so much like struggle to get this stuff to market that now it's sort

of like, well, fuck it is. It is novelty, right, Like this is just a cooler way to ride down the strip to the club or to the you know, the casino, or to this.

Speaker 1

That to the guns shop.

Speaker 5

Yeah, And like I think that's fine. I don't know, I don't know how they're making money doing it, and I don't know.

Speaker 1

That's actually are any of these companies making any money?

Speaker 5

No, the robot taxi companies are not yet making money.

Speaker 1

Why are they bleeding so much?

Speaker 5

Well, because it's extremely expensive. I mean each one of these well so each one of the vehicles. So like you know, we work with estimates, but you know, best estimates for a WEIMA is you know, two to three hundred.

Speaker 1

Thousand dollars of vehicle, right.

Speaker 5

And then the operating costs are very high. We don't we know very little about like how many how many miles can they go? Right, because they're these electric vehicles and they're powered by you know, they're powering not just the drive but also all this light, ar and radar and compute and all these other things. So like the utilization, how many rides can it give.

Speaker 1

Before they must just go back and charge.

Speaker 5

Well, I mean, apparently they're they're burning somewhere on the order of two billion dollars a year.

Speaker 1

Jesus fucking Christ. Is that that from purchasing more of them?

Speaker 5

That is, they're scaling very aggressively, and they're also they're continuing to use most of the So they were ready to sort of start bringing in this vehicle from China which was using fewer sensors and so really bringing the cost down, and then of course tariff screwed that up. I think they've got that back on track based on my conversations here, so you know, I think they're Look, I think WEIMA will get to a point where where they will you know, have a viable business. I think

they're racing. I've heard fifteen billion dollars right now to get to.

Speaker 1

IPO running out of money. We're running out of money. I swear to We're gonna run out liquidity.

Speaker 5

And twenty twenty six is gonna be wild, because yeah, WEIMO is not the only company that needs to raise money. There's huge I PO is, SpaceX.

Speaker 1

Open AI, Open AI is not going to fucking I p O.

Speaker 5

I don't know any of them.

Speaker 1

An I think SpaceX could.

Speaker 5

I'm I'm pretty. I'm pretty. I mean we'll see, like better than I would prove me wrong. I mean, look, you know, I think I think SpaceX, like Tesla, has the kernel of a real business there with the with the Falcon nine launch program, it's the most cost effective way to get into orbit. The basic critique that I have. And again, like you know, make the numbers public, I go. I hope they go public because we'll see the numbers.

Speaker 1

Actually, this is why I want to. I want Anthropic and open Ai to go public so bad. No to just find I mean, look, I just know, let me look onto the hood, let me let me see how much you're burning. Because I bet it's a lot. Well. I mean I was talking to you about this off off air, but there's two Chinese ai companies that go

in public, Zoogi and Mini Mac. They called forget show someone on the man sa I'm wrong on that one, but they I think one of them makes like thirty five million dollars in revenue a month and spends two hundred billions or two hundred million even sorry, Yeah, and that you've got to spend money to lose money, I guess. But I think that you know what, if this is the year when we finally get some clarity over that, I'd be really happy.

Speaker 5

Well, and I mean just in terms of elon Musk, I mean like Xai burned what like fourteen billion thirteen billion, Yeah, and like he's made this whole his whole thing work for a long time by you know, he's really good at raising money.

Speaker 1

But then also today did they Yeah that's nice. Yeah.

Speaker 5

I think the level of burn has that that Xai itself, which has no profitable business to it, is like dramatically higher. Tesla has always lost or not always but almost always lost money. Yeah, but like they could mitigate that loss and they can kind of string it along and Goo a couple of years between raising rounds, but this is, yeah, ten plus billion dollars year. Elon's empire is really fragile even without that kind of cash burn. And so I think twenty twenty.

Speaker 1

Six, Yeah, they raised twenty billion dollars. Si Vela Equity Partners steps, Yeah, Fidelity, Fidelity Management fell through it again award, Qatar Investment Authority, MGX, and Barren Capitol Group among other key partners. Investors in the round include Nvidia and Cisco. We're doing the dot We're doing the dog coom boom again, folks. We love the dog coom boom.

Speaker 5

Okay, Well, so they gotta love raising money and then a couple of years of burn now and.

Speaker 1

Guess what do they maybe twenty billion dollars A Data Centers XI continues to expand its decisive compute advantage, world's largest day I super computers at Colossus one barely built and Colossus two not built at all, ending the year with over a one million, h one hundred GPU equivalents. Now, for the non technical audience, that's just a lot of GPUs so they can generate c SAM I guess, but

my favorite part of this is rock Force series. Our frontier language models are built on the best in class training infrastructure powered by Colossus. They've pushed reinforcement learning training to unprecetated levels, refining Grock's intelligence reasoning. An agency using pre training scale compute, what do you train on? You've been trainerating child porn?

Speaker 5

I mean no, that's the But what's the product? What's the revenue?

Speaker 1

Oh? Sorry, they don't have that here. They don't have that. They will say that our reach spans approximately six hundred million monthly active users across the X and CROC apps. Bull fucking ship.

Speaker 5

Getting skills easy when it's free.

Speaker 1

Also, Twitter doesn't fucking gap that many users like I genuinely don't think they've they've done that.

Speaker 5

Are you suggesting that Elon must might be.

Speaker 1

Like I know ed, I know you're a big Elon Musk fan.

Speaker 5

I mean it's hurtful. It's hurtful to have his credibility questions.

Speaker 4

Yeah, charding a path that will spread the light of civilization on our planet. Yeah, I I wish the listener could see everyone face is what I said?

Speaker 1

That even a drink when you said that, it's I just feel like this is a year of reckonings. I think that that's the thing, because sure they built twenty billion dollars, but he needs to build fucking Colossus and Colausus too.

Speaker 4

I mean it goes to that or we're gonna get getting blitzed and in December being like it's all fucking fraud.

Speaker 1

But the thing is, as I've been saying, we're running out of money. Yeah, like we're running at twenty billion dollars.

Speaker 5

He wouldn't be talking about a SpaceX IPO if he wasn't desperately. Yeah, he's the value also, the thing that he dangles out in the deep future. And like the mart he said so many times, it's like a really important part of the fanboy orthodoxy that like the mission to Mars is so important that we cannot compromise it by allowing, you know, shareholder value.

Speaker 4

To become an issue.

Speaker 5

Yeah, and as long as Eland is the richest guy in the world. Like that was totally, Like that worked. The moment he started is fascinating because the vibe has been wrecked in the in the Tesla subreddits for like years now for a number of reasons. The SpaceX ones really fell this this last year, and the I p O they were. They were crumbling already, just the number

of times Starship was exploding. Yeah, but the I p O news was the thing that really I saw these forums start to like actually melt down, because the whole point of all of this is now like Elon can't guarantee it, right, like if he turns space ex over to shareholders, there's no guarantee that the mission happens.

Speaker 4

I mean, because it was, I wonder how they react also because you know, didn't he said they weren't also doing this series he fund raising round. Yeah, he said, this isn't happening. But it's also an upside around. Now it's you know, it's even bigger than before. So I wonder, but it's that big.

Speaker 1

Nvidia DA sent a deal though the the SPV, but that was going to do a special purpose vehicle. We don't talk about that SPV ship.

Speaker 4

Talk about previous deal. You don't need to.

Speaker 2

Valor the value.

Speaker 1

The value Yeah it was No, it's the twenty billion dollar two billion from Nvidia.

Speaker 5

Yeah, valor was the middleman or they're doing the least back or something. But it's all private, so you don't.

Speaker 1

Know, like, yeah, but they they did it close.

Speaker 5

I I think so.

Speaker 1

Yeah, but that's the thing like this or just getting back into my regular bullshit. There's a eight billion dollar deal the Oracle has been talking about doing for months that's disappeared off the thing. I just think the banks are running out of money.

Speaker 4

It's so sick also that that deal was talked about so loudly. It's like, this is going to be a cornerstone of the coming overbuild for Compute. This allow us to be able to put ourselves in the lead and ahead of any other competitor.

Speaker 5

When I remember people from from banks saying after the Twitter deal that like that dead debt that they weren't able to get off the books was really starting to impact their ability to fund like like new deals, and it was really starting to sound like the especially with banks that have been historically very close. I won't name any names, but but with Elon, it sounded like the magic was was sort of over. But it seems like they're, yeah, there's.

Speaker 1

Still it's stay a cent as bullshit like it really, it's just the everyone's so Google for data centers these days that they're just like, what if he builds more. It's also so funny to close this the same week as the fucking see Sam thing. You're like, like, I don't know if I'm a business journalist, I have any chance fasking anything. I'm like, hey, Fidelity, are you investing in the data centers or the child born? Because that's the thing. It's like, I'm not even being like, I'm

not trying to be crash. It's a fucking question. Like Bryce Elder Legend from the Ft did a great piece today where it's like, oh, it's like the pornography generator connects to a social network and it was just a list of all the staff at X but with clown makeup.

Speaker 7

On FT.

Speaker 1

Drice Elder Alphavil legends. No, it's it's very funny watching this, and he doesn't usually do anything at CS. I wish he never. I wish he did. I wish the big companies would fuck this place up a little bit more, just to make it more chaotic.

Speaker 4

Listen one year you to notice that there's gonna be a South Africa section and you're gonna see all your fa all the stars, Peter thel all the all the famous South Africa Mark Andresen is not South Africa, all right, It's it's the other motherfucker that I Oh, my god, the other bold motherfucker always forget his name will come to me.

Speaker 1

I'm sure. I'm sure the listeners can fill in the gaps. Grumple Shieldtz, that's his name.

Speaker 4

I'm calling him that, but I'm gonna look him up.

Speaker 1

Now.

Speaker 4

It's gonna bother me, all right.

Speaker 1

I think we're gonna wrap it there though. Now we've talked about Elon Musk a little bit. This has been such a lovely episode. Thank you all for listening. Edon Graso Junior of the Tech Bubble Newsletter, Edniamyer of the Autono Cast, and of course Henry Casey of CNN Underscored And as ever, please donate to the Pediatric Epilepsy Research Consortium in honor of Sean Paul Adams, who is a wonderful friend of the Sweet Shawan Paul's son is epileptic,

and his founder deeply appreciate it. Thanks so much for everyone for listening. We will be back in a few hours. Thank you for listening to Better Offline. The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song is Matasowski. You can check out more of his music and audio projects at Matasowski dot com, M A T T O S O W s ki dot com. You can email me at easy at better offline dot com or visit better offline dot com to find more podcast links and of

course my newsletter. I also really recommend you go to chat dot Where's youreed dot at to visit the discord, and go to our slash Better Offline to check out our reddit. Thank you so much for listening.

Speaker 8

Better Offline is a production of cool Zone Media. For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool Zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 2

Film school

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