Welcome to the Techmeme Ride Home for Thursday, September 26, 2024. I'm Brian McCulloch today. There's only two stories, really. If you can believe it, more executive departures at OpenAI as it looks like they're serious about going for profit. And yes, meta-announced a new quest headset, but the real headlines are the Orion Smartglasses which you can't actually buy. What? I'll explain. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech.
Well, and then there was just Sam, I guess. OpenAI, CTO, Mira Murratti says she is leaving the company after six and a half years, quote, because I want to create the time and space to do my own exploration, and quote, quoting CNBC. Murratti wrote in a memo to the company
that she's focusing on ensuring a quote, smooth transition. After much reflection, I have made the difficult decision to leave OpenAI, she wrote in the memo, which she also posted on social media site X. There's never an ideal time to step away from a place one cherishes, yet this moment feels right, end quote. Later in the day, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said research, chief Bob McGrew and Barrett Zof, a research vice president, are also departing as the
high valued artificial intelligence startup continues to lose top talent. Altman wrote in a late afternoon post on X that McGrew and Zof were leaving and that their decisions were independent of each other. The timing of Mira's decision was such that it made sense to now do this all at once so that we can work together for a smooth handover to the next
generation of leadership. Altman wrote and quote, but that's not all, of course, because sources have been saying for weeks now that OpenAI's board is about to restructure the firm into a for-profit business. So could that be why people are all heading for the doors at the same time as people have been saying for weeks? You know, you signed up for a
nonprofit with lofty aims and you find yourself in something different. Reuters is reporting that Sam Altman will receive equity in OpenAI for the first time as part of this restructuring which could value the company at $150 billion. Quote, the removal of nonprofit control could make OpenAI operate more like a typical startup, a move generally welcomed by its
investors who have poured billions into the company. However, it could also raise concerns from the AI safety community about whether the lab still has enough governance to hold itself accountable in its pursuit of AGI as it has dissolved the super alignment team that focuses on the long-term risks of AI earlier this year.
It's unclear how much equity Altman will receive Altman already a billionaire from his multiple startup investments has previously stated that he chose not to take an equity stake in the company because the board needed a majority of disinterested directors with no stake in the company. He also said he has enough money and is doing it because he
loves the work. The new structure of OpenAI would resemble that of its major rival and thropic and Elon Musk's XAI which are registered as benefit corporations, a form of four profits that aim to promote social responsibility and sustainability in addition to making profits. So at this point, seriously, who knows, right? But friend of the show, Chris Memes, threaded something that I've heard from other people. Quote,
To me, all the OpenAI executive partners make perfect sense. OpenAI is losing $4 billion a year despite more than $3 billion a year in revenue. Sam Altman is traveling the world trying to drum up billions more in investment, which he'll get, but which doesn't solve the revenue problem. And leaving a hot AI team is the fastest way to get millions or even billions in an aquahire, that's a lateral move from the perspective of pure self-interest
who wouldn't bail from OpenAI right now. And quote, Don't know if that tracks exactly, but food for thought. On to yesterday's connect event from meta. I'm going to do this slightly differently because I'm going to give you some news up front. But then come back to discuss the news that everybody's actually been talking about. First, the sort of lesser news.
Meta debuted the Quest 3S, a larger VR device with lower resolution displays than the Quest 3, but battery battery life and the same chip and controllers coming October 15th for $300 and up. Quoting the verge. Meta finally announced the very heavily leaked Quest 3S VR headset and the leaks were right. It's a $299.99 headset that looks like a
mix of the Quest 2 and Quest 3. But now that the specs are official, I can tell you that it's a lot closer to the Quest 3 than expected for a refresh that's almost half the price. If you don't have a Quest headset already, the 3S is potentially a very compelling purchase. The Quest 3S offers the same mixed reality features and performance as the Quest 3. It even has the same Qualcomm Snapdragon XR2 Gen 2 chip meaning you can play all of the same
games and experiences on either device. The Quest 3S uses the same touch plus controllers as the Quest 3 and the Quest 3S is actually rated for a higher battery life than the Quest 3. Meta says the 3S gets 2.5 hours of average use versus 2.2 hours for the Quest 3.
There are a few differences. The Quest 3S is slightly larger than the Quest 3. It has its front sensors arranged in two triangular formations versus the Quest 3's three pill-shaped cutouts that lacks the Quest 3's depth sensor and perhaps most notably, the 3S uses lower resolution displays than the Quest 3, the same 1832 by 1920 per eye resolution as the
older Quest 2 and the Quest 3S has a narrower field of view too. But in a demo of the Quest 3S yesterday, as I lurked through dank sewers in Batman Arkham's Shadow and struggled through some bad games in Horizon Worlds, a replica of the Office from the Office. I didn't find myself missing the Quest 3's upgrades and the headset felt fine on my head during my half hour demo thanks in large part 2. It's y-shaped split strap. I would have
happily worn the headset for a lot longer if Meta had let me. The 3S also has an action button for switching between pass-through and immersive modes that I didn't get to test. You can already switch between immersive and pass-through on the Quest 3 and Quest Pro by turning on a double tap feature but having a dedicated button might mean you'll switch back and forth more regularly and get a view of the real world around you. With the Quest
3S, Meta's VR headset lineup is pretty clear. There's the 128GB Quest 3S for 299, the 256 GB Quest 3S for 399 and the 512GB Quest 3 for 499, the 512GB Quest 3 originally costs 649 when it launched last year and now Meta is planning to sell its leftover 128GB Quest 3 headsets which started at 499 for 429 and quote. Over at Daring Fireball, John Gruber said this about this lineup stacking up quote, that's more than an entire order
of magnitude lower priced than the Vision Pro. Vision Pro might be more than 10X more capable than Quest 3S but I'm not sure it's 10X better for just playing games and watching movies which might be the only things people want to do with headsets at the moment and quote. I'm also going to mention there was a limited edition Wayfarers Meta Smart Glasses announced that are sort of see-through sort of like those old max where you could see the guts inside them.
The Meta Smart Glasses also got new features like live translation and audible integration and also given that this was a developer event noting this quote. Today I'm pleased to announce that if you can build for Android you can build for Meta Horizon OS in your favorite language, your favorite IDE and to get all of you in there we have completed the open store transition as we started in April said Mark Rabkin the VP at Meta leading Horizon OS and Quest XR devices.
In addition the company says that its open store now supports 3D and spatial apps and has introduced the Meta Spatial SDK to help developers get started. The SDK lets developers take their traditional mobile apps and add native spatial features like floating 3D objects, atmospherics and immersive media. A new Meta Spatial Editor will also make it easier to add panoramas and 3D spatial videos in its media viewer in the system. Examples of these can be found under
the showcase apps section on Meta's app store now which features open source apps. For 2D apps several features including resizing theater spatial audio background running multi-tasking and handling all of the hand and controller input will also be available with Meta Horizon OS. Porting existing mobile games into Horizon OS is also possible with new SDKs and other tools that Meta says will help developers quote go faster.
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you might never be able to buy this. Quoting the verge. They look almost like a normal pair of glasses. That's the first thing I noticed as I walk into a conference room at Meta's headquarters in Menlo Park, California. The black Clark Kent Esk frames sitting on the table in front of me look on assuming, but they represent CEO Mark Zuckerberg's multi-billion dollar bet on the computers that come after smartphones. They're called Orion and their Meta's first pair of augmented reality
glasses. The company was supposed to sell them, but decided not to because they are too complicated and expensive to manufacture right now. It's showing them to me anyway. Orion is at the most basic level a fancy computer you wear on your face. The challenge with every face computer has long been their displays, which have generally been heavy, hot, low resolution or offered a small field of view.
Orion's display is a step forward in this regard. It has been custom designed by Meta and features micro LED projectors inside the frame that beam graphics in front of your eyes via wave guides in the lenses. These lenses are made of silicon carbide, not plastic or glass. Meta picked silicon carbide for its durability, lightweight and ultra high index of refraction, which allows
light beamed in from the projectors to fill more of your vision. Zuckerberg imagines that people will want to use AR glasses like Orion for two primary purposes, communicating with each other through digital information overlaid on the real world, which he calls holograms and interacting with AI. I had thought that the hologram part of this was going to be possible before AI. He tells me it's an interesting twist of fate that the AI part is actually possible before the holograms are
really able to be mass produced at an affordable price. Orion takes the generative AI capabilities that already exist in the Rayban Meta smart glasses and adds a visual element over what you're looking at. During a demo last week, I used Meta AI and Orion to identify ingredients laid out on a table to create a smoothie recipe. In a few seconds, it correctly place labels over the ingredients
and generated instructions for a recipe in a floating window above them. To demonstrate how two people wearing Orion together could interact with the same holograms, I played a 3D take on pong with Zuckerberg. We scanned a QR code, two pair of glasses, and then used hand tracking to control the paddle. This worked surprisingly smoothly and I noticed a little to no lag in the game. Zuckerberg
beat me, unfortunately. I also used a version of the messenger app built for the glasses to make what I was told was the first external video call from Orion to the Verge's Nielai Patel on his iPhone. He couldn't see me, Meta plans to eventually show an avatar that tracks the wearer's facial movements, but I could see and hear him well in the 2D window floating in front of me. To illustrate how Avatar chats will work one day, a Meta employee then called me and appeared
across the room as a cartoonish full body avatar. The hardware for Orion exists in three parts, the glasses themselves, a neural wristband for controlling them, and a wireless compute puck that resembles a large battery pack for a phone. The glasses don't need a phone or laptop to work, but if they're separated from the puck by more than 12 feet or so, they become useless. Orion boasts a 70 degree field of view which is wider than any pair of AR glasses I've tried to
date. In my experience, a narrower field of view causes AR to feel small and less immersive like you're looking through a peephole. With Orion, I had to get pretty close to virtual objects before their edges started to disappear. At 98 grams, the glasses weigh significantly more than a normal pair, but also far less than mixed reality headsets like the MetaQuest or Apple's Vision Pro. The frames are made of magnesium, which is lighter than aluminum, and used for evenly distributing
heat. Seven cameras embedded in the frames are used to anchor virtual objects in real space, assist with eye and hand tracking, and allow Meta's AI assistant to understand what you're looking at. You can leave a virtual window open, turn your head and walk away, and as long as the glasses stay on, it'll still be there when you come back. The quality of Orion's display is surprisingly good given the form factor. The video calls the crisp enough to feel engaging, and I had no problem reading text
on a web page that was several feet away. However, I wouldn't want to watch Avatar in them, I probably couldn't finish it anyway since the battery only lasts about two hours. You control the glasses through a combination of eye tracking, hand tracking, voice, and the neural wristband, which loosely resembles a Fitbit without a screen. It's made of high performance text-style material and uses EMG to interpret neural signals associated with hand gestures.
In milliseconds, these signals are translated into input. It's not reading your thoughts, but it kind of feels like it. The wristband recognizes a few gestures, pinching your index finger with your thumb, selects things, pinching your middle finger, and thumb, invokes or hides the app launcher, and performing a coin flipping gesture with your thumb against your closed palm allows you to scroll up or down. Haptic feedback in the band lets you know when a
gesture is recognized, which is a nice touch. Your eyes act as the pointer in Orion's interface while pinching your fingers together acts as the click. All together, using Orion felt more precise than controlling a quest or vision pro with my hands. I breeze through a space invaders like game in which tilting my head moved the ship and pinched my fingers together, fired lasers.
And because the band doesn't have to be visible in the sensors and cameras on the glasses, I was able to control them with my hand behind my back or in my jacket pocket. The neural wristband feels more polished than Orion itself, which is likely because Meta will start selling it soon. While the company won't comment, my sources say that Meta is planning to ship a pair of glasses with a smaller heads-up display that the wristband will also
work with, codenamed Hypernova, as soon as next year. Orion was supposed to be a product you could buy as well. When the glasses graduated from a skunkworks project in Meta's research division back in 2018, the goal was to start shipping them in the low tens of thousands by now. But in 2022, a meta phase of broader belt tightening across the company, Zuckerberg made the call
to shelve its release. This decision is evident by the fact that there are multiple parts of Orion's hardware that Meta isn't using from the front facing cameras that can capture video, but don't to the disabled GPS and the compute puck. There's a built-in modem for cellular data that is an active, we're saving $20 a month, quips Alex Hyml, Meta's VP of wearables. As Meta's executives retell it, the decision to shelve Orion mostly came down to the device's
astronomical cost to build, which is in the ballpark of $10,000 per unit. Most of that cost is due to how difficult and expensive it is to reliably manufacture the silicon carbide lenses. When it started designing Orion, Meta expected the material to become more commonly used across the industry and therefore cheaper, but that didn't happen. You can't imagine how horrible the
yields are, says Meta's CTO Andrew Bosworth of the lenses. Instead, the company pivoted to making about 1,000 pairs of the Orion glasses for internal development and external demos. Okay, so what's the point of this? Is this vapor wear? I guess the case could be made, but everybody knows this is what the endpoint of this technology should be. Someday, just glasses. There's probably some value of somebody, and in this case, Zuck actually showing us where this
particular technological puck is going. Certainly lays down a marker for Meta. Apple, with the Vision Pro, wants to get there incrementally with version after version, I guess, but Zuck just showed us the finish line. Nothing more for you today. Talk to you tomorrow.