AI at CES 2024

just had my first CT scan. That was on December thirtieth of twenty twenty three when that happened, and it was all part of a medical emergency I experienced over that last weekend of twenty twenty three. But guess what, The very same day that I was recording that episode, I ended up having another emergency and I had to go right back to the hospital. My blood pressure had spiked again. It got to the point where I was completely incoherent, more so than usual. You know, I realize

my coherence is a spectrum. Well this was off of it, and I honestly only remember the second half of what happened at the hospital once I was moved into the Intensive care Unit or ICU. Before that, apparently I spent several hours in the emergency room, but I have no memory of it. I was told I even received a lumbar puncture, which is I understand it. Those are pretty painful, but none of that is in my mind. But a group of doctors and nurses took very good care of me,

both in the er and the ICU. And as I am recording this now, I'm just back from getting from the hospital. I had to go in for a surgical procedure that is connected to all the emergency stuff. The surgery went pretty well. The recovery has been rough, but hopefully this will get me toward being on the right track. It has been a heck of a way to start off twenty twenty four. And as I mentioned in that last new episode from Me, I am scaling back on

the number of shows that I do per week. One contributing factor to the blood pressure issue is stress, and we figured that reducing my stress should be a little bit helpful. Now, that's just one part of what I'm doing to get better. It's not like cutting back is going to magically make me healthy. I have to do a lot of other stuff. I'm on medication. I've got a new approach to my diet and exercise, which is well overdue. So it's just one piece of a bigger

puzzle anyway. Enough of all that. One of the many things that I missed out on while I was in the hospital was CES, which sometimes is also referred to as the Consumer Electronics Show, although I think now they just prefer to have it called CES. And in case you're not familiar with this event, CES is a huge trade industry conference in the United States in which companies come together in Las Vegas, Nevada, every January to focus on all things in the consumer electronics space and beyond.

If we're being honest, consumer electronics is really just one part of it, which might be why they prefer to call it just CES these days. It's at CES where manufacturers and retailers will show off products intended to launch within the next year or so. Sometimes they just show off things like prototypes that are never going to see the light of day, but might show off some features that could find their way into products in the future. Various members of the media attend and an effort to

get really cool stories. And you know, you've got other industry professionals who go for all sorts of reasons, you know, analysts and such. Most of them are really looking for ways to find free food. At least in my experience, that's kind of what the main priority seems to be. And every year at CEES, trends emerge. Sometimes these trends will establish themselves and eventually become a pillar in technology.

Like think about flat screen televisions. I mean, that's the common form factor now, but once upon a time it wasn't, and when those started to pop up, they eventually did become the standard. Or things like Bluetooth connectivity and smart home technology those fall into these categories too. Now. Other times, various industries will push really hard to get a technology kind of established in order to make it a trend, and it ends up going nowhere. So the one I

always cite is three D television. When I first started going to CES, which is back in the mid two thousands, all the major companies in television space were gung ho on three D televisions. There was a ton of support behind three DTV within the film and TV industries, you know, because three D formats would be a lot harder for

people to pirate than your typical visual media. So the studios were really gung ho on three D TV as well because they were like, well, if this means people can't just steal our stuff and they have to buy it from us, then that means more money. So let's

definitely make three D television a thing. I mean, what better way to crack down on those pesty pirates than to convince them that they all have to watch the stuff in three D. And you know a lot of pirates can't even watch stuff in three D because they got eye patches, which means they have a lack of death perception. That's a parallax joke. Anyway, the whole gambit for three D television didn't work out. Consumers rejected three DTV.

Most folks decided they didn't want to have to wear glasses just to watch television in their homes, or that having yet another component that could go missing was a real hassle. Like if you've ever been one of those folks who's like, where the heck did the remote control go, imagine doing that with glasses as well. Or they were arguing that there just wasn't enough compelling material that was in three D to justify the investment of purchasing one

of these televisions. So after a couple of valiant years of trying to make three D happen. It followed in the footsteps of Fetch and didn't happen. This year was no exception. There were other trends that came out this year. A few different ones popped up, like transparent O led television displays. There were a few of those, and I'll probably do an episode talking about that in the future.

But undeniably, one type of tech really dominated conversation at the show floor this year, and that was artificial intelligence. And we all know that AI is a big deal. Companies like Microsoft and Google and Amazon and Apple are all struggling to find ways to incorporate AI into their business models in a way that benefits them, and that might also mean that these companies will make cuts to actual human staff in the process if they find that the AI can take on some of the load that

people would normally carry. And if you read up on any business conference, any conference that has happened in the last year and a half, you're going to see a lot of discussion will be devoted to AI and how

it's going to change everything. And often at these exact same conferences, at these exact same speeches, you're going to find hardly any detail as to how we're going to get there or what strategies companies should employ well forging the path, it just becomes like this will change everything. How it becomes like the underpants gnomes in South Park. You just have a bunch of question marks and then

at the end it says profit. So essentially, everyone knows that AI is powerful and it's important, but we don't have wide agreement on how it should be developed or deployed. Also, it's not like this was the first time that AI was part of the conversation and at CES. In recent years, lots of companies have leaned on AI for all sorts of things, from voice assistance to image recognition to robot navigation.

If I'm being honest, I would say the AI on display this year more often seem to lean on the large language model and generative AI versions of artificial intelligence, the kind of stuff that we've been seeing so much about from companies like open AI and Google. And I get it. They're very flashy and they are impressive when they're working properly, but it gives a very narrow view of what artificial intelligence is, and AI is so much more than just large language models and generative AI. But

unfortunately that's harder to sell. So it gets easier if you just kind of reduce it all to one form and say, like, this is what AI is. I don't think that's very wise because it's misleading, but you know, I'm one voice in a big crowd. Now, there were a couple of major approaches that I saw while reading up on how various companies were positioning AI in their pitches to the media over at CEES. The big companies, generally speaking, were actually a little less bullish. You know.

They didn't position AI as being a definitive feature in their technologies, that did not seem to be the big thing. Like it wasn't like a big flashing knee on sign saying this has AI in it. So in their products, AI was often a component that they might mention as contributing to the functionality, but it wasn't positioned as being the main event. Now, some smaller companies went in the opposite direction. They developed products that put artificial intelligence front

and center, like this is AI. And we're still seeing some examples of companies that are shoving AI into their marketing message, even if it seems like they still don't quite have a handle on how AI adds value or functionality, or in some cases, I'm not entirely convinced that AI is actually part of the whole thing in the first place. Sometimes it just seems like we need to put AI in there because that's a buzzword that if we don't put it in there, it's going to seem like we're

falling behind. But I would argue that, at least in some of the cases I was looking at, AI really was a grandiose way of saying whatever it was the product was supposed to do. So let's get started. Let's talk about an implementation that I actually think is a pretty good idea, and it's BMW's use of a technique called retrieval augmented generation. So BMW has a voice assistant that you can get in in certain BMW vehicles, and

it uses generative AI to respond to your requests. But this voice assistant can't just chat about anything at all. It's it's not grant access to a limitless selection of topics, So you can't just be like on a long road trip and you're like, let's start talking about Sartra, or can we have a deep discussion about Lord of the Rings. It can't do that. Instead, this voice assistant can really

only provide information about the vehicle itself. So this restriction means that the voice assistant isn't prone to hallucinations or confabulations. So that's the tendency for generative AI to just plane make stuff up on occasion. Right, Sometimes AI, in the lack of information, will make something up and it sounds like it's reliable, but it turns out it's completely false.

This is why AI critics warn that without strong guidelines, AI could manufacture and distribute misinformation in such a way that the misinformation seems like it's reliable and it's not malicious. It's not that the AI is trying to mislead. It's just trying to answer a question and doesn't have the answer, and like some other people I know, it's too scared to say I don't know the answer to that question. So BMW built a barrier around their voice assistance knowledge

base to prevent this from happening. They said, well, it's only going to be restricted to matters that involve the vehicle itself. So the assistant draws upon the power of Amazon's Alexa large language model, and it can interpret what

you mean when you ask questions. So that way, even if you are not a car person and you don't really know how to frame a question properly, like you don't know what you're asking about, you're just trying to find an answer to something you don't know the answer to, well, this assistant can still try to help you get to where you need to go, like what information do you

need to know? It can actually ask follow up questions to you in order to get a better understanding of what it is you're asking about, So like if you don't know what it is you don't know, it can at least ask follow up questions to try and narrow down what the matter is. And then it can simplify explanations. If you find something too technical to follow, you could say, can you explain that to me in in plain English? And it can reduce the complexity and do it now.

The beauty of this is that the voice assistant becomes sort of an interactive owner's manual that's capable of rephrasing passages if they just don't make sense to you, which is great if you've ever flipped through a car owner manual and encountered stuf where you're like, this doesn't seem like a human being wrote this. I don't understand what

they're actually getting at. Well, imagine that it would be able to rephrase it so that it could convey that meaning to you like that to me is incredibly valuable. So for example, if your vehicle has multiple drive modes, right, and you have no clue which drive mode should be

used in any given situation, the assistant can help. You could ask it and you might find out that if you were to switch to a different driving mode, you're going to get way better performance on the roads that you're currently driving on and your drive is going to be far more pleasant. Or maybe that by making a few other changes you can dramatically decrease the amount of fuel consumption you're going through and save some money. I

think that's a pretty neat idea. Now, I should say that the description I read about this tool was done as part of a non interactive demonstration. So the reporter whose report I read is Tim Stevens. He wrote a piece for Ours Technica, and he was not allowed to ask any questions of the voice assistant himself, so he could not interact with it. Instead he had to just witness a kind of a performance almost so BMW representatives

ran the whole demo. And it's hard to say for you know how far along this product is, or how reliable it is, or whether or not you could prompt it to make a mistake, because often that becomes a thing where people will try to get AI things to mess up to see if, in fact it's possible, because it's better to find out through testing than to find

out through actual use. But I think this is an AI implementation that really makes sense, and I could easily see other companies in other industries making similar use of this technology to make it easier to navigate increasingly complex systems, not just vehicles, but all sorts of stuff like I can see businesses that are incorporating generative AI to do it in this kind of way where they are effectively geo fencing the AI so that it's only focused on

the things that are pertinent to the business. That just makes sense to me. Okay, we're going to take a quick break. When we come back, I'm going to talk a lot more about AI at CEES twenty twenty four. Okay, we're back. So we talked about BMW's approach, which I thought was really cool. I don't know if the tool itself is cool. I just think the strategy makes sense.

But let's contrast BMW's rather focused application with a handheld device that is completely dependent upon AI and large language models or large models, I probably should say, and that is the Rabbit r one. So this gadget got a ton of attention at CEES, at least from the media as I understand it, it did not really go viral over on Twitter. I'm not on Twitter anymore, so I

just have to take other people's word for it. But like whenever I went to any outlet, if I were looking at Wired or the Verge or Ours, Tetnica or anything, there were articles seen at the articles about this thing, the Rabbit are one. This kind of happens at the show occasionally, right if you go to CEES, sometimes a particular thing will stand out, and it's usually something that's

not from a big company. It's usually something that's kind of a surprise, and it often can be a small thing, but it just captures everyone's attention and then it generates tons of articles. So like in past years, there was a vibrating fork which was a real thing. It was a fork that had a little haptic motor inside of it, and if it detected that you were eating too quickly, it would vibrate so that the food would fall off your fork, forcing you to eat more slowly. That was

the whole concept. That was a big deal one year. The pebble smart watch was a huge deal one year, and that doesn't even exist anymore. They'll fitbit purchase that and then kind of killed it off. So the pebble, it shows that these little things that can become viral and get everyone's attention and get a lot of excitement, that doesn't mean that they are guaranteed to stick around.

They're not guaranteed to be a success. The Pebble was huge and doesn't exist anymore, so that can raise the question will the rabbit r one have better luck than say the pebble. Well, let's talk about what it is first. So it's a handheld device. It's kind of square ish in shape. It's about half the height of your typical smartphone, so it's not as big as a smartphone. Most of the front face of this device is covered with a touch screen. That touch screen typically has a sort of

cyber rabbit icon face on it. To the right of the screen is a little physical scroll wheel. It's mounted so that you can scroll up or down with it. Above that is a forward facing camera. It has a simcard port, It's got Wi Fi and Bluetooth connectivity. It's got a speaker, it's got a microphone. It's got a few more things. But the physical stuff isn't really where the story is with this device. See The company behind the rabbit are One Rabbit in other words, says that

it wants to create the next generation of computers. But these computers should be able to interface with all the functions we rely on today without us having to deal with the actual applications that provide us those functions. So, for example, than having to open up an application or a program and run a function, you could just tell the computer what it was you wanted to have happen and the computer would do it. So these computers should be able to interface with all the functions we rely

on today on behalf of us. They can act as almost like a middleman. So for example, I could get a smartphone and download and install apps on my phone to do all sorts of stuff like to call a cab or a ride share. I could have an app to order food. I could have a different app so I could listen to music, a different app so I could watch films, or maybe I have apps that are various games. But I have to download and install each

of those apps in order to do that. And obviously lots of different companies make these apps, so these interfaces aren't universal, right, So it might actually take me a little while to learn how to navigate those apps properly, because one app may use one kind of interface, another

might use a different one. And I don't know if you've had the experience where you've opened up programs and like you have that moment where you realize, oh, the shortcut I'm trying to use doesn't work because that's actually for a totally different program. I have it happen all the time. But then I'm also I'm also getting old and broken and perhaps senile. So maybe that's just a Jonathan problem. But what if instead of doing all that, my device just took those steps out and just interface

directly with the underlying platforms. What if all I needed to do was to tell my computer order me a deep dish Chicago pizza to get here by five pm, and the computer, acting like a personal assistant, handles the entire transaction. And what if I could do any kind of transaction that way, not just ordering pizza. Maybe I need to order a ride. Maybe I want to watch

the latest episode of True Detective. Maybe I have a list of things I want to do, like maybe I want to do a full fledged vacation, and I need to do things like I need to book flights, I need to secure a hotel room, I need to get tickets for a walking tour I was interested in, I want to make a dinner reservation for a particular restaurant. What if I just had a gadget and I just told it all these things I needed it to do, and it took care all of that for me in

one go, Right. That's the kind of idea behind the Rabbit r one. The company says the secret Sauce is a system they call a large action model, and it's this model that figures out how to interface with all the different services out there in order to get the result that you desire, whether that's pizza delivery or an update on your health records or whatever it might be. There are a lot of unanswered questions when it comes to this actual approach, like how can the product and

system ensure privacy and data security? For example. As is often the case at cees, answers to the hard questions

didn't really take center stage. Instead, folks got swept up with this idea of a device that you know, possibly could do all these things, And in just over a week, Rabbit had sold out of its pre order inventory that had set aside, and then it sold out of the next batch that it set aside, and then the next one, and it keeps going and one hundred and ninety nine dollars a pop. It's a pricey piece of technology, but

admittedly it's significantly cheaper than your typical smartphone. So you could argue, well, if you wanted to free yourself of a smartphone, then maybe you could use this. Now, gret you can't use this thing as a smartphone, it's not intended to be a smartphone, but you could use it to do all these other tasks. Now, some evangelists have already talked about how the device lets you do lots of stuff that we do use smartphones for today, but

it removes pesky things like notifications and distractions. So if you're someone who's like, I'm so sick of getting text messages and phone calls and all these little pop ups and stuff. I just want to be able to do what I need to do when I need to do it, and then not be bothered that I could see where you'd be. Really you'd find the appeal of the rabbit

r one. Maybe you go back to having just a phone at home and an answering machine or something similar to that, where you're not carrying your communications device with you everywhere. I think a lot of people, at least on one level, think that's attractive. But when you start really thinking about the convenience of having a communications device

on you, it does. I mean, that's a strong use case, right Like, as someone who has been through a couple of medical emergencies recently, I can tell you having a communications device on you is invaluable at times. But you know, it does seem like it would be cool to have a gadget that could handle these things and you know, you just tell it what you want and it handles all the details. That does seem pretty nice. But as one YouTuber vrun Maya and I apologize for the Butchering

of your name. I saw his YouTube video about the Rabbit R one, and he made some really good points, some criticisms about this, and he said that the rabbit R one's place in the pantheon of established technology is by no means assured. He argues that the use case for the r one is pretty limited. And if you were to actually look at how much time the typical person spends on their smartphone and then take another step and say, all right, let's break that down, what are

you using that time to do? Like, what what are you mostly doing on your smartphone? He argues that you would only see a tiny fraction of the use time that would go to interfacing with apps in this way for doing things like ordering say a ride haaling service or food or something. He says, yeah, people do that,

but that's like five or six minutes a day. If you were to look at how much time they're spending on their phone, most of their time is spent consuming content, right, watching videos, listening to podcasts, you know, that sort of stuff, but not booking travel or ordering food or whatever. So his argument is that there's actually not enough of a use case to justify purchasing the R one that yeah,

it might work. If it does work, we don't know because we only got to see some demonstrations and stuff. But it's only taking off like the like, if it's taking off like five minutes of work a day, that's hardly valuable, right. It's not like that's a huge load off of you. It's not a big enough departure from the smartphone to necessitate it. Plus, and this is a

really good argument. I think it stands to reason that smartphone manufacturers are going to experiment with their own approach to things like large action models, which means you're likely to see rabbit R one functionality finding its way into established smartphone lines in the future, right, whether it's Apple's Siri or Google's Assistant, that kind of thing. You would expect to see these companies start to build those capabilities into their own tools, which means, well, you don't need

the R one anyway. You're going to still want a phone, and your phone is going to end up doing the same thing the R one does, so why would you need a separate device to do those things. It's kind of like why most people, not everyone, but most people don't bother having their own like separate MP three player anymore. Right, you don't need an iPod or anything like that. You can just use your smartphone to access music. So for that reason, most people don't carry around iPods are MP

three players. Why would you carry around a separate AI device. Still, it was neat seeing something that was different from everything else that showed up in Las Vegas. Right, it was nice to see something that did not look like everything else. The design is also kind of it's got the sort of retro cool thing to it. It looks a little clunky.

It actually makes me think of the seventies because it was in bright orange, and I associate the seventies with like oranges and browns and it, you know, it was like a little square box and I was like, well, this feels like it was like technology was imagined in the seventies. It's got this little scroll wheel thing, and yeah, that was cool a neat idea. And I think the idea of having AI that can interface with these different platforms,

I think that's interesting too. I do think that there is some value in that, like, especially if you're on a vacation or something and you want to be able to arrange a bunch of stuff, but you don't want to take up time on your vacation to do it. I could see that being really valuable, so I can definitely see this evolving from here. I don't know that the Rabbit R one is going to stick around. There's also the question of if Rabbit were to encounter financial difficulties,

Like the company is really young. It launched in like October of last year. It has not been around for very long at all, which should also raise some questions about things like how likely is this device to work? But if it doesn't stick around, then does that mean the R one just becomes a paperweight? Right? Two hundred dollars paper weight? Because if it doesn't have the connectivity to any underlying services, presumably this device doesn't have a

massive amount of processing power. If it's two hundred bucks, there's no way it's got really high end components inside of it. It must be relying upon cloud and edge based computing. If the company that's behind all that goes under, then presumably that functionality goes away. So I don't want

to see them fail. I think it would be really cool if they succeed, but I would warn people to consider it carefully before plunking down two hundred bucks that they might not ever see again for something that ends up being interesting, but then ultimately fuels other companies to create similar tools and the r one gets lost in the shuffle. But who knows, maybe like a year from now, Rabbit's going to become like one of the big names

and consumer AI. All right, we're gonna take another quick break. When we come back, I'm gonna talk about some other AI components and consumer goods that were shown off at CES and talk a little bit about whether or not I think they're interesting. But first let's take this quick break. Okay, so we're back now. I got a question for you. Would you sleep better if you knew that artificial intelligence

was in your pillow? Because the Motion pillow is a pillow that is outfitted with AI according to the company behind it. So you might say, why why is there AI in a pillow? Well, the idea is that this pillow can monitor your sleep and detect when you do things like snore, and snoring indicates that you're your breathing pathway is obstructed and so you're not getting as much

air as your body wants. So if the pillow in you know, if it detects that you're starting to snore, it will activate pumps to inflate little balloons within the pillow to help raise your head in an effort to clear your airway. And it also includes other stuff inside it as well, like sensors that are meant to keep track of how well you sleep right, you know, are you staying nice and still, are you moving around a lot? Are you getting up in the middle of the night.

And it can give you sort of a score in the morning indicating how well you slept the night before. Now, as someone who personally very soon I'm going to have to do a sleep study because that's another part of the follow up. They want to check me for sleep apneam.

I understand the appeal of a device like this, right the idea of, oh, here's something that can help me deal with sleep apnea, and I'll get better rest and I don't have to worry about all that other stuff, like I don't have to worry about getting a seapap machine or anything like that. I actually worry that some folks might lean on technology like this in an effort to bypass the need to consult with physicians about this kind of thing. I do think technology can help. Don't

get me wrong. I think that having technology to help support a healthy lifestyle is a good idea. I just worry that people will rely on the tech rather than rely on medical assistance, and they won't get the quality and quantity of help that they really need. But still I think it's a neat idea. I don't know how I would feel about plunking down nearly seven hundred bucks for a pillow, though, because that's how much it costs.

At that point. I think I might be thinking more of the seapap mache because as much as I don't want to look like a Star Wars alien when I go to bed, I would like to have something that has a good track record, and potentially my insurance could help me pay for it. But you know, I don't know.

Maybe the pillow is a really good idea. Now. I did mention that pillow has a lot of components in it that are mirroring things that you find in fitness trackers, right Like, there are a lot of fitness trackers out there that you're supposed to wear when you go to sleep, and they'll track your sleep. Well, we saw lots of other fitness trackers at CEES twenty twenty four, No big surprise. They have been a huge thing there for years now, and this year we saw a couple that were meant

for our four legged friends. Again not totally new, I've seen this sort of stuff before, But in Voxia introduced a dog collar. It calls Mini Tales and includes stuff like a GPS tracker, very useful if your dog happens to get away. So has health sensors to monitor things like heart rate and breathing and that kind of stuff.

And it also includes an AI element, so that if you wanted to check in and see what your puppers was doing while you were, say, off at work, you could open up an app you could see if they were sacked out or if maybe they had a serious case of the zuomis. So the AI's purpose, from what I was reading on this description is to interpret what your dog is actually doing based upon the data it's gathering.

So if your dog's heart rate is elevated and if it's breathing is faster, then and GPS is giving indications that could say, oh, well, your dog's running around right, because it's not like there's you know, a clear running around indicator on there, the AI is making an interpretation. So I think that's kind of an interesting concept. It's probably one of the the fuzzier AI things that we're

talking about today. This color's ninety nine bucks, which for a fitness tracker isn't terrible, but it also requires a month subscription of twenty five bucks, and that does start to pile up, and just like I was saying with

the R one, it makes you worried. If you're paying a subscription, that usually indicates that the functionality of the device is dependent upon ongoing support from a back end, and if that means that the company, for whatever reason, has trouble, then you may no longer get that support, which means your smart collar just becomes a regular old collar and it becomes one hundred dollars collar that does the same thing as just a regular, you know, fabric

based collar would do, or leather or whatever. So yeah, again, buyer beware. I don't think you know if you really want to buy these things. I don't think there's anything wrong with it. I just think knowing ahead of time, the risks involved in purchasing something that could eventually become kind of a dumb version of what it once was due to a company dropping support. I think that's a

good thing to know. The gamer out there already know this really well, because there are a lot of games that over years have lost features due to companies either going under or just stopping support. Now, there were a couple of smart mirror devices at CEES twenty twenty four that leaned a little bit on AI. One of them, the b Mind Smart Mirror, claimed it could help users practice mental wellness activities to improve their state of mind.

So imagine you're the evil queen in snow White, and you walk up to the magic mirror and you demand that it proclaimed you as the fairest of the land, and instead the mirror adjusts the lighting to a more soothing color and brightness, and it encourages you to find value within yourself rather than to seek validation from others or something. I've only read about this mirror, so I'm not entirely sure how it works or how extensive this

AI actually is. I mean, it could be that it's a relatively small library of responses that it can provide based upon your prompts, but I don't have any idea if it's some that can make more, you know, extensive interpretations. That's really interesting, But I don't know that. Another mirror like gadget is the Anura Magic Mirror, which looked to me more like a screen than a mirror, sort of like how some people use the forward facing camera on their phone to do stuff like check their makeup and

that kind of thing. Anyway, this gadget can perform a full face scan. Apparently it takes like half a minute, and then it analyzes your face to determine a bunch of stuff like what your blood pressure and heart rate happens to be that kind of thing, And maybe I should get one of these, because you know, I need to keep track of that sort of stuff. Or maybe I should just keep using my blood pressure cuff and just to use that. Anyway, according to the company, the

planned customer base isn't for the average person. Instead, it's for stuff like doctor's offices and gyms and that kind of thing. We also got more than a few robots at CEES twenty twenty four. That's to be expected. Every year that I've attended, I've seen tons of robots. Some end up being fairly simple, like there might be a robot that's essentially kind of like a smart shopping cart that will follow behind a specific person and act as kind of like a little robotic valet and carry their stuff.

Others can get much more complicated, or at the very least can fulfill more complicated tasks. So this year there were a couple that I saw lots of folks mentioned in particular. I mean there were tons of robots, don't get me wrong, like hundreds of different types of robots, but two that a lot of people specifically wrote features on. One came from LG, but I couldn't find like a real specific official name for it, although the one I saw referenced it as the smart Home AI agent. That

just doesn't seem very snappy to me. But it's part of IG's zero labor home concept, and it's a very cute little robot. It's got two stubby little legs, the end in wheels, and its body looks like a horizontal cylinder, so like imagine like a canister on its side, but it's being held up by these two legs with wheels on the end, and it looks like it's wearing a little pair of headphones, and it's got a little digital screen with digital eyes in it. I really wish I

could have seen this thing in person. It's so adorable in pictures. So, according to LG is essentially a moving smart home hub. So it's meant to interface with other smart home appliances and such so that you can control your home by talking to your plastic pal who's fun to be with. Shout out if you happen to get that reference. So, this device has facial recognition capabilities that means it can learn to recognize the various members of

the household. It can monitor the home. It has a built in camera so it can patrol and keep an eye on things. It can also check on various factors like air temperature, humidity, and air quality within the home and alert you if any of those are in ranges that are perhaps unhealthy. And it's even supposed to be able to figure out if you're in a good mood

or not. So the idea is that you get home, this little robot rolls up and looks adoringly into your face and then tries to figure out if you're happy or if you're grouchy or whatever. Then immediately it begins to select settings and content to help you out with

the various smart home appliances in your home. So maybe you come home, it looks at you and it can tell that you're all stressed out, so immediately starts to set the lights to a kind of calm lower level and plays soothing music on a smart speaker and puts a silence on notifications for the time being so that you don't flip out. I have no idea if this thing is ever actually going to be an actual product,

but I can definitely see the appeal of it. Samsung also got some buzz by showing off an update to its Bali robot or bally, depending on how you pronounce it. I watched a video where it was from Samsung. I had both pronunciations in there. But it's a b a lllie. I would think it's Bali because it is shaped like a ball. Now. Samsung first introduced Bali back in twenty twenty, but this twenty twenty four version has a few extra

bells and whistles. Now, like I said, it's rather ball shaped, but it uses again a pair of thin wheels, one on either side of the ball that helps it move around the environment. And this new version of Bali has a projector built into it, which allows it to project images on floors or walls or ceilings, essentially being able

to turn any surface into a video screen. So promotional video showed folks using Bali to create an impromptu video calling screen, or to turn a wall into a television, or even project stuff on a floor in an effort to entertain a Golden retriever, which I think is unnecessary because we all know golden retrievers have like two brain cells, so you really don't need to work that hard anyway.

Like LG's robots, msun showed off that Bali is meant to interact with smart devices and thus give the robot control over appliances and Internet of Things gadgets throughout the home. So like the LG one, you could use it to do things like adjust the thermostat, or change what's playing on the smart speakers, or change the lighting. It can also, like the LG one, it can also patrol and keep an eye out on things that are going on back

at home base while you're out and about. So those were some of the robots I mean, like I said, there were tons of others. There was one that was a few people mentioned that was like a combination robot that was a couple of different appliances, with one big appliance acting as like the docking station for the roving

robot that could mop. It was a washing machine and mop combo, and the mop part could wander around the house and mop and then dock with the washing machine and offload the dirty water through the washing machine's drain so that you didn't even have to empty the mop. It could fill itself with clean water and empty the

dirty water, which I think was pretty cool idea. So a lot of different stuff like that, But moving on, let's talk about Nvidia, because that was another company that's heavily entrenched in AI, and that should come as no surprise because it has been manufacturing powerful processors that have been tweaked to support AI functionality for the past couple

of years. Powering artificial intelligence requires a whole lot of OOF, and Nvidia has a rep for building chips that are very much oomph centric, whether it's to provide the best performance for a state of the art gaming PC or

a computer system that's running artificial intelligence applications. The company held a special address during CEES to talk about how its products will power the tech of tomorrow, and it can be challenging to walk away from stuff like CES and not have a feeling that at least some companies are still more than a little wishy washy when it comes to You've got companies like Nvidia that can very firmly point at how they support AI functionality, but when

it comes to the companies that are building the actual AI implementations, it gets a little more vague. You might have limited implementations, you might have some very loose definitions that don't make a very strong stance as to how AI is a factor. But we do need to remember that artificial intelligence itself is kind of on thin eyes

at the moment. There are governments around the world that are taking a very close look at AI and are starting to consider the sorts of regulations that may be needed to keep AI from going all terminator on us, and companies need to keep that in mind too. It may be necessary one day to walk back some AI strategies, so diving wholeheartedly into AI tech could end up being a costly mistake, and that might be one reason why

companies are a little slow to do so. It's not just that it's hard to figure out how do we do this in a way that makes sense. It's also how can we do this in a way where we don't over commit and if governments decide to push back hard against AI. We haven't gotten into a position where we've you know, over invested in an area of business that ultimately doesn't pan out. So that also opens up opportunities for smaller companies like Rabbit to potentially cash in.

But I'm still not convinced that Rabbit will see much success beyond its initial launch. Maybe I'm wrong, We'll have to wait and see. It's a really weird situation. We already have and use so much technology that has various elements of AI built into it like a Again, AI is not new. You know your smartphone has AI components built into it. It's something that's everywhere all around us. It's clear. It's obvious AI is going to be a big part of our technology moving forward. There's no denying it.

But at the same time, I think most of us recognize that AI also has the potential to do amazing things, but potentially also terrible things. So here's hoping that companies make the best choices and that our refrigerators don't rise up against us, because I'm pretty sure it could take me anyway. That's kind of a round up on an overview of what was going on with AI over at CES. As I said, that was just one small thing that

happened at CES this year. I might do another episode talking about some of the technologies that were shown off to go into further detail, like those transparent OLED screens. It's something we had been hearing about for a very long time, and we had even seen some prototypes in the past, but man, they were on display like crazy this past year from what I've seen, and I'm kind of sad that I missed seeing them in person. Not so sad that, you know, I would have traded all

that wonderful time I spent going to various doctor's appointments. Anyway, enough about all that. I hope you are all well. I'm so glad to be back recording. I look forward to doing that three times a week. I'm thinking about news episodes on Fridays and then other just regular textuff episodes on Mondays and Wednesdays. And it's a pleasure to be back in the saddle and recording again. I hope you are all well. I hope you all take very good care of yourselves, go see your doctors on a

regular basis. Trust me on this, you don't want to fall into the same trap I did, and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.