Tech Brew Ride Home - Mon. 02/26 – Mobile World Congress Is All About AI This Year (Corrected)

Episode Date: February 26, 2024

Mobile World Congress kicks off this week, and I bet you can guess what the big theme this year is. All the hardware that is being announced to allow you to do AI on your existing devices. Samsung unveiled its Galaxy Ring, but Apple wants you to know it could do a ring too if it wanted to. And Lenovo’s see-through laptop is cool looking, but also, looking for a use case. Links: Samsung unveils the Galaxy Ring as a way to 'simplify everyday wellness' (Engadget) Apple Ponders Whether to Develop Smart Glasses, Fitness Ring (Bloomberg) Here’s why the $3,500 Apple Vision Pro headset is so expensive (CNBC) Au Large (Mistral.ai) Nvidia launches RTX 500 and 1000 Ada Generation laptop GPUs for AI on the go (VentureBeat) Lenovo’s laptop concept is fully transparent, but the point isn’t entirely clear (TechCrunch) Peering through Lenovo’s transparent laptop into a sci-fi future (The Verge) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On April 4th, 2023, around 2 in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16. Welcome to the Tech meme right home for Monday, February 26, 2024. I'm Brian McCullough today. Mobile World Congress kicks off this week, and I bet you can guess what the big theme this year is. All the hardware that is being announced to allow you to do AI on your existing devices. Samsung unveiled its Galaxy ring, but Apple wants you to know it could do a ring two if it wanted to. And Lenovo's see-through laptop is cool looking, but also looking for a use case. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. Mobile World Congress has begun in Barcelona and Samsung has used the occasion to unveil something they demoed at their last big event, the Galaxy Ring. It's centered around health and wellness, comes in three colors, will be available later this year, and it's, well, a smart ring, quoting in gadget.

Journalists weren't allowed to photograph it today, but some additional images from Samsung show it to be a chunky, concave ring about the same size as the aura, according to a supplied image. The extra girth isn't surprising, given the electronics cached inside. The Galaxy Ring will also offer a new tool called My Vitality Score that measures alertness so users can see if they're at their best. Feedback will be available via booster cards that offer science-based tips using sleep and other data gathered by the device. The Galaxy Ring will be part of the Samsung health ecosystem and be compatible with the Galaxy Watch. That means you'll be able to use both devices at once to track your health and get higher quality data as a result. That said, the advantage of of a ring wearable is that it's far less annoying to sleep with, end quote. And quoting the verge.

The Galaxy Ring prototypes I was able to try out were presented in three colors, platinum, silver, ceramic black, and gold. I wasn't allowed to take any photos during that session, but gold looked right at home next to my wedding ring. The Galaxy Ring is lighter than it looks and doesn't feel as dense as I thought it would. It has a slightly concave shape, and each color was offered in sizes from 5 to 13, which is a slightly wider range of options than usual, with sizes marked as S through XL on the inside of the band. Samsung's VP of Digital Health, Dr. Hahn-Pack, didn't specifically say what sensors are in the ring, but mentioned sleep insights based on heart rate, movement, and respiratory indicators.

Dr. Pack says that Samsung's partnership with natural cycles, which already brings period and fertility tracking to its Galaxy Watch series, will extend to the ring too, putting it in direct competition with the aura ring. On the Galaxy Ring, battery size increases slightly in the larger band sizes, though Dr. Peck couldn't share any exact battery life estimates. Throughout a session detailing Samsung's vision for its new wearable, Dr. Peck referred to it as a step forward in building out a larger ecosystem of ambient sensing, providing, quote, connected care centered around the home. Rather than relying on a single device you have to wear comfortably and remember to charge, the notion behind ambient sensing is gathering data from multiple places to,

remove friction. Your ring, your watch, who knows, your refrigerator, all working in harmony to remind you the last time you ate a vegetable was four days ago, and maybe that's why you feel disgusting, end quote. Ever notice how when big tech events happen that Apple doesn't participate in, somehow that same week, little drips and drabs rumors tend to spill out to keep Apple in the conversation? Well, funny enough in Mark German's newsletter this weekend, Mark says Apple has considered making a fitness ring, also smart glasses, and adding camera. and more advanced AI to AirPods, ambient sensing anyone. So keeping Apple in the headlines by saying, yeah, we might do something like that too,

quoting Bloomberg. A few years ago, the Apple Industrial Design Group presented an idea to executives on the company's health team, a smart ring that would take health tracking features from the Apple Watch and put them on your finger. More recently, engineers at the company's labs in Cupertino have discussed the possibility of developing smart glasses, something similar to new products from meta and Amazon. The glasses could provide audio so users don't have to wear AirPods and take advantage of AI and cameras to identify things in the surrounding world. The device also could act as a stepping

stone towards Apple's long-held dream, true augmented reality spectacles that you can wear all day. Apple could tie the ring to its health and fitness apps and sell it as an iPhone accessory. It won't generate as much money as a smartwatch, but Apple can court a new type of customer and even theoretically offer it as a subscription. Finally, an Apple ring, owner would be less likely to ditch the iPhone for an Android device. The situation with glasses is similar. True augmented reality spectacles, ones that would meet Apple's standards for visual quality, performance, battery life, and size are likely still several years away. But a less ambitious product could still be functional as Amazon and meta have shown with their second

versions of the Echo Frames and Rayban smart glasses. Lastly, Apple could just take its AirPods, a product that millions of consumers already love, and make them smarter. The company is exploring the idea of putting cameras on the earbuds, along with more advanced AI and health sensors that would give consumers many of the benefits of smart glasses without needing lenses and frames. That investigation codenamed B-798 started last year. It involves company engineers figuring out how to fit low-resolution camera sensors into earbuds about the size of today's AirPods. Such cameras could theoretically be used to capture data that would be processed via AI and assist people in their daily routines, end quote. Speaking of Apple, I said on the bonus episode this weekend,

Apple doesn't tend to sell any device at a loss, not even a new device like the Vision Pro. That's just not how they do things. Well, if this Omdia estimate is to be believed, that continues to be true. Amdiya says that the bill of materials for the Apple Vision Pro is $1,542, with both of the 1.25-inch micro-o-led displays from Sony, costing about $228 each, quoting CNBC. The The second most expensive part in the Vision Pro is the company's main processor, which includes Apple's M2 chip. The same chip it uses in the MacBook Air and the R1 chip, which is a custom processor to handle video feeds and other sensors on the device. Bill of materials, estimates don't take into account research and development costs, packaging or shipping. They also don't

take into account capital expenditures that can add upfront costs to big parts orders, but they're useful for people in the manufacturing world to get an idea of how expensive the parts are in any given device. Display technologies embraced by Apple typically come down in price after Apple makes them mainstream and as multiple suppliers compete for business. South Korean suppliers like Samsung display and LG display have shown their interest in this technology. Chinese suppliers like Sia and B.O.E are also small-scale mass-produced OLED on silicon products, said Jay Shao Omita's analyst for displays in an email. He expects the cost for Vision Prospect screens to come down in the coming years. Apple declined to comment, but Apple's CEO,

Tim Cook is not a fan of cost estimates and tear downs. I've never seen one that's even close to accurate, he said on an earnings call in 2015, end quote. Another day, another one of these, but this one is interesting because it's from Mistral, the nine-month-old AI startup based in Paris, that is emerging as the main competitor to the existing AI players like OpenAI. Mistral today announced Mistral Large, its new flagship text generation model. Here's what it does, according to the company, It scores so well on standard benchmarks. It's right behind GPT4, but above Claude 2, Gemini Pro, and Lama 270B. So near the head of the pack in terms of what has been announced recently.

Quoting from the announcement, it is natively fluent in English, French, Spanish, German, and Italian with a nuanced understanding of grammar and cultural context. Its 32,000 tokens context window allows precise information recall from large documents. Its precise instruction following enables developers to design their moderation policies, we used it to set up the system-level moderation of LeChat. It is natively capable of function-calling, this along with constrained output mode implemented on La Platform, enables application development and tech stack modernization at scale, end quote. Now, Mistro also claims

strong advancements in reasoning, which has been the new big thing everyone is gunning for, and also advancements in even math performance. Alongside Mistro Large, they also released a new optimized model Mistral Small, optimized for latency and cost. Now, here's the interesting strategic play. Mistral has partnered with Microsoft to release this. Mistral Large is available on La Platform, Mistral's own system, but also Azure right now today. Microsoft has also taken a minor stake in Mistral to bring more of their models to market, which is interesting, given the recent interest regulators around the world seem to be taking in Microsoft's super tight relationship with OpenAI. Back to Mobile World Congress, because

AI on edge devices is going to be the big thing for the foreseeable future, at least for OEMs looking to convince you to buy new hardware. InVIDIA launched the RTC-500 and RTX-1000, its new laptop GPUs for on-the-go AI processing powered by the Ada Lovelace architecture available in spring of this year, quoting Venture Beat. As generative AI and hybrid work setups become integral to various industries, the demand for potent mobile solutions has skyrocketed. The RTX 500 and 1,000 GPUs are targeted at this demand, offering a combination of generative AI and graphics performance for professionals tackling diverse challenges. They're aimed at empowering content creators, researchers, and engineers with AI acceleration and graphics

performance, even while working from portable devices. AI is increasingly being integrated into professional workflows, transforming design, content creation, and everyday productivity. The next generation of mobile workstations featuring Ada generation GPUs will incorporate a neural processing unit NPU, a component of the CPU, along with an NVIDIA RTFGPU equipped with TensorFlows for Advanced AI Processing. This dual creation is designed to handle both light AI tasks and demanding day-to-day AI workflows, providing users with up to 682 tops of AI performance. The enhanced AI acceleration facilitated by the GPU is crucial for various tasks such as

video conferencing with high-quality AI effects, streaming videos with AI upscaling, and accelerating generative AI and content creation applications. The RTX 500 GPU stands out for delivering up to 14 times the generative AI performance for models like stable diffusion, up to three times faster AI-assisted photo editing, and up to 10 times the graphics performance for 3D rendering compared to a CPU-only configuration, end quote. Finally, from Barcelona today, Lenovo has demoed the Thinkbook Transparent Display Laptop concept device with a 17.3-inch micro-l-l-D panel and a built-in drawing tablet.

Quoting TechCrunch, I'll be the first to admit that it's difficult to photograph the thing, especially on a crowded show floor with a few dozen folks elbowing their way in to catch a glimpse of it. Broadly speaking, it looks like a laptop with a transparent pane where the screen should be. It's perhaps best understood as a kind of augmented reality device in the sense that its graphics are overlaid on whatever happens to be behind it. I'm racking my brain to come up with a practical real-world use for such a product that goes beyond looks. When I think about working on my laptop, more often than not, I'm facing a wall. On occasion, I'm facing a window with light streaming in. I'm curious how the thing does in full daylight.

A max of 1,000 nits is admittedly quite bright, but it's hard to say how it will handle direct sunlight, end quote. And quoting the verge. The key draw is its bezelless 17.3-inch micro-l-l-D display, which offers up to 55% transparency, when its pixels are set to black and turned off. But as its pixels light up, the display becomes less and less see-through until eventually you're looking at a completely opaque white surface with a peak brightness of 1,000 nits. But there are some specific challenges with building a transparent display into a laptop. Most notable is resolution, which is more important on a laptop designed to show text than a TV designed to show images. That, incidentally, is why Lenovo tells me it went for a micro-LED

panel over an OLED. Although the 17.3-inch display in this concept is only 720P, A.G. Shang, Lenovo's executive director of SMB product and solutions, tells me that going with an OLED would have limited the company to a resolution as low as for 80p. 720P still feels like a very work-in-progress spec on a 17.3-inch laptop like this, but at least text shown on the screen during my demo was perfectly readable. Another sign that this is a work-in-progress, it's not possible on Lenovo's current prototype to manually set the whole laptop screen to be opaque, regardless of whether it's showing white content, black content, or any colors in between. That absolutely is something that we would want if we were going into production, Butler says.

It's also something that LG is using contrast film to achieve on its OLED T television. As well as the transparent display, Lenovo's laptop concept also has a completely flat touch keyboard rather than a physical keyboard with keys you can feel impress. When images of this device first started leaking, I assume this was, meant as just another sci-fi flourish, but it's actually part of Lenovo's pitch for artists. That's because, as well as functioning like a keyboard, the laptop's base is also designed to work as a drawing tablet. The keyboard that you can see on the laptop is actually a projection, which disappears when you bring a stylus close to the drawing surface, or even when you step away

from the laptop entirely. Then you're left with a flat surface to sketch on, similar to what you'd find in a screenless WACOM tablet. The downside is that when you're not sketching, you have to use the completely flat surface as a touch-sensitive keyboard, which was definitely the weakest element of the prototype device. It will not surprise you to hear that this mechanical keyboard fan didn't love stabbing his fingers at an image of a keyboard, and I made endless typos in my attempt to write a simple test sentence, end quote. Nothing for you today. Talk to you tomorrow.