Tech Brew Ride Home - Thu. 09/26 – The Orion Smartglasses

Episode Date: September 26, 2024

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. Sponsors: Thorne.fit/ridehome Links: OpenAI considering restructuring to for-profit, CTO Mira Murati and two top research execs depart (CNBC) Exclusive: OpenAI to remove non-profit control and give Sam Altman equity (Reuters) Meta’s cheaper Quest 3S might just be an upgrade (The Verge) A Few Brief Thoughts on Meta Connect 2024 (Daring Fireball) Meta pitches VR to mobile developers with new support for Android apps on Quest (TechCrunch) Meta’s big tease (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 Thursday, September 26th, 2024. I'm Brian McCullough 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 smart glasses, which you can't actually buy. What? I'll explain. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Well, and then there was just Sam, I guess. Open AI CTO, Mira Muradi 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, end quote. Quoting CNBC, Maradi 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 Open AI, 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 Zoff 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, end quote. But that's not all, of course, because sources have been saying for weeks now that Open AIs 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 Old 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 non-profit 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 superalignment 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 OpenA.I. would resemble that of its major rival Anthropic and Elon Musk's XAI, which are registered as benefit corporations, a form of for-profits that aim to promote social responsibility and sustainability in addition to making profits, end quote. So at this point, seriously, who knows, right?

But friend of the show, Chris Mims threaded something that I've heard from other people. To me, all the Open AI exec departures make perfect sense. Open AI 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 aqua hire. That's a lateral move. From the perspective of pure self-interest, who wouldn't bail from Open AI right now? End 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 and a half 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. It 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 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 to its 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 128 Gigabyte Quest 3S for 299, the 256 gigabyte Quest 3S for 399, and the 512 gigabyte Quest 3 for 499. The 512 Gigabyte Quest 3 originally cost 649 when it launched last year, and now Meta is planning to sell

it's left over 128 gigabyte Quest 3 headsets, which started at $499 for 429. End 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. End 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 Macs

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 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 QuestXR devices. In addition, the company says that its OpenStore now supports 3D and spatial apps and has introduced the metaspatial SDK to help developers get started. The SDK lets developers take their traditional mobile apps and add native spatial features like floating 3D objects,

atmospheric, and immersive media. A new metaspatial 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, multitasking, and handling all of the hand-in-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, end quote. But this was what everybody ended up talking about. Meta also unveiled a prototype called Orion, its first AR glasses with a 70-degree field of view, a wireless neural input wristband, silicon carbide lenses, and micro-l-l-D projectors. The catch is you can't buy this. In fact, 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 notice as I walk into a conference room at Meta's headquarters in Menlo Park, California. The Black Clark Kent-esque frames sitting on the table in front of me look unassuming, 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-LEDD 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 all. 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. end quote. Orion takes the generative AI capabilities that already exists 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 placed 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 to pair our glasses and then used hand-tracking to control the paddle. This worked surprisingly smoothly, and I noticed 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 verges Nelai 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 foam. 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. Video calls look 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 textile 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 small, or 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, amid a 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 isn't active. We're saving $20 a month, quips Alex Himmel, 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 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, end quote. Okay, so what's the point of this? Is this vaporware? I guess the case could be made. but everybody knows this is what the end point 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. You know, Thank you.