Tech Brew Ride Home - Tue. 04/16 – What Should An AI Wearable Be: AI Pin Or Limitless Pendant?

Episode Date: April 16, 2024

Microsoft continues to spread its AI bets. Disney wants to bring back tv channels. YouTube is not gonna let you block ads. What did Humane get wrong with the AI Pin? And can Limitless do any better with its AI Pendant? Sponsors: MackWeldon.com, promocode ride YahooFinance.com Links: Microsoft to invest $1.5bn in Abu Dhabi AI group G42 (Financial Times) To Keep Viewers, Disney Plans a New Streaming Concept: Old-Style TV Channels (The Information) YouTube cracking down on third-party apps that block ads (9to5Google) YouTube Accounted for Nearly 10% of All TV Viewing in March, Nielsen Says (TheWrap) Oh the Humanity (Sandofsky.com) Limitless is a new AI tool for your meetings — and an all-hearing wearable gadget (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 Tuesday, April 16th, 2024. I'm Brian McCullough today. Microsoft continues to spread its AI bets. Disney wants to bring back TV channels.

YouTube is not going to let you block ads. What did Humane get wrong with the AI pin and can limitless do any better with its AI pendant? Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. They are making more moves to diversify. Microsoft is investing $1.5 billion in Abu Dhabi-based AI Group G42, for a minority stake after G42 severed ties with Chinese suppliers. Microsoft's Brad Smith will join G42's board, quoting the Financial Times. The investment will strengthen Abu Dhabi's position as an AI hub

and is a sign of the oil-rich Emirates ambitions in the technology. It also shows how the Gulf, long seen by many in Silicon Valley as an easy source of funding, is increasingly regarded as a credible technology partner. Given the importance of the technology and given how important it is to the two countries and two governments. We've taken this first step in close collaboration with the governments of both the UAE and the United States. Smith said, we will take the next step and following steps in close collaboration with them as well, end quote. Asked if the Microsoft deal was a prize for cutting ties with China, G42's chief executive Peng Zhao said, quote, I would focus

on our decision to form this partnership with Microsoft to really develop our capabilities on a global scale. less focus on what we choose not to do, end quote. The deal has required negotiation with the Biden administration amid concerns from U.S. lawmakers about G42's links to China, including whether the data of American citizens would be passed to the Chinese government. G42 said that, quote, after deciding to partner with Microsoft last year, we began meetings with U.S. officials to ensure compliance with U.S. regulations, including on Chinese technology, so we could get the deal over the line. As part of the deal, G-42 would use Microsoft's cloud computing platform Azure as the backbone for the development and deployment of AI services we provide to all of our customers, said Zhao.

Smith said the company's plan to partner at a later stage on building out data centers in other countries. They will also support a $1 billion fund for AI developers, end quote. Blowing up the cable bundle and traditional TV just to reconstitute it piece by piece, example number 141, what if, and hear me out, instead of searching around for something to watch, you went to one place that was always airing something, and you could just tune in and watch that. Call it, I don't know, a channel? Quoting the information. After more than a decade of growth in streaming services that make viewers click on shows they want to watch on demand,

a growing number of streaming services are offering new channels that function more like old-style TV with a continuous scheduled stream of shows. Disney is the latest to expand in this market. The company plans to create a series of such channels within its Disney Plus streaming service that show programming in specific genres, including either Star Wars or Marvel-based shows, according to people involved in the planning. Lots of other companies have already launched such channels, although typically as free offerings rather than within a subscription service.

That includes Disney, which has launched similar channels within its ABC.com app, such as one dedicated to its 2020 News Magazine program and another to the daytime Soap Opera General Hospital. The precise timing for the new channels isn't clear, but their launch is part of Disney's effort to get its streaming subscribers to spend more time on Disney Plus rather than clicking off to other apps and to boost ad revenue. The theory is that with more viewing options, subscribers will stick around more, and it's part of the broader focus of streaming services to increase the amount of time subscribers spend on their apps as the industry pivots from trying to sign up more people to trying to actually make money. In the same vein, Netflix in late 2020,

explored creating a store within its app for users to subscribe to and watch other streaming services, all without leaving the Netflix app, according to a person who was involved in those exploratory discussions. Netflix's store would have been similar to Amazon Prime Video channels, which lets Prime Video Subscribers click a button to sign up for a wide range of other services. But it would be a major departure for Netflix, making it more of a streaming platform than a standalone outlet. Netflix executives believe such a move could persuade subscribers to spend more time within, the Netflix app, which is the biggest strategic priority for the streaming giant. The company has not moved forward with the idea, the person said, but hasn't ruled it out either.

Netflix declined comment, end quote. Speaking of the future of TV, the real future of TV, at least right now, YouTube has begun, quote, strengthening our enforcement on third-party apps that violate its terms of service and, quote, specifically ad-blocking apps, leading to people seeing a lot of app error messages. So here's our situation. Everyone fled linear TV to escape ads, except ads are slowly creeping back into streaming to subsidize the cost of streaming. Oh, and over at the place where you actually spend most of your time watching video these days, YouTube, they're going to make sure you can't escape their ads. So, we're back at Square One, watching stuff with ads, quoting 9 to 5 Google.

Users will see the following content is not available on this app, error messages, or experience buffering issues when they try to play. content through those alternative clients. We want to emphasize that our terms don't allow third-party apps to turn off ads because that prevents the creator from being rewarded for viewership, and ads on YouTube help support creators and let billions of people around the world use the streaming service. YouTube Premium, which hit 100 million subscribers in February, is offered as the solution for those that, quote, prefer an entirely ad-free experience. Going forward, it will crack down on clients that violate these policies, quote, when we find an app that violates these terms, we will take appropriate action to protect our platform, creators, and viewers, end quote. And as I was working on this segment, I saw this article in the wrap. Quote, YouTube was once again the breakout star of Nielsen's monthly The Gage Report during the month of March. The platform accounted for 9.7% of all television viewing, an increase of 0.4% share points from February. This is the largest share of TV for a streaming platform ever reported in the Gage.

This month marked YouTube's 13th consecutive month as having the largest share among streaming services, end quote. This is why increasingly the TV that you hear about on the internet from friends, the TV everyone is talking about, is not some new series from HBO, but maybe that Marquess review of the AI pin or the Fisker review he did, or Conan O'Brien vomiting milk on the season finale of hot ones, or that Beavis and Buthead sketch clip from Saturday Night Live this past weekend, not the Saturday Night Live episode. itself, but just the Beavis and Butthead clip. Look, I don't think there's any way to couch the fact that Humane's AI pin has, shall we say, not been well received. I mean, Marquez Brownlee literally titled his YouTube video review, the worst product I've ever reviewed. Over at his personal blog, Benjamin Sandowski makes

some good points about this lead balloon of a launch. This took six years to ship. They raised $230 million, and this is what they were able to produce. Maybe building a device, the Apple way isn't the way if you're a startup. Quote, I blame the team's nostalgia. They clearly want to recreate the Apple from 2007, but that's impossible under venture capital constraints and without the momentum of Apple. Contrary to what Imran Ken, and I'm sure many others at Humane Believe, the iPhone didn't begin with their work in the 2000s on Project Purple. It began in 1976 with the Apple computer. And the decades of goodwill it built up in consumers. The project was spearheaded by a guy ready to waste billions in iPod revenue if it helped

achieve his vision, and he answered to nobody. It came together at the perfect point in time when everyone knew the power of the internet, but there wasn't a way to carry the whole experience in your pocket. You can't replicate all these factors in a few years, no matter how much money a VC throws at you, end quote. But also, and this is an interesting point, quoting again, I'm sure their 2018 pitch was about a post-Iphone device. I'm sure it mentioned a Siri-like assistant. There was zero chance that involved ChatGPT in 2018 because ChatGPT launched in 2022. If it's true, they always envisioned an AI-first experience and they spent six years of their lives only to ship this. Well, that's way more embarrassing than a last-minute AI pivot.

There was absolutely nothing wrong with pitching one idea to investors and going in a totally different direction. There's a saying that early-stage investors back the team, not the idea. Humane could have kept true to the essence of their product, detaching from our phones while not having to fight an unwinnable battle. What about an e-ink phone? Imagine a device that gives you weeks of battery life, but too low-fi to leave you vulnerable to addictive apps. Maybe that idea sucks, but I'd try a hundred others before going all in on the doomed laser projector, end quote. V. Talem on threads echoed this idea about the AI pivot when he wrote, quote, just trying to imagine what Humane would have done if there was not a

breakthrough with LLMs like ChatchibbT. Their whole back end is an API call right now, end quote. But I also want to echo what a bunch of other folks are saying, I know that Humane thought their mission was to wean people off screens. But instead of tying yourself into knots with this failed projector technology, what if you had just made a tiny screen? Maybe the mission was to wean people off of smartphones, not screens. Or maybe the mission really was, or should have been, to find whatever the next thing beyond smartphones is. Because the bottom line is, they could have just solved a lot of the problems with this projector by just having a tiny screen like the Rabbit R1 is attempting, TBD on that one. Or why did you put a camera in this thing? Adding it to

the bill of materials only to take pictures that would inevitably suck when you have the best camera ever created already in your pocket? Or I mean, isn't that what they're really trying to do? Ambient computing? Which, don't you think that would be solved easier by some combination of earbuds, smart glasses, and AI, where the smartphone is like the computing mothership, powering everything from your pocket? Eliminating the smartphone actually seems like the worst idea because you need it for the compute. But also, the smartphone does solve a lot of things, does a lot of things well. Created a bunch of solutions that people actually love by throwing the whole thing out you threw out solutions that work. Just my two cents.

Which, funny enough, brings us to this. Limitless has launched the $99 limitless pendant, a wearable AI gadget we've mentioned on this show before that transcribes meetings and provides real-time notes and summaries, shipping in August. Quoting the Verge, The Limitless pendant doesn't exactly scream AI, as Dan Soroker, the CEO of the company, behind the new device lifts it up to show me over Zoom. The round, rubbery-looking gizmo reminds me more of an old-school clippable Fitbit. But what Soroker is actually showing me is a device that can be clipped to your shirt or worn on a string around your neck that is meant to record everything you hear and then use AI to help you remember and make sense of it. The Limitless Pendant

is part of the whole limitless system, which the company is launching today. Oh, and in case you're wondering, yes, it's very much a reference to the movie. Soroker's last AI product Rewind was an app that ran on your computer and would record your screen and other data in order to help you remember every tab, every song, every meeting, everything you do on your computer. When the company first teased the Limitless pendant, it was actually called the Rewind pendant. Limitless has similar aims, but instead of just running on your computer, it's meant to collect data in the cloud and the real world, too, and make it all available to you on any device. Rewind is still around for the folks who want the all-local-one computer approach, but Seroker says

the cross-platform opportunity is much bigger. The core job to be done is initially around meetings, Sorroker tells me, preparing you for meetings, transcribing meetings, giving you real-time notes of meetings and summaries of meetings for $20 a month. The app will capture audio from your computer's mic and speakers, and you can also give it access to your email and calendar. With that combination, and ultimately, all the other apps you use for work, Sorroker says, Limitless can do a lot to help you keep track of conversations. What was that new app someone mentioned in the board meeting? What restaurant did Shannon say we should go to next time? Where did I leave off with Jake when we met two weeks ago? In theory, Limitless can get that data and use AI models to get it back to you anytime you ask.

Seroca and I are talking the day after the first reviews of the Humane AI PIN came out, and he's careful to differentiate his company's approach from these all-encompassing AI tools. We're trying to do a few things exceptionally well, not be a mile wide and an inch deep, he says. We're not, you know, trying to reinvent the wheel with lasers. His plan is to integrate into all the apps you use and put Limitless inside of those apps. You should be able to take notes in Notion or get action items in Slack, he thinks, instead of having to go to some other app entirely. Why would I even have to make you log into my cloud-based app when I could just have you show up to the thing you're already using?

But only a few minutes later, Sorroker's ambition gets the best of him, and he starts to imagine a much bigger future for Limitless. I mean, the thing is called Limitless. there's no, don't do too much faux humility allowed here. You know, of course, it'll do the generic fun facts, perplexity, open AI stuff, he says. The next step is proactive and not reactive. I have access to your email. I have access to your Slack messages. When you get a message for which the context of your past can help answer it, I can just give you that draft, end quote. Once Limitless gets that down, he says, it'll be about AI agents that actually do stuff on your behalf,

so Limitless can know everything about you and do everything for you, and everything will be amazing. After a minute of this, Sorroker catches himself, but that's a much harder problem to solve. For now, meetings. The Limitless Pendant ships in August. The $99 device is meant to be with you all the time, Soroker says its battery lasts 100 hours, and uses beam-forming technology to more clearly record the person speaking to you and not the rest of the coffee shop or auditorium. An LED lights up whenever it's recording, and the Limitless pendant also has a consent mode that detects new voices and doesn't record them until the software hears them agree to being recorded.

It's worth noting this mode is off by default. Everything you record gets uploaded to Limitless, mingled with your other data, and made available through the apps, end quote. Sorry about the snafu with yesterday's episode. Our podcast host was having problems. Hopefully you all got the episode eventually. and if you didn't, let me reiterate what I said at the end of yesterday. If any of you can put me in touch with someone on the Apple News team, please do so. Thanks in advance. Talk to you tomorrow.