Better Offline CES 2025: Day 3 - Pt. 1

26:21Sorry. That sounds really good. Sorry. I thought you meant a member of Entourage. And it actually looks like a turtle. I don't know why it needs to look like a turtle, but it apparently swims and everything, and you can launch it into the sea, and it somehow does environmental research. Don't ask me how. When we kill all the turtles, Due to global warming We're just going to replace them with robots Yeah just in some post-apocalyptic future Those will be like level 1 enemies

26:51Just swarms of like little robot turtles Yeah right now I have to kill the rats In the Vegas In the Vegas aqueducts To level up Yeah I go down there I kill a few rats Then there's a giant one and I have to run out to the cops And they shoot me Jesse anything good? I well I was wondering I was thinking maybe Tom would bring these guys up I accidentally got sucked into the soul semiconductor booth um I didn't see that yet okay so these guys basically make the most baller semiconductors you've ever seen in your life like I I walked it it's a pretty big booth they did a cool thing where it was like um they had some really like uh uh post-apocalyptic messaging almost on the walls but I think in like a cool way like an environmental type of way The thing they had on the sign at the top was like, birth does not guarantee success.

27:42Opportunity must. Something like really, you saw this. Wow. It's like, it's almost a unit. It's a people empowerment. Yeah, yeah. And people are memeing the expletive out of it. I want to meet the guy you can swear. You can say fucking shit and balls and all the other ones. I love that as well, because I want to meet the person who reads that and goes, fuck. Damn. Other than Jesse. I thought it was great. So I walk immediately in and it's like a super serious guy. And he's like, hey, how's it going? And I was like, hey, what's up? You know, what are you guys doing? And like immediately looking around and realizing there's nothing here that I know what it is.

28:20So, but he was saying like, hey, we make all the LED backlights for like all of the TVs. I'm like, hey, I love TV. Actually useful. Great. You know, or they do like, you know, most a lot of cars, new cars now, especially have the LED headlights, taillights and all that kind of stuff. so clearly they do that stuff too that's great i can't really make a joke about led headlights um so i kind of got stuck in a conversation with him for about 10 or 15 minutes but if you're just waiting to make a joke i just truly trying to get out of there with yeah anything at all just trying to do something i i all i didn't i almost said like oh so you're the guy i should be mad at when i you know the lights are really bright on the road at night but it looked like he wasn't even willing to like that wasn't gonna go over at all he would just be like no and then he scanned my badge and i he's gonna send you an email i had to run away really fast from the badge the good thing is is that with me especially today like i'm fully energetic so i'm just walking around with a black mask and my eyes just fucking bulging out of my head and i walk really fast because i've done this show so many times i just i know exactly the route so you just see this high speed british man in a jensen hwang style leather jacket just fucking making a beeline for you taking three photos going, what's this?

29:35I actually apologize to anyone I've talked to. That sounds like a$2 horror game on Steam. But it becomes a hentai one later. Henry, is there anything you've liked? As much as I can be the negative person in any conversation, actually I have three things I'm going to say. That's three more than most. TCL is, they have these next paper devices, they've had matte screens and stuff. Now they're doing something really actually great with it. I think, I expect Apple will have their own version of in two to three years. This thing is the next Paper 11 Plus tablet, which basically has a mode where it switches into basically an e-ink-like screen mode, which will, A, incredibly good battery life, probably.

30:17Oh, yeah. B, let your regular Android tablet become an e-reader-looking thing. Cool. And it has a matte screen device. Sick. And you know how Apple's got the iMac and the iPad now with matte screens? Toss that technology onto an iPhone screen, put this mode on it and they're going to have battery life better than they've ever had. I'm not a huge fan of suitcase turntables. There's good reason. I think Crosley sort of ruined the idea of a suitcase turntable, but Victrola has one that has hilariously, I think it has lighting in the front that you can sync up to the music and it's 75 bucks. It's called the Journey Glow, I believe.

30:54And it's like, if it's, Victrola is a trustable brand, I feel like, in sound. so it's like a suitcase here on a table that doesn't ruin your records. And they play Daft Punk on it. It sounds pretty good. And then I told you about this earlier. Lenovo's got a ThinkBook Plus Gen 16 laptop, mouthful of a name. But the laptop screen raises, it basically rolls up in size. So you can have a more vertical, but in the same size as your normal laptop. I didn't get to actually demo it because I had to run, but that's the laptop changing in a great way, which we don't say that often in this tech reviewer industry that I get to play in.

31:29Well, hell yeah. It feels kind of strange having someone who remembered stuff they liked, though. I mean, actually, I'd be remiss not to bring this up. Some of the stuff I liked here isn't even electronics. Well, half the stuff here isn't even electronics. It's like the Consumer Product Show. But there was this one company. They were in the most popular booth at this event last night that was selling little metal strips that you – or advertising little metal strips that you put on your nose to sleep better at night. And they work fantastically better than I, like I've got sleep apnea. I assume 80 % of people that go to CES have sleep apnea.

32:05So, I mean, it was wild. There's like 20 people lined up and this guy was like doing his like carny thing of like gluing these to people's noses. Well, this has been such a wonderful episode. We'll start with you, Tom. Tom, where can people find you? People can find me on x.com at the Tom Zone or they can find me at bluesky at don'tjudgeme cat turd2.bsky.social He is cat turd. Jesse, where can people find you? Your Kickstarter sucks is the podcast and Golovkings is the Twitch stream. I think it's jessiefrar.com on bluesky. All the links are from there. And Henry? I write primarily for CNN Underscored, which you can open instantly just by typing in underscored.com.

32:49I also have a newsletter and all sorts of stuff which is accessible. I'm henrytcasey.net. That's henrytcasey.net. And also that's my Blue Sky name too. And as we close off this block of the episode, I just want to say something really quick before we go to an ad break. Just want to say Henry brought up Daft Punk. Daft Punk have not made a good album since Discovery. Human After All is dog shit. It is repeated bits. And I thought the soundtrack of Tron was kind of boring. Come at me. I'm sick of hearing about Daft Punk being good anytime recently. Human After All pissed me off so much. Anyway, coming up after this ad break, we're going to have even more wonderful people from CES.

33:27And if Daft Punk is listening, try not looping. Try doing something interesting with your electronic music. You and me, Daft Punk, I'm sick of it.

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37:17I just counted us back in for an episode, and I went 3, 2, 1, and I just want to be clear to the listeners that I did 2, 3, 4. I did four fingers up. My brain is coming out of my goddamn ears. I am dying, but I'm joined by amazing people nevertheless. Ed Ongueso Jr. is to my right, of course. Hello. How's everyone doing? Jesse Ferraro, of course, from Your Kickstarter Sucks. Hello. And we have the other one. Mike Hale from YKS who is fresh from a tech company called Kohl's Tom McKay of course from IT Bro and we're back talking about CES but Ed Onguasso Jr you've been on the main hall the main floor how was that?

38:03I mean would you be surprised if I told you everything is powered by AI now? What? Every single thing Please elaborate You know AI refrigerators Okay, but to what end? Well, you know, you need something that recognizes what time of day you decide to have certain types of coffee and how much of that to keep. Morning, right? Morning? Right, morning. All the time for me. You might be a freaky chica and want to have it at lunch, you know? Whoa. I didn't know there was a legal tech. Right. But one that I was really interested in is this company that is saying, hey, look, the future of technology, it's minimalism.

38:46We want to reconnect you with human nature. And the way that we're going to do that, the way we're going to get you off your screen, we're going to give you a headset that you have to keep on for nine hours a day and it will give you uninterrupted access to your artificial intelligence suite of therapists, productivity assistants. So your connection with human is with AI? Yes, but that's so that you can reconnect with human nature. And it will give you notifications by calling you. It will forward you to therapists that you talk to, friends that you talk to, powered by Claude, almost exclusively.

39:23That sounds like something you pick up in the tutorial level of like Bioshock. Yeah. Yeah. You know, this is the tutorial. Was this a big company? No. They are connected with this other company. This is a side venture of another company. because it was the main hall so the lvcc is it's remarkable because it's it's so expensive to be that like we were talking about the economics earlier you're talking a hundred grand through the door i'm sure yeah and it's like so we're doing a hundred grand for this thing that is just barely conceptual yeah that's also the thing um as they emphasize most of these things do not exist yet they have demos that the demo did not work when i was there what happened what happened.

40:11Just couldn't even hear me, couldn't connect to the internet, couldn't recognize any command whatsoever. They were like, well, you know, see, actually, the thing that happened is one of our guys took the mic home. So it actually works really well. And did work with it. I have no idea. He's chewing on it. He gets nervous. You know, he's playing with it. But yeah, so this idea here is uninterrupted access to an AI so that you can reconnect to your human nature, which is to talk to a bunch of assistants. Did they explain why this reconnects to the human? Because you look at your screen. So you talk to your microphone, though, and that's different.

40:51Yeah, it's very different. No dopamine loop. Okay, so you're not looking at a screen, but you are talking to the microphone. Are you just staring into the abyss? No, you're just walking around daily life. Just like doing something else. But then they also admit that, oh yeah, also it'll ask you to get on your phone a lot.

41:15Way ahead of you. I'm already on my phone. Yeah, yeah. It's like that movie Her, except she's constantly reminding you to buy paper towels. No, it's like, hey, remember to go on this website and buy gifts. Hey, take a picture of this so I can analyze it and put it in a search engine. Hey, go on this Discord channel. Hey, talk to another. always constant notifications to get back on your phone. But it's about getting off your phone. And that's the thing. Katie Notopoulos over at Business Insider said this last year. Very good thing. It's like, I love my phone. It's where all my stuff is. Yeah. I'm on my phone because, I don't know, I don't have to look at the real world.

41:50Who wants to do that? The ultimate use case for the voice-activated technology has always been being in the car. Because we're in America, everyone drives a car. It's the most dangerous thing to do except for to try to put your drink on a side table. Okay, Jesse. Unblast on my fucking podcast. Jesus Christ. I just party fouled. And it went down like perfectly as well. So it's like a really like, it's a real splute. Classic cartoon spill. Well, well, well. It's really not your fault because the side table has a slight rate. It's like a... There's a slight raised area in the middle of the side table.

42:31I have a knife out and I'm just pointing at it really when you think about it it's the table's fault yeah that's right we're all mad at the table obviously that's why you should have picked up a seaman smart table what's a smart table do? I wish that was real there was a smart table a few years ago table it was just the vessel the vessel and table of course thank you the beautiful bartender Phil Broughton is here to clean up my mess May I have another, please? I'm drinking something called the Lahar, which is Phil's Black Blood of the Earth with some vodka. And Irish cream. And Irish cream. Thank you, Phil.

43:09Anyway, what were we talking about? Ed, so... Oh, yeah, and the name of the thing is, it's Italian for human nature. I'm forgetting this. Human natural. Natural. Umara. Jesus Christ. Do you see, what else? What else was there? I feel like finding out, coming home and finding my kid is fucked up a bunch of shit. Like, what else did you see there? I mean, that was the one that pulled me in because they had a giant banner that said AI people above it. Oh, good. And I was like, oh, okay. So I walked up and I was like, where are the AI people? And then it's like, you know, they have five phones on the table and then another five elsewhere, some iPads.

43:51And they're like, they're in here. And you just put this on and they talk to you. But they don't. Yeah. This is something I noticed That all the AI Like this year Seems to be marketed As like AI For people Like They're like Because it's finally Reaching a point Where they're trying to create It feels like they're trying To create the market For AI stuff By forcing it on people Yes And in doing so They kind of have to Reassure them That this is not Like as Dog shit as you think it is But it is though Yeah it is And it's like Some of it's really bad Yeah It's so funny as well Because I'm really like The pig that they would sell slop to.

44:27Like, I love my gizmos and doodads and apps and such. If there was anyone to sell shit to, it's me. And it's just not fun. It's boring. There's no use case. Yeah. There's still no use. It's like a fucking whole industry built around finding the use case for technology. And it just doesn't exist. An entire shop. I met with Kohl's and we're opening some great use cases for AI. Like, if you want, say, like, you know, a larger than normal type of hoodie sweatshirt, they might not have it. But you can speak to an AI agent and it'll tell you to breathe. I did walk over to a booth earlier that said AI agent.

45:06And this is kind of me being a dickhead. But I just went, what kind of agent? He goes, I'm like, oh, good. So what model? Chat GPT. I'm like, great. So how is this agentic? He goes, you talk to him. I'm like, that just sounds like ChatGPT. He goes, yeah, but it's an agent. I'm like, how? And he just looks at me terrified. I don't understand how everybody's building these industries and businesses and stuff around ChatGPT subscriptions. Yes. It's like you're hooked into the ChatGPT API and you're building a business on top of that. How? I don't understand how. And then the magic of venture capital.

45:43I mean, I forget what economist I wrote about that said this, but it was like the idea that AI is almost now like a tax on the rest of the tech industry. It's like a software tax where you need to pay to have it in your product because everybody else does. And all it really does is suck money out of everything else. It's great though. So Ed, I'm going to assume you saw nothing useful. It's actually really funny because I was walking towards something that said AI agent, kind of like the promised land when you hit me up and you said, come back. Did you guys see the toaster where you can print photos of your loved ones on pieces of toast?

46:21That is actually real. Did you really see that? I did not see that. We've actually... Fake news. Very unfair to toaster print. I totally believe that, honestly. It's in the menu. Well, those are tortillas. Do you remember that? We're building up to the final episode where I'm going to do something called the menu. hope everyone joins me I'm going to lock the doors I think also the thing with this Natura Umana whatever the Italian name is similar to your point about making markets I feel like this one is trying because they were like the end goal is to be able to make it connect to apps for you so you could go to your mom's house you could order movies or order in and it's like okay so I feel like they're trying to pretend as if or they're trying to train people into accepting the disappointment that comes with insisting agents are around the corner.

47:16None of that is agents. Exactly. No, you're right. So AI agents are meant to be these autonomous things, and they never are. But that's what we talked about that other episode. They're not, but they keep misnaming things or presenting bullshit. So then, you know, I think this is part of the training process where it's like, okay, we don't have that. But they're training customers. Yeah, I mean, it feels like they're basically just like prepping people to have Netflix scream at you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. this is a this is a this is pedantic but like this is the thing that really drives me nuts is um is like you were saying training people to expect certain things or to hear words and actually imagine something else like algorithm is something that now means a bunch of different things where it's like uh now people like people who i think for the most part share our mindset sort of a skeptical mindset towards tech and um and all that kind of stuff we hear the word algorithm like our back gets up immediately because we think well that's bad but it's like algorithm's not even bad it's just it's like a thought process and everything you do like saying database yeah yeah right exactly everything has an algorithm in it you're using an algorithm when you make a decision but now it's become it's it's got this tech stink grafted onto it and now we have to turn away so eventually we'll go away from ai right and it'll be like there's no algorithms in this at all and it's like well i don't know how's that possible it's smart well it's what i like about that is it's also describing a bunch of things that are not problems yeah like no one is like oh i had to go over to my fucking mom's house and i had to order a movie that took forever yeah i was like oh fuck that took me several seconds like that is a solved problem i'm not none of the things they just go well how are you going to order dinner i don't know i've never done that before also the idea that like if you and your spouse like let's say you and your spouse like take a long time to settle on a movie that a robot like interjecting in the middle of the conversation it's going to speed this up it reminds me of one of my favorite click hole pieces uh which of my garbage sons are you and they're like yeah we named one of our sons lance and blake and the reason they did that was because they picked two names they didn't like and named that for one son which i think is kind of indicative of the consumer electronics show entirely it's like we can't come up with a good idea so we chose five bad ones so what anything else you see over there?

49:29I saw something where they were scanning your face to present what your internal health looked like as an interactive city where organs What? What the hell? Your organs, the way they interacted with each other, were depicted on a screen as if they were a city. Are there little cells walking around as computers? No, it's literally just a city. My doctor has been wanting me to do this. He keeps telling me I have to do it. It's like, hey, is that abandoned part of town? You got to get that checked out. You're in a red state, just like, your legs just fucking falling off. It just zooms in on the liver and it explodes.

50:09It's okay to live in a red state. I'm not saying it's a problem, other than the fact that the governance might not be so big on the social services side. We actually get vouchers for those, so it's not a big deal. I mean, I get mine from George Soros. Every time she asked to scan my face, I just felt like I was being asked to put my skull up to a measuring device. It was like, can we get some of your blood? Get that shit away from me. I thought you were going to say that it's scanned and it just went, no, no. Every time I was like, please, no, no, no. Just added a bunch of please to the city. Oh, well, you know, would you step to the side?

50:45You match the description. Wait here. Yeah. So, but what else? Come on, there must be a thing. I, you know, I spent some time trying to look at, There's a lot of virtual twin, digital twin stuff in manufacturing, in optimizing industrial operations. And this health system was an offshoot of this virtual twin thing where there were two or three booths set up next to each other. The idea was if we can scan you and we set up your virtual twin, you can tweak with it. You can experiment with it. We'll give you more insight into you. There were AI medical assistants and AI caregivers kind of extending off what we were talking about the other day where it's like we are going to give you very colorful, detailed and graphically designed data and convince you to...

51:38What kind of data? A lot of it seemed to be basic metabolic stuff. So stuff you could get and likely already have. Yes, right. but if you buy into this product or this application buy into the ecosystem again then you'll be able to gain more insight into your stress or into concerning health next time you see one of these companies can you just ask a very simple question what am I meant to do with all this data? be healthy so wait, it tries to guess your metabolic health by scanning your face? no, these ones are different that's insane, that would never happen Yes. Yeah. That's actually the tagline of CES.

52:20Isn't that basically phrenology? Yes. In fact, I mean, you know, yesterday I saw one place - We invented digital calipers. That was like, oh, we are not a medical device. But if you let us scan your skin, not if you're black, because we don't have the technology for that. But if you let us scan your skin, we can tell what your blood sugar is. We can tell what a host of other, you know, metabolic indices are for you. And we can determine what your stress. is whether you are eating correctly, what you need to do to rein it back in. Well, this is... That's so sorry. That's what you said is a huge problem.

52:54I mean, that's... That's... Our product currently does not support black people. That's insane. Microsoft Connect, baby. There was a Connect on the floor, which I don't know if you saw. Why? Well, because... Why not? We demoed a... Well, so this... A Wii snowboard game or something. Oh, is that the court one? There was like an Abbott court thing where you could ball up with some people on Wii Sports. It actually wasn't that good. I thought as an outsider, I always thought, see. You do a snowboard game and it tests your depression level or something. She said, we've never had readings this high before.

53:34Your score is wellness check. We are calling your mother.

53:43So it's just a big TV. Well, it was a big gaming monitor. So I thought CES was like, this is where the newest, biggest TVs are. And that's true. I don't know where they are, but they're probably somewhere. I mean, they're in the Las Vegas convention center. Yeah, there were some big TVs. There's some big TVs. So instead of being a TV, this was an 85-inch gaming monitor. Okay. Yeah, yeah. Crazy positive reaction to what I assumed was basically an impossible thing to use because even like a 40-inch TV in front of your face on the desk is like crazy. Yeah, yeah, this is not a desktop. This is like...

54:19I'm sorry, I use a 50-inch screen. That's like a foot and a half in front of my face. You are crazed. I have to have windows at like 150 % zoom. I've got my X-Videos corner. I've got my... Tom is laying down on the floor with the microphone dangling over him. so it's really huge for a monitor but also if you want an 85 inch thing just get a tv if you're going to play console stuff on it just get a tv you don't need the super high refresh rate and it's 5k it's not 8k if you're going to do something stupid make it 8k it makes no sense anyways they seem like perfectly nice people but it's a 5k 85 inch monitor and they had to demo it they had like these little skis on the ground that i stepped on too dutifully and i played an Xbox Kinect game modded to run off of like a little Toshiba laptop that was plugged.

55:07It wasn't a fucking little. First of all, it was hard. My guy kept getting messed up because they put the wood on the ski slopes, which is like, why would there be wood on this down slope, dude? This is a double high mood. Really high on the depression score. But why would you have that? My guy's just sleeping in your bed. Oh God, can we talk about the thing though? so you were bad at the ski game we've established this I don't think that's what he said he's saying it's the worst narrative I don't know if I believe it but it was the demo of this gaming monitor but using technology that's like 15 years old why didn't they just play an Xbox game I don't know in the same kind of area I tried on an eyeglass thing it was like an Android app it was like 9x16 on a display It was cropped vertically and stuff.

56:02It looked very bad, but it was just like, you know, what are we doing here? To Ed's point, why would you, okay, you're going to spend a ton of money and it's a slush fund for the executives. Okay, that's fine. Have a good time or whatever. Why wouldn't it not be like a finished product at any point in the thing? I just don't. It feels like. So if you're demoing a monitor, why not get something that looks good and is fun to play? I think one thing I've been realizing, and I didn't actually realize is the case, most of these things do not seem to be finished, and everyone's fine with that. I actually loved standing next to people and listening to them as they dealt with a fully unfinished product and being like, oh, wow.

56:43Well, I mean, it feels like a lot of this stuff is ostensibly supposed to be a preview of what's coming, but the what's coming depends on whether anybody pays attention to their booth. So I just, pardon me for interrupting here on my podcast. I was looking through my pictures of things I'd taken pictures of today, otherwise known as the Photos app on my phone. And I found this thing called Alize, your choice, your companion. And just showing everyone, it appears to be like some sort of horrifying metal face you put, and has some sort of AI companion. But I didn't read any of the highlighted characteristics, which, by the way, is what it says.

57:18and you go it says speaks your way instantly mimics and plays any voice you love big promise expressive and natural syncs facial expressions perfectly with her speech and based on this image no it does not i want to fuck her i was i was just gonna say i already predict the primary market well jesse you're about to regret saying that behaves different personalities yes it behaves different personalities there is a surprising lack of attention to detail on the stuff that's written, right? Well, there is some detail you wouldn't love. From a playful lolly to a confident boss lady. Confident boss lady I could see myself doing.

57:53Yeah, well, the lolly part. How much? Smart with a memory, powered by advanced AI that remembers and adapts more customized service in replaceable silicon facial masks. You just got like a... Oh, so it's a physical mask too? Wait, is this just like a head that sits on your desk? We're bringing back Sophia. We're bringing back Saudi... We're bringing back body horror. So for people who are at CES, I think mentioned this before, the best shit you can find is on the fringes. You need to go to the back. You need to go to the back and find the guy who's like wooden lamp. Like the only honest guy at CES is the guy with...

58:28And there was one that just said, Felix is hot. That's true. It is true. And I also love the names like PowerCube Semi-Ink Potential Convergence Smart. Oh, I need that. I need that shit, yeah. And there's a whole Kurskstan thing. Empower your innovations with electroactive polymers. Actually, that sounds real. Manage your neck, shoulders, and back through acupressure, massage, and moxibustion. I fucking, every time I walk around the show, I just see shit. I'm like, what are you? Did you see the portable air conditioner you wear around your neck? It just like... Otherwise known as a fan? And blast air at your ears.

59:05Yeah. That's a fan. We have those. But can you wear a fan around your neck, huh? Yes. Hey, a fan is not going to give you tendinitis. So I don't know. I have that already. I have that. I've had that since I was a child. Every moment is pain for me. So that's why we're here though. So within this AI stuff, did you find the same thing as me where it's just no one really knows what they're talking about? And when you ask them questions, they go chat GPT. And if you ask them another question, they start having a panic attack. Or it seems a little frustration with asking why the AI, and I'm like, well, it's because I'm trying to figure out if it's generative bullshit or if it's an actual thing underneath.

59:45And when I'm talking to industry experts, analysts, or people that has trade associations and stuff, I get the strong sense that it's frustrating for them, too, because they're being asked to weigh in on this market that's so nebulous. And it's impossible to tell whether any of this is actually going to pay off. It's just insane to me. We're like, I was into this shit. My soul is being ripped away. There's something for that. If you go to the convention center they put the soul back into you. Actually, you should check out the demo for this human nature thing I was talking about. You can talk to Athena, which is like the wellness AI people.

1:00:26Her boons are terrible. I like the soul cube idea. The thing that CS hasn't really gotten into yet is like crystals and crystal energies. We need to bring that in. I actually wonder how far you could go just making up shit here. You should get credits for how clean your soul is. You can exchange those credits for... Soul-based social credit system. I just think that that's what pisses me off. There's obviously some quasi-fraudulent thing. Where is the real fraud? Where are the people who are just like, yep, it's the SoulCube? Do you ever see those guys who make those devices that are like just measurers for like various body shit.

1:01:03It's like this pseudoscience. Right, right, right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They sell like the e-meters or whatever the fuck it is. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Why aren't they here? I actually remember. Yeah, Scientology booth! It fits! Yeah, ghost hunting technology. Like, you see a whole ghost thing? There's no CES is probably they'll insist that CES is haunted. Right? That's good. Honestly, I want to do that one. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. Actually, when the product demo fails, they're like, actually, this is a good thing. Yo, the ghost is telling me you should invest $40 million right now. It's never done that before.

1:01:34You're just like, Tom, a Tim, a Tam, Tom, a romance. Give me your phone right now. The ghost needs to see your ID. What's your, what's yours? What's your mother's maiden name? The ghost wants to scan your badge. Get your email address, maybe? Yeah, it's, that's the thing. Like, I don't mind if someone's just obviously scamming. Like, yeah, I'm a ghostbuster. I'm a ghostbuster. I'm here with the ghostbusters. and that's what I do here at CES. We spend$150 ,000 on ghost busting. And if it breaks, you just go, you kind of ghost, that's why you need us. I think in reality, the real answer, I think, maybe you know more about this than me.

1:02:13Maybe somebody knows more than I do about something, although it's hard to imagine. I feel like the reason that there's not like the level one gimmick grift guy on the floor is because like with everything else, there's so many levels of detachment. Like you have a problem and you want to call somebody and yell at them about it or get it fixed, I guess, if you want. But you can't because the person you talk to is not empowered to do anything for you and that's on purpose. And now there's an extra layer of AI stuck in between you and even that person. But the people who show up on the floor are just like, when you ask, what is this chat GPT?

1:02:43That's literally all they know because the guy who makes the decision is so far away. And also it does not work. It doesn't work either. Right. Yeah. But I think actually what I'm going to start doing is anytime I see AI now, I'm just going to replace the word with ghost. Yeah. Okay. Ghost. just like oh we have ghosts there is a ghost in the machine I might actually just start asking people about it and they'll be like what's the ghost do that's chat GPT yeah the ghost the spirit how do you get the spirit out what why would you want the spirit out the spirit does all the thinking for you just walk over I'm very haunted how are you going to help I generally don't do bits with any of the people here because just to be clear the reason that no one should and some listeners have brought this up oh you should go and like yell at them the poor fuckers who are on the floor these are pr people sometimes external pr people or they're just like a marketing person who to jesse's point is not empowered to answer a real question and they have to deal with everyone at ces and 50 of the people at ces are trying to make partnerships with other people that can't tell you what their products do and it's like oh these and i admit with the person the company that claimed to be a new hope for autism and dyslexia.

1:04:00I got a little heated, which is why I walked away. And you weren't here for this. They claimed that their smart glasses would help both dyslexia and autism. And my experience with that is that's bullshit. But it's, yeah, there's a reason that you can't really put the boots to these people. And I actually think it's deliberate. They want to put a layer of abstraction between them and the responsibility for their thing actually doing anything. So they've got a fucking marketing person. And these people are there and they're working like 10 hour days doing like, just standing there. And if it's a bad show, you're just standing alone.

1:04:30Well, the marketers are the real heroes, aren't they? Don't you find? Yeah, yeah. They're basically troops. Yeah, that's what I... Except their job's more dangerous. Right. Than the troops. Okay, as we trundle towards the end, Edward on Grayso Jr., where can people find you? You can find me on Twitter and Blue Sky, BigBlackJacobin. You can find me, my newsletter, thetechbubble.substack.com. And my podcast, This Machine Kills, where we talk about tech. Jesse Verra, Michael Hale, Where can people find you? Mike and myself host Your Kickstarter Sucks. And Mike, did we get the custom domain on Blue Sky, YourKickstarterSucks.com?

1:05:03I believe we did, yeah. You can also find me at Kohl's.com slash about slash people dot HTML. No, I think Kohl's took down the about page because of the stuff that's going on. So you're not going to, they don't want the people to find you. I'm just going to be clear. Michael's name is commonly Dog Boner. Tom, where can people find you? You can find me at ITBrew.com or on Twitter at twitter.com slash thetomzone or on bluesky at catcher2.bsky.social. It works. That's an embarrassing name. He joined Bluesky and was like posting about how there's a scammer about, like warning his people before immediately getting banned.

1:05:47And as the listeners know, I am your cult leader. And you can find me, if there's an Ed Zitron, it's probably me unless it isn't. And if you choose the wrong one, well, that means you're not chosen. But if you need to spend your money from your hog slop job where you go out and you smash windows and you steal things from cars and you con people and you're walking around the street thinking, where's my next victim? How will I extract value from them? Well, when you get your ill-gotten gains, the next ads will probably be for something you can spend them on. Ideally, you want to operate in cash.

1:06:19If these are digital, you need a prepaid debit card. email me at um was it tom.mckay no sorry um ed at ease no no just a google uh crime and that's where you'll find my email

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1:10:18So we've had a slight rotation. To my right is Tom McKay of IT Brew, of course. Hey, how's it going? And actually over across from me is Max Churney of Reuters. Hello, internet. And thank you. Glad someone respects the computer. And Jesse Farrar of your Kickstarter sucks. Of course, he's back. Well, now I'll be on the left. He's on the left, as he has not been. No, okay. Come on now. Hey, come on. Whoa. So Max, I'm actually really excited to have you here because we have spent like several hours just like dunking on this, just like making fun of stuff and being annoyed at stuff. But you are here covering chips and silicon and such.

1:10:56What have you seen? What has NVIDIA done? Actually, that's a great point. What has NVIDIA covered this trip? Sure, absolutely. I mean, they've unveiled a few new things. In terms of silicon specifically, they launched a computer called Digits, which is essentially one of their supercomputers compressed in something even smaller than a Mac Mini. And that's like the$3 ,000 one, right? That's the$3 ,000 one. Yeah, exactly. And so that was kind of an interesting thing. We've reported that they're going to make PC chips themselves. So this is potentially on the road to producing some kind of laptop or desktop PC chip themselves.

1:11:36So when you say, what is this machine for, this$3 ,000 NVIDIA computer? Because I've seen a ton of coverage, but no one will actually tell me what it's for. Well, it looks like mostly it's for researchers and people that want to do experiments with AI or code with AI or essentially just do things that require giant computers on a small scale. So is it generative AI focused? Well, of course you can run generative AI apps with it, but they pitched it as something that was geared for researchers and developers. Interesting. because the way it's being reported is by other people is that it's some sort of replacement for the large-scale GPUs that are being used for inference so inference being the thing when you make a request from ChatGPT for example and it generates an answer so it's not really for that?

1:12:31That's not the business use case? It didn't look like it to me. It looked like, I mean maybe you can run of course I'm sure you can run but it looks like it's set up designed for somebody who wants a computer in their office or, I don't know, at their university or whatever, just given the price point. And the setup it showed was with a monitor and a keyboard and a mouse. And so it's definitely like a personal computer, effectively. It runs Linux. So that also means it's probably not a consumer machine. Right. Because most consumers are not willing to learn how to use Linux or won't do it or whatever.

1:13:05So it should be able to run like 11 Chrome tabs on it. So I hate to do this, Max, if you wouldn't mind turning your microphone just slightly. We've had a late entrant. We have the wonderful Matt Binder, who made his way up here. Thank you, Matt. Thanks for having me, Ed. It's finally, I finally met you in person. Matt Binder and I have been on this podcast like three or four times, of course. Scam Economy. Yes, yes. And we've never met in person. We've never met in person. Now we have, he's on my podcast. So, Max, back to you for a question. So, what else was announced in general with Silicon on this, with the hardware in general?

1:13:38Absolutely. I mean, as always with the big chip makers, they announce new PC, usually gaming stuff. NVIDIA announced a bunch of new line of gaming chips, the RTX 50 series. They're claiming the low end on that series is able to deliver performance that's capable of what the high end of the current RTX series is. Yeah, they use a technique called DLSS, which is just a fancy way of saying. They use AI to predict what the next frame in the game is going to look like. At the moment, they're rendering two frames at once. This one can render four frames at once. But it's on the hardware side, not...

1:14:15On the hardware side. Right. Yeah, yeah. This is all hardware. And this is differentiated from... When you say AI, this is separate to generative AI. I don't know exactly how it works. Right. Just to be clear. But DLSS has been around for longer than the current boom, though. Yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah. DLSS has been around for, I don't know, four or five years, I want to say. But don't quote me on that particular word. We don't know things here. Don't worry. But okay, let's move you up to Matt Binder, of course. Matt, what have you seen so far? What have you been cursed with on this eternal trip? I've been covering a lot of like weird stuff.

1:14:47And I do a lot of AR glasses. How are those? You know, I have yet to find one that I could actually, would actually use. Like, sure, you put them on and they're cool to like see because some of them have different ways of doing things. But like there was one, for example, that like, there's no lens. and usually it's the holiday glasses. What is a holiday glass? Holiday. So they're basically air glasses where the... Oh, you mean holiday like a name? Holiday, yes. Yeah, I'm just British. That's my problem. Yes. So basically the AR part isn't built into the lens. It's built into the rim. Okay. So it's a little like a circular screen where basically you put the glasses on and your eye is meant to look at the circular screen above the lens.

1:15:34Oh, that's where I generally look. Yeah, of course. And I couldn't use it without going cross-eyed. I immediately would go. Sick. I love the experience of being hurt by things. Right, right. So, I mean, the idea is interesting, but I think for me, though, the thing at CES is always, what's not here anymore? How do you mean? Like you can see where the tech industry thinks it's going based on what has just disappeared from the previous years. Like what buzzwords are companies staying away from that they used to proudly say they were back last year or the year before? Like what? Like I came here two years ago for the first time and every company had to say they were doing something in the metaverse.

1:16:18Hell yeah. Every company was a metaverse company. And this year, I don't think you can even find the word. Well, I did. I found a Metaverse and Quantum AI panel that I missed. A panel, though? Was there actually any Metaverse product? I don't know, because I missed it, which makes the trip a failure. So, did you see anything you enjoyed, or was it mostly pain? I mean, there's stuff that I've seen that worked, but again, I don't think I'd ever use it. I love that quality level with the show. It functioned. The weirdest thing I saw is hands down that, I don't know if you've seen it, the electric salt spoon.

1:16:54No. Okay. It's by this Japanese company named Kirin. Okay. And it's actually available in Japan. So that's already ticking off a rarity at a CES. That exists. Something that's actually in stores and available. Right, right, right. So basically, their goal is to have people eat less salt. And they want to make your low-sodium foods taste saltier without actually adding salt. So how do they make it taste better? They send an electric current through the spoon to your tongue.

1:17:24So just so we're clear. Yeah. Just so we're clear as I begin to disassociate live on air. It's a special spoon. It's a special spoon. Oh, good. And I mean, listen, it worked. Wow. Like the food did taste a bit saltier. And I know because I thought at first I thought it was like a placebo effect. Like, oh, they told me it tastes saltier. So my brain now thinks it's saltier. But then I fucked up the usage of it. Some Merovingian shit. Yeah. But then I messed up while using it and it turned off mid-sip of the soup they provided. And then – My spoon broke. Right. So the soup actually did taste less saltier as I'm drinking it when the machine shut off.

1:18:04So I was like, oh, wow, it works. But also I would never buy this$130 spoon. Wait, are my spoons uncharged? But actually, yeah. So did it have a battery? It was like – yeah, it was a battery-powered spoon. Yeah. so assuming you have multiple people eating in your house right so the the spoon handle and the the actual ladle or whatever you'd call it they're separate parts so you can replace oh good i love my spoon to be multiple parts yes yes thankfully only two though they could have went really crazy with it so you'd need like so these was it actually 130 i believe it was like 100 in japan though They're not selling it in the U.S.

1:18:46yet. Yeah, they got money there. Yeah. I mean, to me, it's like the idea is noble. I must find the spoon. Where is the spoon? It was at the first night, the media night unveiled. I don't know where it was on the show floor. They're going to hide it from me. They don't want me to look at that spoon. So you need to buy multiple ones of these ostensibly. Right, right. So some rich-ass guy is like, yeah, now you don't need much salt at all. I mean, you could, I guess, you know, eat your food one at a time and just wash the spoon after every juice and fight a bunch of people over and pass the spoon around.

1:19:17Combined with so long... Does it work with not soup? They just had soup there to try. And I'm assuming it's got to work with things that are not soup. But otherwise, well, okay, no, no, no, no, no, no. I mean, what if you pick up the spoon by accident? What else are you eating where you would reduce the salt that wasn't soup? A lot of things. But what is the thing? fried rice? I don't know. Yeah, but like, wait, where are you adding the salt with fried rice? Okay, that's a good point. I don't know. And why are you eating with a spoon? Yeah, that seems to be the best use case. That's fork-coated.

1:19:55You don't need this one to eat ice cream. So this is just a very expensive soup-related technology. I mean, again, Japanese company, they eat a lot of soup over there. They do. I'm just thinking about this spoon, and I really There's always a point at CES where I begin to go insane. When I begin to just think of the special salt spoon, and then I call my therapist and I say I'm thinking of the spoon. Anyway, did you see anything you like, though? Everyone has the same answer. It's a sigh and then a space of time. Right. Well, hey, wait a second. I mean, some of the chips look pretty cool. Actually, yeah.

1:20:34Max, you take this question before so Matt can try and think of something he liked. I mean, I don't chill for any of these companies, but AMD... But if you like something, please tell us. Well, AMD, Intel, and NVIDIA did all announce new chips. Arguably, they all look pretty interesting for different reasons. AMD did something pretty unique. They added this technology called Unified Memory to their latest gaming processors. What does that do? Apple did it a few years ago. It basically just makes the chip faster. It means that the memory and the CPU can talk to each other much more quickly, which allows more speedy graphics and more speedy computing power.

1:21:13But it is actually an interesting thing. I haven't tried it. I don't have any benchmarks, so I have no earthly idea how it performs in the real world. But theoretically, the technology is pretty good. So as I'm speaking for the listeners that don't know stuff and myself, how does that manifest into something good? Is it just that the hardware and the software, the hardware parts talk to each other? Max, I think I can take this one. basically he's trying to say basically is it goes like so the chip goes into more tabs yeah well it's more browser tabs and to be clear this is for computers 90 oh okay yeah so if you just think about whenever you you probably have a computer at home right now right i don't right now but well a lot of people may have computers and these chips basically can go in them so it's from there it's just pretty cool stuff actually damn i love logging on okay matt anything enjoyable i mean the TVs are cool.

1:22:01Okay, yeah. I mean, how can you, and the gaming monitors, the really big curved monitors. Like, I would never buy these things because they cost like thousands of dollars. Like$1 ,500. Well, yeah, you're in journalism. Right, right, right. I mean, one thing I like is that coming to CES, it is now clear that at least as a technology product, crypto is dead. There is no cryptocurrency. No blockchain bullshit. Nothing. Absent completely. Now, I mentioned metaverse, and metaverse is just silly. But it is actually a breath of fresh air to finally see that the tech industry, at least represented by CES, has seemed to move on completely from crypto, blockchain.

1:22:43I remember two years ago, every company, it doesn't matter if they were a special electronic dental floss company or whatever, they all wanted to give you a free NFT if you come to their booth. There is not a single, I don't think the words NF or T are even here at CES. If you find them, please email me, easy at betteroffline.com. I want to find them and ask them some questions. I want to know what they're doing here. Right. You know, I think people realize this is, if anything, it's a financial day trading scam. It's not a tech product. But it's pretty cool, though. It is really cool. Jesse, would you like to shill for crypto?

1:23:23As a crypto guy. as the crypto expert for the show i think it's just kind of cool because they're like little pictures or something so it's like i don't know i just think that's like i hear what you're saying it's like okay the tech companies have moved on from the little pictures but it's like we're always going to have little pictures you know what i'm saying daguerreotypes you know what i'm saying like it's been forever we've had these little pictures so i just think like okay maybe it's waned right now but there's going to be a time where we come back to ces and we see the little pictures again and i think that's going to be really cool i think it is funny as well that Max is probably the only person who has been at CES who has found the real stuff.

1:23:59Because you can't really fake silicon. No, you can't. You can fake it up until a certain point. You can brag about how good it's going to be or what your startup's doing, and you can claim performance. But at a certain point, you have to send a chip to the fab and make it. And if it doesn't do what you say it will, well, then, that's that. And the thing is that's really important. and it's actually good education for the listeners as well, is to give him back the microphone. Come on, Matt. I was going to say, go ahead. No, go ahead. All right. But it's actually an important foundation for people to know.

1:24:33With a lot of these companies talking about ASICs, so specialist chips, and like, oh, OpenAI or whomever will simply build a chip, it is not that easy, right? It is not that easy. So what is the process of a chip getting done? And you know a lot more about this than I think you're letting on. I mean, you know what an ASIC is? Yes, I just don't know what it stands for, candidly. Application-specific integrated circuit. Thank you. Woo! Hell yeah, someone knows stuff. No, you're right, but you're really right. It's super complicated and expensive to make even a basic AI chip. And we're talking a couple of years, from scratch, a couple of years minimum.

1:25:07Right. At least half a billion dollars, if you're lucky. Another half a billion to build the hardware around it, because that's something people forget often. When you make a chip, you make the actual piece of silicon. And if you look at any NVIDIA product or many others, they've got a whole board around it with a bunch of other chips and other stuff. And to make that is probably another half a billion dollars. So these are not inexpensive ideas. And then when it comes to the actual integration and putting these into service, you have to do a bunch more cooling. And there is a failure rate as well.

1:25:37Absolutely. And you have to write the software on top of it. I mean, having the idea to make a chip is like it's a multi-year. And if you only make one, you've just wasted your time and money. So you have to, as a company, you generally have to do multiples? Absolutely. Yeah, you want a roadmap. Because that's the whole, I mean, anybody that's buying AI chips for any reason, they're not buying the current generation. They're buying Gen 2, Gen 3, and maybe Gen 4. So they're buying ahead. Absolutely, yeah. Absolutely. I'm glad, I'm really glad you're here for many reasons. But I like putting this stuff down because the reason that there is like the real and the fake parts of CES is, as I said, you can't really fake chips.

1:26:12You can be like, oh, yeah, we're doing an AI stethoscope, or we're going to claim to cure autism with VR or whatever. But you can't really be like, we're going to do a chip, because the actual chips people will just be like, no, you're not. There is very clear boundaries with what you can actually do, which is what's so interesting, because you have this chunk of CES with just the no bullshit zone, because you really, you cannot be making, like, NVIDIA pumps themselves up and says all this stuff, but ultimately is what it does. It does have to deliver. It actually has to exist. At a certain point.

1:26:41I mean, people will buy them, put them in the field, try all the hardware, try the software, and the claims have to, at a certain point, live up to whatever they're saying. So forgive me for a very direct question, but how realistic is it for someone like Sam Altman to build out an AI chip? It's years ahead, right? It's years ahead. I mean, it's more of a talent question than a money question, I think. There are only maybe 10 to 12 teams of people around the world that can build cutting-edge, world-class chips. And all of the people that lead those teams have jobs that they probably like or enjoy.

1:27:20And so you have to find the right people in order to do that. Find disgruntled people or whatever the reason is why they're leaving. But you have to assemble the right group of people to be able to build a chip. And even if you get the right group of people with the amount of money that you need, there's still just risks with building a chip. Like what? You could think the design works. For example, you could virtually verify that it works. You could test it. You could do all the computer simulations and other simulations that you want. When you send it to the fab, to the factory to print, it might not come out exactly how you think it will.

1:27:52And that will mean it doesn't work as well? It doesn't cool as efficiently? It might not work at all. Oh. It might not. Yeah, there might be. So you can get billions into this and like... And you might not. I mean, it does happen frequently with the first generation of chips. Most companies that try them for the first time, the first version will not be amazing. It'll do certain things effectively and well, but it probably won't be able to achieve... Just for example, NVIDIA spent 20 years, 30 years, whatever it is, working on its designs. So to expect that a company can come in and two years replicate the performance or whatever of somebody who's been doing it for a long time is kind of unrealistic.

1:28:30So it usually takes several generations to get right. And NVIDIA has their own software, CUDA, for making GPUs do stuff. It took quite a while for that to kind of scale, right? I mean, they started in 95, I want to say. Yeah, building CUDA. And they've been working on it ever since. I mean, it used to be centered around their GeForce graphics cards. And now it's obviously... A little bigger. A little bigger, yeah. I mean, maybe not as big as the electric soup spoon, but, you know. potentially one day, maybe they'll have that success. And they can do more than just soup. That's for sure. So Matt, bringing it back to you.

1:29:06But the chips you're talking about, you can't even taste. So I mean, come on. There are probably chips in the spoon though. And there are chips that are salty. So anything hurt? Anything hurt? You just saw it and it upset you? Oh, I thought you meant physically. I mean, just walking is pretty rough, mate. I'm not going to lie. I'm in pain. but um geez i i need a second i try to think uh well anything just upsetting or annoying yeah i mean i i it does it does pain me to see the the ai integration in everything like i don't need uh ai to be like the most random things like i was actually surprised that the spoon didn't say claim ai integration or anything um you know uh the smart glasses i mean i i guess i could see with the glasses, like the AI integration for like translations is a use case if you're someone who would wear AR glasses to begin with.

1:30:00But I mean do you really need like generative AI and things like that? Like no. I find the Ray-Bans disgusting. Pardon me, disgusting. I think if you're walking around looking at things and trying to work out using the computer, you're a pervert. Like what are you doing? Right, right. Perverts buy stuff too though. Perverts are a huge adjustable market. Perverts are a great market. Many of them listen to this show. Speaking of which, I think this might be the first CES where the sex toy industry is here. That's the thing. Wait, they weren't here before? There was a huge thing a year or two ago where some company applied for CES and they were told we do not deal with this industry here.

1:30:40And they smartly, I mean, used it to their advantage like with press and they were like, got tons of coverage. That came in the dildos out of CES. I think on top of this, this was like a sex positive woman owned business. There's nothing wrong with it. Yeah. No, nothing wrong at all. But like that company used that to their advantage and said like, CES tells, you know, woman owned sex positive companies. A least perversion is honest. Yeah. Yeah. And so for the first time I'm seeing these sex toy companies on the floor of CES. I feel like Vegas is, something's economically breaking. I haven't seen the guys with the flappy cards.

1:31:12I didn't see the flappy guys either. No, they're back. No, they're back. They're back. So these guys who are, I think it's strip clubs, personally never. Oh, the guys heading out like the... Yeah, yeah. And I haven't seen them for years. And they're back clapping. They're back. They're flipping together. Clap, clap, clap. I saw them. They put, they like took a fan. It was actually kind of nice. Oh, no. They're very industrious. They took all the nasty little cards and they put them like on a street sign and made like a little fan. Yeah, yeah. I saw that. Kind of cute. They have been gone for years.

1:31:39The fact they're back is probably not a great sign. But I must be clear. There's nothing wrong with being a pervert as long as you don't. I think there's something wrong with that industry. No, that industry. Do these guys not know about QR codes? Right. You're supposed to scan the porno. Right. No, but that's the thing. Nothing wrong with being horny as long as it's not anyone else's problem. In fact, let's go around right now. Let's just say who's horny in the room. So, Ed? Nope. Not horny. Tom? This is great. I love this. This is really good for the show. Max, who's Max? Reuters declines to comment.

1:32:11Reuters is off on this one. Okay. Matt when you walked in I was like this is a guy who's horny can we quote that? can I write this up and we'll quote that? on the question of horniness Reuters declined no stop it I'm sorry why did Dave I just didn't say anything for a minute so I wanted to say something well we didn't get Matt on the record here so well I can quote Mashable here Mashable very horny wow that's so nice I'm so sorry everyone I had Robert Evans listing all the crimes I commit, like, every episode. I thought your listeners were the criminals. I know. Okay. And I made a joke about stealing stuff once, and it's all that's in the Reddit.

1:32:53And even saying this, there's going to be another thread, and they're going to be like, oh, I did this crime. Are you looking at your Reddit? I run the Reddit, baby. Okay. I'm on top of that shit. Isn't that kind of a conflict of interest? No, no, no. Well, yes, but no. The Reddit was created by someone called, like, Comic-Con, And all it was for the first month was just like, this show fucking sucks. That's a good Reddit. So I went in there and just argued with everyone. And now it's great. They love me because they now I'll fucking respond. Yeah. Culture of fear, baby. So, Max, how long are you here for?

1:33:28How long are you suffering with this? I'm leaving tonight. That's probably for the best, mate. A short trip. Just enough time to see the silicon and get out. Yeah. And with the horny levels there, we don't even know what kind of silicon. I'm so sorry. Maxie. I'm sorry. But so do you like, see, is this your first? How many of you? I've been twice now. Right. So how does it feel? What's the vibe you're getting? Vegas is a city that I think you just have to accept. Yes. And when you do that, especially this part of Las Vegas, then I think it's a lot more enjoyable. Right. Because like I don't visit Vegas very often, you know, so it's kind of a novelty for me.

1:34:08I get to We go see the crazy casinos and walk around the room, see all the different people who are here. Various degenerates. Me. Okay. Yeah, exactly. Most of you. There you go. I mean, and it is kind of cool to see like all this technology, you know, sort of stuck into like 16 different convention centers or whatever the number is these days. Right. You know, but, you know, this is visit number two I'm staying for two days. So I don't have the, you know, tenure to be able to talk about it. Like I'm a 20 year veteran and some people certainly have. I know. I find it fascinating when people haven't got much experience, how they feel, but you also deal with the real things, which is, which is fun because everyone else is just going and being like, yeah, I saw an AI dildo and I can't, they wouldn't let me use it.

1:34:54Well, I mean, you know, the PC chips and so on are pretty exciting, but a lot of the stuff that we report on is the data center chips that power most of AI. And are they here as well? No, this is all consumer stuff. I mean, the biggest thing that tends to get talked about now, you know, we're talking about things that aren't discussed or weren't discussed before, Matt, are these AI PCs. This is like one of these things that the industry has been trying to make happen for a little over a year now. And, you know, it's supposed to start lifting PC sales this year. And what are these chips meant to do, just to be clear?

1:35:32I wish I could have a good answer for you. I have a demo with HP later today. I'll let you know. It's unclear to me either. I mean, I'm saying that because I think the answer is that this is one of those situations where if you don't build the hardware to do the thing, then nobody can make the software to do the thing. Right. So if the capability doesn't exist, then nobody can code on top of it to make the cool application for whatever AI thing. Okay, I'll buy that. I have no idea if it'll succeed or not. I mean, I don't predict the future, but I think it is true with any generation of hardware.

1:36:02like for example real-time ray tracing that nvidia made a few years ago when they launched it and real-time ray tracing just makes light look better video game graphics look better so for when they launched it there was like one yeah i don't remember how many games but it was like a small handful you know very very few and you know it was like cool but not widely adopted it took until i think um the video game consoles the xbox series x and the ps5 included the tech in their systems for it to become like very widely adopted by developers you know so this is i think with ai pc chips it's like kind of similar except how long will this bubble last right i mean i would give it a few years like i would give it two or three years for the software software ecosystem to like actually build out but i mean you know at the moment arguably the most interesting thing that microsoft talked about when they launched their copilot plus program was the and what is that just so we're clear?

1:36:54It's their AI PC platform. Okay. The PCs that are part of it have to have a certain spec in order to run the applications. Was this thing called Recall, which allowed you to look back. Oh, everyone loved that. Everybody loved that. They killed it. They're relaunching it now, but I mean, you know, so, yeah, I just, it's... Go ahead, Matt. But like, you see this blowback even from like regular consumers, not just the disgruntled people in the room right here, right now, like the five of us, but like regular consumers are not upgrading to like Windows 11, for example, they're choosing to stick with the non-AI operating system.

1:37:27And listen, I don't think they are aware that they're like, oh, I don't want AI for the most part. But also the AI has not been a draw for them to get them to upgrade. They don't care about it. And when it comes to enterprise stuff, especially what you're talking about, trying to sell business laptops with integrated, I think they call them NPUs, neural processing unit, is okay, all this stuff is already running in the cloud. I can't think of any other like you know sort of like function where they offloaded it from the cloud to like your local pc like what's the business value in running chat gpt on on like your laptop i actually i can actually answer that one in the sense that it will kill chat gpt because when you realize what you can run on your laptop you'll fuck around with it and be like oh this doesn't do that very there's all these like software as a service companies that are like uh speak and it'll uh text to voice right away for you well there are models that you could just run off your computer You don't have to pay a monthly fee to do that.

1:38:23You could just literally download the free language model, and there you go. You're set. They don't want people to know this, for real. Yeah, I mean, but in a lot of cases, you can already run this stuff on a sufficiently powerful computer that just has a GPU. Oh, yeah. You could get right now probably a$200,$300 M1 Mac Mini because they're now at M4, and even that's$500. And you're set. You could run all this stuff right off your silicon Mac chip set if you want. Yeah, I just haven't seen the use cases to justify buying a new generation of AI PCs. It doesn't really stand out to me as to why you would do this.

1:39:05I mean, I think what's really going to drive people to buy new computers is the fact that Windows 10 is end of life. Yeah. No, my dad has to buy a new laptop because of it. Four stops lessons. He loves his laptop. It's like he loves this weird Surface thing. it's unfortunately not very funny or interesting the fact that that's the reason why people are going to upgrade also my dad, Jeff hi dad, you sometimes listen to these hi Ed's dad everyone say hi to my dad and Jeff let's get a horny check on you as well if you don't mind do not now I am going to have to talk to my father about that on a scale of chase to Randy I'm going to tell the group chat I have with my siblings that I am shortly going to have to find out how horny that is.

1:39:51I could go down to the AI-powered dildo company and see if they can hook your dad up with what it is. I need you to send me the booth number. I'm going to FaceTime your dad right now. It's 10.42pm in GMT just going for that. Okay, we've got to wrap up then. So, Tom McKay, where can people find you? You can find me at itbrew.com. You can also find me on Twitter at twitter.com slash thetomzone or x.com whatever. on blue sky as cat turd to dot b sky dot social. So good. So I bet you're loving that you chose that name. I am not. It's so good. I'm on a bunch of blacklist. I remember everybody thinks that I'm the actual.

1:40:32I remember when you picked it being like, he is going to get blocked by people. It's so good. Max journey. Where can people find you? Anywhere where there's a chip, but that's not even factually true. And what's great, by the way, my brother just responded to the thing of, I am shortly, my other brother responded with, what the fuck? I can't wait to explain why my dad is going to have to do a horny check to my siblings. Max Cheney, where can people find you? Sorry. At Churn and Burn on X and Blue Sky and then on LinkedIn if you want. Just look up my name. Very good. Matt Bender, where can people find you?

1:41:05First of all, I'm sorry for bringing up the sex toys being at CES this year. But yeah, you can find me. Well, my CES coverage will be at Mashable, Mashable.com. and you can find me on all sorts of social media, Blue Sky X, the Everything app, threads at Matt Binder. Very good, Jesse Farrar. Yeah, your Kickstarter sucks is the podcast. Go Off Kings is my stream, yeah. And I'm not on the Everything app, but yeah, on Blue Sky, jessefarrar.com. I probably need to change the episode links because I linked to you on X. And I'm, of course, Ed Zitron. I am now going to have a very uncomfortable conversation with several of my siblings about this episode.

1:41:42thank you for listening to the first part of the two-part day three better offline ces experience we're so grateful for you we love you all i'm ed zitron you can find me everywhere where it says ed zitron other than the parts that make me look bad thanks for listening and we'll see you soon

1:42:06thank you for listening to better offline the editor and composer of the better offline theme song is Matosowski. You can check out more of his music and audio projects at matosowski.com. M-A-T-T-O-S-O-W-S-K-I.com. You can email me at ez at betteroffline.com or visit betteroffline.com to find more podcast links and of course my newsletter. I also really recommend you go to chat.wheresyoured.at to visit the discord and go to r slash betteroffline to check out our reddit. Thank you so much for listening.

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1:43:56Do you want to hear the secrets of psychopaths, murderers, sex offenders? In this episode, I offer tips from them. I'm Dr. Leslie, forensic psychologist. This is a podcast where I cut through the noise with real talk. When you were described to me as a forensic psychologist, I was like snooze. We ended up talking for hours and I was like, this girl is my best friend. Let's talk about safety and strategies to protect yourself and your loved ones. Listen to Intentionally Disturbing on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman, host of the Psychology Podcast.

1:44:31Here's a clip from an upcoming conversation about how to be a better you. When you think about emotion regulation, you're not going to choose an adaptive strategy which is more effortful to use unless you think there's a good outcome. Avoidance is easier. Ignoring is easier. Denial is easier. Complex problem solving takes effort. Listen to the Psychology Podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Let's start with a quick puzzle. The answer is Ken Jennings' appearance on The Puzzler with A.J. Jacobs. The question is, what is the most entertaining listening experience in podcast land?

1:45:12Jeopardy truthers believe in... I guess they would be Ken-spiracy theorists. That's right. They give you the answers and you still blew it. The Puzzler. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an iHeart Podcast.