Sony and TCL Team Up on TVs - DTNS 5188

0:00All right, here we go in three, two.

0:10this is the daily tech news for tuesday january 20th 2026 we tell you what you need to know give you the important context and help each other understand and don't worry folks there was a holiday in the u.s yesterday we didn't all just fall into a pothole because of the rain well speak for yourself well yeah if we did it wasn't because of that's not why we didn't do this show yesterday Right, right. Today, Andy Beach is here to tell us why we shouldn't call things AI, and he's got some recommendations of what terms we should use. Plus, Sony is spinning off its TV business to TCL. Yeah, interesting story there.

0:49We're going to talk a lot about it. I'm Jason Howell. I'm Tom Merritt. And let's start with what you need to know with that big story. Yeah, lots of spinning going on. And Sony spinning out its TV and home audio unit into a separate company where TCL will own 51 % and run manufacturing primarily, while Sony will keep 49 % and its branding and its image processing technology on Bravia sets. So the agreement is going to keep the Sony Bravia branding intact on TVs produced through this new combined company anyways. Anyways, so basically what this means is your next Sony TV may actually be built by TCL, labeled as Sony Bravia, and tuned with Sony's processing technology stack, which Sony is very known for.

1:41The company signed a non-binding agreement, aims to have everything locked in and operational by April 2027. That's next year, pending regulatory approvals, of course. All this, you can imagine, seems to be in favor of, well, cutting down on production costs. While also, and I think this is kind of critical here and a big question that I have, without impacting the premium strength of the brand, it could lead to cheaper Bravia TVs in the near future. So you might see kind of more entry-level Bravia TVs coming down the pipeline. And TCL sets will stand to benefit from Sony's processing, the software, the calibration standards as well.

2:22So, yeah, what are you thinking about this? I'm curious to know your thoughts. It's an interesting way of doing it. We're focusing on the TV because that'll be the biggest thing you notice out of this. But it's all of the audio and entertainment out of Sony. which when you think back, what do you think of Sony? You think of the Sony Walkman. A Walkman. I mean, yeah, storied history. And I remember some rack audio sets when I was a kid. It was like, well, there was Fisher and there was Sony was one of them. That all goes into this joint venture, which if you're like, wait, it's non-binding. They do hope to have the binding agreement done by the end of March.

3:03uh so and then like jason said it'll it won't actually happen until april of next year once they get that because of regulatory review but this will be a new company it'll be a joint company like you said mostly owned by tcl but best of both worlds so i get we're like oh they're going to keep the sony bravia name this is not just sony licensing the name to tcl and tcl makes sets and puts the slaps the sony name on there they're using all of that technology you talk about So it's a smart business move, I guess, to say like, hey, Sony has very valuable stuff here, but we're not as good at making efficient supply chain decisions.

3:44We don't have the whole supply chain stack, the vertical supply chain that TCL has. TCL bought Samsung's LCD patents and bought Samsung's factory in China for making LCD TVs. Why not have them make these? That'll bring the price down, but we'll keep the quality high by using Sony's technology. I think consumers are probably going to notice very little except maybe that the price is cheaper. Yeah, okay. And if that is the case, then not a bad outcome. I mean, that was my kind of immediate knee-jerk reaction was, does this dilute the Sony brand in any way? But really, if we're talking about both brands get the thing that they didn't have before, then I guess that's why you enter into a partnership, right?

4:36TCL has been making some strong moves, really strong value player in the industry. Apparently recently took the number one spot in global shipments for their large format TVs, mini LED TVs, Google TV sets. They're just very competitive. And Sony, consistently seen as the quality brand, but still kind of behind TCL as far as how many units they're shipping and everything. So I guess Sony does get something out of this. That's just my main concern. No, Sony gets a lot out of this. And Sony keeps their image processing tech. That is one of the keys that makes Bravia sets better. Totally. And TCL, the joint venture gets to use that image processing tech.

5:25We don't know if TCL will get to use it. Maybe they will because they're playing nice to each other and they'll come to an agreement to also license that to TCL. It wouldn't be shocked, like you said. But it's not like TCL owns Sony's image processing tech. So it's interesting to watch Sony back out of consumer hardware. They backed out of laptops. They backed out of phones. Phones. Totally. They're now backing away from this, but keeping the really valuable part of it, saying, you know, the consumer electronics business, that's a risky, low margin business. TCL is really good at that. Let's let them take on that risk because they're good at it.

6:02But we'll keep the image processing stuff because that's where the bread and butter is. And we'll always be able to sell that to people. So that is also a way this is making sense to me. Sony also has intellectual property that they're going to hold on to. Obviously, Sony is a vast company well beyond home theater entertainment. It does make me wonder if we see something like this happen to the PlayStation at some point. Oh, I hadn't even considered that. And pardon me, because I haven't been hugely into gaming lately to know which is the real strong player right now. Is it Xbox? Is it PlayStation?

6:48Sony is considered to be the leader, but Microsoft is making all the moves. and people say, I don't know, Microsoft buying up all these big studios like Activision Blizzard, making a cloud service that is viable. We're going to have a little news about that later in the show about an ad supported free version. Microsoft is seen as coming on strong and Sony's a little on its back foot. Nintendo's kind of a separate situation because they own the whole stack and their IP is what sells it, Animal Crossing, Mario, Zelda. And so I do wonder if this causes Sony to say, you know, we're going to rely on making the games, being studios.

7:30That frees us up to actually put Sony games on Microsoft services, which Microsoft really wants them to do. And we'll do a joint venture to make the PlayStation with somebody. That's, of course, you know, Galaxy Brain stuff. And I'm sure Sony would deny that they have any plans to do that right now. But I look at this and I wonder if five years down the road, we're looking at a similar situation for gaming as well. Oh, boy, that would be a big deal, too. Yeah. Well, all the home entertainment and home theater people in our world were a little rocked. They're like, that's interesting. But none of them turned their nose up at it because TCL has improved its premium quality sets.

8:18They're considered to be very good at making these. and they keep the prices down. So, you know, I think this is a, I don't know if it's a match made in heaven, but at least purgatory. Yeah, I was just going to say, you beat me to it. Well, DTNS is made heaven by you, the listener. Thanks to Ali Sanjabi, AB Puppy, Dale Mulcahy, and we got a bunch of new patrons. We want to welcome in all our new patrons for the week. sancy robert gail christine and brett welcome uh and a couple of returning uh folks matthew and jesse welcome back into the fold it's good to have you back yes good to have you here

9:03there's more we need to know today let's get to the briefs netflix has revised its offer for Warner Brothers Discovery from a combination of cash and stock to an all cash offer of$27.75 per share. It also reduced the debt that would be placed on the part it doesn't buy, which is Discovery Global. That's the cable networks. So that reduces the debt load, which increases the value of the part that it's not buying. I'll get to why that's important in a second. But Warner said that they were able to do that because there is better than expected cash flow performance in that part of the business last year.

9:40Now, this is all important because Paramount is out there saying, we'll give you$30 a share, which in case you missed it, 30 is bigger than 27.75. Paramount has said, we'll give you$30 a share for the entire company. Netflix previously had offered 23.25 in cash and 450 worth of shares for Netflix. Again, just for the studios and streaming side of the business, leaving the rest to be sold separately. Uh, shares of Netflix had dropped more than 12 % since the Warner brothers deal was announced December 5th. That put it in danger of some terms that were like, well, if the price drops below this amount, it limits the amount of shares you get.

10:18So what Netflix is doing here is saying, let's just take the whole uncertainty about the shares out of this and make it a clean 27 75. You're going to get cash per share. You can do whatever you want with it. And it implies then that discovery global, the part that Netflix isn't buying is got to be worth$2.25 a share or more, right? Netflix is saying it's easily worth$2.25 a share. So we'll give you cash. You'll still own the other part, and then you can sell it to somebody else if you want. Paramount has argued that that part of the business is not worth anything, but of course it's still offering$30 a share.

10:53And Warner is out there raising concerns over the amount of debt Paramount would have to carry if it succeeds in its offer. Paramount has a current junk credit rating. So Warner is making the argument like it's not going to make their credit rating any better to go into debt to buy us. Paramount saying, Oh, this is all backed by Larry Ellison, our CEO, David Ellison's dad. So don't worry about that. And they're going to do a proxy fight to, to try to nominate an alternate board of elector or directors to the board. But right now, Warner brothers discovery has accepted Netflix's offer. This filing just changes the terms of the offer.

11:30So what we're waiting on is to see if Paramount can convince the actual shareholders, not the board, to change their mind, to say, no, you should go with Paramount after all. And does the cash switch simplify the deal to the point to where that basically makes that more certain, essentially? It says we're not going to leave the part that we're not buying. We're not going to leave with as much debt. And it's very clear that you're going to get$27.75 a share. And you don't have to keep looking at Netflix's stock price and going, well, how does that change how much this is worth? And does that also then make at least a little more certain that the hostile bid on the other side isn't given that extra time to, I don't know, develop into something more hostile?

12:15I don't know if that's even a part of the consideration like cash bid so we can get this moving and get it done. The idea is there might be some shareholders that were listening to Paramount that now will go like, well, all cash offer. That sways me. At least that's Netflix's hope there anyway. Yeah. Interesting. Well, I find this really fascinating, this next story. Realme's P-more. Sorry, P-more. No, don't do that. It's got more, though. Oh, my goodness. Excuse me. uh realme's p4 power smartphone launches in india on january 29th with a whopping 10 ,001 milliamp hour battery capacity that one is really important by the way it is the phone's big differentiator in this case yes this is a silicon carbon battery so that means that it packs more battery capacity and a tighter density system we're seeing a lot of this right now in some smartphones, particularly globally.

13:15And Realme says this gives the phone roughly three and a half days of light use. Light use. Define that as you will. Three and a half days. I mean, that's crazy. That is awesome. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

13:32Let's not go that far, Tom. Maybe a OnePlus Watch 3, which we can talk about that in a second. The device is kept relatively light, 218 grams. There's no reporting on exactly how slim it is. But with the silicon carbon battery, I imagine the phone is slim based on the size of the battery capacity anyways. I'm guessing it's kind of in the range of normal size. It's not going to be super huge. No, totally not. Realme is not releasing any information on a more global release at this time. So this is really targeting India, at least initially. But yeah, you mentioned smartwatch, and that's really what kind of came to mind for me.

14:10One of my big takeaways from CES was the fact that that Sunday morning when I woke up very early, I had a fully charged OnePlus Watch 3, which is running a silicon carbon battery. That lasted my entire time. Running full-on Android Wear OS, I didn't have to charge it, even for a couple of days after I got home. And so the gains that we're seeing here in the smartphones, it's a real trend right now where these smartphones are coming out 7 ,000, 8 ,000, now 10 ,000 milliamp hour battery capacity, largely driven by the integration of these silicon carbon batteries. It's very exciting because battery technology, batteries on devices, that's a real trigger for people when a device, you get that battery anxiety.

14:55Oh, it just sucks. And we're not really seeing that much anymore because of gains like this. Yeah. Well, and just real quick, we're not going to go down too much of a rabbit hole, but silicon carbon batteries are lithium ion batteries, if you're confused. It's just that they are faster charging, they're smaller, they're thinner, and they're less likely to catch fire because they replaced the anodes with a composite that's higher energy density. but they are still lithium ion so it's it's not like it's a new battery technology in that sense it's a new way of doing a lithium ion battery right that said uh you're making these in india so you can ship them in india easily uh you can't ship 10 000 milliamp hour batteries into europe or the united states right now nope you can't not unless you split them not unless you split the batteries into two separate yeah components and you get under that threshold like it's still the same battery.

15:50So I think I'm hoping there can be some easing on the regulations in those regions for silicon carbon batteries to make this easier for companies to make available in multiple parts of the world. Not just because I live in the United States, that's certainly part of it, I'm not going to deny it, but also because if you can sell them into Europe and the United States, then it's more likely you're going to make more of these kinds of phones, which means we get more phones with longer battery life. Everyone benefits. I think the one ongoing concern with the silicon carbon technology is about longevity.

16:22I'm like, yeah, it's great. You get this much more capacity, but how does it do over two, three, four, five years? And that's a real big question mark that we're seeing right now. But I love to see more phones going down this road. Like you said, I would really love to see more phones coming into the US and European markets that support this type of capacity to see if that happens. This next story is a little bit wonky in the sense of if you're really into retail, you might love it. But it has an important effect on consumers, which is why we're talking about it. Starting March 31st, Amazon is going to stop the practice known as commingling.

17:06This is where they would fulfill an order from the nearest inventory, even if it wasn't from the seller you bought it from. So let's say I'm in Los Angeles. I buy a product from a seller in India, but there's a company with inventory in Los Angeles. Same exact item, right? Let's say it's a Cam Link adapter. And Amazon will be like, we're going to fulfill it from Los Angeles because it's the same exact item. That gets it to Tom faster. and then we'll just credit the inventory to say like, hey, that one in India now belongs to the company in LA, etc. Unfortunately, when they were doing that, most of the time it worked great.

17:47You never knew. It all worked fine on the back end. Everybody got credited. But in a small number of cases, the inventories were not the same. And you might end up with a counterfeit item because it was fulfilled from a less reputable seller's inventory. It didn't happen a lot, but it definitely happened. So they are ending commingling, which will eliminate that possibility. And Amazon said, now that most sellers maintain inventory levels that keep products close to customers, we can achieve fast delivery without commingling. Okay. Yeah, that's interesting. I appreciate your clarification on this.

18:25I do wonder how this change impacts. There's a lot of resellers. There's a lot of, what is it? triage uh what is it yeah the product triage or whatever they call it um and uh i wonder how this kind of impacts how they run their businesses if they're doing that legitimately does this overly complicate things they have to rework their workflows and everything but resellers will now all have to use amazon upc codes that's one thing i did read in there uh instead of being able to just sell off the box uh which is another way of preventing counterfeit items from showing up in the supply chain right interesting adobe is bringing more features to premiere and effects and i'm pretty happy about these including new tools that bring masking tracking and motion design closer to one click operations than the more old school traditional key framing approaches which are just a pain in the butt in my opinion the new object masking tool lets editors hover and click on a person or an object to auto-generate a colored mask overlay that then tracks that person or object throughout the clip.

19:33That's generated on device, no data sent to Adobe. Those masks can then be, God, I just can't talk today, can be adjusted and tweaked by the user after the fact. So they're not locked in place. This is an assistive tool that you can tweak later. Other features include a new shape mask tool that generates masks directly from the toolbar at up to 20 times faster speed, so you're not waiting for the processing and all that kind of stuff. An easier import path for objects generated using Adobe's Firefly systems into the apps, and then full Adobe stock integration into Premiere. And then finally, After Effects gets import capabilities for SVGs from Illustrator as editable elements for building objects directly in After Effects using new 3D meshes.

20:18Now, I'm not a designer like that, But what I understand is this is a gap that has pushed some users to use external tools like Cinema 4D or Blender, that sort of thing. So as far as After Effects is concerned, that seems to be a big new inclusion that's going to make a lot of people happy. But as far as Premiere is concerned, I can't wait to test this out because I have wanted to do this masking. But I just, plain and simple, I don't have the patience for generating these keyframes frame to frame to kind of follow objects. And there's probably a better way. But this sounds ideal. So I appreciate you bringing your expertise to this one because I'm less familiar with the Adobe stuff.

21:03But what's an example of what this would make easier with the masking? So you might see it on some YouTube videos where there is a person talking and there is a background and there might be like a title that they place in the background behind the person. And so as the person is kind of talking to you and their head moves slightly, that kind of overlaps the text and that sort of stuff. That like dynamic kind of foreground background stuff might be one example. You could mask the person in the front, and then any time that person treads into an area where the text is, it knows that it needs to carve out that piece of the text and put the person in front of it.

21:45So it looks like you're walking in front of it, basically. Yes, exactly. I mean, there's a million different things that you could use something like this for. No, that helps me wrap my brain around it. Or I think another thing that people often do is they might have a title, and they want that title to follow an object around, like name above a person. and you can anchor that to the person, this gives you the ability to kind of assign those and map those out a lot easier when you can just use the tool embedded and say, this is the thing, follow it, versus having to go in there step by step. And I know there are other ways to do it, but like I said, I just don't have the patience to sit there for 20 minutes tracking an object.

22:24Oh, that's good. That's good stuff. And Adobe gets a lot of heat, sometimes rightfully gets a lot of heat, but I feel like these are the kinds of features that make it so people go, okay, I guess I'll keep paying that subscription fee because they are improving it. I mean, tools like this just make something easier than it used to be. And I think it would be a chore before, but now this tool kind of lowers the bar, makes it more accessible. And I could totally get behind that. I love that. Well, if you've got ideas of like, hey, you know what? This will help me do this with Adobe. be uh let us know in our discord uh we have great chats going on in there so so jump in and join the conversation you can link your patreon account to discord to join it uh just go to patreon.com slash dtns all right we have some quick headlines that are good to know might make you look smarter in the future even indeed everybody's going to be talking about oh lego they got the smart blocks but you're going to be even smarter thanks to PJC Reese in our subreddit for this one.

23:29Lego's new computer science and AI learning solution, KISS, which is based on those recently announced SmartPlay blocks, uses locally run tools, on-device tools, to teach kindergarten through eighth grade students not only core computer science, but concepts in machine learning, computer vision, and generative models, like large language models. And it does not rely on using chatbots to do it. Pretty cool. That is super cool. Love it. ChatGPT Go, OpenAI's cheapest paid plan at$8 per month now gives users in the US and other markets unlimited access to GPT 5.2 Instant. That also has longer memory and context windows over free usage if you're using ChatGPT for free.

24:14Presumably you'll be able to avoid the forthcoming ads from OpenAI. Yeah, presumably. Microsoft will soon test its ad-supported Xbox Cloud Gaming tier. I mentioned this earlier. If you're an Xbox insider, you should be able to test it with support for up to one-hour streaming sessions and around five hours of play per month in exchange for two minutes of pre-roll ads before your game begins. Code in the Spotify Android app is hinting that the company is testing a, I haven't heard of this one before, a page match feature that lets you take a picture of a page in a physical book or an e-book that you might be reading.

24:52And it takes you to that spot in the audiobook if you purchased it on Spotify. That's syncing your physical book with an audiobook. Yeah, I know, totally. ASUS chairman Johnny Shee says the company is halting new smartphone models and putting its Zenfone and ROG phone lines into indefinite observation, effectively ending its Android smartphone development while continuing to support existing devices. they fell short of saying they're not going to ever make a smartphone again but this year they're not making you know what i'm going to say tom so you're saying there's a chance uh netflix is launching a global live voting feature that lets subscribers use their tv remote or mobile app to cast real-time time-limited votes and ratings during special live shows so something like star search is one example tallies are updated instantly results count only during the initial broadcast.

25:48I mean, if they're bringing back Star Search, they have to do this, right? They're not going to have people, you know, texting on their AT &T or Pac Bell phones or whatever Star Search is doing back then. That's right. If you're into the open source RISC-V chip architecture, you can now get the Milk5 Titan, a full-featured mini-ITX motherboard kit with one M.2 slot, USB-A and USB-C ports, gigabit Ethernet and BMC out of band management ports, And you can run Ubuntu on it right out of the box,$329. And Amazon CEO Andy Jassy told CNBC that Amazon's early 2025 pre-tariff inventory is depleting, depleting, depleted, meaning, quote, some sellers are deciding that they're passing on those higher costs to consumers in the form of higher prices.

26:37Some are deciding that they'll absorb it to drive demand, and some are doing something in between. So, end of quote. So if you see prices going up, it might have something to do with that. Yeah, yeah. Everybody is like, oh, so the tariffs didn't affect the price or a price went up. Oh, it must have been the tariffs. What Andy Jesse is saying is no. Up until now, it was something else. Now is when we're starting to see that pre-tariff inventory depleted to the point where companies are having to make a decision one way or another. All right. Those are the essentials from today. Let's dive a little deeper.

27:11We talk a lot about calling AI something more specific than just a blanket term, AI. And Andy Beach actually has some ideas about what words we should use. Andy, thanks again for joining us. Hi, Tom. Okay, so you've got a new piece coming out on Engines of Change where you argue that we spend way too much time arguing about AI and not enough time talking about what systems are actually doing. You are preaching to the choir when you're talking to me. But what are we missing when we talk about it as just AI? It felt like a good place to start the year. I feel like we spend a lot of time personifying capital A, capital I.

27:56And it's super dangerous. It's a thing technologists always have hated because they know that AI ends up really being more of a marketing phrase. And it's a catch-all. and that there's a lot of other functionality that's buried under it. But when we give it that single name, it becomes super easy to be able to force blame on it. And when I say personify, literally, we see articles constantly about how AI is taking people's jobs. And the reality is it's the business decision someone made in using AI that is impacting jobs or other pieces of it. So part of this was just a way of me sort of clarifying and wanting to say, let's reframe the conversation and let's not let's not debate it in an abstracted way.

28:45Let's get back to specifics. And one of those is to start thinking more about when we say AI, what do we really mean? Because there's like I said, there are a lot of different functionalities and I didn't buy, you know, there's no way that I'm going to hit all of them in a short piece. But I wanted to at least set up sort of eight big areas that I think are critical, because at least for media workflows, when we say AI, we probably mean one of these eight things. And if we can start pointing the conversation that we're having about AI into those areas, I think we can find middle ground with the people who are sort of the detractors of AI and get to a place where we agree more than we think we do about the direction that automation goes or orchestration goes.

29:33Yeah, yeah. And she goes. No, I like this because I have been doing I've been practicing the idea of don't say AI because that could mean anything. Tell me what it is, machine learning or deep learning or computer vision or something like that. Large language model. And at least tell me which one you're talking about. But that still leaves us arguing about the, you know, what are the feature sets within those different kinds of models? And I've also at times said, you know, we should not talk about your product having AI. Tell me what it does. And what I love about what you did in this column is you combined those and said, you know what, instead of talking about even machine learning, let's talk about what it does.

30:19Let's talk about the features because one feature is more of a threat to jobs than another feature, which might be very helpful for something else. So walk us through these different categories and why you picked them. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, so first of all, I actually started a similar piece to what you're talking about, where I was like, let's just talk about all the words that AI really means. And it was like weights and machine learning and all of the statistical pieces. And the reality is that, like, while that's super helpful, it's almost more of the chapter of a book as an explainer.

30:52Maybe when you update Noah a little more, I'll throw that in for you. Okay, yeah, maybe we'll make it an anthology. That would help. Yeah, exactly. But for when we talk about it in work, I really wanted to get down to a few categories. And again, you're still probably pulling multiple pieces together. But where I continually see it, particularly, again, when I think about it in terms of media workflows, whether it's content creation, content delivery, advertising, content management, like when you think in those categories, you end up talking about a couple different areas. First of all, orchestration is a big one.

31:29And that's just sort of automating the way that we move content around within a system or in pipelines as we're either working to create it or we're going through delivering it. This could be a lot of agentic stuff, I would imagine. Absolutely. When we talk about agentic, it is the orchestration of multiple models working together. But it's also when you really when we think about orchestration, it's it's humans working with agents in order to to go do those broader pieces. Right. prediction comes in a lot around recommendations and and other pieces you know what what other pieces of content do i have that are going to fit the niche based on what this person's been watching or as i'm creating a piece of content uh you know what are what are likely uh elements that uh that readers or watchers uh like that are a direction that the storyline can go or should go that or maybe where shouldn't it go because this is too trot upon ground.

32:35All of those are elements that can kind of fall into those areas. Optimization is another one. It's really around paring down sort of the signal to noise that we get when we're particularly consuming content. It's almost the reverse of predictions of how do we push the outliers out of it. So it's not what I'm recommending. It's almost what I'm getting rid of because I know it doesn't fit in. You're not going to like this. Don't show them that option on Netflix, HBO Max. Absolutely. Generation is a big one. And I tried to spend a couple of different places. I tried to talk about this because it's probably the biggest hot button area when we think about AI replacing a creative.

33:22um and you know the the direction i've tried to take with it is is very clear that like ultimately it is still people that are driving the ai models to do what it is doing what we are seeing and what i try to acknowledge in the piece is that you will see fewer people coming together to do a high quality production than you have in the past but that doesn't mean that people won't be working they will be potentially doing their own productions, whereas before they were an assistant director on something. Which is similar to what we have now with podcasts and YouTube and everything. Like people are doing more content that would have never gotten done before.

34:04Right. Another big area that isn't talked about a ton, but I feel like we're probably going to start seeing more and more of it, even just with the other sort of news that's in the space right now, and that's enforcement. using AI to either gate language or images that shouldn't be shared online. If there's even rules around either age or location-based pieces, automating the pieces of the system, all of that is still using artificial intelligence in some way, but it's a very selective way that we're applying it as part of a rules enforcement or governance piece. I like these a lot because it really does start to clarify what parts of this kind of technology just improve on existing thing.

34:56So, for instance, prediction and optimization, right? We already have recommendation algorithms, right? They decide whether to show you something or not show you something. What you're saying is this isn't going to change much except the quality of those recommendations. Yeah. And I think there's actually room even like, yes, we have all of these things today, if I'm honest, but it also by sort of breaking it into the buckets and reminding us that it's targeted into these areas, it gives us opportunities to think about how we refine it. One of the big things I would argue for recommendation is that recommendation is pretty weak today because it does a really good job of reinforcing all the things you like, but it does a bad job of then helping you discover new things.

35:41That's what everybody complains about. Part of recommendation should absolutely be challenging your pre-baked assumptions on some regular interval. And that could absolutely be part of recommendation that we just haven't tackled yet. this is a useful lens if you are worried about anything with AI. I highly recommend you read Andy's piece and try to look at things through these lenses because let's just take jobs. Suddenly, I'm not worried about optimization and prediction. Maybe I'm a little worried about classification because that's somebody's tedious job to classify, but I'm probably like, it's actually going to make that person's job better because they can do other more fulfilling stuff than the tedious job of classification, but generation and automation.

36:24Those are ones where I'm like, okay, now I can focus on those two parts and I'm not throwing the baby out with the bathwater. I'm saying, this is where I'm concerned. This is where I have concerns. And to your point earlier, allows me to have a productive conversation between an optimist and a pessimist about this, where you're talking about the actual areas of concern instead of talking past each other, where the optimist is saying, yeah, but you're going to get prediction and the pessimist is saying, yeah, but you're also going to get generation. Let's, let's just talk about one or the other of those.

36:54And I think we can agree more. Like you said. Yeah. I think, I think that talking past each other is exactly why I wrote this piece is because I feel like everybody says AI and they, they technically mean something different. Yeah. So they never find a way to settle their arguments or find middle ground because they're not having the same debate. And by giving them extra language, I'm hoping to arm them with enough material that we can have a true debate and not just a fight and that we can find ways to work through it. Well, Andy, this is great. If folks want to read the full column, which I entirely recommend that they do, where should they go?

37:30Thank you. So it's on my sub stack engines of change and the URL is engines of change dot AI. That piece went up on Sunday. It's called stop arguing about AI. Fantastic. Thanks, Andy. Thanks, Tom. Are we going to stop arguing now, Jason? Yeah, that's it. Let's find something else to argue about. No, I think peeling the curtain back just a tiny bit, I think it's a really great example and very timed perfectly with this, which is that the Adobe story earlier in the show, when I first wrote it up, I kind of followed the articles that were saying, yeah, new AI features. And you pointed out to me as we were kind of getting ready to do the show, like, how important is it that the feature is AI?

38:17And what does that even mean? If it's a feature that's a useful feature, then that's the most important part of the story. And I completely agree with that. And honestly, all I did was I took any instance of AI out of what you wrote and then asked you, like, does this still make sense? Do you see anything weird? It says the same thing. Yeah. And it was fine. It all made sense. Yeah. How important is it? Yeah. I love it. Good piece and good interview. We end every episode of DTNS with some shared perspectives today. Russell sent in an evaluation of our CES coverage. All right, here we go. Russell wrote, hello, Tom and DTNS team.

38:55Wanted to say thank you for what I think was the best CES coverage that you all have done yet. Really enjoyed the daily panels, very well organized with the guests covering topics. Also, some of the other shorts and brief interviews were really good and helpful. Thanks again. Russell, you're one of our best cheerleaders. So thank you for weighing in on that. And it's not like I asked Russell. He just out of nowhere was like, hey, I just want to say good job on the CES stuff. I kind of felt it was one of our best too. So I'm glad to hear that. Solid coverage. And I love the fact that CES continues to reverberate a couple of weeks later.

39:29Indeed. Well, if you got some insights into a story we talked about, maybe you're an expert in the field and you can shed some light on to help another listener understand it, share it with us. Feedback at dailytechnewsshow.com. Yeah. And thanks to Andy Beach again. Thanks to Russell for contributing to today's show. And thank you for being along for Daily Tech News Show. You can keep us in business by becoming a patron at patreon.com slash DTNS. We'll see you tomorrow.

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