Apple Picks Gemini for Siri AI, Google’s AI Shopping Tools, Meta’s New Power Player | Jan 12, 2026

0:13Welcome, everyone, to the information's TI-TV. My name is Akash Pastrucha. It is Monday, January 12th. First up this morning, the information published an exclusive deep dive looking at AI-powered dashcam maker Motive and the people assisting its AI behind the scenes. We will dive into that with the reporters who broke the story. We'll then discuss Google's weekend announcement about new AI shopping tools for Gemini. We're also taking an in-depth look at the story that we published over the weekend over why Robinhood shares have done so much better than Coinbase over the past year. We'll then turn to a conversation with the CEO of Austin-based Excelsior, which announced this morning it raised$65 million to scale its data center cooling technology.

0:57And we will end the show with our editor-in-chief, Jessica Lesson, who has a reaction to two big news stories this morning, Meta's appointment of Dina Powell-McCormick as president and vice chairman, and Apple's decision to tap Google's Gemini for its AI Siri update. It's going to be a fun show, and so let's get right on into things. The Information published an exclusive deep dive into Motive, a company that sells AI-powered dash cams to monitor drivers of trucking companies. Ahead of its planned IPO this year, our reporters looked into the extent to which its AI tools rely on people checking things.

1:34Joining me now are the reporters behind that story. Corey Weinberg, Deputy Bureau Chief of Finance, and Michael Rodden, our finance reporter. Welcome to you both. It's great to see you this morning. Hey, Cash. Hey, how's it going? So, Corey, we're talking about dash cams today. What is the dash cam at Motive supposed to do? What did you find? Walk us through all the reporting. Motive is one of the leaders in this interesting industry that's really boomed over the last few years, selling these sort of software-enabled cameras to big trucking and logistics companies. They compete in a world where you might know publicly traded company Samsara.

2:16They're another company that sells these AI-powered dash cams. And, you know, they are purchased by these large trucking companies so they can keep tabs on their drivers, so they can know sort of what's actually happening inside the cab and on the road. And Motive has this camera that is powered by AI. It uses computer vision models to detect when a driver is reaching for their cell phone or following too close on the road. And it's supposed to alert its ultimate customers, the trucking companies, of major violations that happen and even collisions. So it's supposed to keep tabs on the drivers, basically, make sure that they're driving well.

3:03And I guess in the event that there's a crash of some kind, then I guess, what, it alerts the company saying, hey, there's an issue, you got to respond to it. Is that the idea? Yeah, companies want to get a beat on this, on anything bad that happens on the road. They need to know for insurance reasons, for dealing with the authorities, all that nasty stuff. Okay, and this company has grown pretty big, right? You wrote that it's looking to go public this year. Yeah, it crossed$500 million in annual recurring revenue back in September. And it's slated to be, unless the markets totally melt down, sort of the first major venture-backed listing this year.

3:45So now the crux of the story is how much of this is AI and how much of this is actual people in the loop. What did you find in your reporting about the people that are helping the AI in this system? The humans at Motive seem to play a pretty important role. Basically, every video snippet that the AI dash cams capture, so whether it's like a potential collision or a stop sign that a driver missed, those videos come in and they get fed to a team of 400 staff in Pakistan whose job it is to review these videos in really quick succession. So they've got like a minute or half a minute to say, this is a real stop sign violation, or this is a crash.

4:27And then once those videos are verified, they get sent to the fleet manager. And so these humans who are paid about the equivalent of$125 a month are central to the company's claim that we're going to give fleet managers the most accurate representation of what's happening on the ground. You know, the fleet managers aren't going to be in the dark about when there's a crash or if they've driven past a stop sign or if they've tailgated someone too close. So the company talks about that a little bit in their prospectus. They call it human in the loop. But we tried to really pull back the curtains on this and show exactly what's happening, which is that this team of 400 people are under increasing pressure to improve their accuracy, make sure they're not missing any collisions, and really drill down the time that they're getting these alerts to fleet managers.

5:22So it raises this question about, you know, how important is this huge workforce of people clicking on a thousand videos a day to the company? And while the company is also making these big claims about its AI technology and the accuracy of it, it tells potential investors that it has the most accurate offering on the market. and it captures 99 % of 15 safety events. And that puts it ahead of its competitors. But we're saying it's just like, well, if you look at how it actually works, there is this really big team of 400 data annotators making sure they're clicking on half a million videos a day or something like that.

6:05Corey, I mean, I just want to get behind sort of why these human, you know, the transition from human to AI and, you know, which of these ways of doing this job is actually more accurate? Because one of the things that surprised me in your story was, was you both reported the extent to which, I mean, both of these systems can make mistakes, which one ends up being better? I mean, how many missed collisions have there been on, on either side? Yeah, that's one of the really interesting kind of practical and somewhat philosophical questions, I think, in all this is by trying to use humans to really drill down and nail the real edge cases that are difficult for AI to capture.

6:55The really long tail that sort of AI researchers would talk about in sort of the pursuit of 100 % or 99.99999 % accuracy, is it better to use sort of these operation centers worth of humans? Or will the AI models, checking AI models, be a better way to do it? And that's where there's some disagreement across the industry. We talked to some competitors like Samsara and some others that do it differently than Motive. You know, Motive is certainly not running away from its approach. It's currently in the quiet period for its IPO, so they didn't talk to us for this story. But their CEO, Shreve Makhani, has said in the past that this is an approach that's working for them and it's working for their customers to get to as high of accuracy as possible.

7:49And so, Michael, I wonder, what is the bigger picture here around this story? You touched on it a little bit. I mean, this idea of companies marketing AI as AI when there are humans involved. You know, do you see this as a broader issue that the AI sector, I mean, we've talked about this with the robotics sector. I don't know we've talked about it as much with computer vision on the show. But I mean, big picture, is this something that you are looking into a little more closely in your reporting? Yeah, it's definitely like, you know, AI is such a big thing at the moment. But I think this story shows the current limitations of AI and how rich and powerful it is.

8:30You know, in a lot of cases, you still need humans working behind the scenes. In Motive, they've hinted at that in their prospectus. And the humans seem pretty central to, you know, stacking up their AI claims. um but you know we've seen a lot of cases where companies have tried to you know pull a bit of like a a hoodwink over their customers so it's like there was a builder ai that collapsed uh last year i think who said that they had this like really powerful ai technology but in reality it was just you know thousands of sort of uh humans behind the scenes in you know uh developing countries tapping away.

9:13You know, there was the Amazon supermarket where people could walk through that was supposedly all AI, but there was a bunch of people behind the scenes tracking what the customers put in their shelves. You know, even Waymo, which I, you know, I take and I really like, you know, every now and then a human will have to intervene through a teller about it. They have to phone in and drive the car themselves. So I think that it's a good sign for investors to just be really careful about what claims companies are making and to really try and dig into how the companies that say they have these really powerful AI tools, how they actually work.

9:55Corey, last question for you. You didn't have a chance to speak with the company because of the quiet period. I wonder if you did have the CEO and you had him in front of you, what questions would you want to know the answers to from them? I want to know more specific detail on their plan to lower the rate of human review on sort of what the AIs capture. They've said publicly that they aim to reduce it over time. in our reporting, we weren't able to kind of determine whether they have or what their exact plans are. And I'm interested in sort of this trade-off that they have to make around, you know, sort of paying for humans, you know, to make sure that there's 100 % accuracy versus, you know, the drive to actually build technology that works seamlessly.

10:49I think that's something that CEOs across Silicon Valley are grappling with. Great. Well, Corey and Michael, I want to thank you for coming on. That is Corey Weinberg and Michael Rodden from our newsroom here at The Information. See you guys very soon. Okay. Google is adding AI shopping tools for Gemini. The company announced a slate of AI commerce features over the weekend, including the ability to buy stuff with Gemini. AI and shopping is, of course, becoming an increasingly competitive battleground. And so I want to bring on our senior editor, Meredith Mazzilli, to break it all down. Meredith, welcome back to the show.

11:25It's great to have you here. Hey, Kosh. Thanks for having me. It's the Friday-Monday special with Meredith. Always with shopping. Always with shopping. Well, okay. So I want to get your initial reactions here to the tools because we were just talking on Friday about how OpenAI has dived into this agentic commerce space, I guess. We were talking about Amazon, and here we have Google coming up. And, you know, what did you think? Yeah, so, I mean, I think this says a lot about how Google is responding to the threat of AI to their core search business, and maybe has a little less to do with, you know, the timing of OpenAI's own in-chat checkout rollout and things like that.

12:12So I will unpack all of that, but let's first, I think, would be helpful to dig into what exactly it is that Google announced on Sunday. So number one, AI checkout inside Gemini, inside Google AI mode, which basically, like you said, lets you just buy stuff there without leaving Google, without going to other sites. You're starting to check out there. And number two, another thing they announced that was super interesting was types of ads that would go inside that AI interface. So that might look like promotions or special offers that the retailers basically pay to place inside that AI interface.

12:52So that's a big shift for Google. So it's moving from Google sending you out to other sites, basically getting paid for those clicks to send to other sites and not really caring what happens after that. Now what they're trying to do is bring more of that shopping inside AI and controlling more of that process. And, you know, to me that reads really just as, okay, the core AI search business, or the core regular search business, rather, is under pressure. Right, right. You know, we did see OpenAI in September announce something very similar, checking out inside of ChatGPT. But I think, you know, for OpenAI and Google, they're just kind of arriving at the same place independently.

13:36OpenAI, they are trying to build monetization from scratch, whereas Google is trying to defend their existing monetization or come up with new ways to make money. So I want to ask you about how much of an advantage you think Google has here over OpenAI, because one of the key parts of this is that they're going to be leveraging Google Pay, which is something that's been in place for a while. And we've had Anne Guillen, our e-commerce reporter on the show here, talking about how difficult payments is as a thing to figure out, not just with AI, but at all. And so Google seems to have payments figured out and maybe they've built that.

14:18The other part here is it's tough to get data from retailers. So, you know, maybe they don't have an advantage there. I mean, do you think Google has a leg up here? So I think the fact that Google does have its own Google Pay and its own digital wallets is definitely advantage for them. As we've written about before, there are just lots of really tricky payments and product data things that just make AI shopping at a very basic level very difficult. And because they've dabbled in different shopping efforts before, they work a lot with merchants on traditional ads, they do have more experience in that space.

14:57I think what it's going to keep coming down to with all of these AI tools is merchant adoption. And I think that's the big open question right now. will merchants want Google to be taking more control over the whole purchase process away from the merchants? So kind of cutting out the merchant's own website, their own branding, more and more out of the equation. And that's the open question, and that's the same for all of these AI shopping tools. I think with merchants that maybe have less differentiated of products, you're going to see more adoption on that side. I think that explains why you see some big box retailers really jumping in.

15:39But when it comes to kind of mom and pop shops, small brands that maybe go direct to consumer and really want to tell that brand story, I think the calculus is a little different for them. So you don't think this is, I mean, this is not really a slam dunk for all retailers insofar as keeping up with the times. You're saying for the big retailers, sure, because they have to have this sort of omni-channel approach and be everything everywhere. But for the small retailers, I mean, it's sort of a walk away from that D2C relationship that we saw so many retailers getting excited about building a couple years ago.

16:18Yeah, exactly. And I think everybody in this equation is trying to figure out, it's a bit of a chicken and egg situation. will shoppers actually want to do this? Will merchants participate in such a way that there's enough stuff out there for shoppers to want to do this? And can the AI companies, payment companies, everybody figure it out? But for the merchant adoption specifically, yes. Like that's still kind of the big open question. We actually have one of our reporters on the ground at NRF in New York this week, which is where Google did announce all these products yesterday. That's the national, what is it?

16:55It's the national retail? Yeah, yeah. Something retail. It's the big retail conference in New York. Exactly. So those smaller DTC brands, I think, is really a bit of an open question to see where they land on this. Right. You know, on the flip side, if you sit it out and that's where shopper behavior goes, it's very difficult to catch up, potentially. And, you know, the last thing that I think is worth talking about is Martin Pierce, our co-executive editor, wrote last night in the briefing about Google's efforts to become more of an e-commerce or shopping player in the past. And I guess, I mean, there is a reality that, yeah, even though they have all these tools established in place, I mean, Google shopping, I guess, I mean, we do, you know, there's Google flights, there's, you know, I'm trying to think Google, I do hotels through Google Maps, but i'm not really shopping through google just yet so it it seems to have had some trouble in that arena before right but though i think in the past the stakes weren't necessarily as high kind of circling to what we were back talking about at the beginning of this segment um you know with this idea that the core search business could be under more of a fundamental threat from just people shopping and thinking about looking at products in different ways um you know i i think there's just more pressure there to get it right this time.

18:21Well, earning season is coming up, so I guess we'll get more answers to that effect. Meredith, I want to thank you for coming on the show. That is Meredith Mazzilli, our senior editor here at The Information. All right. Thanks, Akad. Okay. Robinhood versus Coinbase is a rivalry that increasingly has been heating up as they both compete on similar trading tools. But last year, while Robinhood's stock nearly tripled, Coinbase shares fell 12%. My colleague Yueqi Yang wrote a deep dive looking at that delta over the weekend, and I want to bring her on to talk all about it. Yueqi, welcome back to the show.

18:54It's great to have you here. Hey, Akash. It's the most exciting rivalry of the season, Robin versus Coinbase. Not Robin, Robinhood versus Coinbase. Why has Robinhood stock done so much better than Coinbase? This is not even like, I mean, this is crazy. I didn't know the numbers until you did it. Down 12%, 100 and something percent for Robinhood. What's going on? So this is a rivalry that's years in the making. But really, last year, we started to see the stocks of Coinbase and Robinhood to diverge. And investors like Robinhood stock because it's a more diversified bet. As you know, Robinhood offers stocks trading.

19:44They offer crypto trading. They have a big options business. And crypto is only 20 % of Robinhood's total revenue, whereas Coinbase generates all of its revenue from the crypto industry. And I also noticed that Robinhood last year really took advantage of the regulatory environment under Trump by moving very quickly and launching new products aggressively. And one case in point is prediction markets. Robinhood launched Prediction Market in late 2024, initially offering the bet on the 2024 U.S. presidential election, and it quickly doubled down by adding more bets. And Robinhood said that Prediction Market has since become its fastest growing business line by revenue in its entire history.

20:31Hmm. So one of the interesting parts here is for the longest time, when I covered crypto a couple years ago, Coinbase shares sort of seemed to have mirrored Bitcoin's performance. And I feel like Coinbase has tried to get away from that a little bit with its subscription offerings and make its revenue and its profitability a little bit less volatile. I feel like Coinbase still hasn't really been able to get away from that tying to Bitcoin prices at large, right? Yes, and Bitcoin was down on the year last year. I think you're right, Coinbase generates all its revenue from the crypto industry. I would say that it has done a good job building up a bigger portion of revenue from subscription businesses and services, which are more sticky than just trading fees.

21:25and Coinbase now is entering stock markets, stock offerings as well as prediction markets. So one big thing we'll be watch out for next year is to what extent Coinbase can gain traction with certain non-crypto products. So let me ask you this. Do you think that this is more a story of Robinhood really excelling or is it Coinbase falling behind? I think they're competing head-on. and we sold. I think it's Robinhood excelling. I'm going to be up front with it. I mean, hard to argue that 180-something percent growth over the course of a year is not a company excelling, but I feel like it's a little faster to innovate, and there's more products.

22:14I mean, they have the credit cards too. They're really getting a much more diverse pool of traders, right? Yeah, but I will say that Coinbase and Robinhood, who actually have a lot of overlap with your users because they're both going after young users who love retail users, who love speculations and trading, who are largely US-based. So this is a competition that will only intensify. Now, do they make money the exact same way? Because I know that Robinhood, payment for order flow was that way of Robinhood keeping charges basically to nothing, right? For traders, they weren't making money off their traders.

22:52It was more off the, I guess, the market makers that they were routing the trades to. Coinbase, I think, still takes a transaction fee off their trade. So are the business models entirely different here or are they quite similar still? Coinbase crypto trading is still their biggest revenue generator. And Coinbase does charge a high fee, especially from retail users for offering crypto tradings. And they have been able to maintain that fee for years just because they're so popular and so dominant in the U.S. And they haven't really faced too much pricing pressure to reduce their fee. For the stock product, which is a new product at Coinbase, Coinbase will also offer zero-fee trading.

23:41So in that sense, on the stock product, they're charging. It's the same business model as Robinhood's stock product. And going back to what you were talking about at the very start, prediction markets seems to be the new in thing that both of these companies are exploring closely. And there's also this notion, you know, Robinhood is getting into, I guess, giving exposure to private companies to whatever extent it can. How do you think this story plays out this year? And prediction season is over now. We're in the middle of January, but do you see the companies being a little bit more closely tied together in terms of performance?

24:19Do you see prediction markets changing the landscape altogether? And maybe, I don't know, maybe Polymarket comes in. You know, we don't know where people will go, really. I think prediction market is important going into 2026. There are some big events that people are watching out for. The World Cup is going to happen this year. And that's something that a lot of people are excited about betting on prediction markets for. The U.S. midterm elections will also happen. So prediction market is really rely on these big news events and cultural events and sports events. And there are several that are scheduled to occur this year.

24:56And for Coinbase, so we'll see how their stock trading product perform. A lot of users already have their stock investing capability elsewhere. So we'll see to what extent they're able to gain traction there. Great. I was just watching the Golden Globes last night, and I saw that they too had their polymarket partnership, I guess. They were predicting who was going to win the next award anyway. It's all moving very quickly, and I want to thank you for coming on to help us make sense of it. That is Yueqi Yang, our crypto reporter here at The Information. Okay. A new data center cooling company is raising a new funding round.

25:38Excelsius, which specializes in the business of liquid cooling, is raising$65 million. The information wrote about that news in our AI infrastructure newsletter where we get into some analysis around the business as well. I want to bring on Josh Klammon, CEO of Excelsius, to help us unpack the big news. Josh, welcome to the show. It's great to have you here. It's good to be here. Thanks. So you had some big news today. Tell us about what your company does. So we make two-phase direct-to-chip liquid cooling. You know, liquid cooling in the data center is a huge challenge now as chips get hotter.

26:15The water chip chips continues to increase. And within a rack or a server in a rack, the density of power and therefore heat, residual heat, continues to increase. This is a huge challenge for data centers to manage this. You know, a few years ago, there was a kind of a competition of new architectures for cooling. That is liquid cooling. The consensus was building the liquid cooling to be required for the data center market over the next few years. And one was immersion. You know, and when we founded our company, we thought that was interesting, but probably an impractical architecture for broad adoption.

26:56Immersion was the way that they used to. What does that even mean? Immersion means you actually put the server equipment in a pool of non-conductive fluid. So it's kind of a bathtub of non-conductive fluid. So the whole server goes in. This had a lot of hype, you know, three or four years ago. I think it captured sort of the attention or the imagination of the lay public. You know, it seemed like sort of science fiction-y. So that was out. put it in a pool yeah yeah and then and then water simply you know pumping water over plates that are installed on top of the chips um and basically you have a couple a couple variables there you can pump water faster for if it's higher heat or you can come pump colder water um but it's limited and we see with the next generation of chips and the one after that the concentration of heat's going to be such that water is going to struggle through convection or sensible, what it's called sensible cooling, it's going to struggle to carry that heat off.

28:07So Excelsior founded a company to develop a really fit for purpose cooling architecture for data centers going forward. And it's based on... Sorry, go ahead. How does it work? Yeah, tell us. Yeah, it's based on two phase physics, which means you pump a fluid, a non-conductive fluid over a plate on top of the chip and you orchestrate a phase change. So from fluid to vapor. Okay. And if you think about your high school physics class, I'm thinking about it right now. Yeah. Okay. There you go. It captures a huge amount of heat energy by creating that phase change much more than just convection cooling or carrying that heat off without that phase change could do.

28:50There are a lot of advantages to this. One, it's a very efficient cooling so um you we can tie this into some of the conversation our last few days that jensen created this sort of sort of uh uh sort of shake in the market because he's right yeah because he i mean correct me if i'm wrong but he he he said he basically said that the the new rubin chip family was not going to need as much of the chilling uh equipment i think i think right That's sad. And it shook up sort of the big chiller manufacturers in the world, JCI, Invertive, etc. We don't think that's true. We think that data center cooling is going to be a challenge and you need to reject that heat efficiently.

29:34The reliance on chillers will continue to decrease because you will be able to warm that primary, what's called the primary water loop in the data center up. But the interesting thing is that for every one degree C, you don't have to cool that water. You save about 4 % energy a year, which obviously for a scaled out data center is incredibly material. So I just want to understand this. So are you suggesting that basically what Jensen was saying about things not getting as hot and us not needing as much cooling equipment, And is it your view that that's not going to be the case and that they're still going to produce as much heat?