TWiT 1066: A Supercomputer in Your Pocket - CES & the Next Leap for On-Device AI Power

8:20Ant Pruitt:You still like, last time you were on, you liked that vacuum cleaner that couldn't get under your bed, but was at least a little smarter than the iRobot.

8:27Leo Laporte:The Matic, yes. Yeah, I still like that. I think it's a great product.

8:31Ant Pruitt:Well, let's stick with robots for a little bit. but somebody's got to do a cut down of robots falling over because there were multiple occasions besides the one that hit you of robots attempting backflips. And there was one, he did a backflip. He kind of got wobbly, stood back up, but then his hand fell off, which is not good. As it happens. I mean, come on. As it happens. Then there's another robot I remember just saw, it just collapsed. It was like pickup sticks like not just like like your robot fell on its face like a human would this robot just went like a like a rag doll the one that just came running into the hall and started

9:12Leo Laporte:like punching people and then try like punching in the air and then i think punched itself in the face and knocked myself out my colleague caught that one on video i haven't seen the video it's

9:24Ant Pruitt:Probably not good for us to take too much human pleasure in the failings of these robots. I know. Just thinking.

9:31Megan Morrone:I was meeting to a vendor in the West Hall who had a robot out, and she was telling me that they had turned off the more aggressive auto-balancing features because, unfortunately, when you turn all of that stuff on, robots, they'll try to move their limbs to rebalance when they're grossly off balance, and it looks like they're punching. It looks like they're attacking. So they said as a safety measure near people, they turned those features off.

9:59Ant Pruitt:I think the leading robot company, at least in the US, there may be some Chinese companies that are ahead of it, is Boston Dynamics.

10:05Leo Laporte:Yeah. And they had Atlas there. Atlas made its debut. But Atlas is not designed for the home. So Atlas is very much designed for factories, although they've hinted that there may be a home robot in its future. But so we didn't we didn't go visit Atlas because he he can't do my laundry. But apparently its demo wasn't particularly impressive. The reporting on The Verge was, you know, he just kind of walked out there and turn around and walk back.

10:31Ant Pruitt:And well, he's going to they've made a deal with Hyundai.

10:35Leo Laporte:Right. And it's going to be in the factory down the road for me. So I'm excited to go check.

10:39Ant Pruitt:You can go look at it, do the laundry at the Hyundai factory.

10:41Leo Laporte:Yeah.

10:43Ant Pruitt:No, it makes sense because robots have been building cars for years.

10:45Megan Morrone:this is not new not humanoid robots jason why are we so obsessed yeah why aren't yes i don't get that why are we so obsessed with robots for humanoid i mean it's so much more functional if you don't worry about making it a humanoid yes form factor the future of robotics and i think

11:04Jason Howell:maybe that's why they're getting a little bit of a rebrand and that cs was part of this and certainly 2025 was a big part of it, of rebranding robots as physical AI, meaning that physical AI doesn't have to look like a human. Even the word robot has come to essentially mean humanoid robot to most people. And so physical AI means AI that is embodied in some way in the real world that can do a number of things. And I'm going to say something that really impressed me, and it's going to sound maybe a little bit boring, but there was in the Siemens keynote, they talked about, and I saw a demo of this in North Hall.

11:46Jason Howell:They had this PepsiCo robot that really, it was just it. And I'll get to why it's actually revolutionary and because it's going to sound dumb. It was basically a giant arm that picked up something from a skid, a product, either, you know, drinks or chips or whatever, right? Bags, boxes, cartons of them and move them from one thing to the other. No big deal, right? That's been happening for a long, long time. Very cool. Or, you know, maybe not that cool. But what it was was the difference was they now have this digital twin. So when you combine AI with world models and physical physics models, what it can do is, you know, a lot of times it would take this robot in the past, you know, somebody would design it, one team would design it, the other team would sort of get it and figure out how to put it in the real world.

12:37Jason Howell:it would mess up things and it would like run into things by accident. And they're like, okay, well, we've got to put the angle higher and all that. Well, with this new model, this digital twin model, it's called digital twin composer. This was something that was announced at the show. It can not only help you design a robot or physical AI of different kinds, but it can help you simulate using the world models. It can help you simulate all of the things that it can do. And so with this robot arm, they said that when they brought it to CES to do the demo, they had never seen it before. They had not used it to set up what the demo was going to do, but they simulated it on the world model.

13:22Jason Howell:And so instead of what would have taken two days and two or three days and a bunch of engineers to like, you know, stage it and make sure it worked right and all that took less than two hours because they had already done all of it. They were able to simulate all of it. And so that's going to enable them with this sort of physical AI to deploy things in factories, in hospitals, in all kinds of assembly lines and other things much, much faster and at a much higher scale and for a lot cheaper. And so sort of this influx of robotics is about to happen now, thanks to the combination of AI, but not just AI, but these sort of next generation models, these world models that are coming in, probably going to be one of the big trends of 2026.

14:11Leo Laporte:Yeah, that's what the guys I would, the interviews I did with the roboticists was like, these, they can't do what you want now, but very soon, using world models, they will just be able to watch you and then do what you do. So like, you just need to show the robot how to do the laundry, and it will then just do it. Like they were saying that that that's the sort of next step. And right now, I mean, SwitchBot was the other humanoid robot that we got to interact with. And they showed me some videos of all the they have like a huge warehouse in China with tons of little rooms where they've just got the robots doing things like making beds, doing the laundry, making breakfast, like just repeatedly to try and train them to do this.

14:56Leo Laporte:And then the thing that the switchboard is the one.

14:59Ant Pruitt:um the one row yes the one row yeah one row um that's the one they say they're going to ship

15:04Leo Laporte:that this year for under ten thousand dollars and that will be in our homes this year um but then the xeroth um ceo told me that they train the robots on tiktok which made me very worried

15:16Megan Morrone:so the robots will be doing dances while folding your laundry

15:21Ant Pruitt:this is it kind of uh was a i don't want to say dead end but this was the initiative some LLM AI companies took, which is to make tools that are human-like, right? Like chat, that's basically what chatbots are. So it's like you're interacting with a human because they think that that's what we want. But it turns out, at least in my opinion, the most useful AI, whether it's robot or LLMs, isn't emulating humanity, but doing specific tasks. Yeah, yeah.

15:50Leo Laporte:And that's what actually the end of my video summarizes, It's like we don't need a humanoid robot to do everything in our home. What we just need is the current robots we have in our homes to do to be better at what they do and maybe do a little more. So I actually saw a robot vacuum style, like it looks like a robot vacuum, but it had a larger arm. And this was at the Dreamy booth and it could open the washing machine, load the clothes, move the clothes into the dryer and then take the clothes out of the dryer and put it in the basket. And it had little cameras in it so it could actually sort the laundry.

16:22Leo Laporte:so it could take, you know, it could see the whites and the colors. It could even, like, analyze the washing labels so that it could make sure it puts the delicates on and all the, you know, be able to do. So it's a concept robot, so it wasn't, like, something they kind of announced. It was just, like, in the corner of their booth. But it was like, this makes more sense to me. And in theory, it could roam around the house and pick up clothes for you, too. But, yeah, like, you don't, the idea, and I spoke to the CEO of Roborock as well, who's the robot vacuum manufacturer, and he made the same point.

16:56Leo Laporte:He said, we're going to make the robots that we have in the homes better at what they do. So they're very, very good. And then maybe give them some additional capabilities. So you'll maybe have two or three robots in your home doing your chores, but not just not one robot emulating you. although what LG's Cloyd demonstrated, which is what I think is much more realistic and actually very much to your point, Jason, about being able to create, you know, personalize AI, bring AI into your home, is it could create, it could connect to all your smart home appliances and control them. So it doesn't need to open the washing machine.

17:40Leo Laporte:It can just tell the washing machine to open because it's a smart home hub it doesn't need to that makes more sense to make the the dishwasher run it just turns the dishwasher on using smart home connectivity um same thing with the oven you know so it can control all the appliances and so it's sort of orchestrating them for you just like your smart home hub is and then it fills in the gaps that the robots can't do themselves which is perhaps like putting the croissant in the oven or taking the laundry out

18:10Jason Howell:of the laundry machine jennifer did you see the one that go the one that goes up that take itself

18:16Leo Laporte:up or down the stairs yes the robot rover yes i think that that that was my pick of my robot pick of ces i was like oh nice we finally did it a robot vacuum that can not only climb stairs but it can clean them too yes because everybody's got perfectly clean floors but their stairs are

18:37Ant Pruitt:The stairs are a mess, right? The stairs are a mess.

18:41Leo Laporte:Yeah, so it can... It's kind of cute.

18:43Ant Pruitt:It's got like little lever legs. Yeah.

18:47Leo Laporte:And I did... Yeah, it can leap as well. So it can kind of jump over things.

18:53Megan Morrone:No, I'm scared. I don't know if I want to jump in robot. It's just little leaps.

18:57Leo Laporte:Just to get like over a transition between a room. Because that's one of the challenges robots vacuums have in your home. they get stuck, you know, on high transitions or big, thick legs of chairs. So yeah, the Roborock Saros rover, it's a concept, but they say it will be coming to market. And it goes up. It's quite slow, but not really slow, not as slow as the laundry folding robot, but it climbs up the stair and then it lifts one leg up and pivots and then vacuums along the stair and then brings its other leg up climbs up to the next step and it kind of on it teeters on its wheels a little bit a couple times i was thinking oh it's just gonna go right back it's going yeah but they say it has um the engine has like built in like braking and you know so it can figure out where it is and not not go backwards keeps going up they didn't show it climbing down the stairs they just showed it going down a slope um but they did before ces they did show us a demo video um and briefings that did show it going downstairs as well as up.

20:03Leo Laporte:And it can also like lift one leg up and sort of clean along things. So I think the idea there is that maybe it could like clean other surfaces, not just steps, but any kind of surface that's maybe, you know, like maybe even a table. Not that I don't know if you'd want your robot vacuum to clean your table, but, you know, it could get into different areas because, and this is Roborock's president's point about making the robots that we have do more and do better rather than do everything. which I think I definitely think is the way we're going with home robotics.

20:33Jason Howell:I was just imagining, you know, I think it was really good to have. And eventually I'm sure these things are going to get good. They'll climb the stairs. They'll, you know, scale the stairs. They'll do all of, they'll clean the stairs. They'll suck your face like the half-life face suckers leaping into you. That too, all of it. But I was just imagining having one of these and then you're like, you hear thump, thump, thump, thump. What was that? Oh, it was the$2 ,000 robot just fell on the stairs.

21:00Leo Laporte:Yes. No, that's, well, that has been a problem with robot vacuums from the beginning. It's true.

21:06Ant Pruitt:It's very, very... There's going to be things like that for a long time where we have little accidents happen.

21:13Megan Morrone:I mean, personally, I would want robotics. I would want two robotic arms mounted to the ceiling in my dining room slash kitchen because they'll help with chores. I'd probably want an arm or two in the laundry room. But other than that, I don't really need a robot following me around the house. Those are the two places that are going to have the most use for any sort of robotic help. And those are the places where you can really easily define the tasks that need to take place. And I think fixed arms work so much better than trying to make it work with a robot that follows, a humanoid or not.

21:50Ant Pruitt:Roborock is one of a number of Chinese companies that basically put Roombas out of business, right? i mean are the chinese lapping us on all of this yes yeah dreamy they're iterating

22:03Leo Laporte:a lot they're all everything you've talked about booth dreamy so dreamy came out in 2020 i think they launched their first robot vacuums in the u.s and they are now so they had their first booth at ces maybe two years ago and it was quite small but like robot vacuum booth next to robo rock now they had two booths one in the venetian one in the lvcc and when i went i went there to interview the um president and the pr guy said to me oh we just signed the contract for our booth next year we're gonna have the largest booth in the history of ces oh my god not our largest booth but like

22:38Ant Pruitt:the largest and they're bigger than samsung yeah samsung and lv have a whole city blocks they had

22:44Leo Laporte:a car they had wash appliances they had smartphones this is dreamy they had smart home appliances, smart home devices. They had a whole like Dyson ripoff room with all the hair dryers. Like they had everything. They're not just doing robots are their main thing, but they have become a huge multi appliance, kind of like robots, robotics and household appliances, like Shark Ninja and Rumba together, plus, you know, Whirlpool and then cars. They're just going crazy. And I heard there was a really interesting article in the South China Morning Post. Am I saying that right? Just before Christmas saying that, and this is unconfirmed, but the dreamy CEO had sent out an email to all employees and was giving everyone an ounce of gold as a bonus.

23:31Leo Laporte:Oh, my God.

23:32Ant Pruitt:Yes. What is that? Five thousand bucks or something. Wow. Back to the heyday of CEOs. They're doing very well. Their first. Go ahead. Sorry, Leo. i'm just i shouldn't bring politics into this but we've banned chinese evs because they're so much better than our evs we've just banned all drones made outside of the us because we don't like it that their drones are so much better than ours uh i am this this this it feels like you're putting a big target on your back when you say we're gonna have the largest booth in the history of ces Yes. I don't, there's nothing to say about it. I don't, you know.

24:12Jason Howell:Two years ago, I remember the first, when I was, I was still at ZDNet and we reviewed the first Dreamy, I think it was like, it was their first big product. It was like the Dreamy 40, maybe.

24:24Leo Laporte:Yeah, the L40, yeah.

24:25Jason Howell:Oh, thank you. And the crazy thing was, it had really just come to the point where Roborock had just taken over from Roomba as like, they were clearly now the best, you know they had the best products um they they had the best pickup the best sort of battery life the best um you know navigation all of it and it was like wow roborock is is the you know 800 pound gorilla and dreamy came out with their first product and it was better than than roborock's and it's like ever since then roborock has just been you know uh scrambling to try to catch up and dreamy i i was so impressed that how did they come out with their first product clearly they just looked at what all they were doing and they're like oh there's a couple things that could be better and we'll just make those better and and it was better at almost everything you know with

25:11Ant Pruitt:its first gen is there a security or privacy concern uh with this i mean these uh these autonomous devices in your house map cameras they have cameras yes but the same sort of security

25:24Megan Morrone:issue you're going to have with having amazon appliances everywhere i mean right any any sort autonomous vehicle in the in your home is going to have a map of your home that's that's how it moves around it's going to generate that and a lot of that processing does not happen on the device it's going to happen to the server that it's connected to on the other side of the cloud so is there a security issue absolutely what could you do with that information i mean you could do nefarious things but people would have to really target you to do it so it makes

25:54Ant Pruitt:more sense frankly for amazon to look and see what furniture you have so they can show you the right ads than for the chinese to look and see what furniture you have so they can invade our

26:04Leo Laporte:shores i don't know i don't know what i mean and this is why the matic we mentioned earlier is one that i really like because it does all its processing locally you don't need a cloud there's no i like that wired honestly and if that's something you're concerned about yes i you know chinese manufacturers is is there are so ecovacs had a pretty bad incident recently which is another Chinese robot vacuum manufacturer where their robot vacuums got hacked and they were like chasing people around and yelling at them in their houses, which is obviously terrifying. And then there are like user metrics you can put on the robot.

26:40Leo Laporte:So you can disable the camera. There are, Roborock actually came out with a whole line without cameras. So if you, you know, you can still use the vacuums without having a camera in your home. They have like a pin in order to enable the camera and the camera all of them when they are recording because you can use them to like check in on your home and dreamies one of dreamies features is and narwhal which is another one there's a lot of them um is they can go find your pet for you so if you're out of the house and you want to check on your pet the robot can go and look for the pet for you but the the robot will say as it's moving and recording live view enabled live view enabled like so that there There are lots of safeguards, I suppose, but ultimately, yeah, anything connected to the internet, you are going to have security risks.

27:25Leo Laporte:But now with Matter, you have got the capability of using some of these devices just with a local platform. You obviously lose some of the capabilities because if you so you could connect, I think Dreamy and Roborock both work with Matter. So you could just set up the robot via Apple Home. Although if you want the mapping features, you do need to use the Dreamy app. So, yeah, there's still little ways to go until we can get, you know, local control of some of these devices. But I think that's the way we're going to see some companies coming out to sort of differentiate themselves because there obviously are concerns around that.

28:04Ant Pruitt:I do think the Dreamy Halo hairdryer, which is great.

28:08Leo Laporte:The Verge did give an award to.

28:11Ant Pruitt:Why isn't that you there, though?

28:13Leo Laporte:i don't there is a video of me i used it because this wasn't plugged in this was an unveil it was just sitting there but so i went to the dreamy booth and got my hair dried by it it was for

28:22Ant Pruitt:people who don't aren't seeing the video this is a thing that is as tall as a human almost i mean it's it's a big arc that sits on the floor like half circle yeah yeah does air come out of the

28:32Leo Laporte:whole thing no just the time yeah so no it's the top so you can this is it back to the stand

28:38Ant Pruitt:hair dryer that we got rid of in the 60s it looks like that's like the dyson hair lots of young people and i didn't want to say yeah we just remember you used to go to the salon and you'd sit under the hood with all the other guys and curlers and this is like that it does it

28:56Leo Laporte:it reminded me of that a lot it's got it so it uses ai to try oh well like movement so in theory they told me what does it track your hair you should be able to just moisture move you it tracks your head so you can move and it follows your head and also it moves around your head yeah i'm gonna drop the link of me does this does it so it's rotating yes oh my god yes so it's moving for you so instead of having uh having to hold a blow dryer which

29:27Ant Pruitt:gosh knows is really an onerous task uh and you don't have to go to a hairdresser to do it for you you can have the dreamy halo dry your hair yeah i need to pitch to defcon this year that

29:40Megan Morrone:we're going to create a village with nothing but these smart appliances and just let hackers go crazy all the ways you could hurt a human inside this little village no it does have um it's a

29:53Leo Laporte:lamp so the whole of course it is because why not yeah and then it also it shoots like moisturizing air so it's supposed to like be a scalp treatment for you does it do sense at the end of the run

30:08Ant Pruitt:yeah i see it on your instagram like essential oils yes like that kind of thing it's meant to make you feel jtp healthy there's me and and you went in with your hair wet no you didn't no all

30:19Leo Laporte:And it also was just kind of, so you could see it moving a little bit. It's like, because as you dry your own hair, you move the hair dryer. You don't want a big hot spot at the top of your head. Yeah, so it's moving for you.

30:32Megan Morrone:Yeah, then it's just an air fryer.

30:33Ant Pruitt:That's different.

30:37Leo Laporte:It was, it was, they said it's going to be about$700. $700, they say.

30:41Ant Pruitt:It's not available yet, but.

30:44Leo Laporte:No, but they showed the video of it, of like you sitting on a couch and it just kind of. jennifer you're such a trooper i can't believe you had to go around all of these different things

30:53Megan Morrone:i mean we're making fun of it but i mean it looks nice yeah it does it's furniture you could have

30:59Ant Pruitt:it could be in your living room yeah oh that lamp that's my hair dryer too yeah

31:06Jason Howell:i need to let the lamp hold on a second i'll be right there i'm going to let the lamp dry my hair

31:10Ant Pruitt:i could see buying this for my wife just as a gift just just for us i mean it'd be a fun christmas gift yeah and then my mom would use it to dry the kitchen right mom why is it dreamy in the kitchen uh trying all the rags trying all the stuff well i do want to talk about the computer in your pocket father robert uh we'll get to that we there's so much to talk about chips uh this was an interesting it sounds like a very interesting ces uh we have a doll yeah not doll there's a lot yeah a lot jason heiners here from uh his brand new the deepview.com great to have you jason jennifer pattison tui from the verge father robert from the vatican the digital jesuit now father robert has put together a countdown a casey casem style countdown of your top five gizmos from ces and we're going to do it as casey casem does backwards so now starting our top five countdown of CES hits here's number five from the show floor hit it

32:22Megan Morrone:CES what we used to call the consumer electronics show it's the mecca for industry professionals engineers and those who are just interested in the latest and greatest in technology now with millions of square feet of exhibit halls and thousands of vendors it can be difficult to zero in on the technology that you're looking for, which is why I did the hard work for you. I'm Father Robert Balassir, the digital Jesuit, and this is Padres Top 5 from CES 2026. Number five, the Strut EV. Not everybody who needs a mobility device can safely operate a mobility device. That's the basic problem that led Singapore-based robotics company Strut to create the EV.

33:06Megan Morrone:To address that problem, strut cable EV is a suite of sensors and processing that they call their EVSense system. It uses a combination of cameras, LiDAR, time of flight, and ultrasonic sensors to give the system a 360 by 360 degree view of the environment around the EV. This allows the EV to not only see, understand, and avoid people, hazards, and obstacles, but also to autonomously bring its users safely to their destinations. Combined with a four-motor active drive motion and suspension system that will dynamically adjust torque and prevent slippage. The EV works well on carpet, gravel, concrete, wet surfaces, and the like.

33:41Megan Morrone:It tops out at 7 miles per hour, has a max payload of 350 pounds, can climb grades of 13 degrees, and has an all-day replaceable cartridge battery that can charge from 20 to 80 percent capacity in 30 minutes. In co-pilot mode, the EVSense system smooths user inputs to prevent jerky motions and applies This is the hover chair from WALL-E. To prevent collisions or driving into unsafe areas in three axes. This is for my parents. In the plus mode, move the joystick where you want to go, and the E-Sense will automatically adjust the heading to get you there while going around any obstacles. Basically, it's drive-by point.

34:13Megan Morrone:So I'm not driving it right now. I'm hungry. Oh, it's just... In Pathfinder and Wave, the EV drops into full autonomous operation. All right, I need it now. Users can either use a map to point out where they want to go, or they can use the context-sensitive voice assistant. For example, say I'm hungry and the EV will safely pilot you to the kitchen. At$5 ,300 launch price and the eventual$7 ,500 MSRP, the Strut EV is well below the average price for an advanced wheelchair. It could be the perfect tech for those who need a little help getting around.

34:45Ant Pruitt:That's very cool. Now, we're going to take all of these and put them together. There's a seven-minute feature we'll put up on our YouTube channel, on our Twit News YouTube feed, so you can see all of them. but that was number five and father robert's hit parade and we will get to the rest and i was so

35:02Megan Morrone:enamored because i've been looking at nice wheelchairs for my father because he's having trouble moving around but the problem is 7 500 bucks is a good price it's a it's actually it's 5 300 right now it'll go up to 7 500 oh okay well 53 yeah but 15 000 is what i was looking at for a standard electronic motorized wheelchair oh that's the problem with that is if you can't drive it if you don't if you no longer have the ability to drive you'll be driving into walls and

35:28Ant Pruitt:the people this will not let you drive oh that's fantastic yeah wow the only thing that's missing i'll be honest with you it needs a scissor lift so you can say up and it goes it goes up wow that's all it needs it just needs that and then done deal if i could sit yeah if i could sit at the

35:48Megan Morrone:bottom of the stairs and it would just push me up the stairs now now leo one of the other things that i was thinking of is we have a retirement home for jesuit priests in los gatos california and we had to ban scooters mobility scooters because the guys were running into each other yeah you know we were we were jousting they were not jousting but when you live with someone for 60 years you develop a lot of grudges oh they were intentionally running into each other i think so ramming each other all right we'll have more accidentally running over people's feet it was

36:21Ant Pruitt:We'll have more in our top five countdown with Father Robert, Jennifer Passatui, and Jason Heiner. Our show today brought to you by Redis, brand new sponsor, but not new to us because we've been using Redis for our website for 10 years at least. Redis is R-E-D-I-S, and I think if you're a geek, you know the name, is the real-time data platform that powers ultra-fast applications. We use it for caching. You can use it for data storage, for search, vector embeddings, AI workloads, and more. With a global user community and adoption across startups to Fortune 500 companies, Redis continues to innovate on speed, scalability, and developer experience.

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37:45Ant Pruitt:We love Redis. Extremely low latency and high throughput. That's important to us because, you know, you go to a website, if it doesn't load in a second or two, you feel like something's wrong. You might even leave. It does automatic scaling, global availability. We have a global audience. You probably do too. Simple setup and a generous free tier. In fact, I want you to check out the free tier. Redis Cloud. It's the real-time context engine that gathers, syncs, and serves the data you need to build accurate AI apps that scale. To learn more, or try Redis Cloud for free. Just search for Redis Cloud, or you can go to their website, redis.io.

38:23Ant Pruitt:R-E-D-I-S dot I-O. Thank you, Redis, for years of making our website ultra-reliable and for sponsoring this week in tech. So glad to have you in the Twit family. All right, what is in your pocket? Robert. You got a supercomputer in your pocket?

38:42Megan Morrone:Really? I've got a supercomputer. It's got a whole bunch of NDAs attached to it. But let's just say it comes from the largest maker of AI chips in the world. Okay.

38:53Ant Pruitt:We know who that is.

38:54Megan Morrone:Okay. We know who that is. It's their next generation. Do you have Vera Rubin in your pocket? Possibly. Possibly. She's happy to see you. It's in the format of their Spark. So if you've seen their spark okay it is basically a mini data center in a box this is using the newest of the processors the uh two-part that you can't mention i understand yeah yeah yeah exactly now the nice thing about it is we're going to be using it mostly for video creation and you can do everything local you don't even have to remotely touch cloud resources to be able to do it and i can put together a 4k video lasting about 30 seconds in about 90 seconds.

39:33Megan Morrone:I mean, the turn is so fast. It iterates so quickly. It's amazing. Does it run normal software? It's not running Windows. No, no, no, no, no, no. This is all Linux. So it's a standalone server that you can basically send prompts to. You can send prompts and it will continue to iterate. You could also load up your own LLMs.

39:52Ant Pruitt:So you can have multiple processes going at once?

39:55Megan Morrone:Exactly, exactly. So we've got this box ostensibly it's for video but also we where i work my day job we're in a place where we often have these conferences that have conversations that we call them internal forum which means it cannot leave that room it it's it's not secret it's just sensitive information we cannot use any of the current popular translation services because they all require us to send those conversations away this that's that's a no-go so we're going to be trying to host our own small AI data centers that do nothing but real-time translation. That's where this thing really comes in.

40:32Megan Morrone:It's where it's really going to shine. So I like this. It's a nice trend of taking just enough compute power and putting it into your local network, your local campus, so that you can do everything in-house. I'm a big, big proponent of that.

40:48Ant Pruitt:Well, I am. Yeah. I mean, honestly, I was talking before the show, maybe we'll talk a little bit after the show we'll certainly talk more about it on other shows like intelligent machines but i am head over heels in love with cloud code or clude as uh french friends could it cloud code and uh in fact i just ended up this morning paying for the max version the 250 buck a month max version because i'm so blown away by what it can do but ideally that's a lot of money ideally i have a lot of hardware here i could run this stuff locally uh as for privacy reasons for security reasons for cost reasons i would love something like claude to run my household um so i could see some real applications for this now this imaginary company that you can't mention the name of do they envision it as a commercial only product or do they see a home

41:38Megan Morrone:use for it at some point i mean it's it's going to be commercial only but it will leak its way into enterprise it it's never going to make it into home not in its current configuration just because even though it's far more efficient it's still kind of power and water hungry so you wouldn't

41:56Ant Pruitt:want to do that what you are you carrying a a pump and a reservoir with you in your pot in your backpack how water it's gotta be a sealed system right yeah to be able to get decent throughput

42:08Megan Morrone:put on this thing for an enterprise, you would need to water cool them. In fact, we'll see that later on in one of the segments, but the blades, the data center that Nvidia set up in their suite in the Fontainebleau, it's amazing how much they have to put cooling into the development of the solutions. It's no longer an afterthought. They have to have that upfront because these things are putting out so much thermal energy that if you're not thinking about that from the get go, it's just not gonna work.

42:38Ant Pruitt:uh jensen did do a uh quite a uh fun speech talked a lot about all the new things i'm not saying that this is an nvidia product but i'm segwaying now to nvidia sorry uh uh although um jason jeff jarvis said he really wanted to interview jensen's leather jacket he's very

42:57Jason Howell:impressed yeah i mean the leather the leather jacket the black leather jacket is the new The new black turtleneck. It's the new black turtleneck.

43:06Ant Pruitt:Yeah. For sure. I tweeted that. This one looked like alligator or something. He pulls it off, though. He kind of does, right?

43:13Jason Howell:Greg Brockman came on, the president of OpenAI, came on the AMD keynote. And when he came on, he came on in a black leather jacket. And I tweeted out, this is my most popular tweet of the whole show. I was like, breaking news. uh greg brockman has arrived at the amd keynote in a black leather jacket this is serious and that was by far my most um interacted with tweet of the entire show that's hysterical well maybe it's the new look for the new billionaires um so we'll get to amd in a second nvidia announced

43:49Ant Pruitt:a new platform called vera rubin yes i presume she is a computer scientist uh space yeah scientist space scientist okay uh this is this is this is replace blackwell or is this it does

44:04Megan Morrone:this is the next generation race blackwell vera ruben so it's a vera ruben here's a cpu ruben is the gpu so so there's a there's a blackwell in the ruben no no no it's it's a brand new chip brand new piece of silicon it uses nv link 6 so it's double the bandwidth to each gpu and two GPUs are two Rubin GPUs are paired with each Vera CPU on the same piece of silicon

44:28Jason Howell:the Rubin is the GPU it's like a sandwich and the Vera is the CPU he said there's like six chip this makes up essentially six chips one of them is Vera one of his Rubin and then there's four

44:39Ant Pruitt:others um the interlink and all that the thing she's an astronomer she reshaped how scientists understand the property of galaxies yes very cool the ruben gpu the vero cpu uh both built uh on tsmc's three nanometer uh process uh but it's the bandwidth is the interconnect that is i

45:00Jason Howell:think very important it's amazing you know they were already double yeah they were already had a huge lead right in in ai chips like this is no secret they have 90 market share um they have uh If they stopped taking orders today, they have everything that they're going to make in 2026 is already sold. Right. So they have so much demand. And that's why they're, you know, essentially been printing money for three years. And even with that, you know, there are competitors trying. So Tranium from Amazon, you have Google with their TPUs. You have AMD, of course, trying to also grab a piece of the market.

45:46Jason Howell:You know, the next biggest, according to AMD, according to most places to NVIDIA at 90 percent is AMD with five percent. And yet their next generation chip, this Vero Rubin chip, we weren't expecting for about another six months. So this is kind of about six months ahead of schedule. Well, it won't be out till later this year. That's right. It won't be. But we expected them to kind of announce the full details of it, you know, probably mid-year.

46:10Ant Pruitt:One of the things that comes up for me is we see these companies, you know, XAI, Elon Musk's company, and Meta, of course, and Microsoft, spending billions of dollars building these data centers with the latest chips that are now obsolete.

46:28Megan Morrone:it's worse than that leo because we know for a fact because of the power consumption of the blackwell chips that there's a very large percentage of the blackwell chips sold that are not powered on they can't power them on so they bought them they had they had an overheating problem when they first came out exactly exactly so you've got a huge chunk that are doing nothing except waiting for more data center capacity well if you look at how much more energy efficient the vera rubin is going to be over the grace blackwell it actually makes economic sense to just no longer use the blackwell chips that you've got in reserve oh my god buy all brand new vera rubin chips now

47:08Jason Howell:for the this is for the especially for the folks who are on the leading edge of like training yeah

47:13Ant Pruitt:you can send those blackwell chips to to us you'll take them you'll take them put them on ebay you know what we'll sell those and they'll do that's not fully ingested at some point right it might be a couple of years off this is the thing that fi i find most interesting i'm again cloud code is so good but it's running off of anthropic servers trained with very very expensive hardware probably being sold at a loss by anthropic but this stuff trickles down yes it does right is it is it reasonable to think that in six months or a year or even if it's two years i will have that kind of capability sitting on on my desk here it's very reasonable desk and i mean the problem

47:56Megan Morrone:is they sell them in blades so they they're all right i'll have a server closet okay well i mean no how big is your server closet and does it have three-phase power but you've got something in your pocket liquid cooling yes so that's very special use case so instead of putting it into a blade they put it into a individual case well it's not tied then to the blade you could do it in different

48:21Ant Pruitt:ways right i guess i don't know i think there'd be more of a market for that than there would be for a robot and it i mean look maybe those robots are going to cost thousands maybe ten thousand dollars right if if for ninety thousand ninety that's what one of the the jupiter he said it

48:39Leo Laporte:would be 90 ,000. Who's going to buy that?

48:43Ant Pruitt:That's got to be a kind of limited market.

48:46Megan Morrone:There are a lot of people who are going to pay a lot of money to have robots fall on them. It'll be like a car event, right?

48:54Ant Pruitt:It'll be like a car.

48:55Jason Howell:And will you need it as much as you need a car? Optimus, they talked about that, that essentially the price will be similar to a car with Tesla, you know, Optimus. But, you know, the thing with, to your point, Leo, though, the chips, The thing is, is these high-end chips are going to be, you know, essentially they do the same thing for training with a quarter of the number of GPUs, which is incredible. For inference, I believe, and Father Robert can gut check me on this. Inference is 10x. Inference is 10x, exactly. So 10x for inference, 4x for training, that's going to let you do so much more with the same amount of chips.

49:36Jason Howell:Now, one of the counter trends that's happening right now.

49:39Ant Pruitt:Before you go on, I need to know these terms. So when you create an LLM, you train it. And that's the first expense. Is that the most CPU or GPU intensive part of the process? It depends what kind of model you're making. Okay. But if you're building chat GPT 5.2 or Anthropics Opus 4.5, Yeah. That's the inference part. Then you do a lot of post-training and reinforcement learning and stuff. What's the inference?

50:12Megan Morrone:Is that when I'm using it? That's right. Every time you ask something of an LLM, it's generating an inference token. That's its response.

50:20Ant Pruitt:That's the user cost.

50:21Jason Howell:And is the user cost higher than the training cost? It's not now, but it will be. Remember, only 13 % of the world, people in the world have actually used generative AI to this point.

50:33Ant Pruitt:Which is surprising because OpenAI says 800 million people use ChatGPT every month.

50:39Jason Howell:Well, sorry, only 13 % use it on a monthly basis, you know, have used it once maybe.

50:46Ant Pruitt:I must be in the top 10th of 1 % because I'm using it all day, every day. I'm using it right now.

50:53Megan Morrone:There is one more spec that's important for the conversation, and that is per watt, per watt of power used. vera rubin does eight times the work of grace blackwell so it is far more power efficient which again that's why yeah if you're sitting on a lot of blackwell product right now just waiting powered up you wouldn't be looking at it and going you know in a year the the vera rubin is going to be cheaper because the power costs are so much less and somebody in the flow connects

51:21Ant Pruitt:pointing out in the chat room remember the six million dollar man was six million dollars so 90 ,000 is a deal. The counter trend though is we have the technology.

51:34Jason Howell:We're going to see, we're going to see that I'm, you know, because it's so expensive to run AI, right? There's this real ROI problem for businesses. And so what we're seeing is small language models, SLMs and domain specific language models. There's a real move to using them and optimizing them. I did a story in December on this company, Neurometric AI, that their whole thing is they're going to help you find the way to optimize your workload to a specific model. And you can, it'll be like up to like a 10th of the cost and higher performance. And so, and you can use older hardware, you can use Blackwell, you could use hardware two or three generations old.

52:20Jason Howell:So you're still going to, it's not like Blackwell, people are going to throw them the trash or something they're still going to use them they're just going to use them for

52:26Ant Pruitt:smaller you know things where they don't need them as much in fact this argues for less uh focus on these kind of generalized chat bots and more specific stuff a medical ai for instance that would help a doctor with diagnostics it could be a smaller model run much more inexpensively and really frankly be more useful and accurate because it just does that um yes that makes a lot of sense in the context of what we're talking about this general purpose robot versus purpose build robots it makes more sense not that totally a dozen robots running around the house all the

53:01Megan Morrone:times well the sustainability question really has to be that's a big question the conversation yeah it's terrible right you've got elon musk who's going to be spinning up a new two gigawatt data center and remember you lose about 1.8 gallons of water to evaporation for every ton hour of cooling that means for his two gigawatt data center he's going to be losing about 79 million gallons of water a year yeah out of that in your head he's great that way it's like

53:32Ant Pruitt:a little ai himself i mean look golf courses probably lose that much as well i mean we have to decide what we want to spend our water budget on and evaporate doesn't mean it goes away forever

53:43Megan Morrone:it comes back down but they are pulling from municipal water sources so that's a problem the the meta uh data center in arizona it's already pulling from a place that has very little

53:54Ant Pruitt:water right i don't know why they're building these data centers in water-deprived areas

54:00Jason Howell:well tax breaks i guess meta is building one in louisiana that's essentially the size of manhattan um and uh hyperion uh it's two gigawatts so and it's going to scale up to five gigawatts and essentially the size of Manhattan. But the interesting thing, I did wonder this because it's, you know, Louisiana is essentially a swamp. So I thought, well, the water is to get a hold of. Suck it out of the bayou.

54:23Ant Pruitt:There's also power. And unfortunately, at least some of Elon's plants are running on natural gas, which is a horrible polluting form of energy. Although what is interesting is all of this puts pressure purely economic, not necessarily environmental, but it has the same impact on these companies to become more efficient, to go to nuclear power and renewable power, to use less energy, to use less water. And they seem to be doing that.

54:49Jason Howell:On Friday, Meta just became, sorry, I'll just say, Meta became the number one buyer of nuclear power in the U.S. on Friday.

55:02Ant Pruitt:They signed a huge, huge deal. Like five more plants or something.

55:06Megan Morrone:yeah or you could do it the way that they're doing it here in nevada which is there's three data centers that are going in and they all have an agreement with nevada power that the cost of building the new plants at least two to three new plants at a price of 1.2 to 2 billion a pop are going to be paid by the rate payers so oh that's good that's fantastic oh yeah what could possibly go wrong there jeez yeah well there's some there's some warring parties uh at all of

55:37Ant Pruitt:this um but i think at least for now the world has said we want ai uh whatever the cost so amd lisa sue they have new they've replaced or not replaced but they're going to have a successor to the strix halo right and new zen 5 uh apus um amd is amd lapping intel in this i mean not lapping they laughed intel it's done done deal they're they're intel's in the dust although intel's new processors are actually surprisingly good um but when it comes to ai AMD is the leader here.

56:17Megan Morrone:They're not as AI-optimized as AMD's new chips. AMD and AMD Silicon, they have a lot of headroom. So if they really wanted to push, they could push Intel out of existence. But that's not in their best.

56:30Ant Pruitt:What about Qualcomm and its chipset, the Snapdragon?

56:34Megan Morrone:Is it competitive? I mean, ARM, you've played with ARM chips. Some of them are competitive. Most of them are not. Right. The Strix Halo I have over here on my framework

56:45Ant Pruitt:is great i have an apple mac mini and apple's done some pretty amazing things and they have npus and they have unified memory and so they have some Hardware that's pretty good for AI, right? Nothing like the Vera Rubin.

57:01Megan Morrone:It all comes down to where Qualcomm is finding its profit center. Its profit center is not in super powerful intelligent devices. It's in all devices. Right. And so that's where they're spending their R &D. Well, you know what else is getting smart? Legos. Yeah. This was my favorite thing. I didn't put it in my top five, but I loved this.

57:21Leo Laporte:This was our best in show by far. No one disputed it at all.

57:25Ant Pruitt:Tell us about it, J.P.T. This is a smart brick.

57:29Leo Laporte:So sadly, I didn't get to see it myself, but I heard everyone raving about it because it actually wasn't on the show floor. It was one of those, like, you have to go have a invitation booth thing. Gotta go to the hotel. But Sean Hollister, who is our unofficial Lego correspondent, just had a blast. And there's a great video of him playing with the toys. But basically, it just makes Legos come to life. So each brick, so there's special, these special bricks come in the set. There's, I think, three sets that are launching in March. And they have Bluetooth, so it works on a little Bluetooth mesh, like a local Bluetooth mesh to communicate.

58:08Leo Laporte:They have NFC chips. And then what happens is when you put it in, say, you put one brick in with Luke Skywalker and R2-D2 in one of their jets, planes, spaceships, and it knows which character is in there. And it can talk and respond like the character, making noises, like R2-D2 noises, and they can connect to each other. So there was one demo I saw where Darth Vader was talking to Princess Leia, and they were kind of communicating in a different language. So it's like everything that you did as a kid to make the toys talk to each other, but it actually doesn't pull you out.

58:49Ant Pruitt:Oh, now you don't have to do that anymore.

58:51Megan Morrone:It is exceptionally stupid. It is a waste of time, and I want them so much. It's so fun. It's going to sell to adults, obviously. There's an X-Wing, and then there's the Emperor's Throne Room. You need all three.

59:03Jason Howell:So it's not AI. We're not talking AI here. No, they're like, our product has no AI. It's dumber than anything you have seen at the show. And it's also the coolest thing that you've...

59:12Ant Pruitt:It can measure distance and orientation. So it has accelerometers in it. So it's more than just NFC talking.

59:21Leo Laporte:Yeah, it knows. It lights up and makes noises.

59:25Megan Morrone:And you fly it around.

59:26Jason Howell:Yeah, it whooshes. It lights up and makes Star Wars noises.

59:31Ant Pruitt:But how, you know, the next generation is not going to know how to go, pew pew pew pew it's got toys are going to do it for the next generation can do their own thing this is 45 minutes like battery life so it doesn't take uh triple a batteries no it has a little comes

59:50Leo Laporte:with a little charger thing you pop the bricks on the charger so you get 45 minutes of playtime before they have to be charged again. And yeah, I mean, it is, we saw a lot of AI in toys at CES, which is not a good thing.

1:00:06Ant Pruitt:No, in fact, not a good thing. There's our own Senator, Alex Padilla, has introduced a bill in the Senate, US Senate, banning AI in toys for kids.

1:00:16Leo Laporte:Yeah. And this is just a way of taking, you know, technology, taking the experience of playing with your toys to that next level, that level you always wanted when you were playing with them as a kid. And I don't think, I mean, I'm sure there's some naysayers saying, well, yeah, but aren't you just destroying your own imagination? You can't use your own imagination, don't have the toys do it for you. But you still are playing with them. You are still creating an experience with the toys. It's just more augmented and with more fun and more engaging. So hopefully maybe keep kids away from engaging things online and playing with engaging things in real life.

1:00:52Leo Laporte:It feels like a win-win here, really.

1:00:54Jason Howell:I think that last point is the most important one because I had plenty of toys where, and my kids had plenty of toys where you had the button that made the noise of the ship, you know, and it didn't mean you didn't make noises, other noises, right? But it was more engaging and it becomes, it can compete a little bit better in some cases with some of the digital, you know, stuff.

1:01:17Ant Pruitt:You put Palpatine on his chair and he, it plays. Exactly.

1:01:24Megan Morrone:the death march this is sean's adult me an adult me can afford all the toys that child me couldn't

1:01:31Ant Pruitt:get so yeah that's who's gonna buy this you know what i love about this is lego lost the patent you know it expired for its bricks so anybody can make lego bricks now but they are innovating in ways that preserves i mean i'm sure this is patented that preserves their advantage that's good. I'd like to see that. That's nice.

1:01:50Jason Howell:Yeah. You know, the AI toys, we talked a little bit about this on Thursday, on Wednesday, Intelligent Machines as well. But this was one of those that felt like all of a sudden, it's not like that there hadn't been them, there hadn't been AI toys before at CES, but while the sort of like emotional support toy, you know, thing was really disturbing.

1:02:15Ant Pruitt:Tell us about that. You mentioned that on Wednesday, but a lot of people didn't see it. There are emotional support toys?

1:02:21Jason Howell:Multiple ones. And yeah, there's this one that was like essentially a sock with an eye that like follows you around. It is as silly as it sounds. It follows you around the room. It tries to learn what makes you laugh, what makes you smile. And I loved it that we wrote about these very skeptically and said, like, look, putting all of these toys out in the world that are aimed at helping, you know, be emotionally supportive for your kids because they're trying to help solve loneliness and isolation and that kind of thing. And we sort of questioned like doing all this before thinking through all the implications feels like it's pretty dangerous.

1:02:58Jason Howell:And our audience responded 50 % immediately. And this was an AI audience, right? That said, no, they wouldn't want this. And then only 25 % said yes. And then the other 25 were sort of like, we're still trying to decide. And one reader wrote in so coherently and said, you know, isn't the promise of AI that it should do more things for you and you can spend more time with your kids, not that you should, you know, buy emotional support toy for them. And, you know, how does this help?

1:03:26Ant Pruitt:Let's face it. Most parents are looking for ways to spend less time with their kids. Let's be honest, right?

1:03:31Leo Laporte:I think the emotional support toys are also for the adults though. Like we saw, I saw one. Well, this is for old people.

1:03:37Ant Pruitt:This one, and and from the mind with heart robotics is for elderly people who you know not only do parents don't want to spend time with their kids they don't want to spend time with their parents

1:03:47Leo Laporte:so there was one we saw called little milo that actually we that was picked as our best most irrationally loved product at ces um because it was so cute and it was designed for people who can't have pets but would like to have a dog and it's a little it was a tiny bit creepy and a lot the comments on the article were like well this is i mean it's made by a robot vacuum manufacturer from china so um just a little yeah the little milo but he was so cute what's he look like um he is a dog it looks just like a dog and remember the dogs from like the 80s that everyone bought speaking like ipo sony's no no no no not even as robotic as that like it was a dog that could kind of just go,

1:04:33Ant Pruitt:it's all you really need a dog to do really. Let's be honest.

1:04:37Leo Laporte:And move around and wag its tail. And this one can't even move, but it, the idea behind it is it's supposed to, I mean, it uses AI to kind of develop a personality based on how you interact with it and become an emotional support for you. And it's, it's meant for adults. It's not meant for kids.

1:04:53Ant Pruitt:Is this a market you think that's going to take off?

1:04:56Leo Laporte:It seems, I think there is, there is, you know, one of the biggest epidemics in the world is loneliness. And we're seeing a lot of companies come out with products to help with things like aging in place or loneliness for elders who are living alone. It's not because they don't have the ability to leave the house, but they're just sort of stuck and lonely. They don't have people visiting them. There's one robot that I've actually been following at CES since 2018 that's very successful in its space called LEQ. And we've actually talked about LEQ on the show before, I think. And they were at CES again this year, and they've been using AI to help the robot become much more useful to the person because the main point of it initially was conversation.

1:05:47Leo Laporte:It's one of the only proactive AIs on the market. So it prompts the person it's living with so that it's trying to get them to talk and communicate. Because if you're an elderly person living alone, you don't speak sometimes for, you know, days because you're not if you're not talking to people. So this the idea behind this one is proactive. And with AI, they're now using they've turned it into more of a health agent that's actually fully monitoring the person and looking for any potential issues. Oh, that's different. Connect with their health providers. So you connect it, you can connect it through the app with your health providers and it can help understand your, not just your emotional health, but also physical health.

1:06:31Leo Laporte:Like she only went to the bathroom. I don't know this because this is maybe a little private, but, you know, it could be something like she only went into the bathroom four times today, maybe, or she went too many times today. And this could be bad. This is something we need to relate to the health agent. You know, think proactive things to keep monitoring. I think that, but you know, in terms of having devices like this in your home, when I said this to the LEQ guys like, but isn't it kind of sad that we have to use a robot to do things like this rather than have people helping us? And he's like, yeah, if we could, if there were enough people out there to just spend time with the elderly, I would love to be put out of business, but there just aren't and people are lonely.

1:07:11Leo Laporte:and this is something he thinks, and it has been shown to help. They did a trial in New York City for a couple of years. Yeah. When I was at ZDNet,

1:07:20Jason Howell:we actually worked on, we interviewed people who had used it. So, and they talked about the things they liked, they talked about they didn't like. It's a story from Sabrina Ortiz at ZDNet that really interviewed people. And on balance, they found it quite useful and helpful and were wanting to keep using it after the trial.

1:07:42Leo Laporte:Yeah.

1:07:43Ant Pruitt:It feels like it would be better to get a dog, though, than a robot. So we did a study. A dog can be hard to look after. I guess it's a lot of work, right?

1:07:51Megan Morrone:Yeah, my day job has a lot to say about loneliness and human interaction. And so we did a limited study about four years ago, and we took a bunch of these AI companions, put them into the hands of some people who needed some sort of companionship and it helped i mean the the test for for neuroplasticity looked very very good you had people who were engaging far more than they would if they were alone and surprisingly the one metric that we really enjoyed was the fact that the residents who used these devices tended to reach out to to real humans more than they would have otherwise that's interesting so so it's a kind of a wedge to

1:08:37Ant Pruitt:kind of move them in that interactive direction it's really true and i've seen that things about

1:08:42Leo Laporte:leq is they do between users they do like a bingo night every wednesday so everyone with an leq plays bingo oh that's cool and then they also have these tours and they actually go live with a tour guide in a city like say you know at the vatican or um in paris and the tour guide is showing them around live it has a little tv screen and you can actually ask questions and say oh look over can you move over this way so i can see what's over here and like so that it's really helping it's not just a computer talking to you it's kind of helping bridge a connection um to people i think i think we're going to see more of this actually the founder of irobot um which went bankrupt this year last year um his new endeavor he hasn't gone public with exactly what it's going to do but the The name is Intelligent.

1:09:29Leo Laporte:Oh, it's Familiar Machines and Magic. The new robotics company, Familiar Machines and Magic. And I think, and I spoke with him, I interviewed with him on The Vergecast a while ago, and he kind of hinted at how, you know, this loneliness epidemic could really be, help, we could help solve it with robotic companions. So I think we'll be seeing something from him along these lines too. So I think, yes, I think it is something that, to answer your question, Leo, it is a trend we're going to see more of. it's sad that we need it but maybe we do yeah it is and we shouldn't also try to find ways

1:10:02Jason Howell:to do get humans involved too like one of the things that i do in my spare time is work with um you know youth literacy um programs and one of the things we do with is getting kids if they want to sort of find ways to make their community better and one of the ways is often going and visiting you know people who who are lonely like in their community like hey can we can we think of anybody, you know, who is doesn't have many people to visit them and do it. So like, we should also find the human ways to do this in addition to the technology.

1:10:31Ant Pruitt:How much is Lil Milo, the most irrationally loved project product?

1:10:35Leo Laporte:I don't believe there was a price or release date.

1:10:39Ant Pruitt:This is we should mention this as we do every year that a lot of what you see at CES is pre release may never be released. That's right.

1:10:47Jason Howell:Yeah. Well, we did see speaking of pre release products that have run into challenges. The company that did the Jibo robot, maybe the most famous CES robot of all time. Which I owned. Of course you do.

1:10:59Ant Pruitt:I bought, of course.

1:11:00Jason Howell:You're Leo, you know. But they have another product. And actually, two of the most maybe polished of these products that were especially aimed at kids were by them. And part of it was because one of the products they've actually had out for a while, it's called the Luca robot, L-U-K-A. So the Luca robot is a robot that reads to kids. So it reads books and they've already sold something like 10 million of these worldwide, I think mostly in Asia. But the Luca robot, there's a new version that has AI that they showed off at the show. the Luca robot, not only will read to kids, can you put a physical storybook in front of them, and it can read to them.

1:11:41Jason Howell:And it is very cute. But it also then can interact with them, right? It's more uses AI to interact with them in terms of the storytelling. And then they had another product, this other product, the Luca, it's like a tablet. It's essentially like a ruggedized tablet that has a camera on it and they can go around and it sort of you, it hangs around their neck. This is aimed at like, I think like kindergartner, first grader sort of kids. They go around and they get in the real world and it works in like museums and things like that too. They can take a picture and then ask questions of the things that they're, they're seeing.

1:12:20Jason Howell:So they were pretty advanced. I was a little bit shocked at how advanced some of these things were. And these were one of the ones that because they were so good, I was kind of asking them questions about privacy. I was asking about like, what models do you use? You know, where does the data go? They had good answers. And clearly they had thought through some of that. And some of these products, their products are already in market. So that was good. But I still just had a lot of questions about while getting kids sort of almost like addicted to sort of daily interactions with technologies, you know, some of my, my questions about that, would I wanted to have give that to a kid, you know, a kindergartner, first grader, preschooler, I'm not sure.

1:13:06Jason Howell:It feels dystopian.

1:13:08Ant Pruitt:It feels like 1984, a brave new world where children are raised in creches and, you know, they don't, they have mechanical tenders and minders and so forth. But as Darren points out in our club twit user group, if it solves a problem and we don't have another solution, Maybe we say, oh, yeah, it should be solved better.

1:13:27Jason Howell:Yeah, but if we don't have another solution, better that than nothing, I guess. It helps fill the gap. Yeah.

1:13:33Ant Pruitt:Well, let's continue with Father Robert's top five countdowns. We're going to go to number four now in the Father Robert hit parade.

1:13:43Megan Morrone:The best of CES. Number four, the Dinsys Z1 exoskeleton. I first started saying consumer grade exoskeletons five years ago. and to say that they were early would be generous. The 2026 models are light, long-lasting, and far more comfortable. Of the units that I tried, the most comfortable and intuitive was the Dinsys Z1. Made from carbon fiber with a design that contours to your legs, the Z1 is a knee exoskeleton for those who suffer from joint pain. A single charge on its swappable battery will provide up to 9.3 miles of climbing assist, during which time it will offload up to 150 kilograms of weight, provide up to 20 kilograms of lifting support and reduce stress on your knees, making you feel up to 44 pounds lighter.

1:14:28Megan Morrone:I tested a Z1 at the Dinsys booth, and it really is a strap-in and use experience. I could immediately feel the assist while walking, standing, and caring. There is no input required aside from regular leg motions, and the device is smart enough to know how much to engage the assist function. At just over$1 ,000 a unit, it's a solid option for anybody who needs a bit more stability while walking, those who are standing for long periods of time, and the outdoorsman who doesn't mind going a little Robocop. It's kind of like an e-bike for hikers. It is. You know, the first one I tried a few years back, it was cool because, yeah, you felt like Iron Man, but it was extremely clunky and it was not comfortable.

1:15:09Megan Morrone:Right. The Z1 was the first one where I thought, I could wear this all day. I mean, I'd look funny, but I would totally wear it. All right.

1:15:19Leo Laporte:our reporter sean hollister wore one around ces the entire show both this year and last year different models um he reported about it last year and then this year he wore the wii robotics one

1:15:31Megan Morrone:i would totally do that oh my gosh did you like it great for c yeah i mean it helps because you're

1:15:37Leo Laporte:walking so much yeah yeah he loved it and they the one he wore last year was quite clunky and the one he wore this year you barely even noticed it was on him so there's these are definitely getting a lot easier and actually um it packs down into a little box like this big so it's really easy

1:15:53Megan Morrone:to carry around it fits into a case that's like this big yeah so interesting yeah kind of an

1:16:00Ant Pruitt:unexpected uh area let's take a break we've got lots more to talk about we're doing our ces wrap up with three who were there and one who was not and is very happy jennifer pattison tui from the The Verge, Father Robert Balassare, the Digital Jesuit, and Jason Heiner. His brand new publication covers AI, the deep view of AI. And that's a free subscription if you go, is it thedeepview.com? Subscribe.thedeepview.com. Yeah. Very nice. Very nice. Great to have all three of you. Our show today brought to you by Bitwarden. We love our friends at Bitwarden. It's the password manager I use and recommend.

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1:18:03Ant Pruitt:called bitwarden lite bitwarden lite delivers a lightweight self-hosted password manager this is ideal for people like us home labs personal projects environments that want quick setup minimal overhead it bitwardens just wants to make sure that everybody should needs a password manager should have a password manager even in a simple environment like that bitwarden is now enhanced with all of the flavors of bitward with real-time vault health alerts and password coaching features this is great for business it helps user identify weak reused or exposed credentials actually it's great for everybody isn't it and take immediate action to strengthen their security now if you're using ever have been using your browser's password manager you'll be glad to know probably shouldn't be and bitward now supports direct import from your browser from chrome edge brave opera and vivaldi direct import copies imports the credentials from the browser right into the encrypted vault you don't have to create that separate plain text export file which is always a risk that simplifies migration but it also helps reduce the exposure associated with you know manual export and deletion steps you got to remember to delete the clear passwords on your download folder g2 winner 2025 reports bitwarden continues to hold strong as number one in every enterprise category six straight quarters now and a bitwarden setup is so easy when i move from that other password manager to bitwarden it was like this they support importing for most password management solutions it's just very straightforward and as i mentioned gpl open source regularly audited by third-party experts very secure it meets SOC 2 type 2 gdpr hipaa ccpa compliance it's iso 27001 2002 certified you really need to try it and your business get started today with bitwarden's free trial of a teams or enterprise plan and as an individual it's free forever unlimited devices unlimited pass keys individuals there's no reason not to use it bitwarden.com twit use it at business to bitwarden.com slash twit this is the only password manager i recommend this is the one you should use bitwarden.com slash twitter thank you so much for supporting this week in tech uh meta showed uh its wristband now they had this wristband i know jennifer i think it's victoria who uses the meta ray-ban display glasses victoria song is a big fan of those have you

1:20:36Leo Laporte:tried those at all no i've um i'm actually got these are smart glasses but they don't have what

1:20:44Ant Pruitt:You sneaky. Ah, which ones which ones are you wearing?

1:20:48Leo Laporte:These are actually the Amazon

1:20:50Ant Pruitt:Echo frames and do you like them or you just wear them?

1:20:53Leo Laporte:I I actually got these specifically because I just wanted audio for me. I wasn't

1:20:59Ant Pruitt:Look, that's one thing metas do very well. That sound is very good on those. Yes. Yes. Is it as good on the frame?

1:21:05Leo Laporte:It's fine. No, I think the metas are better, but I got these for a hundred bucks

1:21:09Ant Pruitt:whereas the messes are a lot more expensive. And do you have your prescription in them too? So they're your spectacles. Okay.

1:21:14Leo Laporte:I use them as my glasses. And all I wanted at this stage was audio because I think at some point I'm going to want what is coming with smart glasses. I just don't feel like we're there yet. So this is kind of my stop gap. There's also the privacy concern of having a camera in there. Yes, exactly.

1:21:32Megan Morrone:Would you be banned from taking those on a cruise ship? Because I know most cruise ships are banning them now.

1:21:36Ant Pruitt:Yeah, MSC, I think, announced that they're not going to allow them. in public spaces. You can have it in your cabin. Royal as well. Anything with a camera.

1:21:43Leo Laporte:Yeah. I mean, because this doesn't do any recording. These don't do any recording. It's just like having speeches.

1:21:48Ant Pruitt:I think, you know, for years, museums said, no cameras in the museum. We don't want to take pictures. But now everybody has a smartphone. How are you going to ban that? I think we're just going to have to get used to the idea that people are going to be.

1:22:00Leo Laporte:Victoria took her meta ray-bans to italy and she she wrote a story about seeing lots of renaissance butts and how she used the meta glasses to say okay tell me about this butt how many butts have i seen today and she said it was great for that experience getting that information right to her without having to pull out her phone i love that idea things in yeah just say tell me about it it's a

1:22:30Ant Pruitt:lot of classes at uh the show this year uh xreal was there of course google's got their xr uh were you impressed by any of them were any of them particularly something to write home about or

1:22:42Leo Laporte:is it more of the same so v v said no i didn't see all of them but she was like this is kind of boring this year a lot of iterations i think and like i was sort of saying it's like we're we're still waiting to get to that next point. I saw a couple of people testing one with like a little scroll screen, like what the metas are going to be doing and showing you, and you have a little ring to scroll through what you're reading.

1:23:10Ant Pruitt:Metas put a teleprompter now in their display. So you can read ads as I walk around the show floor.

1:23:16Leo Laporte:It would, I mean, and you could see a lot of use case for that for, you know, in business and for any, any sort of professional, like having been able to pull up that kind of information right in front of you. But I just feels like from what I understand, I didn't see any of these devices myself because I was chasing robots, but is that you, that nothing's quite at that level where it's going to be mass market adoption yet. There's still a breakthrough.

1:23:42Jason Howell:Yeah. None of them are ready to break through quite yet. I do think the teleprompter one is pretty interesting for, so I used the, during this past year, I used the Even Realities G1 and G2 products that have a teleprompter built in. And I used it in two things on stage where I had to sort of write, you know, some remarks and go up and say them. And it worked great. I thought it was, it was very good. Nobody noticed that it was a teleprompter, at least didn't say anything to me. And several of them I asked, you know, and I told them like, hey, I was using it. They're like, well, no, I would never would have known.

1:24:17Ant Pruitt:Is it listening to you? How does it know what you're reading?

1:24:20Jason Howell:Yeah. So it's a teleprompter and it sort of automatically uses AI to, you know, automatically move it forward. So you're not scrolling it yourself.

1:24:28Ant Pruitt:So one of the things I don't like about the meta is the display is just in one eye kind of down. Yeah. How do the even displays do it?

1:24:36Jason Howell:Yeah, that one's in both eyes. So it's monocolor though. So it's only green. It looks like a green screen. Yeah, but that's fine. It is. It's fine. And it's bright. It's much brighter. It feels much brighter than the, I've also used the Meta Ray-Bans display. And the problem with it being in one eye is it does feel pretty washed out, you know, because of that. You can turn it up really bright, but it's still not great.

1:25:00Ant Pruitt:One of the things I'm really interested in is the idea of having, and this is why I'm interested maybe in the metas, an AI assistant there to talk to, to ask questions of, I really want a heads-up display so it can go that's jennifer patterson too you you want the facial recognition i want face recognition i want that store don't go in that store that's a great place to get pho that kind of thing i want that kind of because you know as i become more and more enamored of ai i i kind of want to have it with me with you that's what that's one of the reasons

1:25:34Leo Laporte:what made me why i pulled the trigger on the frames even though these are kind of an older generation now is it does have a plus oh it does yes um so they brought it to the glasses and the buds and then also the the b is i think it'll be coming oh you still have your b yeah amazon bought them i just got one at the show they gave me one to try i got it a year ago when they announced

1:25:58Ant Pruitt:at ces last year yeah wore it for six months i saw you said in our verge comments actually that

1:26:05Leo Laporte:you were getting rid of it.

1:26:06Ant Pruitt:Yeah, because Amazon bought it.

1:26:08Leo Laporte:I know. So I spoke to them about it at the show. The founder was there. Maria is great.

1:26:13Ant Pruitt:We've interviewed her. Very nice. Yeah. Very nice people. And they say, what, that it's going to, we're not giving that data to Amazon?

1:26:22Leo Laporte:And they've added additional privacy and protection layers. Like no one can access any of the recordings, not even B. There's no, you know, they've reinforced their privacy because obviously there's been a lot of concern from users around that. But Amazon and Bee haven't announced exactly what's going to happen with Bee and Amazon, but it does seem fairly likely that we're going to see this sort of sink into the Alexa Plus ecosystem sooner rather than later as another input method for their AI, which they're very much trying to take outside of the home, which they've been trying to do for a long time, but with not much success.

1:27:00Leo Laporte:but now it seems like I think they're gearing up to be a competitor here.

1:27:05Jason Howell:Leo, if you want, you know, a good language model on a pair of glasses, like so you have it access all the time, the thing is you don't really want the metas because it uses Lama 4 and it's just not very good. Yeah, yeah, I've tried it.

1:27:18Ant Pruitt:No, I have the first generation, yeah.

1:27:21Jason Howell:But if you use the Solos glasses, so S-O-L-O-S or Rokid, R-O-K-I-D, those you can both use gpt5 on so you have access to sort of the latest and they look pretty nice

1:27:36Ant Pruitt:too they're not bad looking glasses these are the solos they're very similar they they all look

1:27:42Jason Howell:a lot like um you know the meta ray bands right the original sort of black um arraigments some of you know the solos have different ones you can you can use but um you know okay that's a little kiki looking i admit they're pretty nerdy i think the the the ones the even realities g1s are probably and g2s are probably the best looking they really they're made designed by swiss designers you know and they're they're they're made to be like premium glasses and so i i find them sort of as the best aesthetically you know of the ones that are out there um the software is still catching up, but it also will do, it has their own models.

1:28:23Jason Howell:And then you, it has, you can use chat GPT essentially with it as well. But the software is, this hardware is amazing. The software is still catching up. I'm sure it'll get better, but the Solos and the Rokid, the software works a little better on those two.

1:28:38Ant Pruitt:I should mention that the A Word Plus, Amazon's Echo AI assistant is now available on the website to everyone.

1:28:47Leo Laporte:Yeah, this is part of their real push to, as I said, to take A out of the home.

1:28:54Ant Pruitt:You know what? It's not bad. One of our Echo devices got upgraded. And Lisa, my wife, was talking to it and was kind of, wow, I'm kind of having a, she used to swear at the other one. Kind of having a nice conversation because it would follow up. You can ask it more difficult questions. I noticed Google's doing the same thing with their voice assistant. They've added Gemini to it. And of course, part of the reason both are moving in that direction is because Apple, at some point in the next few months, we think, is going to release Siri with that kind of capability, probably based on Gemini.

1:29:28Jason Howell:White box Gemini. Yeah. They probably won't use Gemini as the word Gemini in it, but you know, yeah. Right. Siri couldn't get any dumber.

1:29:37Leo Laporte:So, Amazon has a head start here in terms of being in the home space. They launched their agentic AI version of Alexa a lot sooner than any of their competitors. And whilst the agentic elements are still a bit shaky, and I have tested a few of them, it can actually do things for you, which is something that none of the others have really accomplished yet, although the chances are they will get leapfrogged at some point here. although I think they use a variety of different models behind the scenes so who knows exactly um I think Claude is one of the um partners for Amazon um I guess I'm all in on Claude now that

1:30:18Ant Pruitt:I'm spent spending so much money yeah I better use Claude I have them all right I've had the $20 subscription for everybody um didn't pay for Grock I have an un uh a non-consensual blue tick as as cory doctorow calls it but i still got brock brock is in a lot of trouble um they uh like it and i was generating non-consensual deep fake uh nudity at scale at scale impressive yeah uh in fact they've been banned now from indonesia some some a number of countries uh the us refuses to do anything about it apple and google are getting a lot of heat because they despite especially Apple, despite its longstanding rejection of adult content, has done nothing about the X app in the App Store.

1:31:05Ant Pruitt:And Elon's only response at first was to apologize. And then now he says, well, you can't have it for free. If you want deep fakes, you're going to have to give me money.

1:31:18Jason Howell:I mean, it does limit the number of users that can do it for sure, but it doesn't solve the problem.

1:31:23Ant Pruitt:such a cesspool anybody's still using x get out while you still can't none of you use x do you i i haven't been on x for a year and a half now i think yeah i mean it is still for everybody

1:31:37Jason Howell:it's still a place where people announce when bob weir passed my wife said did bob weir die and i said well let me check where do you go you go to x there are still pockets as well of certain

1:31:49Leo Laporte:industries that kind of isolated themselves on X and they don't, they're not really involved with the melange. That's what you have to do.

1:31:57Ant Pruitt:Yeah.

1:31:58Leo Laporte:And so some things you do. Hear no evil, see no evil. I was talking to someone the other day who was saying, yeah, they would love to get off X, but the VC Twitter is still a huge space. So for journalists in particular, it's something that...

1:32:15Ant Pruitt:Well, we have an excuse. As journalists, we kind of need to

1:32:18Leo Laporte:I don't really engage on it, but I do check it.

1:32:21Ant Pruitt:Oh, I never engage.

1:32:23Megan Morrone:Security Twitter disassembled about a year ago, a year and a half ago. As did Science Twitter. Science Twitter. I think Black Twitter even has found... I had it working properly because the little block bot that I had created, which would no longer work with the new version of Twitter, by the way, it was fantastic at weeding out the most toxic users who would even remotely interact with my account. Just block them.

1:32:45Ant Pruitt:Block them instantly.

1:32:46Megan Morrone:but but then that you know then he started charging more for the api and that just became

1:32:50Ant Pruitt:a non-starter uh we are going to talk in just a bit about the toilet that looks at your poop but every yes every c yes unless you know that's one of your picks i don't know let's find out number three on the father robert hit parade watch number three the jack rey solar mars bot

1:33:13Megan Morrone:Imagine living off-grid and never having to worry about properly placing your solar panels for energy capture. That's possible with the Jackery Solar MarsBot, an AI-enabled, autonomous vehicle that is part robot, part power bank. At the top of the bot are six solar panels that are safely stored in the bot's hat that is held by a double-axis arm that allows for 60 degrees of tilt. In that hat is a light-tracking sensor that determines the optimal inclination of the solar panels for capture. The lighting system automatically rotates the bot and angles the hat before deploying its panels for up to 600 watts of power generation.

1:33:48Megan Morrone:When deployed, the unit's AI can waypoint to optimal charging locations, follow users, and automatically return the bot to its charging station on overcast days or when its energy storage is full. The unit I played with has a 5 ,000 watt-hour battery, a complement of USB-C, PD, 110, and 220 volt outputs, and up to 3 ,000 watts of constant power. That's enough to keep a small off-grid cabin fully powered for two days even without additional sunlight So it's it's totally niche I get it I get how much power can you generate with a little panel though I mean, it's not that 600 watts 600 watt, but how long does it take to do that?

1:34:26Megan Morrone:Well, I mean that that's the thing about the solar tracking So it rather than having to build your house or your cabin so that it properly

1:34:34Ant Pruitt:just put that thing in the yard and then you put it in the yard and you let it you let it go from

1:34:38Megan Morrone:spot to spot always optimizing its solar capture actually it's really interesting yeah it is neat

1:34:44Leo Laporte:they they actually i mean that came out a cut they launched that a couple of years ago i'm not sure it's actually ever shipped though right or did it well maybe announce it in 23. but um it's it is a neat idea though the thing that really caught my eye at ces from jackery was the gazebo the solar power oh the solar gazebo yeah that was cool okay uh you know i don't have anywhere to put

1:35:07Ant Pruitt:a gazebo but what so this is this is uh it sits outside and actually doesn't look like a gazebo

1:35:13Leo Laporte:it looks like a little little house out there yeah and it has 2 000 watts of solar panels and an integrated lighting and a pull down projector screen and outlets and you can put the jackie power stations in it so that you can basically so is it a man cave what is it outdoor yeah it's an

1:35:30Ant Pruitt:out or it's an outdoor oh it's a oh yeah you'd put it in your um patio yeah it's a it's like a

1:35:35Leo Laporte:solar cover for your patio i see yeah so you just hang out that's clever i know but like 15 000 oh

1:35:42Ant Pruitt:now leo wants it well if you put in we used to have uh our old house had 30 or 40 solar panels it was much more than 15 000 but it was great i mean we we were off the grid we had two tesla batteries and i never had to worry uh this is interesting i think i've wanted to be off grid

1:36:01Megan Morrone:for a while just get a piece of land in nowhere nevada and i'm kind of getting into the the

1:36:07Ant Pruitt:renewables now so so 2 000 watts 10 kilowatt hours a day is that i guess that's enough to you you know small house refrigerator could i have a refrigerator i mean it doesn't have walls

1:36:23Leo Laporte:so this isn't really for living.

1:36:25Ant Pruitt:No, no, no, I know, but this powers the house it's attached to. It's not, right?

1:36:29Leo Laporte:No, I think it's just powering itself.

1:36:30Ant Pruitt:Oh.

1:36:31Leo Laporte:I don't know, maybe I'm wrong. I think it's just so that you can power your outdoor appliances and things.

1:36:38Megan Morrone:Oh, I see. I want to power the house. The rule of thumbs is per person, you're going to be budgeting about 2 ,000 watt hours a day. Oh, so this would be enough to drive your appliances.

1:36:51Ant Pruitt:a five could have exactly live off this yeah well you have to live underneath the gazebo in that

1:36:56Leo Laporte:respect if you could plug it into your internal it looks like you could yeah it looks like you could put it into your house especially like my house i can't put panels on right i don't want to put them on the roof yeah well i also have too many trees like we could only put panels in like a little corner um and now if i could put this in a sunny spot in my yard i could get more power instead of just sticking the solar farm in your yard, you put a nice gazebo in your yard.

1:37:25Ant Pruitt:Yeah. Yeah.

1:37:27Leo Laporte:But Chakri does come up with some pretty innovative stuff. So, yeah.

1:37:31Megan Morrone:I did like their, they've got a power station that it's not, you can't submerge it, but it is basically waterproof. And that I kind of like because you're going to be using a lot of these out in the outdoors. So, yeah.

1:37:46Ant Pruitt:Let's see. what else here oh the throne what did i do my ad yet oh i was gonna do an ad i'm sorry let me do the ad and then the throne then we'll check out the throne you're watching this week in tech our ces episode all the great stuff that may never make it to your house with jennifer pattison tui jason heiner and father robert balassaire our show

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1:41:37Ant Pruitt:This is table stakes. Meter, built for the bandwidth demand of today and tomorrow. We thank meters for sponsoring. Go to meter.com slash twit to book a demo now. That's M-E-T-E-R dot com slash twit to book a demo. This is the new standard for networking. Brand new, very exciting. Meter.com slash twit. I want you to check it out. Meanwhile, the throne is checking out your poop.

1:42:09Ant Pruitt:As Daniel Cooper says it in Gadget, who doesn't want a camera in their toilet? it now this isn't a whole toilet this is just a camera you hook onto the side we do see these every year at ces yes um why is there a demand well you you can learn a surprising amount of

1:42:32Megan Morrone:very accurate information about the state of your body by what comes out of it so of course that's why doctors are always asking for samples, right? Exactly, exactly. I mean, it shows what your metabolic rate is. It shows if you've got any buildup of toxins. And if you can have a piece of technology that just sits in that receptacle all day, why wouldn't you?

1:42:55Ant Pruitt:Yeah.

1:42:59Leo Laporte:I can think of lots of reasons.

1:43:02Ant Pruitt:I am shocked, shocked Jennifer Pettison-Tui that you don't actually have one of these in your lab.

1:43:08Leo Laporte:have yeah no no I leave all that stuff to be no no no followed you around with a little bag you'd

1:43:16Megan Morrone:be okay with that right I mean because that's that's your beat so so no no best of CES award

1:43:22Ant Pruitt:for uh the whoop for the poop toilet I do think that the pee one from last year did win an award there was one oh there you go I think you see thing yeah um but yes the this is I mean the

1:43:36Leo Laporte:Measuring the metrics, you know, having every part of our body and movement tracked.

1:43:44Ant Pruitt:It's the quantified self, baby. Yes, that's where we're moving.

1:43:48Leo Laporte:And then you feed it all into your smart home AI and then your home can kind of respond to you and say, no, do not take the big steak out of the fridge. It's bad for you. It's going to tell you what you're allowed to do now and then we're all going to be in trouble.

1:44:04Ant Pruitt:I mean, really, we're all like that. I mean, I wear an Apple Watch. I wear a continuous glucose monitor. I wear an Aura ring. I mean, we're all, you know, kind of putting on these devices. I admit they're still a little bit less than, you know, fully operative, but we're getting there. In fact, Apple seems to be.

1:44:24Jason Howell:I remember ChatGPD Health was just released this week, too. Yeah. Announced and not fully released.

1:44:30Ant Pruitt:I want to hook that up. So that you hook up, you put it on your iPhone and you hook it up to your Apple health, right? I signed up. I haven't gotten it yet. Yeah.

1:44:38Jason Howell:Multiple sensors. You can upload, you know, your test results to it. You can do all kinds of things. Now, what they said is, you know, the Fiji Simo, the CEO of apps, said that 200 ,000 people a month are already uploading there and asking about health questions and uploading their data. I can say that I knew two people this past year who had something come up in their health. They essentially were going to have to get an appointment with a specialist that was a month away. So they got sort of a negative indicator, right? And they were like, okay, we'll schedule an appointment for the specialist for you to look at.

1:45:26Jason Howell:So they freaked out, right? Because like you do, like, oh my gosh, you know, I've got something that's going to be terrible. and in both cases these are two separate people that just reached out to me and told me this um in both cases they took they they went on their health portal downloaded the test themselves upload it to chat gpt in one case and claude in the other case and they said um you know read this for me should i be worried and in both cases it gave them very detailed uh interpretations

1:45:56Ant Pruitt:of the of the data there's some risk there though isn't there of hallucinations of inaccuracies i

1:46:01Jason Howell:mean i don't know for sure yeah but in both cases but it was enough that before they went to the specialist they had something to ask they were like a little uh relieved and in one case so the one was relieved um and when she went to the doctor when um this person went to the doctor uh they told them something very similar the other one um when they went to the doctor uh They shared that they were, and they said, hey, this is what I got from ChatGPT. And the specialist looked at it and was like, wow, that's pretty good, actually. That's really close. Can you leave this with me so I can have a copy?

1:46:40Jason Howell:And so it was really interesting. So I guess my point is just that people are doing it already. There are all kinds of reasons to be wary about uploading, you know, very sensitive data that could have, you know, very negative ramifications if it were leaked and someone accessed, you know, your health data to a source like ChatGPT. But, you know, at the same time, we have to expect that this is coming not just from OpenAI, but from all of the others, you know, as well. Oh yeah. Remember Google and Apple and Amazon and other have been trying to do things like this for years and get people to put all their health data in their ecosystems.

1:47:19Ant Pruitt:Yeah. Well, or in your toilet as, as the case may be. Or in the toilet too.

1:47:24Jason Howell:Upload your toilet. I mean, if Amazon wants to

1:47:25Megan Morrone:send everyone free toilets, they can have all that data for free.

1:47:32Megan Morrone:It's a razor blade scheme. Moving on.

1:47:36Ant Pruitt:Jennifer, your favorite device of CES was the Aqara SmartLock. It's funny. I just replaced all my Aqaras with Schlage. Did I make a mistake?

1:47:45Leo Laporte:Which Schlage? The Uncode? Yeah.

1:47:50Ant Pruitt:It's a HomeKit enabled. Yes.

1:47:52Leo Laporte:You didn't make a mistake. That's a great lock. If you're happy with Apple HomeKit, that is as it is. That's what I wanted.

1:47:58Ant Pruitt:I wanted to walk up to the door and have it open. Okay, no, then you did make a mistake. Yeah. I did?

1:48:06Leo Laporte:Well, because the Schlage won't be able to do that. the new Schlage, which they announced last year and still hasn't launched, will be able to do it. But what is so special about the U400 is it's the first smart lock to support Apple Homekeys hands-free unlocking.

1:48:24Ant Pruitt:That's what I wanted. It uses WB.

1:48:28Leo Laporte:And that has, so there's two locks.

1:48:31Ant Pruitt:Because I can do that with my car now, and I really like that.

1:48:34Leo Laporte:The same technology. It's exactly the same technology. And so this is just, so it was announced a couple of years ago that Apple was going to support this in Homekey. So it's the same concept as Homekey, but the Homekey that you have with the Schlage lock is tap. So it's tap to, it's NFC.

1:48:52Ant Pruitt:Yeah, I don't mind tap because I'm a little nervous that the door will just open itself. Lock when you don't want to.

1:48:58Leo Laporte:So this is what's taken a while for the technology to come out because obviously you've had it, But this is something you have in the car, too, is it does have directional awareness.

1:49:08Ant Pruitt:The UWB makes a big difference.

1:49:10Leo Laporte:Yes. It knows that you're approaching from which direction you're approaching. And actually, when you set up the lock in a Kara's app or in the Apple Home app, there's a little... You can turn off approach from direction. So you can turn it so it's just from the front of the door. Don't come in from the side. If you want. But, you know, my house, my path is along the side. so i want that on but you can control where it's detecting you from but it one of the key things is it does not open when you are walking from inside your house that's something i had to turn

1:49:46Ant Pruitt:off in my car because my car i'm above my the garage right now my car was unlocked like you know all the time it was going so i finally i say and bmw just added this feature yeah when i'm at

1:49:59Leo Laporte:home don't do that yeah so this no this is designed to it will not unlock from if you're anywhere inside the house good that's what i was worried about and it will not unlock if you just walk past the house it knows intent of directions so you have to be walking up to it up to the door and also it knows velocity so if you're walking slowly it will unlock a little bit later like so it's going to unlock at the same time no matter how fast you're moving that's clever running in and running to get in a little quicker. So you can, no matter what, as you get to your door and open the handle.

1:50:35Ant Pruitt:That's cool.

1:50:37Leo Laporte:It's very impressive. And that's why I chose this lock because it's the first one that supports Apple Home Key. But what's really interesting here and which is why it was more relevant at CES because Apple Home is quite a niche system still, even though there's a lot of people that use it, it's still small, But Apple is part of a new protocol called Alero, which is a smart lock standard that is going to bring all of the home key features that tap to unlock and the UWB hands-free unlocking to any platform.

1:51:11Ant Pruitt:So Apple, Samsung and Google are involved.

1:51:14Leo Laporte:They're all part of this. And all the major lock manufacturers are part of it as well. And it's specifically, and one of the big concerns people have about this, obviously, is, well, if someone steals my phone, can they unlock my house? Well, if someone steals your key, can they unlock your house? I mean, that isn't something that's going to go away. But the nice thing about a smartphone is you can remotely wipe it. Can't do that with a key. But it does require you to turn off the facial recognition or fingerprint unlocking that you might have on your phone because it's not going to work with the whole hands-free point is that you not completely just for this lock wait a minute wait a minute when do i turn it off so when you set up hands-free unlock in apple home it will say enable express mode which you may have seen with the home key nfc feature which means you can use this without authenticating by unlocking the phone.

1:52:16Leo Laporte:So because it's faster, you still have to have authenticated that it's your phone at some point within the last, I think it's 24 hours is the time window. So if you, you know, if your phone was lost for a while and someone picked it up, it wouldn't, they wouldn't be able to use it. But yeah, it does require you to turn off, turn on express mode, which bypasses facial recognition or pin code authentication. So if you are worried about it from that perspective, then this is not a technology for you. But it is, I mean, it is hands-free. You do not need to touch your door other than to unlock it. But door manufacturers are working towards automatic opening as well.

1:52:58Leo Laporte:We've actually seen, there was a new company that just launched last December called Doma from the founders of August, which was the first smart lock that had this hands-free unlock capability but that used bluetooth wi-fi and gps and three radios working together invariably meant it was not very accurate but this is a very specific um radio to antenna phone to lock um technology that in my i got to test this before ces and it worked flawlessly it was a really good experience and what's great about this new standard aliro is it's bringing this technology to every platform and every manufacturer across handsets and locks.

1:53:40Leo Laporte:So it's not going to be just limited to Apple going forward.

1:53:43Ant Pruitt:Hallelujah.

1:53:44Leo Laporte:Which is, yeah, and it's a great example of how standards are working in the smart home to make the smart home a lot easier and more accessible. And it's not just for homes either. This could also be used for offices, businesses so you could just basically use your phone as a key for everything uh which yeah i mean i can and there are obviously the other concern the concern about security is hacking and they do this is one of the reasons it's taken a really long time to launch this standard that well not really long but they were supposed to launch it earlier last year and it's now not launching it's launching this quarter is but they use asymmetric i'm gonna test my memory right here it's asymmetric security.

1:54:31Leo Laporte:So it's not, so every time the code is sent between the two devices, it's different.

1:54:37Ant Pruitt:So the rolling code for your garage door.

1:54:40Leo Laporte:So you're not going to, even if someone did manage to hack in and get the code the next time, it's going to be different. So that should, I mean, obviously once it's in the real world, we'll see if there are any flaws, but they feel pretty confident. I spoke to the head of Alero at CES and they wouldn't give me the exact details yet because the spec hasn't been released. But they said they feel pretty confident that the security is really high. And I said this has been developed by a number of companies. So they're working for a lock manufacturer like Schlage and Asa Abloy and Yale, Quickset. They're all on board.

1:55:18Leo Laporte:And when I've spoken to them, they've all said that they feel like this is a real game changer for the smart lock space. So that was my pick.

1:55:25Ant Pruitt:I can't believe I just bought the Schlage. I'm sorry.

1:55:29Megan Morrone:I don't think it'll work in my place because our locks have like seven pound keys. I don't think that's going to work.

1:55:39Leo Laporte:I mean, at this point, I'm not sure that's retrofittable to the BC buildings.

1:55:47Jason Howell:Yes. Anything before the dark ages. In your case, it means you could bludgeon another human being with it if they try to mug you.

1:55:55Megan Morrone:Our smart locks is there's a Jesuit brother standing by the door who will unlock it for you. Or a Swiss guard with a halberd. It's getting smarter than that. Much smarter. Oh, which, by the way, Leo, so I was very enamored by the anti-gravity drone that was being displayed at CES. I really wanted to get one from my office. And I got the expense approved. and then I got a message from a friend in the Swiss Guard who said don't don't bring no drones are they really from Switzerland by the way the Swiss Guard they are they are although there is a Filipino Swiss Guard two years ago he's the very first one you just have to be born in Switzerland so his parents were from the Philippines there you go yeah that's really so they kind of on loan to the Pope from Switzerland it's a choice it's a choice assignment so they

1:56:43Ant Pruitt:only send their best and the people who are the best people in in the best clown outfits precisely

1:56:48Megan Morrone:and and the the pay is not great but it's completely untaxable and you can you continue to receive half of it for the rest of your life oh nice if you complete your tour so it's kind of

1:57:01Ant Pruitt:nice yeah that's pretty cool uh what about this uh lock-in that you have on your article uh it looks like it's in a time tunnel. What is that all about?

1:57:12Leo Laporte:So that's a different smart lock. So this is another really interesting technology around smart locks is wireless charging. And this lock-in was showing off a new type of wireless charging that it's using because now most smart

1:57:27Ant Pruitt:locks... So that thing around it isn't just like for show, that's actually charging it, the time tunnel it's in?

1:57:34Leo Laporte:No, that was just for show. Okay.

1:57:37Ant Pruitt:It does look like that's how you You go through that and you should be all charged up.

1:57:41Megan Morrone:I was about to say, wait a minute. So it's radiating stuff? Is it wireless charging?

1:57:49Leo Laporte:So if you scroll down in the article to the section where I mentioned the lock, there's a picture and you can see the little puck. You have to click to the right. Oh, it's got a little puck.

1:58:00Ant Pruitt:It's a little puck, yes.

1:58:01Leo Laporte:So if you click to the right, there's another image there.

1:58:04Ant Pruitt:Oh, I see.

1:58:04Leo Laporte:And the puck is plugged in.

1:58:06Ant Pruitt:and then so that's reasonable because otherwise i'm putting in batteries every few months that's

1:58:10Leo Laporte:the issue with smart locks right now and there and that's why locks are limited right now because you can't so you've seen you've probably seen and on the show floor this year there were um facial facial recognition 3d facial recognition locks there were palm vein unlocks this one this lock in particular has so many different ways that you can unlock with finger vein palm vein 3d recognition that the handle is a palm reader so as you hold the door i like that what's a finger vein though is that different from fingerprint yes and that's the palm vein is the same uses the same technology so it's actually reading the blood the blood running through your veins rather than the fingerprint because fingerprints can be um can be manipulated they can be also um is there

1:58:59Ant Pruitt:There's something unique about the blood running through my veins?

1:59:02Leo Laporte:The vein pattern is unique on your palm and your finger. So it's considered more accurate than a fingerprint. So it has three biometric unlockings. It has two cameras for the built-in video doorbell. And then it has the interior and exterior touchscreen with the cute little avatar. So you can create an avatar that greets visitors for you. Yeah, it's a cute little guy in there. But because it's got continual, like a regular door lock, if it had four AA batteries, would last like a day with all this technology. But because this one is wirelessly charged, it can power, you know, it can do things that most door locks can't.

1:59:43Ant Pruitt:How long, though? Do you have to put the puck on every day?

1:59:46Leo Laporte:So, no, the puck sits within a four-meter range, somewhere in the house. As long as it has line of sight, you just plug it in. So it is radiating. it's it's using um wireless and infrared charging wireless optical charging to just continually power the lock and it said that if the if your power goes out in the home and the lock is not being charged it should last up to a week um which is obviously wouldn't be good in real you know in a regular use but as long as if you were out of power for a week you'd you have it would be good

2:00:16Ant Pruitt:like if your cat slept on the puck and kept it from charging you wanted to keep working it would

2:00:21Leo Laporte:still work for a while yeah and so you know this lock itself is very expensive and it's also a mortise lock which most people aren't going to be using in the us so that's the european style or the really fancy high-end doors will have the mortise lock um it's it's not a deadbolt basically so it's it's the sort of real mechanical i think when you when you go into like an apartment building quite often they have mortise door locks um so it's they're more expensive much heavier someone just dropped a picture of it in the chat that shows it has a lot. It's a different type of technology from a deadbolt.

2:00:57Leo Laporte:But they do have a deadbolt version. But what's interesting here is when you have wireless power, there is so much more you can do with the technology in your door. And then this one does also support Matter. And they said they will have UWB support in the future too. So it would have the hands-free unlocking. So lots of exciting things going on in the door locks. space.

2:01:19Ant Pruitt:You might have a mortise lock in your in your Vatican housing. It's a kind of old fashioned kind of no, seriously,

2:01:27Megan Morrone:our locks are embedded. So you can have a marble mortise. Our house is really, really part of our house goes back 500 years. And part of our house goes back the new part of our house goes back 120 years of the new the new quarters.

2:01:45Ant Pruitt:The new one. Yeah. Now you could also get a why things body smart scale. I think I have the predecessor to this. It's got a handle that you hold while you're stepping on the scale. Yeah, that should be part of the smart lock.

2:02:01Megan Morrone:That should go outside.

2:02:03Ant Pruitt:Checking your veins.

2:02:05Leo Laporte:Yeah, this is interesting because this was and Victoria wearables reporter was talking about this on our best of video that it's representing a kind of longevity, a shift from health tech to be about losing weight or tracking to tracking your immediate condition to be about longevity and making, helping you sort of focus on health in the way that is going to help you.

2:02:32Ant Pruitt:My body scan scale says I am two years older than my chronological age.

2:02:39Leo Laporte:Yeah, and this supposedly measures a number of metrics, but one of them is specifically through your foot sweat.

2:02:51Ant Pruitt:No, I do the foot sweat test. I don't know what it's telling me, but I know you have to stand on the scale, and I don't know, is it sending electrical current through my feet? It's doing something. Something. Something.

2:03:06Megan Morrone:Leo, do you remember we had a Y things in the studio that broke? Here we go. I, it might've been my why things. It might've been, yeah, like 10, 11 years ago, it broke and on know how we improved it. Oh God. I installed a small MP3 player so that when someone stepped on it, it would go. Oh, you're too heavy.

2:03:28Ant Pruitt:Yeah, that might've been my old one because it was tweeting my weight for a while. It was not appreciated. Oh, I remember that.

2:03:35Leo Laporte:I remember that. yeah i think this one is supposed to sort of she was saying it sort of helps take away the focus on just your weight just weight more about other other elements of your it does my heart

2:03:49Ant Pruitt:beat it does uh it does a little uh you know 30 second uh ekg basically when it always says

2:03:57Leo Laporte:this one this one is a non-invasive metabolic health so this is to do with so maybe you don't have to use a toilet camera you can just use i don't know how accurate though this can be with foot sweat i mean yeah yeah well she said there is some there is scientific evidence to back up some of this but um we'll see um once she's had a chance to test it victoria also liked this l 'oreal led face mask yeah just because you could dress as vecna for halloween she's yeah

2:04:31Jason Howell:there is i i will say like there's a um a really good scale it's a chinese knockoff company called greater goods that has like a smart scale i have their uh 30 bucks their um yeah i have their blood

2:04:44Ant Pruitt:pressure uh monitor it's really good yeah 30 bucks they make really really good stuff the scale is like 30 bucks versus like 100 or 200 bucks oh no like this this why things is 500 or 600 500 bucks It probably comes off the same assembly line. So, I mean, it probably does.

2:05:00Jason Howell:There's also that. There is also that. So, anyway. It's 5 o 'clock. I'm kicking off. All right. You're good, guys. Come on in here. You get the next shift. So, if anybody doesn't want to spend$600 but wants to have, like, you know, the basics of, yeah, the smart scale that still manages to get your foot sweat, yeah, digitally analyzed. Greater goods,$30, Sam.

2:05:24Ant Pruitt:That foot sweat is a bioimpedance spectroscopy, if you'd like to know the actual name. Oh, there you go. Yes. Sounds really fancy. Right on. B-I-S. The goal is to simulate the sweat glands, I'm reading from Victoria's piece, that are inside your feet with a tiny safe current. We measure, I do this, I don't know what it's telling me. We measure the maximum activity response from those sweat glands. If the activity is high, it means your glands are healthy.

2:05:52Megan Morrone:if not it means that it's electrocuting you to make you sweat actually it's good because i am a

2:05:58Ant Pruitt:type 2 diabetic and one as you know one of the consequences of diabetes is uh that you you can get your feet amputated because you don't have good circulation so it's it's actually good for it to test that uh i don't know i don't know how useful it is as a diagnostic anyway i get on it every day and stand there for an hour while it's measuring all that stuff and says you're old

2:06:23Megan Morrone:the information from your smart blood pressure reader from your smart well that's what i'm

2:06:28Ant Pruitt:saying put it all in the chat gpt yeah and then it could say uh either my watch is stopped or you're dead let us uh go back to casey casem and i think we're at number four on the top Well, actually, it's number two. It's our fourth. But it's number two in Father Robert's CES Picks. Watch.

2:06:50Megan Morrone:Number two, LG Mobility. Talked away into the center of the LG booth on the show floor was their tech demonstrator for their mobility display solution. A combination of a transparent OLED display embedded into a windshield, the car's sensors, and an onboard AI that delivers important context-aware information to the driver. When I first saw it, I thought that it would be too much, that the information would become a driving hazard, but it would appear that LG has put in the engineering time to make sure that only immediately usable and actionable data is presented to the driver. For example, potential hazards ahead, information about the vehicle surrounding the user, GPS directions presented by highlighting turn information, red light duration, and enhanced vision in low visibility environments.

2:07:34Megan Morrone:In a vehicle that has full autonomous driving, the screen can switch to visual displays that keep the users engaged and looking forward, helping them to keep at least a partial eye on the road while their vehicle has control. That's really cool.

2:07:50Ant Pruitt:Were there a lot of car products at CES? Yes, I know they took the cars out of the South Hall. They're all in the West Hall. They're all in the West Hall now. That's the new Fancy Hall. Oh, the West Hall is? Oh, okay. Yeah. Well, when we come back, we could talk a little bit about car to other car technology. You're watching our CES wrap up with Father Robert Ballasier, Jennifer Patterson-Tui and Jason Heiner. So glad you're here, especially our club members. Thank you for being here. Our show today brought to you by Delete Me. Oh, man, when you go online and you do a little search for your name, I don't recommend it.

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2:11:25Leo Laporte:didn't make it into the west hall at all actually because it's the trek but i did see um the dreamy

2:11:31Ant Pruitt:car dreamy had a car this is crazy these companies are i know was it a home automation car does it

2:11:39Leo Laporte:drive around inside just a car and it didn't do much but it was very green which i liked but i know our editor uh autom automotive editor picked um was it the mercedes yeah he liked the mercedes the self-driving and he got to test it and he was really impressed with this uh new kind of level two is it of the force yeah yeah level two is that was the best not yeah i mean we you

2:12:07Ant Pruitt:know we're not gonna get anytime soon to completely autonomous vehicles so the smart thing to do is to be reasonable about about what you can do this is mercedes drive assist pro and andrew hawkins who's a very good uh automotive reporter for the verge said uh there was the it was the only thing there that they could actually test they let him drive it uh partially autonomous driver assist everybody's being very careful since elon's been sued and the state of california said you're not going to be able to keep selling teslas if you keep saying it's autopilot so everybody's being very careful about what they claim yeah you know west hall this year without byd

2:12:53Megan Morrone:BYD actually did make a notable splash last year. They were at CES last year,

2:12:58Ant Pruitt:even though you can't buy them in America. They were there. That's the big Chinese EV maker.

2:13:03Megan Morrone:Number one car maker in the world now. So this year we had the Sony Alfea 1, which they had last year. So it's just an incremental increase on the prototype. They had the Waymo Ojai. They had the Tensor Robo car. And then the BMW iX3. I think that was the big one because they actually had part of the parking lot. so you could go outside now i i wish they had done what mercedes did must have been 20 years ago they used to have the thing called the mercedes test drive they had taken over one of the parking lots and it was actually a little course well that's fun yeah check out a vehicle and take it around

2:13:37Ant Pruitt:yeah he actually went up to san francisco to to take a test drive yeah he never comes to ces

2:13:44Leo Laporte:oh lucky fella but yeah the bmw i think is the one that has alexa plus in it too right yes it does

2:13:51Ant Pruitt:Yes.

2:13:52Leo Laporte:So I saw that they had that in the Amazon booth, but you couldn't drive it there.

2:13:56Ant Pruitt:Yeah, I will never turn on Alexa on my BMW. I use Apple's CarPlay, but the BMW voice is so awful. Some of these car voices, it's like, come on, this is not even close to the standard now.

2:14:12Megan Morrone:But the big announcement was that with every BMW iX3 that you buy, you get, I think it's 15 cases of dracard noir so at least you smell good as you're driving around

2:14:27Ant Pruitt:you know your your virge folks liked allison liked uh the uh everybody likes the galaxy z trifold the three yeah but i've heard some reliability issues with it so i'm not sure you'd want to buy if you

2:14:41Megan Morrone:fold it more than 10 000 times probably well you'll start to get some creasing but i mean foldable tech is actually quite durable if you want to damage it you can but if if you're treating

2:14:53Ant Pruitt:it gently it lasts forever i'm i have the galaxy the latest galaxy fold just the the two fold the seven it's quite nice it's very thin yeah i am very excited about what apple's going to do rumored to be doing later this year i think that might be the one yeah they actually had

2:15:13Leo Laporte:doesn't say they had that they had that the the samsung screen was there which they took away did you get it away yeah yeah did you get to see it before they took it away we just saw it let an empty hole on this display where it was supposed to be well they weren't apparently they weren't

2:15:30Jason Howell:supposed to be showing it but of a tell on that one for sure yeah um but the the you know the get the Z fold seven, I hate calling it that the, um, the fold seven, uh, is the first one that's like, okay, when it's closed, it feels like a regular phone and you're like, great. And then it opens up. So that was, it's so close. It's, it's like 90 % of the way there. So I feel like this year, you know, we get a lot closer and the Apple one will be, you know, I think really good. And the ones from, you know, the Honor Magic V5 was even a little better than the, you know, the Chinese phones have been even better for a couple of years.

2:16:11Jason Howell:The Fold 7 is really catching up to them. I did want to go back. So I think this is going to be a big year for foldables. I did want to go back to one thing on the cars at CS, though, was I think the most significant thing wasn't anything that was shown there because most of it was really all stuff we'd heard before, seen before. or it was not that exciting. But NVIDIA announced the Alpameo model. So it's the first chain of thought reasoning model, and they released it as an open model. So a lot of the problems for these vehicles is, and you kind of expressed it, Leo, it's not that they don't have the hardware to do it, it's the software.

2:16:53Jason Howell:The software is where a lot of the problems are.

2:16:56Ant Pruitt:and alpameo nvidia that is by the worst open model that is the worst name alpameo sounds like

2:17:06Jason Howell:it's a dog food sandwich what is alp a-l-p-a-m-a-y-o i i know i know it's a special kind of mayonnaise that you only can only eat when you're in the in the alps or something so what

2:17:20Ant Pruitt:So it's safe, reasoning-based, autonomous vehicle.

2:17:24Megan Morrone:It utilizes the power of the edge. So they had it at the Amazon booth in the West Hall. It was one of the vendors there. And essentially, they're trying to move away from the old foundational model where you had the huge LLM that did everything. And they're allowing the local compute power to take over some of the specifics. So you take the foundational model, but then you build in your driving habits, the environment in which your car will normally exist. And it's supposed to be a more efficient way to give your car self-driving.

2:17:56Ant Pruitt:Okay.

2:17:57Megan Morrone:What are we going to see these? World models too, right?

2:18:00Ant Pruitt:I do know that the Mercedes that we talked about has an NVIDIA chip in it, NVIDIA AI in it. When is Alpameo going to come to my car?

2:18:13Jason Howell:I know, Alpameo. So the thing is, is it's, it's the releasing as an open model, you know, obviously works on top of their hardware, but it's going to, this is going to, I think, help some of these car makers that are really struggling with the software side of things. It's going to help them advance potentially, you know, a lot further. This is, this is definitely Nvidia saying, let's advance this self-driving car thing a lot faster folks. And since you're struggling with it so badly, we're just going to give you all the technology. We're going to, you know, the software to do it and we're going to make it available openly.

2:18:48Jason Howell:You can use our hardware to do it. And we're going to streamline this so that we can speed up the development, all of this.

2:18:55Ant Pruitt:Alpamayo, by the way, is one of the most conspicuous peaks in the Peruvian Andes. It's a mountain. Perfect.

2:19:02Jason Howell:Perfect. Thank you for clearing that up. So there. That's the first I've heard it. That's the first I've heard it. Yeah. It's not a sandwich. But you know, the most interesting thing that happened in self-driving cars, that it wasn't at CES, but it happened in the last month, and I feel like it was a bit under the radar, was actually Rivian going all in on AI. They announced this in December, and they announced a couple specific things that are really interesting. They've been working on this essentially for four years, and they took the wraps off of it. They announced that they're making their own chip.

2:19:35Jason Howell:They have one of Tesla's former engineers that's now their head of autonomy. They released their own chip. So they're sort of going to have all of their own processing power, similar to Tesla. They're integrating LiDAR into the vehicle, right? So one of the problem with the edge cases of self-driving is that, you know, in the dark, in other things, radar and LiDAR, which Tesla vehicles don't have, it makes it really tough when it's in the dark, when it's raining, when you have sort of these other edge cases. It's going to have that. But it used to be, and Tesla said, we're never putting LIDAR in because it's too expensive because it used to cost$10 ,000 to$20 ,000 to put LIDAR in the vehicle.

2:20:19Jason Howell:But now it's only cost a few thousand dollars. And it doesn't have those big giant spinning things on the vehicle anymore. It actually looks like just above the visor of the car, there's this little thing. So Rivian is taking this really far. And essentially they said they're working toward level four autonomy. That's true autonomy at that point. That's true autonomy where you can send the vehicle to go pick up your kids, where it can drive you to the airport and then drive itself home and park itself, you know, in the garage. And so I thought that all of that stuff that they, you know, announced and they showed sort of some of the pathway to doing that.

2:21:01Jason Howell:And they're also about to release this vehicle that is much more affordable, under$50 ,000. The average new vehicle in the U.S. is$50 ,000. So releasing an under$50 ,000 vehicle would be big for them. This could be like Rivian's breakout year, similar to when Tesla released the Model 3. It feels like Rivian is building toward its sort of version of the Model 3, but also, you know, autonomy, a pathway toward autonomy at the same time. And they see their vehicles as potentially being able to be used as, you know, robo taxis, but also to be for people who want to keep a vehicle and use it and have autonomy in the sort of the level four sense, you know, that they have a path to that, too.

2:21:47Jason Howell:So I thought that was the most important one. They weren't at CES, but it hasn't gotten much airplay. And I think that one is worth keeping an eye on because Rivian has shown the ability to make really good vehicles. And they really apparently have a very clear path on autonomy as well. So we'll see. It's a prove it moment for them in 26. But impressed by what they talked about in December.

2:22:12Ant Pruitt:They are overachievers over there at NVIDIA, aren't they? It's just amazing. They're so, so dominant.

2:22:18Megan Morrone:It kind of feels like this is their version of Google's Pixel program, where they wanted to show the manufacturers what's possible with the tools that they're providing them. So you give this hardware slash software pack to a small manufacturer and you say, what sensors do you have available? What can you do? Plug them in and see what happens. I love this idea.

2:22:40Ant Pruitt:What were you saying, Jennifer? What was at CES, besides the donut light?

2:22:45Leo Laporte:That the IKEA they made their debut at CES have an IKEA What's that? This is IKEA's new Bluetooth speaker that costs ten dollars.

2:22:56Ant Pruitt:Okay Does it sound pink?

2:22:59Leo Laporte:You can pair it with up to a hundred. It has a quick pairing button. Oh, I like that I got to demo this and they had Ten in their room.

2:23:08Ant Pruitt:They didn't have fun to put this all over the house though.

2:23:11Leo Laporte:I know and then yeah because so I was playing music through one and then you just hit the little button on the top and to the next one and it pairs to that and then you just press a button on the next one and then you just end up with a hundred little

2:23:25Megan Morrone:tiny speakers singing as an agent of chaos I approve of this idea okay I mean

2:23:32Leo Laporte:they're very small I mean it sounded fine in the room that time going yeah not too tinny um but you know ten dollars a really fun gadget and the main kind of thing though was the lighting and their they've moved you love these donut lamps the donut lamp what is it the farm blixit one bleak shit yeah sorry this is this was called the calc if you're looking for the speaker um but so the big thing with ikea this year is they have just announced that they're They're moving their entire smart line to Matter over Thread from Zigbee. And they have a new hub. Well, the hub came out a couple of years back, but the hub supports Matter and Thread.

2:24:14Leo Laporte:And so it's just making their smart devices so much simpler. And obviously, that's a key part of IKEA's value prop is inexpensive and easy to use. And now with this donut lamp, which actually came out, the first version came out a couple of years ago, and it's viral. It was all over TikTok and it was actually, it would sell out very quickly.

2:24:34Ant Pruitt:Do you have any in your house?

2:24:35Leo Laporte:No. So they gave me one to take back, but I'm like, I can't fit this in my suitcase. It's pretty big. It's big. So I was like, I'll go with the tiny Bluetooth speaker. Thank you. So I'm hopefully going to get one to try, but it comes paired with a Bill Risa remote, which is their new smart remote. It works over matter, over thread. But when you get it out of the box, it works. you can use the remote without needing any connectivity. You don't need to connect it to your Wi-Fi or do anything. It's got built-in smarts, so you can adjust the colors and the dimming. And then if you want, you can connect it to Matter platforms, so like use it with Apple Home or SmartThings or Google Home or Alexa, just a much simpler smart home experience, which is the whole point of Matter, that interoperability and ease of setup.

2:25:24Leo Laporte:We will see once we get to try it. But they also had a bunch of smart sensors that they just launched that are all super inexpensive. Everything, you can buy like a smart light bulb, a color-changing smart light bulb for, I think it's going to, they said it's going to be about$5. Which is, when you think back to when Philips Hue first launched with that$80 smart bulbs. It's just the smart home is becoming so much more accessible and affordable. and Ikea moving into this space and coming to CES for the first time in its history is kind of a big sign of that shift towards the mainstream here with the smart connected.

2:25:59Ant Pruitt:And just imagine how much fun you're going to have when people come over and you say, have you seen my Van Brix light? It's paired with the Beereza remote on the Deere Gira hub. And people will go, huh?

2:26:11Megan Morrone:Are those inflatable? They look really cute.

2:26:15Ant Pruitt:Is it a soft glow?

2:26:17Leo Laporte:Yeah, it sort of has like a frosted, not frosted. I like that.

2:26:22Ant Pruitt:It's an accent light. It's not a reading light.

2:26:24Leo Laporte:Right, exactly. But you can do, there's multiple colors you can change it to. It comes, when you pair it, the remote that it's paired to, lets you cycle through like 12 different scenes that have been specially designed to fit, to look good on the donut lamp. But then you can also choose your own, as well as light, warm to white light, warm to cool white light if you want more. So you could use it for task lighting. I suppose if you can hang it on the ceiling so you could have like two donuts hanging behind you. And that would be a nice and bright.

2:26:55Ant Pruitt:Well, I'm thinking of it in my media room. I don't want a bright light in there. I want just kind of an ambient glow. That'd be kind of cool. Can you tie it to what's on the screen? You know, you can get those ambient lights that do that.

2:27:07Leo Laporte:Yeah. So those things. Hue has something like that. Hue has that. And actually, Hue came with a really interesting feature. If you have Hue bulbs, you will probably be very interested in this. It's called Spatial Aware. And it uses, you basically get your phone and you map where your Hue lights are in your home. And then it can use, they've remastered their scenes to create the way the light works in the scene to fit into your home. So, for example, if you are doing a sunrise scene or a sunset scene, the lights in the front, for example, would be more sort of red and dim and the lights behind you would be darker and blacker to sort of really emphasize like the feeling of the sunset.

2:27:53Leo Laporte:it. And now if you ever use a Philips you've seen, if you've got say eight or nine hue bulbs around your room or some light fixtures, you'll find that one light over here is pink and then the light in the ceiling is blue and it's all a little kind of random. Whereas now with this new spatial aware feature, everything will be much more in tune with the way, and this was a quote from them, the way the lighting designer intended. So it's basically bringing really high-end lighting design into your home. And I did an article on it with a video. It really is hard to describe. You have to see it to really understand the impact, but it is a big difference.

2:28:36Leo Laporte:So, they would cycle through, like this was what the old scene looked like, and then this is what it's like with Spatial Aware, and it's like night and day. Looks so much better. But you do need the new Hue Bridge Pro for it to work because it uses more horse processing power. But it is because I've always struggled a little bit with smart colored lighting. Like you mentioned with the connecting to your TV. That's fun if you've got the right lighting setup to be able to kind of have a bit more of an immersive ambient feel. But just turning my light bulbs different colors in my sitting room doesn't always.

2:29:12Leo Laporte:I'm more like warm white and cool white is great during the day. But multi colors never really worked. But this really makes it seem like, wow, actually, I can see the purpose of having color changing lighting in my not just in the gaming room or not just in the TV room, because it just makes it made the room just feel so much more sort of immersive and like enjoyable to be in.

2:29:36Ant Pruitt:So it's good for lazy husbands because I don't have to put Christmas lights up. We just have outdoor lighting. I can make red and green. And now I'm done. There you go. That was it.

2:29:47Megan Morrone:I just told my mom about that, that I could actually put up Christmas lights that could stay up the entire year. And I've never seen her enthusiastic about tech until I told her that. Really? Oh, my husband too.

2:30:00Leo Laporte:My husband was a big fan of when I said, here, we've got some permanent outdoor lights you can try. He's like, do you mean I don't have to climb up the ladder every year? Exactly. But we'll have to see how long the permanent part actually lasts.

2:30:12Ant Pruitt:You know what? But I have to give you credit, Jennifer, because for a long time, home automation, especially at CES, was always like, oh, so close. But not, you know, oh, you know, who's going to really want to spend 15 hours setting all this stuff up and then it's obsolete the next week and then it doesn't work the week after that. and but it's i feel like looking especially at your article of the smart home gadgets that you impressed you there we've come a long way that this stuff is starting to really kind of make

2:30:42Leo Laporte:sense is is that right yeah this this really felt like the year the smart home kind of grew up yeah um it was less about silly crazy gadgets doing weird things in your home and more about here we've made this stuff better and this stuff works and this stuff will actually work together

2:30:59Ant Pruitt:which is a big deal.

2:31:01Leo Laporte:It is a great, it was a great show for smart home standards, like Matter and Thread and Alero and even some Z-Wave. And, you know, it's like this standardizing things in the smart home has made the issue of interoperability getting closer to going away. And what that translates to is that manufacturers now can focus their efforts on making products less expensive that do more because they don't have to spend all of their time figuring out how to work with five different platforms, which, you know, for most of these manufacturers was a huge amount of work and often didn't work very well. So you ended up with frustrated customers.

2:31:42Leo Laporte:Now they've got a clear, solid connectivity layer that they can use that connects to all the different platforms. So it means that they can focus their efforts on more features, bringing better things to your smart home devices and making things less expensive. I mean, Ikea's new smart home products that they launched this year are less expensive than their old smart home products that they've had on the shelves for a few years. So it's really a sort of sea change as we sort of see the smart home become more mainstream. And I mean, nothing's more mainstream than Ikea, to be fair.

2:32:16Megan Morrone:Wouldn't it be amazing if Ikea was the company that finally

2:32:20Leo Laporte:made all those alliances worth it yes well this is a good so one there was so i did a panel this year um on uh a matter panel we had amazon google samsung um ikea and akara were on the panel and the ikea guy and i had talked a lot about the bilcita remote that i mentioned that you use to control the donut lamp and you can use it to control anything in your i believe that's pronounced

2:32:50Leo Laporte:So the big issue, though, is that there is one smart home platform that does not support buttons in Matter. And that smart home platform is Google Home. And so the Google Home guy was on the stage and I teed up the IKEA guy. I was like, so what's been great about Matter for you and what have been some of the problems? Have there been problems with adoption from the platforms? and he didn't go for it but but this is yeah this is the this has been an issue no one understands why google does not support buttons but the guy he did say to me afterwards he said i actually i think he even posted it on linkedin um he said there will be once once all these once there are millions of buttons in people's homes ikea buttons in people's homes i'm sure google is going to start

2:33:40Ant Pruitt:So when you say a button, what do you mean a button?

2:33:44Leo Laporte:So, okay, so you have smart light switches that's supported in the standard, so on, off. But button is a wireless light switch, so essentially. So it's not like a button, like just a button.

2:33:58Ant Pruitt:It is a term of art for a wireless switch, basically.

2:34:03Leo Laporte:So it is, well, it is a button. Is it always a button? This is a button. This is a Philips Hue button.

2:34:08Ant Pruitt:Yeah, okay.

2:34:09Leo Laporte:And the Bill Racer remote is a button. But it's a button because it's not wireless, because it's not wired. So it can be anywhere.

2:34:18Ant Pruitt:Does Apple support buttons?

2:34:19Leo Laporte:Yes. Apple does. Amazon does. Everyone else does.

2:34:22Ant Pruitt:Just Google.

2:34:22Leo Laporte:Just not Google. And this wireless switches are a big part of the smart home because what's great about them is that you can control, so you can connect it to a light and have it turn the light on and off but you could also connect it to lights in a different room or um to your robot vacuum cleaner if you want to press the button and the robot vacuum cleaner starts you can connect it to anything in your smart home so it just gives you a lot more flexibility and because one of the key issues with the smart home to date has been not having physical controls for things there was too much reliance on voice which is is hard and not always accurate having a It's delayed sometimes.

2:35:00Leo Laporte:Sometimes it's delayed.

2:35:02Ant Pruitt:Delayed is really the most annoying thing when you say lights on and nothing happens.

2:35:06Leo Laporte:And physical controls are so key in the smart home. I'm looking around because I have buttons here that I want to show you. But yes, it makes a big difference to be able to control with physically because it's not just the person, the tech guru in the home that knows how to control the home. It's everyone in the home that needs to be able to control the home.

2:35:25Ant Pruitt:If you're going to replace switches, you need to have something equally good to replace it.

2:35:31Leo Laporte:Or better. It's a pretty good interface, right? Or better. That's the point.

2:35:33Ant Pruitt:Yeah, but if it's not even as good, then it's just a non-starter.

2:35:37Leo Laporte:Yeah. So buttons are like one of the... We see a lot of really interesting elements, innovations in buttons. And you see, like, if you go into a really high-end home and they'll have a panel that looks like a switch, but has like three different or four different buttons that are labeled. and that's essentially that concept but without needing to wire it into your home and you can control anything in your home turn press one button and all your lights turn off and the shades go down um press another button so that's instead of a display i mean i i thought that the

2:36:11Ant Pruitt:like the high end was like an ipad or a big display hanging on the wall with switches not not really people want physical something that clicks especially in homes high-end

2:36:21Leo Laporte:Can you feel it in the dark? They don't want iPads. Yeah. You need something tactile. That's the case as well. So we, and buttons have sort of been on the verge of becoming a thing in the smart home for a while, but have been frustrated by interoperability because it only really works, a button only works if it works with everything in your home. It's like if I can only turn on half of my lights because these ones don't work with Apple Home and this button, you know. So how does the button know?

2:36:48Ant Pruitt:You program the button.

2:36:49Leo Laporte:Yeah. You program. You have a button. Can you do multiple tabs? So yeah, there'll be short press, long press, double press. There'll be, yeah, so there'll be lots of different options based, depending on which button you have. There are many, many options out there. But yeah, it's basically something that can control another device wirelessly without being, you know, it's normally battery powered. So, and it's, I've had, I've been on a crusade for good buttons for years. So I'm really excited. I had no idea.

2:37:18Jason Howell:this wasn't on my radar they're getting there i'm getting there i'm getting there i'm excited

2:37:24Megan Morrone:wait weren't we told that removing buttons was a bold visionary yeah right right there's more

2:37:30Leo Laporte:buttons look she's got a whole bunch of buttons this is the beleza how do we say it it's a button

2:37:34Ant Pruitt:here it is let's see it no no they say no there it is yeah there it is okay so it's just there's no words on it there's no controls it's just honor it's just a switch you push you there's one on a

2:37:52Leo Laporte:one on the top and one on the bottom okay um and this one's a fairly basic button how do people know what the button does i mean they also have one that has a scroll wheel so you can like raise your shades lower your shades turn your volume up lower your volume um that is an issue how what it does is an issue so if you put this on your wall you can kind of in your living room you kind of assume okay it's a light switch i press it my lights turn on i press and hold my lights dim you know but some manufacturers come out with little stickers so that you can put a little sticker on it but that's not in a high end home no no the high end homes they're engraved

2:38:30Ant Pruitt:they're engraved buttons oh you need a laser button engraver yeah with traditional buttons

2:38:35Leo Laporte:you just push the switch and see what it does i mean yeah who knows what this is gonna do

2:38:41Ant Pruitt:but this is the thing you're replacing a switch that goes up for on or down for off and i have to say in some countries it's down for on and up for off and that's extremely confusing right have you been to those countries do this can do so much more that's that's the difference

2:39:02Leo Laporte:okay let's take and also this is four dollars whereas the buttons you could have bought a year ago were at$40. I have Lutron switches all over my house. Yeah, so you have Pico remotes. Do you have Pico remotes? I do.

2:39:14Ant Pruitt:Those are buttons. That's a button.

2:39:16Leo Laporte:That's a button. There you go. I have one of those$35.

2:39:20Ant Pruitt:I didn't even know I had the buttons.

2:39:21Leo Laporte:I guess a remote is the better way of saying, but it is, but it's remote kind of makes it, it diminishes the concept because you think you remote control one thing with a remote, right?

2:39:31Ant Pruitt:I've lived here a year and a half And I still haven't figured out what the buttons do.

2:39:37Megan Morrone:Leo, go push all the buttons.

2:39:39Ant Pruitt:I do. I push them. There's an on and an off. And then in the middle, there's an up and a down. And it's just, I'm confused. Have you tried double tapping? No, I didn't even know you could.

2:39:50Megan Morrone:Do all that.

2:39:52Leo Laporte:I don't think you can on the Pico, actually. Oh.

2:39:56Ant Pruitt:All right, let's take a break. Because you've been very good, boys and girls. And now it's time for the number one CES gadget from Father Robert.

2:40:07Megan Morrone:Robert? Number one, the NVIDIA Rubin. Let's be clear. There is so much about AI, especially at CES, that is just noise in the hype cycle chamber. I ignore most of it because, well, there's only so many AI-enabled appliances and dancing robots that I can take. However, as part of my day job has me analyzing the AI landscape for significant developments, there was one CES release that caught my attention above all else, NVIDIA's announcement of their new Ruben platform and their Vera Ruben chips. The platform is actually a combination of six different components, the Vera CPU, the Ruben GPU, the NVLink 6 Switch, the Kinect X9 SuperNIC, the Bluefield 4 DPU, and the Spectrum 6 Ethernet Switch.

2:40:53Megan Morrone:By tightly integrating all six components, NVIDIA has greatly reduced the bottleneck between each, enabling rack-scale integration. In layman's terms, all the silicon in a Rubin data center spends more of its time processing and less time waiting. In practical terms, Verirubin is 3.5 times faster than Blackwell, requires one quarter the number of GPUs needed for LLM training, and is 10 times more efficient in inference token costs. Again, for my day job, I'm most interested in the fact that it provides eight times the amount of inference computing power per watt. While AI still requires an enormous amount of power and water for data center scale operations, such a large increase in efficiency with a little tweaking of the silicon is an extremely welcome sign.

2:41:39Megan Morrone:That's it. While there was plenty of interesting tech at the show, these were my five favorite things. If you feel like I left out your favorite, feel free to reach out to me on BlueSky at Padre SJ. Till next time, I'm Father Robert Balassare, the digital jesuit closing up ces 2026.

2:41:57Ant Pruitt:robert's entire report from ces is available on our will be available on our twitter youtube channel on the news feed uh or if you subscribe to our twitter news feed i love the time lapse especially the one everybody taking the picture how did you do

2:42:10Megan Morrone:that robert that's really well so that's part of the cesb role oh it's good i like does provide some decent high high quality footage that's and i used to do my own time lapses but there's our

2:42:21Ant Pruitt:top-notch yeah and you don't want to leave a camera sitting there for hours anyway that seems like that's not exciting all right we'll wrap up our cs coverage just a little bit with jennifer pattison tui from the verge jason heiner from the deep view at the deep view.com and father robert balassare the digital jesuit our show today brought to you by netsuite every business is asking the same question these days how do we make ai work for us possibilities are endless but maybe guessing is a little too risky and you certainly can't sit on the sidelines that's an option one thing is almost certain your competitors are already making their move they're using ai you can't wait with netsuite on by oracle you could put ai to work for you today.

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2:43:51Ant Pruitt:So whether your company earns millions or even hundreds of millions, NetSuite helps you stay ahead of the pack right now. Get NetSuite's free business guide, Demystifying AI at netsuite.com slash twit the guide is free to you at netsuite.com slash twit that's netsuite.com slash twit we thank net suite so much for supporting this week in tech well it sounds like uh this was a good ces to go to better than in other years jason you think i mean you know ces is on an upswing again

2:44:26Jason Howell:And certainly because of AI, I felt like there were a number of years there, maybe 2019, 2020, and 2020 was the super spreader event that likely was what spread COVID.

2:44:38Ant Pruitt:The last CES I went to. Yeah. Yeah.

2:44:41Jason Howell:You know, it really felt like CES was contracting. It was trying to find its identity. And then it felt like in a sense that there was a little bit of a death blow, you know, from the COVID era. And would it bounce back? But really what has happened the last few years is, I mean, the show is up over 145 ,000 attendees. Again, there were 4 ,500 vendors there. There were like over 5 ,000 press. So that was really the case where CES has. And there is one stat that I saw on LinkedIn. in, somebody in PR posted that 80 % of the vendors now are either enterprise or they have consumer and enterprise.

2:45:25Ant Pruitt:So that's interesting because even though they don't call it that, maybe the Consumer Technology Association was smart when they said it's just CES. It doesn't stand for Consumer Electronics Show because it isn't just consumers by any means.

2:45:37Jason Howell:It's not. It really has become an AI show and an enterprise show. There's a whole pavilion that's enterprise now. Obviously, the automotive piece has become a huge part of CES and has been for a while with autonomous being the key. For a while there, it was focused on electrification, but it really has moved to be almost entirely about autonomous and or the market, like the accessory market and partner market for auto. So all of that is to say that it is much more of a B2B kind of show than it's ever been. And that seems to be what has made it, you know, continue to grow and expand again. At the same time, there's still plenty of things like as as Father Robert and Jennifer have mentioned, like there's still plenty of consumer stuff to be seen, to be experienced there.

2:46:36Jason Howell:This is the place that a lot of companies are now coming again to launch products, which had really been the case. That's where I was starting to wonder if it had a future because people had stopped launching products at CES. They were launching them themselves. They were launching them separately. They felt like it just got lost in the sea of things at CES. And so that's when it felt like it was starting to lose some of its favor. but there were consumer companies, in addition to enterprise companies, actually launching things and announcing them at CES. So it does feel like it's on an upswing.

2:47:09Jason Howell:It has some new energy. I don't know if it was the best CES ever. There were years where I remember there were like huge launches, even 10 or 15 years ago. I don't know if anybody remembers sort of a doomed product, but the Palm, they're essentially - Oh, the Treo. The successor to the Treo. What did they - That tablet. No, it was before the tablet, the Palm Folio. The Palm Folio. Thank you. So that launched at CES, right? So it was a huge, one of the biggest product announcements of the year. I think it's the Palm Pre you're talking about, right? The Palm Pre. He's talking about the Pre.

2:47:47Ant Pruitt:Yeah, I think you're right, Benito. That's what I was going to say. Yeah. I love that Pre. I did too.

2:47:53Jason Howell:If it wasn't so stinking slow and the software could not work. But remember the charger? It had this charger that was like a little stone you just put it on. It was a beautifully, beautifully designed product. That was a gorgeous device, yeah. It truly was. But there's not anything like that that's happening anymore, for sure. But there were a lot of things that were pretty real there. And so it is a show that is sort of regaining its momentum. It's interesting because you know who wasn't there?

2:48:26Ant Pruitt:Apple. intel microsoft microsoft intel was kind of there who they partnered up intel had a intel did they

2:48:36Jason Howell:have a keynote no but they like they were they had they had the wrap the monorail they had partner things going on they bought ads and um actually you know who bought all the ads ohio ohio ads were

2:48:50Megan Morrone:everywhere the state of ohio the state of open your business in ohio move to ohio they were on every column going to the west hall okay i never i don't really think of ohio as next silicon valley but maybe it is technology natopia remember a lot of them there used to be a time when there was a ces blackout for two to three months before the show there were no releases yeah and then that started going away i like i like that that's coming back i like to be surprised at the show you know i remember that the down year for me was maybe 15 years ago when where a quarter of of the products were iPhone cases.

2:49:27Megan Morrone:And that was the rock bottom for me for CES. And like Jason, I think it's on the way up. This was better than last year. The traffic seemed to be more enthusiastic. The people were asking the right questions. Press were actually looking at things that might be future products. So yeah, I actually walk away from most CESs thinking, not much here. I thought it was interesting.

2:49:52Ant Pruitt:Both NVIDIA and AMD made big chip announcements. I mean, that's not where you think of them going to make those big announcements, but they did. I think Computex or some, but not there. Car manufacturers is there. Jennifer, it's amazing what has happened with home automation. That used to be, I remember there was a home automation pavilion in the back of the South Hall or somewhere. And it was all just a tower of Babel. nobody talked to anybody else it was zigbee and z-wave and and now it's it's starting to coalesce as a real plat a real technology platform that people are interested in uh sorry a quick question

2:50:33Megan Morrone:to to either either of you two uh did you make it over to the foundry um only at the very end of the

2:50:40Leo Laporte:show and i yeah i didn't what what was the point of what what was the fact in blue oh yes so this

2:50:47Jason Howell:was quantum so so quantum is like one of the next big things but that it had its own so quantum computing had essentially its own pavilion um in the font and blue which is like the new sort of

2:50:59Ant Pruitt:the hotel yeah the ces foundry is where you see ai blockchain and quantum innovation they say right it's kind of their blue ces blue sky yeah basically yeah yeah i did um was there a lot of

2:51:15Jason Howell:quantum innovation at the foundry there was so we we reported on this in the deep view so nat rubio licked wrote about this and interviewed a bunch of them you know and has followed the the quantum um thing there are things that quantum can do so this is another area where some of this chip stuff it's it's going to be interesting to see how it plays out because there are things that take a lot of power, a lot of GPUs and all of that, whereas quantum can do it in an absolute fraction of the time to do it. And so there are, but these are obviously, you're not going to use it to solve math problems.

2:51:54Jason Howell:You're going to use it to solve like the most, the hardest, most complex things. And so quantum is very real in terms of when, you know, it's going to be a thing. It's like anywhere from sort of one to three years, but there are, there are companies that are actually commercializing it now. So this is no longer a lab project. There are companies that are getting a lot closer. There's no longer just IBM talking about it and a couple others. It's getting pretty real. And really with AI, there's a use to put it to, before we used to think it was only going to be a cybersecurity, algorithms sort of thing.

2:52:30Jason Howell:And with AI, where there being really big computational problems to solve, it's going to have a reason for being and also a reason to fund it and to make the ROI worth it. So anyway, it was in our newsletter last week, and there's a separate story on the DeepView that details the quantum stuff. Very interesting.

2:52:52Ant Pruitt:Wow. So yeah, that shows you that CES is still a cutting edge conference where you're going to hear about stuff that is actually relevant, not just new iPhone cases. There were, we didn't even talk about it, a lot of new PCs announced, monitors. Verge picked the LG OLED monitor, which is a beautiful monitor. Lots of lifestyle tech, gaming tech. You know what we didn't talk about at all? What?

2:53:16Leo Laporte:Which is the origin of CES is the TVs. Yeah.

2:53:21Ant Pruitt:Oh, yeah, you're right. Normally, it's all about TVs, isn't it?

2:53:26Leo Laporte:About the TVs, yeah.

2:53:26Megan Morrone:was there any big tv screen that's one millimeter thinner you know i keep waiting for micro led

2:53:33Ant Pruitt:to happen i think that's the next technology that that but i maybe it's harder for it them to get it working than uh people knew because they've been showing these giant micro led screens for almost a decade now without any real consumer products it's a great technology hall is normally nothing

2:53:50Megan Morrone:but screens it's right that's in fact that's where the big main entrance is and there's usually a

2:53:56Leo Laporte:waterfall of monitors well the really interesting thing was samsung did not have a booth on the

2:54:01Jason Howell:show floor what yeah it was in the wind they had a they had they essentially had their own pavilion

2:54:07Leo Laporte:in the yeah in the wind so and they had like a little like check-in table at in the central hall where you could go and check in to go over to the wind oh and did you ride the elon's little underground tube to get there special samsung but it was it was someone one of the samsung execs i spoke to said that basically they were fed up of doing well not fed up but they said they used to so they had their big show floor booth but then they would also have suites full of things in other areas yeah so they wanted to just put everything together and they

2:54:44Ant Pruitt:said they couldn't get a big enough space they have so many products yeah um so that so tcl took

2:54:50Leo Laporte:over their big space this interesting which was kind of interesting because one of the stories are new we've got a new tv reporter john higgins um at the verge and he wrote a story about um how tcl is kind of coming for samsung and lg yeah well they have been for a while the chinese

2:55:06Ant Pruitt:manufacturers it's funny it you know it used to be american manufacturers and then it was uh japanese manufacturers sony and then south korea said no we can beat him and it was samsung and lg which used to stand for lucky gold star and was in the back of the drugstore and then they tried

2:55:25Megan Morrone:to rebrand it as life's good life is good yeah no it's still like gold certainly and now it's tcl and

2:55:31Ant Pruitt:hisense the chinese companies are coming hard after these guys with lower costs lower prices and newer technology. Although it's all manufactured there.

2:55:41Megan Morrone:So yeah. Right.

2:55:41Ant Pruitt:But my sense is that LG's panels are still widely agreed to be the best panels out there. They're the best. Yeah.

2:55:49Jason Howell:They're the best.

2:55:50Ant Pruitt:Yeah. Yeah. We didn't talk about the Lenovo expanding laptop screen. They've got these rolling screens. The Verge picked one of the keyboard computers. Was it the HP Elite? I can't remember which one you guys liked.

2:56:06Leo Laporte:People are very excited about that. I'm surprised that idea hasn't happened sooner, honestly. It's called the Commodore. Exactly.

2:56:15Megan Morrone:I don't get it. We had it at the beginning. Is that for your coffee table? I don't understand.

2:56:19Ant Pruitt:Yeah. I don't get that. But at least PC manufacturers are trying new form factors, and that keeps it kind of interesting.

2:56:27Megan Morrone:Right now, they're just trying to get memory.

2:56:28Ant Pruitt:That's what they're trying to do. That's right. Good luck with the RAM, kids. Wait, I wasn't meaning to ask you about that project.

2:56:34Megan Morrone:And they're begging. They're begging for allotments. I was asking about that Padre. Like you said that little box that you got from Nvidia has how much RAM in it? 256 gigabytes. So that's like what, a$10 ,000 computer?

2:56:47Ant Pruitt:Yeah, they bought all the RAM.

2:56:49Megan Morrone:I didn't say it was from Nvidia by the way. No.

2:56:51Ant Pruitt:Oh, right, right, right. We don't know whose it was. I love my framework desktop. It was 128 gigs of RAM and it was very pricey for that. But it would be double, probably double the cost today, which is amazing.

2:57:05Megan Morrone:I squirreled away about, what, half a petabyte worth of memory for some projects that I was doing. And then the memory prices went crazy. And I'm seriously considering just selling it all and banking it until the memory prices come back.

2:57:20Ant Pruitt:You're doing memory arbitrage, aren't you? I knew it. Oh, my goodness. RAM arbitrage. Well, I want to thank you guys. You made this a very interesting show. And you made CES sound like a very interesting event, which is in the past not always been easy. Thank you so much. Jennifer Patterson, too, a senior technology reviewer at The Verge, where she covers Smart Home at Smart Home Mama on the blue sky. Your husband will probably have something to celebrate a little later on tonight. So break out some champagne. Okay. I'm just giving you a hint. In the sported light. when they get the buttons ready.

2:58:00Ant Pruitt:We're ready to have a party. Break out the buttons and the little$10 speaker. Woo, we can a party. Jennifer is a regular party on Tech News Weekly with Micah Sargent every month. And we just love having you on. Thank you, Jennifer. I'm on this Thursday, I think.

2:58:19Leo Laporte:So lots more CES. Oh, wonderful.

2:58:20Ant Pruitt:We'll listen Thursday. We'll have more CES information. Maybe more buttons will make their appearance. Mr. Jason Heiner, it's always a pleasure. I really appreciate you giving us a quick preview on Wednesday on Intelligent Machines and the in-depth preview. But that's because you're the EIC at the Deep View. Free to subscribe. I keep asking you that.

2:58:41Jason Howell:I don't understand.

2:58:43Ant Pruitt:How can that be?

2:58:45Jason Howell:I mean, it's a newsletter. That's our primary thing with about half a million subscribers. Nice. It's only been around for two and a half years. they've built something really amazing and and i left zdnet to come to the deep view to work on covering ai every day and to build a next generation media company so we're a newsletter today but also lots more to come as usual jason you're on the cutting edge i think this is

2:59:12Ant Pruitt:absolutely the future very very exciting thanks for having me lio always a pleasure to see you always a pleasure and uh father robert ballasair the digital jesuit padre sj on blue sky uh look at look for his jesuit pilgrimage app on ios and android too and android and android yes

2:59:34Megan Morrone:you can hear my voice if you listen to enough of those the stories that come through the app

2:59:37Ant Pruitt:yeah and uh and the flipper zero that i gave you don't bring that to the mayoral inauguration apparently New York City's banned Flipper Zero. I just want to let you know.

2:59:46Megan Morrone:I saw that, and that's a little strange. Although I've disguised mine, because my flipper now wears a clerical collar.

2:59:53Ant Pruitt:Oh, it's been ordained. Well, anything you want to plug? Anything going on in the world of Father Robert?

3:00:03Megan Morrone:A whole bunch going on. I just got back from the Holy Land and from the Middle East. The next couple of weeks, I'll be all over the Midwest of the United States then probably down in puerto rico in belize gotta make a couple stops in south uh south america probably heading to venezuela are you on a mission really going to venezuela there's a bunch of stuff that needs to get taken care of so yeah well my goodness okay so if you see me it means i'm still

3:00:30Ant Pruitt:alive okay okay yeah be careful in venezuela wow i'm in for you yeah yeah it's different it's

3:00:38Megan Morrone:different. But Leo, it's always great to come back. It feels like coming home.

3:00:42Ant Pruitt:Yeah, we love having you on, Father Robert. All three of you, you're three of my favorite people. Catch Father Robert's full CES coverage on the Twit News feed or on YouTube, youtube.com slash Twit News. I can't remember. But anyway, go to youtube.com slash Twit. You can find it there. Hey, everybody, Leo Laporte here with a little bit of an ask. Every year at this time, we'd like to survey our audience to find a little bit more about you. As you may know, we respect your privacy. We don't do anything. In fact, we can't do anything to learn about who you are. And that's fine with me. I like that.

3:01:19Ant Pruitt:But it helps us with advertising. It helps us with programming to know a little bit about those of you who are willing to tell us. Your privacy is absolutely respected. We do get your email address, but that's just in case there's an issue. We don't share that with anybody. What we do share is the aggregate information that we get from these surveys. Things like 80 % of our audience buys something they heard in an ad on our shows, or 75 % of our audience are IT decision makers. Things like that are very helpful with us. When we talk to advertisers, they're also very helpful to us to understand what operating systems you use, what content you're interested in.

3:01:55That's enough.

3:01:56Ant Pruitt:Let me just ask you, if you will, go to twit.tv slash survey26 and answer a few questions. It should only take you a few minutes of your time. We do this every year. It's very helpful to us. Your privacy is assured, I promise you. And of course, if you're uncomfortable with any question or you don't want to do it at all, that's fine too. But if you want to help us out a little bit, twit.tv slash survey26. Thank you so much. And now back to the show. Thank you, Jennifer, Robert, Jason. Thanks to all of you. A special thanks to our Club Twit members. Without your support, we would not be around, to be frank.

3:02:33Ant Pruitt:If you're not yet a member, please do check it out, twit.tv slash club twit. You get ad-free versions of all the shows and a lot of extras. Our AI user group is really beginning very interesting. I think it's some of the best AI coverage out there right now. And your support makes all that possible, twit.tv slash. Club Twit. We do This Week in Tech every Sunday, 1400 UTC Pacific Time. That's 1700, not UTC, 1400 Pacific Time, 1700 East Coast Time, but that is 2200 UTC. And I say that because you can't watch it live. We stream this live in our Club Twit Discord, of course, for our club members, but also on YouTube, Twitch, X.com, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Kik.

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