Techstrong Gang – August 15, 2024

Hey, everyone. Happy Thursday. We've got a great show for you today.

You know what? Apple's not the only phone building, ai intuit. Google had some big news yesterday.

Uh, Samsung's out there, we're gonna talk about that. What's going on with Google? Is Google destined to be the next mob be.

We've got sustainability and echo insights from Bonnie and our Booth Babes, a thing Again, all that more you're watching Textron Gang. Hey everyone, good day to, it's Alan Shimel here. I'm, I'm actually remote today out in the big country, Abilene, Texas, where I'm, I'm visiting my son, actually.

But we've got a full gang lineup and some really great topics to jump into today. Let me introduce you to who we've got going on. First of all, uh, he, he was at the Google Conference yesterday, and he's going to give us, you know, his usual expert insight into thing, voice of reason.

It's our editor extraordinaire, John Schwartz. John, welcome and, and thanks for joining. Hey.

Hello. Hello, Ellen. How things are Not too hot in Texas.

Oh, it's hot here. Not as hot as Vegas was last week, but hot. Oh, God.

Also joining us, you know, if we've got AI on, he's a good person to have on it. He's got a great newsletter that goes out there. Uh, he does, but he's done so much more than that.

He's a regular gang member here, where that's the first time I've been on with him in a couple weeks, so it's good to see my good friend, Mark Hinkle. Mark, welcome. Thanks, Alan.

Good to see you buddy. Nice to see you. And then joining us from High up in the Rockies, where it's probably also pretty hot.

Um, he's our CTO, he's also Futurum, a Futurum, CTA, Mitch Ashley. Hey, Mitchell. Welcome.

Good day everybody. ai a ai, ai a ai and then a, a first time guest on the Gang today. He, he runs, uh, signal six five, which is the testing lab arm of Future.

And they've been doing a lot of work around AI phones and, and a bunch of other stuff. I, he, he could tell us more about it. Ryan Shrout.

Ryan, welcome to the gang. It's great to have you on here. Thanks for having me first Time.

Looking forward to it. Thank you. And then joining us, holding the fort down back in our Boca Studios.

It is our Echo Insight Sustainability Editor, analyst, Bonnie Schneider. Bonnie, looking good. I'm not used to seeing you from this angle.

Thanks. I'm usually right on your elbow there. Yeah, Great to be here.

Absolutely. I joining Bonnie as always, batting cleanup, playing first base from the Bronx, our chief content Officer, Mike Vizard. Hey, Mike.

Oh, for me, for the Allstar yet, right? Well, the All Star game was two weeks ago, but next year. Um, but anyway, so guys, I guess, well, let's lead off with the Google story, with the, with, excuse me, there's a couple Google stories, but let's lead off with the Pixel story, if you don't mind.

Google had a press through, uh, I don't know if it was a press conference, but had an event yesterday. John, I understand you were there. Why don't you, why don't you kick it off?

Yeah, it's kind of their oppress event. You know, with apologies to my friends at Google. It's really the warmup act for the Apple announcement, which I believe is gonna be September 10th.

That's the, the odds, the, that it will happen then on their campus. So what Google did was they preempted the Apple announcement by announcing themselves AI capabilities for Pixel nine line, and then Android 15, I think Ryan and Mark probably can talk about the details of that. But from a bigger point of view, I'm thinking about it as Google's preemptive, again, warmup back to Apple in which they try to gain some sort of measure of publicity.

And what they did was they, they think brought out Jimmy Butler of all things, although I don't have no idea what he has to do with ai, but it was a good photo op. Um, he took a, he took a couple of photos, they'd edited the photos through ai, which was kind of cool. But here's what Google really wants to do, is they wanna gain more attention from their phones because they have about 1% of the worldwide phone market far behind Apple and Samsung in terms of the cloud.

They want to boost the cloud through ai. And when it comes to search, we'll get, we'll talk about that later, but AI is gonna play a role in search or whatever that may be. We'll never, we won't know in for a couple years in terms of whether search is part of Google or it's broken off.

So again, it's an event. These happen all the time here. Apple set the bar, set the precedent.

When Steve Jobs used to do these, I'll just give you a little historical context. Long, long time ago, I went to the iPhone launch, 2007 January. It was around the same time as CES, which in a sense created this, this mass kind of craziness among reporters to go to the event.

So I went to the event because my colleagues were in Las Vegas, and I ended up getting a demo from Jobs who gave us an interview about this. And I always remember him saying, do you think the phone will really, do you think this is gonna really make much of a difference? And so now what we see is happening, these events, Samsung tried to do it, Samsung still does it.

Google's trying to do it. They want to bring attention to the company, they wanna market it. It's free advertisement and it's effective.

Although, again, the big ones coming in a couple weeks. Ryan, I don't you, Ryan, I dunno if you wanna jump in there and kind of go in through some of the details, but what are the comparison points between these things that are out there? So the first, I mean, the first comment I'll make is, uh, it's, it's a good point about kind of Apple starting these kind of, uh, I I call 'em like direct to consumer events, live stream.

You wanna go talk to the audience directly. I, I find them to be very effective. Uh, as somebody who was in technical media and press for years and years.

Um, it's, it's an opportunity for Google to go talk about their product in a way, um, that they get to go tell the message as opposed to reviewers. And I, you know, it's, it's good that consumers will get to see both sides, you know, I think, I think the event itself, you know, they announced four distinct devices, the Pixel nine, the nine Pro, the nine Pro xl, and then a fold, uh, nine pro fold. Um, so they got a, a, a plenty of new devices to go pre-order.

I think they start shipping at the end of this month. Um, I think the event went really well overall. There was one major demo snafu at the very beginning, the very first technical AI demo they did.

I think it took three attempts for them to get it. It was the third time was the charm, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

It was, uh, I felt, I felt some, some that was emotional pain. That fringy. Yeah.

Yeah. It too. Yeah.

During it, um, you know, I I being, being in, uh, in the era of, in the field rather of kind of testing and comparing performance and experiences on these devices, the things that I look for on here are one, what cool new AI features did they discuss in de in debut, uh, how do they compare to what other vendors in the market are doing, whether that be Apple or some of the custom Samsung stuff or, or what have you. And then like, I, I get really geeky on, uh, the silicon, right? What do the chips do?

What do they have? What's the performance? Um, and I, my, there's still a lot of details let that we still haven't gotten about the, the chips themselves, but all indications are that the Google Tensor G four, which is the name of the chip in the new the new phones, um, is not really a significant upgrade of any kind over the previous generation.

So the G three chip that was in the Pixel eight Pro and the Pixel eight family of products. Um, and this G four, you know, I, I think they've upgraded the, the arm architectures, the arm cores that they use in the, in the SOCs. But all it looks like there might be one fewer of them, uh, than there were the previous generation.

They're still calling out that the, uh, the AI co-processor built in the OC the, the tensor unit is still a third gen TPU, um, the same as the previous generation. So they didn't talk much about speeds and feeds. They had some claims, you know, 20% better browsing performance.

Uh, I think they said up to 20% better battery life. But when it came to AI performance as an example, they talked about 45 tokens per second industry leading 45 tokens per second, which is kind of a, you know, nonsensical way to talk about performance without a whole lot of other context, right? Like what model you're running, what's the, you know, what's the precision rate you're running it at?

Um, what's, what's the usefulness of that? Um, so it's hard to compare that to anything else on the market, which is again, obviously what I'm trying to pay attention to. How does this compare for on-device AI processing relative to, to other phones, uh, and, and tablets.

Um, but otherwise, I mean, I thought some of the features were, were really interesting and compelling, um, to, to compete against what, uh, apple Intelligence is trying to do. Uh, as of, you know, this, this last couple of months, You know, usually we think of these things and as we're framing it here in terms of Apple versus Google, Android versus iPhone, Ryan, you, you recently did a, uh, a report over at, uh, signal 65 on the, on the latest ai, uh, galaxy Samsung phone, right? So now, yeah.

Is, and usually Google my take, and I'm not as sophisticated probably as the both of you guys are on this, but usually Google kind of sets the bar and then Samsung fills it in, if you will. But how, how does the, this, you know, Google announcement yesterday compared to the actual real, you know, real testing you did on the Samsung? It's a, it's, it's a great question.

I think what Google tends to do is, so they, they control the operating system. They control for the most part, kind of what cloud AI capabilities exist, uh, for the most part for this, this particular segment. Um, but they have not been traditionally a local compute kind of compute on the device leader in, in almost any, any way, right?

If you look at CPU performance, GPU performance and AI processing, so the, the report that we did obviously didn't use the, the Pixel nine devices. That was a Pixel eight versus a Galaxy S 24 Ultra. Um, and what we found was, if you looked at local AI inference on the device itself, the, the Samsung device that uses a Qualcomm Snapdragon SOC was, you know, anywhere from three to seven times faster in a lot of, in a lot of tests.

Um, and, and that's a combination of both, you know, SOC selection and kind of what your AI processing capability is on the chip itself, and also the software integration and kind of the frameworks and, and how the, the operating system operates, uh, kind of, kind of with those models. And the, and, and the, and the hardware itself, I think is really a huge part of it that people don't, don't really give enough credit to. So Qualcomm and Samsung had spent a lot of time optimizing the software stack.

This, uh, you know, q and n Qualcomm neural network, API, um, Google still is dependent on this N-N-A-P-I, that they have this neural net, API that's a little bit outdated long in the tooth, doesn't see the performance benefits. And so if you look at, you know, cloud-based AI functions, things that are going up into the, you know, using your network, they're gonna be roughly about the same across any of those devices. Things that are using local processing.

It gets a lot more interesting. And if you look at what they announced yesterday or, or this week, the Pixel nine devices have some more local things happening, image generation, um, kind of local screenshot searches, uh, and, and, uh, things like that that are gonna need more local processing. So it'll be really interesting to see how those kind of compare across devices later this year.

I think also when you mentioned the, the local processing, that's also key because that's a, a factor in keeping it more energy efficient. So it's interesting that the nine is, is putting out that, um, they're doing, doing more local processing, and also that it comes to photos, because Google's known for the, I I've been a Pixel user for a long time. They're, they're known for photo editing and, and different types of capabilities.

I think that draws in the user. Yeah. Yeah.

And I think that local pro, it's gonna be interesting to see kind of how the phone vendors and the Android operating system really kind of go about dividing that workload, right? How much of it is gonna happen in the cloud? How much of it happens locally?

How much of it requires a newer device to even run? The same thing is kind of same debate happens in the Windows world with the copilot plus kind of initiative that they, they've been pushing. So, you know, it's gonna be interesting when Apple announces the iPhone 16 in September and the AI capabilities, one thing in the back of my mind, and we'll, we, I'm kind of foreshadowing the next segment, is Apple's been backpedaling a little bit in terms of AI development, especially in Europe.

It'd be interesting to see how they might be compromised and going forward, how much of an impact AI really has on phones. I think we kind of talked about this earlier, Alan, this, this idea that are they really gonna be the selling point? And with some regulatory pressure, especially from Europe, it'd be interesting to see how these companies thread the needle.

Well, Clearly they're building in the, the horsepower. Apple, Google, Samsung, they're building in the horsepower. The question I always have for these things is, is there a killer app that's gonna drive it?

And, you know, mark, I'll throw it out to you. I mean, do we need this much AI horsepower in our phones? What are we gonna do with it?

Yeah, you know, I, the way I look at it is, I think that the phones outside of the iPhone are a commodity. The, the, uh, ability to deliver high bandwidth is a differentiator, and then the interface is a differentiator. So when Apple came out with Siri, everybody talked to Siri, people's kids asked Siri questions, but after the sort of honeymoon period, we found out it wasn't that great.

So I think that what the killer app is, and the things that I'd be interested in, is how well the AI helps with the interface. So just imagine right now, um, you don't have the ability to control many AppSec on your iPhone via Siri because of permissions. But I think that's gonna change.

So it's gonna be more of a action model. Um, also I've found the killer app for me and AI on my phone is using the multimodal capability. So this is Google's Gemini to take pictures.

And, for example, I was on vacation, we rented a boat. I wanted to see how they add my phone to the interface. I took a picture of the stereo on the boat, and it gave me the directions.

That's a, that's a leap. And that's probably more around search and actually contextual information. I think that's always gonna be network and remotely bound.

So the two things that are really interesting to me about AI on the phone is that ability to have AI create more robust interface where I can talk to it or even type to it, but get an answer rather than diving into AppSec. And then the second thing is just, you know, contextually aware inputs using, you know, vision eventually audio. So we already see Shazam as like one of the popular AppSec to understand video, but imagine it start to understand second languages and doing realtime translation.

That's the kind of things that I think it'll be good for. But I don't know that there's any other local killer AppSec. Like, you're not gonna ask the same complex questions, chat, beach, GPT, or um, just generate really robust video images on your phone.

You're gonna use it to interpret information, is my opinion. You know, I really think it's about the experience that, that customers get out of their phones. I think, you know, the, to the graphic cards, all the testing that we do around those, and the, you know, we have the ML perf for, for machine language testing like the Ryan does with, with the mobile phones.

And, you know, there's all, every graphic card is rated compared to other each other's what? And, and that, and that's important just to kind of compare generally. 3 of this, I'm not gonna buy it.

It's usually, well, I wanna run this game. This is, I, that's what I want, is something that I can run that what's out now, and then what's gonna be out for the next two years. Thinking about a mobile phone, generative AI has the potential to kind of deliver the promise of Alexa and, and Siri Mm-Hmm.

Um, or at least more of it, right? And change how we interface into getting information, interacting with, as well as creating content, whether it's audio, video, or text, right? Yeah.

Writing, responding and automating some of the tasks seems to me that's, that's the real value we wanna measure eventually. Ryan, I'm curious your perspective on, I I think the one thing that people tend to miss in this conversation is that it's very difficult to predict how different this can be when AI works well, right? Um, in, in the, in the, the paper, Alan, that you referenced earlier, I, I kind of talk about how, you know, when, when the mouse was invented, nobody really knew exactly how much the computing environment and how we interface with data and, and devices would change from a terminal.

And when we moved from a mouse and windows into just the ba the early pieces of how, you know, voice communication with these devices, how that would change. And I, and I do fundamentally believe that when this works well, when we get this right, how you interact with all of your devices is gonna be completely different. And what your expectations of what they, uh, will be able to accomplish through their different sensors and cameras and temperature and barometer, like anything you can think of, um, and, and really the phone or your laptop or your watch or whatever is gonna be running these, these models just becomes a sensor for everything around you.

What are you looking at? What are you seeing? What are you hearing?

Um, and we gotta get past some societal cultural norms of, Hey, maybe your phone is kind of your, I mean, Microsoft went through this with recall, right? When they pulled back recall, Hey, nobody likes the idea of something watching your screen all the time. But I can tell you from experience of using that feature, it's really handy if you get past the, the social threshold of somebody, you know, don't think of as somebody spying on you all the time as having the world's best assistant that's just kind of always looking over your shoulder.

Um, and, and all of those types of things will, will change. And all we're measuring right now is how can you do the existing things that you were already used to doing a little bit faster or a little bit more creatively. And, uh, there will be some wow moment somewhere like chat GPT was that, that sparks us to the next, the next step.

I have a question. Where do I find this paper, Ryan? Because I'm not sure everybody watching this knows exactly where to go.

Great question. com, it's right there on the homepage. You can see the report, uh, that looks at, uh, galaxy AI capabilities and kind of some comparisons there.

Uh, like I said, it's comparing the Pixel Lake device versus the S 24 Ultra, both existing platforms out into the world, uh, once the Pixel nine and whenever Samsung decides to do their next announcements, it'll be really interesting to go back and kind of take a second look. Can I ask a dumb question? Hey, Ryan, of, am I ever gonna get a thumb wheel back?

No, I don't think so. No. You're gonna have to verbally say, scroll down, scroll down, scroll down, Keyboard, keyboard.

You're too much from the Blackberry keyboard. Hang on. Hey, Ryan, I, I got a quick question.

A lot of people out there are like me, I don't look at the notes. com Cor, correct? Yes.

com. Yes. Cool, man.

Right. Hey, you know what? Whether we like it or not, we're getting AI in our phones.

And here, here's another lesson I've learned in life and, and the internet, if you build capability in there, someone will figure out what to do with it. Mm-Hmm. So we may not know what that killer app is as we sit here today, but someone out there does, or someone out there will.

And whether it's a new thumb, thumb wheel or something else, I'm, I'm sure we're gonna find some great uses for all this capability. So exciting times. Indeed.

We're gonna take a break here on Textron Gang. Ryan, I think you're gonna hop, I want to thank you for coming on here for your first time. And you know, don't be shy and keep up the great work at Signal 65 there.

You, thank you very much. Happy to come back anytime, right? All right, we're taking a break.

You're watching Textron gang. All right, folks, and we're back. And if you remember from, uh, last week we were talking about how Google in a court case has become a, what they call a convicted monopolist.

But now there's noise coming out of the government that says they might actually think about breaking Google up, which seems like in some instances, an extreme remedy. But I'm going to Alan with this to start with. I guess what they're saying is that, to a certain degree, if they took all the money they got from search to move into these other businesses, then those other businesses are quote unquote, maybe fruits of the poisonous tree that they gotta give back.

I mean, what's, what's the reality? You know, Mike, you're, you're, you're signaling here with words like convicted and fruit of the poison industry. Those, those are term, those are terms we use in criminal cases.

Adam, let's be clear, fighting words, this isn't a criminal case. Okay? So that, that's number one.

They're not criminal cases. We have a, a, a decision from a judge that said, yes, Google was guilty of using monopolistic practices. I'm sure that decision is being appealed, and we'll see what happens with it.

We have the EU constantly nipping at the heels of Google and Apple and meta and, and so forth. And I, I have a theory on that, actually. I have an all encompassing theory behind these states.

But, you know, shades of John d Rockefeller and, and, and Ma Bell, these things like breaking up a company are not done lightly in the United States. It took them 10 plus 12 plus years on the at t case. And I think even the IBM, uh, it wasn't really a breakup, but the IBM Monopoly case dragged on for near two decades.

But I, I have a different take on this. I have a different take on this the way I view it. We exist in a world why to economy where nation states wage war for supremacy, money talks, and the United States of America.

So many we're on this show because of the, what we've done in technology. We invented the internet, right? To borrow a phrase from Joe Biden, we're the United States of America.

And when you look at companies like Google and Meta and Apple, I, I put forth the proposition that these are strategic assets of the United States of America in our quest to be still to remain a world leader in economic commerce and, and the world, right? If we don't have the Googles, the Apples and the Microsofts, what are we using? Huawei, Tencent, and, and du whatever, and say it's called, because the Chinese aren't sitting there worrying about it.

They, they do anti monopolistic stuff if they don't pay enough money over to the party. Okay? So we've gotta tread real carefully here about killing the goose that lays the golden egg, and as it replaced that, or the, the piece that lay the golden eggs, and as it re as it's in regard to the eu, you know, I was talking to Daniel Newman, CEO of Futur group before we got on today's gag.

And he, he said something to me that resonates too, which is for all the eu, the EU is sort of like, I had an aunt like this. She made a lot of noise. She wore very stinky perfume, had nice pocketbook, but for all the noise, but for all the noise, for all the noise they make, you know what they like collecting the billion or 2 billion Yeah.

That they bang Google and Microsoft and apple and metal with every year or two, it fills their CERs up. And that's what they've been doing with Google Books. That's what they've been doing with Google for years.

They end up Google one's up paying Ups. They do it with everyone. They do it to Microsoft.

I'm telling you, If it's a Microsoft, they did it with Apple. Someone's gotta pay for that stinky perfume in pocketbook. It's a racket.

Wow. You're saying it's a racket, Vincent. It's a, well, you know, they, they, they're the classic ankle biters.

Yeah, no, it's, It's, you know, let here put out, you know, let me, let me slap your wrist. I'll look the other way. Keep going.

Well, gambling going on here. I'm shocked. All right.

I might argue that we are a, we are a nation of laws and we are a great country 'cause we have these laws. So just because we're locked in a global battle, maybe we shouldn't ignore the laws that are the foundation upon which this great society is built a natural more advocate can, We can enforce them within, within reason. I mean, the punitive measures here probably is, is probably gonna be a fine.

I mean, we've been down this path before with Microsoft to break. I, I agree with, with Alan to break up a Google and a company like this was just so intricate intricately intertwined in the digital economy worldwide would have not just a devastating effect on maybe the world economy, but the US economy in particular. And I just think we're gonna go down this road.

It's gonna take years for this to be resolved and there'll be some sort of fine and maybe some tweaking of the operations for Google. But, um, it's definitely a game changer in the Valley. People are terrified of Apple said it wouldn't would fight the EU tooth and nail after it lost its case and it ended up settling with them.

And I think the same thing's gonna happen with others, which kind of leads to this, what we're gonna see more and more and more investigations. I'm all for, um, slapping the wrists and bringing these guys in because they're definitely performing monopolistic tasks, but within reason in terms of a penalty. Do you think that, I'm not advocating for break at 'em all up or breaking Google up, but lemme take the other view.

Do we relent that we broke up standard oil? Do we say, damn, I'll miss those days. I wish we had standard oil.

Damn, I wish we had at and t running all of our telecommunications. Well, we do. What a stupid decision now.

I mean, think about, think about how that exploded the market, at least for at and t of telecommunication services and what that ecosystem looked, that that would've never happened without breaking up at t. So I'm not saying we have to break everybody up, but you know, there, there's a whole upside to it as well. Um, and I don't think any of those companies that are so precious, we don't wanna mess with them.

I, I strongly disagree with that. If they're doing things they shouldn't be doing, let, let's stop it. We, we need competition in the market and they wield a lot of power, whether it's, you know, in the government, in Congress, or whether it's in the marketplace.

And, you know, somebody has to, to watch out for that and, and help everyone else to compete in those markets. So I don't, I'm, I'm not hands off. Well, I just as, as well this irony, I'll, this will be the last thing I'll say about this, this certain sense of irony, the Obama administration embraced and they loved big tech.

Then ironically, was it in June, 2019 when the then Trump administration went after tech on the grounds, and it was very vindictive actions, um, on the grounds that it was censoring the hard ride views. But then they kind of looked at it from an antitrust point of view. Now, ironically, we have all these tech billionaires lining up behind Trump for tax breaks and hopefully, you know, dismantling the Justice Department.

It's all very kind of political too for me in a certain sense, a certain kind of cynical viewpoint of mine. Um, so I want to just throw that out there. Yeah.

And actually it is political. If, so, what Google was lost on was violation of the Sherman Act. And going back to Alan Stinky perfume, the Sherman Act was not a, uh, an act to like for the good of the people.

It was a actual fight between Tim Sherman of Ohio and Mic the rep from Michigan who cost him the presidential election or nomination. So he was trying to make sure that tariffs were high, but they wanted to make sure that there was no comp, that there was no, uh, um, incentive for local companies to jack up prices. But at the end of the day, I think Greenspan hit this in the nineties really well, and it's antitrust is if we didn't have these companies like to, to just, um, debate Mitch's point, if it wasn't for Bell Labs and Lucid and all these things, would we even have the telecom infrastructure that would advance as quickly as it did?

So there is a cost to a lot of these things by not having, um, by, by Overregulating, we, we might be missing out on things that wouldn't happen. We may not have, you know, large language models from meta without, you know, uh, more lazy fair policies. We may not have good global search without letting Google do what they did.

Um, so there is an argument that there is a cost if you overregulate and I think of worse people to actually, uh, create laws around technology are legislators. I mean, GDPR is a prime example. I have carpal tunnel from clicking cookie warnings all day.

And so I think that the, the takeaway is if you regulate these things, you have to have a law that actually does what it's meant to accomplish. And right now, I think free markets are much better regulator of technology then, uh, a bunch of lawyers in Washington trying to come up on the call. I was, I I agree.

Mark, I'm I'm sorry. Go ahead buddy. No, I was just gonna say that, um, could there be some sort of compromise where they're not breaking up Google, but they're pointing out specific instances where they are not, let's say, the standard for a certain phone company.

You know what I mean? Where it doesn't default to Google. Um, and maybe the data is, is it's more transparent, uh, rather than just saying, okay, pay all these fines to at least on some level, change some of their practices so they're less, according to what the d OJ said, monopolistic.

Well, we're Not, we're not gonna package the browser with D os kind of thing. What You're talking about, I have a great conspiracy theory on all of this too, is for the first time in many years, there's legitimate, um, competition coming to Google in the, in the form of ai. So OpenAI, right?

Just announce their search and complexity is, I use perplexity instead of Google these days for search. And I'm wondering, given how well connected Sam Altman is, if he hasn't been lobbying or he's That sort of opportunity, well, you think Microsoft absolutely. You think Microsoft hasn't been lobbying against Google for this?

They all do big Time. You know what's interesting is yesterday Eric Schmidt was, I believe it was yesterday, he was at, uh, Stanford and he was, uh, talking about OpenAI and about generative ai. He said that the reason why Google is behind Microsoft and OpenAI, because Google employees only go into the office once a week.

I mean, that's just kind of shows you Like that. I don't disagree with them, but that's a whole, I think I saw that too. That's, that's a different segment.

Sean did, did I tell you about moving to Florida yet? Oh, hey, that's a deal breaker, my friend. I'm not about to get up.

I'm up. I'm downloading here. I'm out.

No, but let me let you know, we talked about the Sherman Act. I'm reminded of people who say the Second Amendment was written in an era of muskets, not ar fifteens. And therefore it's kind of totally irrelevant.

And I, you know, there are parts of that I agree with, parts I disagree with. You know, we have a tendency in this country to think that somehow the Constitution is, is the word of God. It's biblical if you believe the Bible's the word of God.

And we could debate that another time. I don't believe the Sherman Act is the word of God. And, and I think Mark has brought it up right here, and what worked for Standard Oil and, and John d Rockefeller and the rest of the robber barons in the early, you know, part of the 19 hundreds is not necessarily gonna work in the worldwide global economy that we find ourselves competing in today.

Yeah. And we as a country need to, uh, maybe update these kinds of things. Let the market, let the market figure it out.

'cause it, it sooner or later, it it does. Right? And I think the case of AI search is a great example of how do you change this?

I would, I was talking to a gentleman yesterday, we're gonna have him on here at some point. His name's Mike Rubin. He's working with Six Five Media.

He was one of the top five people at a place called Alta Vista Easter. Raise your hand if you remember Altavesta. I used to, yeah.

Junior, right. Altavesta was going to be the search engine of the internet. I mean, they had everything lined up and, you know, if you would've asked the, the bookies in London who's gonna rule the roost, it was Alta Vista.

And, you know, of course it didn't work out that way, right? So the market has a way of, of writing itself. I think.

Well, let me get back to that point about the AI competition, right? If Google adds AI to its existing search engine capabilities, and then has these licensing agreements wrapped up with all these other vendors, then how is anybody gonna find these other applications that you're talking about people using? 'cause they'll just default to what they already have when the AI is part of the existing search engine Interface.

That's, that's a great point, Mike. When Google came out with AI search, the first two weeks, 85% of search results had ai. There were millions, probably hundreds of millions of dollars in lost revenue for people who depended on Google.

So it's not hurting Google as much as it was hurting, you know, the trickle down effect to other customers. Obviously, it probably will hurt them in the way that they monetize search, but, um, I'm, I'm, it's, it's concerning in the way that people have built business, that ship from Amazon, that have e-commerce build it businesses that could theoretically collapse by, you know, being too disruptive to the ecosystem. You might punish Google, but you might punish small and medium businesses throughout the world much more greatly than Google.

Absolutely. Guys, I, I, we gotta end this segment, but I, I'll end it with this. My advice is tread lightly, tread lightly.

This, this, these are very complex issues that are intertwined throughout our economy and throughout our strategic position in the world. Um, anyway, though, let's take a break from text, uh, on Textron Gang here. We're gonna come back.

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Well, the European Union has partially delayed its corporate sustainability reporting directive. What does that mean? And who's impacted?

I decided to take a closer look. Hi, I'm Bonnie Schneider with your Ecotech Analyst Insight News from Europe. The eus corporate sustainability reporting directive has been partially delayed from 2024 to 2026.

The extended timeline solely for sector specific reporting means it's tailored to different industries. Does this also mean that organizations can relax their efforts? Well, the answer is no coming due.

Just one year from now. Designated public companies must disclose their ESG risks based on their current 2024 data. Who's impacted will companies head forward in the EU and those outside with major operations in the region?

If you're wondering, are businesses prepared for this transformative shift? A recent PWC survey says, yes they are, but they do face challenges. PWC polled hundreds of executives and senior professionals across over 30 countries.

Their findings, well many say they haven't completed certain tasks detailing the financial impact of their sustainability, not just for themselves, but also how their activities affect the environment and society. The biggest concerns of those surveys cited data availability and data quality. This survey underscored the effort to drive sustainability across business operations.

The EU regulators aim to foster transparency and to create a level playing field for responsible business practices. So the sector specific delay that we were speaking of that's now going to be, um, reported on from 2025 data for 2026. What does that mean?

Well, one of the big factors is technology. As a sector, that means there's going to be new rules, not only for the general ESG reporting I spoke of in the video, but also sector specific like tech, like healthcare. Uh, different industries are going to have even more details.

So I think the issue of ESG and carbon accounting and, and different areas of this type of reporting, the demand for, um, understanding this is, is only going to grow. And of course, the EU regulations are definitely more strong than what we have in the us but California is also putting out some of its own, uh, regulations. And any global company that does business in the EU is also impacted.

So it impacts more people than you think. And this, this, um, was only gonna grow as we see not only the general specifications, but the sector specific ones that are coming next year that we're gonna have to keep track of. I gotta wonder, is this the first in an ongoing series of delays?

Because, you know, the history of these bodies and bureaucrats is that Yeah, you know, somebody sends them a memo and they go, oh, we didn't think of that. And then we're like, oh, well let's add another year to this thing. That's Exactly what happened.

That is why there was this delay. This wasn't supposed to happen where we're gonna have the sector specific delays. But people said, well, my, uh, reporting for technology is gonna be different than somebody in healthcare.

So that is why they're going to, I would imagine defer to experts in, in those sectors to iron out. It is all new and that is why there's the, the current delay. But keep in mind for 2024 people are gathering their data because that is going to be, the generalized reporting is due next year for the EU To be a little cynical, Alan, um, do you think somebody might be paying their lobbyists to raise an objection every four or five months or so and just delay these things forever?

You know what? But there's enough lobbyists to go around and and pay it the other way. I, as we spoke about in the last segment, right, I, it's kind of the stinky perfume on the end story, right?

The, these, these people. What was Her rat's name by the way? Excuse me?

What Was her aunt's name by the way? It was an Irene God rest her soul. She was a beautiful person, but, but Stinky.

Yes. No, the perfume was stinky. She wasn't sorry.

And she wore a lot of costume jewelry. She liked costume jewelry. None of it was real, but like very gaudy costume jewelry with loud big pocket books.

Right? Well, we're painting a picture here, huh? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

She had like, from wearing those big costume earrings, like ear LOEs kind of were like, you know, like elongated, like, uh, an Amazon Rainforest Indian or something. This, this was back when we didn't know how to spell sustainability. Right?

Right. Exactly. Wow.

I'm not sure We fell off the path into the Amazon, but, okay. Yeah. Okay.

I'm sorry. I took us down there. Mike, back to you.

Yeah. Can I just sort, I'll also start something out. You, so the, the, I'm just gonna go right at this from a tech, big tech point of view, as again, it kind of goes back to the last segment.

These companies willingly and voraciously go after as many markets as they can. They choose to do this. So they find themselves facing all sorts of regulations and rules that apply to things like healthcare, retail, what, what, what have you, transportation.

So in a sense, they kind of, you know, if they wanna, they wanna run the world, they have to also face some of the consequences in running it. Mark, let me come to you here for a minute. So we talked about AI the last couple episodes.

Sorry. Um, should we be tracking like how much energy each of these little tokens that we're inputs and outputs that we're creating with AI and, you know, is it really worth the amount of carbon being generated so I could write a better email? Yeah, I think it is a good metric to have some kind of energy usage per token so that we understand.

Because when I pick up my phone and type something into OpenAI, it's, it's, there's no cog, there's a cognitive dis um, disconnect. If we knew what we were doing, we can make better choices. I don't think we will, because that's just the nature of, of human beings when nobody's watching.

But I do think it, it gives us a better, you know, north star of where, where our goal should be as an industry so that, you know, technology companies like OpenAI, like Nvidia, like EMD and Intel are like striving for a goal and not just performance at any cost. I mean, there's a reason why we have, you know, we, um, MPG on our cars is we want to know how fuel efficient it is. We should probably, given the impact of this stuff, have that same kind of awareness whether or not we drive more or less or makes a difference.

But at least you can make an informed decision. You know, it's, it's interesting in this study that I cited in the video of the executives that were interviewed, many of them first said, yes, you know, they're ready. And then when they started getting into the details, well, not quite, the biggest challenge that they faced was data gathering, accurate data, sorting the data, and, uh, being able to account for, let's say AI energy use and things like that.

So that seems like a big challenge going forward. And it could open up innovation opportunity for companies that can help, you know, third parties to help 'em do that. Well, I'll tell you who cares about this a lot, and Red really yells at me about it.

It's my kids. In fact, the, you know, about 45 seconds that they look up from their phones that they're using all day, they'll yell at me about energy. You understand the paradox here.

You know, it's, it's interesting this, it's not by, it's far from a perfect analogy, but it reminds me of when Sarbanes Oxley came out, right? There's all these reporting requirements. Mm-Hmm.

You know, I don't know how many CEOs went to jail for, you know, inaccurate financial books, but it wasn't very many Le less than you. And I told our prospective customers that went Mitchell, that was absolutely that, that was our big selling point. How do you look at Stripes?

So it creates this whole industry of data gathering and compliance and a lot of things. And you can argue whether those that's helped or not. You know, I think in this case, it's kind of the same question of is it, is it helpful to measure energy consumption per token?

I don't know. You know, is that gonna change any behavior? Well, if it's not, then why should we measure it?

Why should we report on it? What, what are the things really that we do wanna to help drive down? You know, it may be just overall consumption of energy and water by AI as the scale as that scales up.

You know, I'm no expert in this area for sure, but it, it's easy for regulations. And I'm talking to the other side of the issue I talked about last time on the last segment. It's easy for regulations to become, take on not only a life of itself, but a galaxy of it in and of itself.

And, uh, and go way overboard in terms of reporting. And I mean, there's companies that don't do IPOs 'cause they don't wanna do Sarbanes Oxley. They're not big enough to pay whatever it takes to do that every year.

I mean, that's, that's a really good point, is the regulatory overhead is that, is the reason. And it's happened here recently for Amazon and, um, Google with their, um, reverse acquisitions because m and a from the Adobe Figma scared people away from trying to do m and a. So, uh, Google acquired the license and the, um, talent from character ai, but they didn't acquire the company.

And the same thing for Amazon did the same thing a few months back. And it's, it's a danger of like, you want a fair and level playing field, but if you do not have a regulatory environment that allows for that, it's gonna cause A mess. You know what, I, I used to do a lot of press co a lot of, uh, press briefings with companies and it usually, it was about products the last couple of years.

They were background conversations with the legal teams, with the lawyers on background, explaining to us other reporters why Apple, Google Meta, what they were, their point of view, where they were, where they were going, that was as integral to them as the actual products themselves. I mean, it's become almost a necessity. Absolutely.

Guys, we're, we're about outta time for this segment, Bonnie. Great, great job on that. Uh, the, the link to the video that you just watched will be in their notes.

I wanted to bring up one thing before we close out today, guys. Kind of a last story coming outta Black hat for me. Uh, good friend of Mitchell and my Jennifer Manila, formerly Jennifer Jaish put something first on her Facebook.

Then on her LinkedIn, evidently there was a reception at Black Hat, not part of official Black Hat, a private reception by the Cyber Risk Initiative, which is kind of the CISO council, if you will, of Cyber Risk Alliance. They put on a lot of events through the year for CISO. And, um, it was sponsored by our friends at Palo Alto.

And walking into the reception, there was sort of the classic accordion, you know, sign that said the Cyber Risk Initiative and what have you, and the name of the, of that particular reception. And standing next to her, they had two women dressed up in like 50 style dresses. And I'm not kidding you, I don't know who thought this was with Lampshades over there had that had the Palo Alto Network logos on the lampshades.

Um, from what I understand, people walking in, some people walked right by it and shook their head. Some people didn't say anything, other people said something. But the Bruja coming out of it has grown to quite a level of bruja.

Um, and, and Mitch, you know, jj, she's not some crazy wild-eyed feminist, you know, she's not one of those kind of person. I'm pick a fight, but she Right. Well, no, but she's, she's not She'll stand up.

Yeah. But it, it offended her. It offended my friend Olivia Rose on LinkedIn.

It offended a bunch of people. Offended me a picture of it. It it is just, you saw the picture, Mitch, it's, it's pretty.

So Cyber Risk Alliance, immediately their CEO disavowed, any knowledge of it and this whole, and they, we called their whole Mission Impossible team. Um, Palo Alto kind of fumbled the apology, and then I think the 13th came out. Their CEO wrote a formal apology with things they're doing to make sure this stuff doesn't happen.

Can Now, Mitchell, you and I, you know, we fought this, the, the Booth Babe Wars at RSA and Black Hat 20 years ago, Right after the Clone Wars we did fought the Boost Babe Wars. Yes. Well, we did, right?

We, Mitchell did. I used to write about it all the time and, and call it out. Yeah.

And I thought we were past that In an industry where we struggle, where right here we have what, five men and more women on the, on our panel, we struggle to have diversity and, and equal representation. And we ask ourselves why? And then you gotta ask yourself, who the hell came up with that idea?

What were they thinking? So I'm not here to pile on, I'm just here to say, as an industry, we have to do better. We, the, the diverse people in our industry deserve better.

Our industry deserves better, the world deserves better. And I, I hope it's the last time we, we see something, this talk about not reading the ru it's, it's A stupid, I mean, it's just idiotic. I, I mean, I can't believe it.

Yeah. Anyway, we'll leave you with that. We hope you had a great time.

As much fun as I had doing this. It's the first time I've been on this side of the, of the text gag, not sitting there with Mike and Bonnie. It's a lot of fun.

It's liberating. But thanks. We'll, we will, we'll be back tomorrow.

We hope you've enjoyed this edition to Textron Gang, but until then, everyone, I'm Alan Shimel and we're out. I'm Bonnie Schneider, sustainability contributor to the Techron Group. I'm excited to introduce you to a groundbreaking new initiative from Techron Research, the sustainability pulse meter.

The pulse meter offers valuable insights into how environmental responsibility factors into tech purchasing decisions for key players in the industry. Position your company as a leader in the industry and differentiate from your competitors with the sustainability Pulse meter offered exclusively from Techstrong research.