Techstrong Gang – January 28, 2025

Hey, everyone. Look up in the sky. What is that up there?

Is it a bear to play in a meteor or No, it's deep seek. You're watching Textron Gang. Hi everyone.

Happy Tuesday. It's Alan Shimmel here at Textron Gang. You know, there are some days where I'm just so damn excited to be on here to talk about stuff because the world is exciting, whether you like what's going on in the world or not, like what's going on in the world.

We, there's, there's arguments to be made on both sides, but it's nevertheless exciting. I guess it proves that old Irish proverb written by Mike ards, great grandpa, where you live in interesting times. Um, speaking of Mike Ard, let me introduce our fantastic Textron gang lineup for us today as we delve into some really important subjects.

I, I mentioned them, so I might as well go there. He's, he's not back in Ireland. He's actually up in upstate New York, as we call it, from Long Island.

He's our chief content officer, Mike Ard. Hey, Mike. How are you?

By that definition, the Bronx is upstate, so pretty much, yeah, well, even Northern Bronx, like Yankee Stadium was still the city, but once you got up like the Bronxville up, that area that was already upstate. Um, anyway, joining Mike and I, we have our Ohio contingent. They're both regular gang members, uh, part of our futur and brotherhood and, uh, of Tech Field Day.

She is the editor of Text Strong ai and, and Gestalt it, sone Saha. Hi Sonis, welcome and thanks for being on with us today. Hi, Alan.

Thank you so much and so happy to be here. Great to have you. And then joining Sone, he's the, uh, founder of Tech Field Day and still it's president, uh, running the show over there.

Our friend Steven Foskett. Steven, good to see you. Nice to be here.

Uh, I'm not sure geographically, but we might have just gone north to South. Could be From Mike to you to the Ohio folks. Yeah, I guess.

I mean, because GNAs a little north of me. Oh, okay. Well, I look, I didn't have my Google maps on and stuff.

I I just wing it. Anyway, pretty close. And then certainly heading south that I know for sure.

Coming down here to the Boca Raton Studios. We're joined by our everything Green and Sustainability analyst and editor. They're the one and only Bonnie Schneider.

Hi, Bonnie, how are you? I'm Well, Alan. Great to be Here.

Great to be here. And, and of course, as I said, I'm Alan Shimmel, if you don't know, and we're here now. Um, so anything happening in the news today, dice, There's this little startup thing called Deep Seat that everybody's flipping out about.

Stock prices are dropping through the floor, and the issue is they created a AI model that is, I don't know, maybe a 10th the cost of what everybody else is producing it for. I'm just estimating off the top of my head. But, um, folks are saying that they, they've created some new technique for, um, training these AI models.

They have not said what that is exactly. So everybody's scratching their head about how this thing works a little bit, but it's pretty clear that, uh, the cost of AI is coming down and it's all open source, so people are testing it and using it like crazy. But Alan, I know you've been following this, so what's your thoughts here?

Absolutely. You know, there's, there's circles within circles here, and you know, it, it's, it's such an interesting story, not just from the technology perspective, but from the nation state strategic perspective from the, from the winning of the hearts and minds battle perspective here for AI as well as the financial perspective. You know, I wrote what I think is a great article if I say so myself.

ai, and it talks about necessity being the mother of invention. So Mike, I I, I've got to, I I don't necessarily agree with you that the, the retraining techniques was so obscured as to not understand what they were doing. I think time will tell.

I, I think, you know, there's so much to this. Let, let's, let's try to build the case as, as if I was back in law school, and we'll start, you know, at that general foundational layer. What, what the folks, this company did deep seek Chinese backed company in a manner of a couple months, and for a mere few million, $6 million or something, they claim to have built a, a AI that rivals, um, chat, GPT Gemini, Claude Lama, and all the best that, you know, the western AI companies have done at the, at a cost of a trillion dollars or so, or whatever it is.

And they did it not with the latest, greatest hoist, GPUs from Jensen and the Nvidia folks, but with relatively much more modest hardware. They did it not with these elaborate training kind of, uh, machinations that take months and years, but in a matter of weeks using this retraining technique, as they call it. And then for the cherry on the top of the cake, they released it all.

Or if you believe, you know, you are entitled to your opinion. They released it all under an open source license and a real open source license, not some cockamamie fake open source license, but a real open source license, which will allow the world to verify this scientific method. At its best.

We could run this in labs. We could see what works, what doesn't work. Are they telling the truth?

Are they not telling the truth? So that's at our base layer, right? Then the intrigue and the, and the machinations come in, you know, a com, a country that just said, we're putting $500 billion into buying or building AI data centers and energy production says, oh, no, we can't let this happen.

This, this will ruin the whole thing. And, and immediately you start seeing, well, you know, the Chinese have done this before. This sounds like cold fusion.

This is, uh, you know, a ploy. This is, they're using forced labor. So the, the numbers aren't really true.

Maybe, maybe why did the Chinese open source it, obviously to try to kneecap the, the Western AI industry, very likely. Um, but, but here's the bottom line. Who, who benefits from this?

I'll tell you who benefits from it, the consumers, because ultimately in this war, for lack of a better word, and, and war doesn't necessarily mean guns. But in this battle of, of AI supremacy, I, as I think Satya Nadella at Microsoft said, we're, we, we will all win because AI will become more ingrained into what we do. We will use it more.

If it's easier to do, we all win for that. Now, there are some out there though, who, you know, looking at this under the guise of, of nation state strategy, strategic initiatives and advantages, uh, you know, are just gonna refuse to accept it. I think there's another argument to be made that perhaps if we didn't hold it so close to the vest and made it available to other countries, maybe this experimentation wouldn't go on.

Or maybe it's the inevitable necessity is the mother of invention. ai as another good article there from John Schwartz that was written prior, actually last Friday, you could check that out as well. And I'm sure we'll have more coverage, especially as the, the shock waves of this vertebrae around the, around the globe.

Anyway, I'll throw it open to the, uh, panel here for your thoughts. So the part that I like about this is the open source side of it, and that theoretically at least we should be able to replicate the results, and somebody else might use the same techniques to create additional models. And that would be awesome, because other folks, in additional, the things that you just said are gonna be a little bit wiggy about using an AI model directly from China, because we're busily ripping out every telecom piece of equipment we can find from those guys.

So I really hope that this is the way it works out, but, you know, I'd like to see the scientific proof and then I'll be happy. Steven, I don't know what you think. Yeah, well, I think that there's a few different aspects to this story that are, that are interesting.

I mean, and, and we've touched on most of them here already. Certainly one of the questions is how did they do it? Uh, you know, this thing exists, it's the most downloaded model in hugging face apparently.

And, um, everybody's trying it out and experimenting with it, playing with it. Uh, so it's not like we can pretend that this didn't happen. It happened.

Um, you know, how did they do it? We don't know. And I think that of all the controversies here, the how did they do it question maybe the most salient controversy.

In other words, you know, it would be very, um, appropriate, I suppose, in an international relations way for the Chinese government to want to stick a thumb in the eye of the US just as the US is announcing big AI investments and tariffs and export controls and all this to say, look, we developed, you know, we, we, we actually put this thing together with, um, stone knives and, um, paper, you know, coat hangers and, um, and, and it's just as good as anything you've got. Um, I could completely see that from a political standpoint. And so we can't really truly know how they did it.

I suspect that there's a lot of truth in what they're saying about how they did it, which is that they really relied on reinforcement learning. And furthermore, I suspect that the reinforcement learning leveraged a lot of the open source models and, and freely downloadable models that already exist out there. So if I was gonna be training a new AI model, I would have it training in a classroom with Claude and Llama and all these, and, and, and let it, um, you know, let it do its thing with, with that as a way to train it.

That may be how they did it or it may be different, but, you know, setting aside how they did it and, and, and what they did it on, the, the next question is, you know, did they do it on these export controlled H eight hundreds? Was it really just a small fraction of what, uh, you know, one of these other companies would use? Again, we can't really know, uh, exactly for sure what they use to, to, to train it on, because of course, there's a political implication of that too, you know, in terms of access to technology and these export controls and so on.

It is in their interests to say, Hey, we put this together on 50 H, eight hundreds. Ha ha. Did they, I don't know.

You don't know. But again, we can maybe set that aside and let's look at the merits of the model. The model is really good.

This is what's happening right now in ai, is that we have these companies like meta, like anthropic, like, you know, and, you know, like, like this model that are, are out there. They're freely available. People can build on them, people can use them.

That's why I feel like the basic models are not the strategic advantage people think they are. And, and, and again, that would leads me to question this whole Stargate investment, because if we can have basic models that are freely available, and then we can retrain them or connect them with applications or build, you know, a network of agents out of them or whatever, well, that benefits all of us, but it also kind of kickstarts this entire industry and in a way that frankly doesn't benefit the people that are spending, you know, billions of dollars to develop these basic models. Do we really need basic models?

I don't know. Um, you know, Sono, there's a whole bunch of articles on Textron AI about this thing. What do you think?

Um, so my thoughts are the same, really. Whatever the, whatever combination of techniques they use, they made it happen within two years with a small team of, uh, people and with just a handful of GPUs. Um, I do not know, uh, uh, what, uh, combination of techniques like, uh, engineering techniques they use per se.

But, uh, definitely, uh, it's been told that the experts who are studying the Chinese, uh, innovation, they say that it's a smart combination of, uh, open source methodologies and, uh, uh, software driven resource optimization. And obviously they used, uh, interestingly, a small patch of, uh, uh, candidates like, uh, who are, these are PhD students, and, uh, they, they do not have any industry experience. They just not seasoned AI engineers, so none of that.

Uh, so these are individuals who are fresh out of university, eager to prove themselves and, uh, really dedicate to the mission. So, yeah, and, uh, none of these techniques, uh, that were used, uh, were novel, so to speak, but they mixed and matched them so well that that was half the job done, and the rest of it were, well, um, you know, history. Everybody saw how impactful this thing is.

You know, I'd like to turn from the technology aspect of this and, you know, I was a political science and history major, and, uh, the, the implications here are stunning. Couple of things. First of all, all through the Cold War, and I'm old enough to remember as some of us here on the paddle are, and some of us aren't, but, but, um, you know, we were the red menace.

We were brought up around the Red Menace. The Russians had more rockets than we did. They got to space first.

Their planes were faster. And, and, you know, in the, in the rear view mirror of history, we found out we probably overestimated exactly how good those, the Russian technology was, right? They didn't have necess, they may have had more numerically, excuse me, but the quality and sophistication were probably not what we had.

That being said, they certainly may do, they need more with less, right? Excuse me, where they didn't necessarily adopt digital technology for this rocket program. They did a hell of a job with the analogs and their, their fighter jets maybe weren't as fancy electronically and, and cutting edges, maybe especially as, you know, the seventies turned to the eighties, but they were still am good.

And, you know, so while it wasn't the red menace that we were brought up to be, there was still something to be said for making due with what you have and necessity being the mother of invention. And that's the whole point of my article, is that given what they had to work with here, never underestimate the ingenuity of the human, of the human mind and human nature, we nature or pours a vacuum, and, and where there's a will, there's a way they, they figure it out. And you know what?

I I will tell you the truth, historically, that was one of the things about America, right? We, we used to, in the, you know, going back to the railroad era and the cars and, and, you know, all of those things in the, let's say mid 18 hundreds through the mid 19 hundreds, we figured out new, better, cheaper ways of doing things. It's not always the guy who spends the most money wins.

And, and that's part of the American story too, is it, you know, if you could come up with a better mouse trap, good for you, you deserve what you get. And is this a better mouse trap? I I, you know what?

I don't even pretend to know enough about the technology and what happened here to tell you. It's definitely a better mousetrap. But I will tell you, it is a mousetrap that seems to catch mice as well as some of the other mousetraps out there right now, and until it's shown otherwise, I think it's, it's just a fascinating story about human, the human condition, whether you're Chinese or Indian or American or Brazilian, or I don't care where you're from, we're all humans, and our curiosity and our drive to figure out and solve problems, it's what, that's what makes us human.

And so kudos to them for, for what they've done, assuming that the whole thing's not full of beats, right? Well, Well, assuming that it doesn't matter what they did per se. One of the things that we have seen is the open source community keeps closing the gap between their models and the proprietary models, and they keep closing it faster.

And so these AI companies, they have a problem that goes beyond just what the Chinese are doing. It's, they're investing billions of dollars to build AI models and then turn it around six months later in the open source communities, right on their heels. So, Because the, the, the tighter you hold sand in your hand, the more the grains slip between your fingers somewhere Dr.

Richard Stallman is dancing a jig, because that is the open source model. I think it'd be great if it, uh, some of the prices come down if it creates more competition, because just one thing I've been watching is the prices keep going up as they add more features and, and, you know, suck you into it. So, um, I'll, I haven't tried it, the deeps seek, but I'm, I'm curious to see, uh, the performance and of course, um, the pricing.

Well, there are a couple other technical aspects to deep seek that I think are particularly interesting and worth calling out. I am doing AI Field Day tomorrow and the next day after all, and we've been studying this a couple of things. Number one, um, to Bonnie's point, uh, deep seek uses lower precision mathematics, which requires much less, uh, power and infrastructure on the inferencing side as well as on the training side.

And that is pretty, uh, pretty valuable. And that's a, a trend that we've been seeing with AI models. I mean, the fact that you can run a deep learning model on your phone now shows that, uh, you know, the, the power budget is dropping rapidly on the inferencing side.

Another aspect of deep seek that I think is really interesting is that they're actually exposing the entire chain of thought as the model is, um, trying to work out, uh, the answers to problems. Now, that's been something that has been a pretty closely guarded secret for companies like OpenAI. Um, even though the, the models that do expose more chain of thought, you know, for example, you can make llama from meta, uh, expose some of that if you really work hard, um, you know, deep seek is doing that by default.

And so you can really watch it doing the thing, which I think helps, um, both in terms of giving us confidence in its answers, but also in terms of helping the next model, uh, develop. Because we can see how this thing is working to some extent. And I think aspects like this are important, as well as the sort of big geopolitical questions of how do they do it and what does it mean for us.

Um, you know, the deep seek team has pointed out that we're all helping each other to develop better models, and they wouldn't have been able to do this if it hadn't been for the fact that much of the work of, of researchers up to this point has been exposed for the rest of the world to learn from. And so essentially they're trying to share their innovations and say, look, we can do it with pure reinforcement learning. We don't have to have supervised training of the model, that sort of thing.

I think that's very, very cool, and it helps push the state of the art forward in a way that science is supposed to work. Yeah, I'm looking forward to all the investor lawsuits that will be coming down the pike if this turns out to be true, because the investors are gonna be, Hey, you guys either should have known about this, or maybe you did know about this and you hoodwinked this so Well, all those investors that are counting on open AI to develop artificial general intelligence this year, right? It's coming.

It's coming. So squ. Mm-hmm.

I don't know. Not According, not according to, uh, the Nvidia CEO Quantum's not coming to be relevant for at least a decade. Hey, this is the guy who said you needed the biggest, baddest processors to do ai.

I know who Jensen, Jensen, Jens, Jen's credibility's taking a hit here. Um, anyway, hey, we, we've devoted a lot of time to this, but well worth it. I'm sure this won't be the last time we discuss it, but we need to take a break here on Techstrong tv.

We're gonna come back to our next block as we talk about, uh, it's data privacy day. What are you doing to celebrate? com is the leading resource for news analysis and education on challenges facing the cybersecurity industry.

com covers all aspects of cybersecurity, including data security, DevSecOps, cloud security, application security, network security, security threats, and more. com has the largest selection of security content featuring breaking news, blog posts, podcasts, and more. com to learn more.

com. Home of Security bloggers network. All right, folks, we're back.

And yes, we are celebrating Data Privacy Day. And once again, I think we've been at this for almost, that feels like a decade. I'm not exactly sure how long, but in the age of ai, I think this is becoming a more pressing issue.

Steven, what's your assessment of the current state of data privacy? 'cause some of the younger generation would say there's no such thing. Well, I think that that's a pretty cynical attitude, but I guess, uh, gen Z can be forgiven for being cynical, considering that, uh, what they've been hearing, uh, all this time.

Yeah, I am skeptical of declaring days. I, I don't know if you guys know it, but every week on the gestalt it rundown on Wednesdays, we begin the show by, by pointing out some of the ludicrous days. It is, it's National Spaghetti Day, national Girl Scout, cookie Day, whatever, you know, so, so data privacy day does get my hackles raised as the old men say a little bit, as does the fact that the whole point of data, data privacy day is to raise awareness.

Yes, awareness. And a dollar 89 will buy you a bean burrito at Taco Bell. It's not all that useful to raise awareness of things that people are already annoyed about and cynical about and resigned to.

But that being said, that's my grumpy old man shouting at the clouds. Let me put on my regular hat here and say, yes, there's a lot of things in Data Privacy day that we do need to focus on. Now, first off, I think that it's important to, to recognize that we do or should have some control over our personally identifiable information.

I think most of us have experienced the joy or frustration of going to, I don't know, some sort of appointment. And the form says, put your social security number here, and if you're like me, you go to the person and say, are you going to tax me? Well, then why do you need my social security number?

And half the time the answer is, oh, we don't need that. We just ask for it. Well, right there is the problem with data privacy.

We don't need that. We just ask for it. The next aspect is that most of these, uh, most of this personal identifiable information is not stored in a secure way, at least here in the us.

Now, I know in Europe, they have strong penalties for not storing it securely, but I question whether those penalties are actually having the impact that they could have, because I suspect that many of it's still not stored securely over there. Uh, and in other countries, well, who knows what the laws are and who knows what the practices are. I suspect that in many cases, this stuff is, uh, you know, PII is stored wide open sure seems to be because of all these massive data breaches, uh, as my, my friend Sheri Hunt and, uh, have I been pod uh, exposed?

There are data breaches all the time, and all of us get caught up with them. And there again, I mean, it's, it's easy to become cynical when the answer to a data breach is, here's a free year of credit monitoring from a company that's gonna try to sell you stuff. Awesome.

That's really gonna help me. So I love the idea, I love the spirit, I love the heart of data privacy day. But the truth is, we do live in a cynical time, and I'm not surprised that people are cynical about data privacy.

I have, I I have, I have a thought or two on this, so I'm really glad we have a data privacy day, one day a year, but we should give a crap the other 364 days a year too. But that being said, when I think of data privacy, I don't think just of PII, I think from a corporate level, right? Data represents the crown jewels of so many, so many organ, of so many of us for our organizations.

And if we don't handle that data, someone's liable to steal it, use it to build an open source model and sync the whole ship, right? It's happened. That being said, Stephen, I agree with you.

Social security numbers were never meant to be unique identifiers for, for, for, you know, I, uh, ID it was really just so you have, it's like your account number in, in the bank, in the Bank of Social Security. And I wish we would get away from Social Security numbers as a unique identifier. I do take Umbridge though, in terms of the GDPR, I think whether you're based in Europe or not, you are subject to GDPR if you're doing business on the internet, that that's the reality of it.

Very few companies can get away with saying, oh, well, we are not in Europe. We don't participate bull crap. You've got customers in Europe, you have customers of customers in Europe, you're subject to it.

I think a lot of people do store PII in encrypted or secure locations. I just think the bad guys, the, the way most of these data breaches happen today is Vera phishing attack. And so, Steven, not to pick on you, but if I a, if I'm able to log into Tech Field Day encrypted data as Stephen Foskett because I was able to get your credentials, I have, I have access to the whole thing.

Very few attacks are sort of brute force and, and we read about them sometimes, right? You'll hear about a brute force attack, and I got salted, you know, data that I could work on for the next 300 years to decrypt until, until Jensen tells us it's okay. And then Quantum is real.

And, and we'll use Quantum to break it, but it, it, you know, that's not the way most, most hacks take place. They take place with credentials that give them access to unencrypt, the encrypted data that they're, they're grabbing. Um, now that being said, you know, as I said right from the outset, I appreciate the, the gesture of calling attention to data privacy day.

I think it made more sense 10 or 15 years ago when we really had a, a problem getting people to focus in on security. It's time is probably passed, you know, every day is data privacy day. I would argue the, the tenor of the conversation needs to change, and I think Steven touched on it a little bit with the whole social security thing, but too many organizations think that the data that they collect is now their data, and they don't really think about it as they are the stewards of data that belongs to somebody else and they're being trusted with something, and then they don't manage it well, because then they give it to developers to code stuff, and then they give it to, uh, salespeople to shove it in a spreadsheet somewhere and an unprotected file, and they're just cavalier with the whole thing.

I remember talking to one guy recently who was a developer in a bank, and, you know, they, they would know how much money Celtics players had in their account because they were just kind of, you know, using that data to help build their next generation of applications. And they had no business knowing it, or no requirement for knowing it. I just think that the issue isn't so much the way we secure the data, it's just how we think about what the responsibility is.

And I totally agree with, uh, you, Mike and Steven as well. Uh, I feel like that, uh, when data is getting collected from customers, it needs to be on a need per basis. You know, like if you need it collected, if you don't, then don't.

'cause we have all seen the, um, the downside of playing fast and loose with the public data, public information, sensitive data and things like that. And also, sometimes companies rely on third party collectors who, you know, aren't always the most mindful about the security of that data. So, yeah, uh, I feel like that there needs to be some sort of, uh, uh, uh, oversight on what data is being, uh, collected and how it is being handled within the organization as it passes on from team to team And how it's being sold, right?

You know, from company to company. That's probably such a big issue. That's why I hate giving my phone number to any store.

'cause you'll get so many spam calls after that from people you never heard of. Let me give you a real world example though, that happened to me this weekend, or not to me, to my wife Bonnie. Um, but if it happens to her, it happens to me too.

Yeah, when you're married, as long as we are, it happens. But anyway, we get a letter in the mail from an organ, from a company called The Garden of Life. I don't know if you guys are familiar, the Garden of Life for people who make like protein powder.

My, my wife's much, much more healthier than I am. And, uh, so she, you know, does all of that. And, uh, it seems the Garden of Life was breached.

And Bonnie's PII was stolen her name, her address, not her social security number, but her credit card number and that she used to, to use their, her, her email and so forth. We've all gotten these letters, I'm sure I usually get one a week or so, um, from some organization that, or company we do business with. And, um, and like most of these letters, it says, good news, we're going to give you a free year of monitoring.

Now, it used to be you would go to like Experian or Equifax and you'd sign up and you'd get, or TransUnion, you'd get your free year of them giving you alerts. But no, now there's a cottage industry of companies who do this sort of thing for companies who are victims of breach. In this case, the company was called IDX, Bonnie.

I said, well, Bonnie, you gotta go fill it out and get your years of monitoring. She came back, she said, now they're asking all these questions. I don't understand why they need this information.

I said, what do you mean? Let me, let me check it out. I log on, I scan the QR code, put everything in.

It says, great Bonnie, we sorry about the breach of Garden of Life. They've hired us, we're here to help. And it then proceeds to ask her all of these questions about her financial accounts, oh my God, bank accounts and everything else in under the guise of protecting her.

I said, quite frankly, I said, f**k this. We're not doing this. We're not, I'm not giving, we're already a victim of a breach.

Why would I be giving you all this information? Do me a favor. If you see her, if information anywhere, her name or email address, you let me know.

Until then, just, you know, S well, If I can f up, If I could suggest a couple of tools, a couple of specific tools for people, let me just do that for, so first off, I mentioned, have I been palmed? That's a great site to see if your email address is included in any data dumps, I strongly recommend signing up. It's free, it's legit, it is respectable.

Use it. com. com, which is the actual US government one.

And there's like 50 fake Hasn't been shut down yet. Milans nonsense. No, it hasn't been shut down yet.

com, all that. They're all scam, well, not scams, but businesses trying to, trying to, to take advantage of you. com is the real one By run by the US government, you can get your credit report as it says every year.

You can actually get it every four months from each of the three credit agencies. So that's what I do is every four months I download my credit report for free from the actual government one. The other thing is you can sign up for free in the us, um, on TransUnion, Equifax, and Experian for you.

You can, you can wait, navigate your way through there and get a free account. And then you can freeze your credit and you should all have your credit frozen at all times because it wa is the really, the only way to protect yourself from, from fraud and scams. And even then it may not work.

Um, my wife had her, um, a, um, a payday lender lent somebody some money using her stolen information even though her credit was frozen. And they keep coming back to her now saying, Hey, you owe us this money as they sell it to yet another, uh, bottom dweller. But the point is, um, those are basically some, some legit resources that you should use.

I would never sign up for some random service that is randomly saying that it's gonna protect me if only I give it even more information. So back to the subject at hand, uh, data privacy day. Let's keep our data private.

Let's not give it out as much as we possibly can. And happy data privacy day to you. We're gonna take a break here on Textron Gang.

We're gonna come back. We've got, we're gonna end up with the future of farming from our very own farm. Galbani Schneider, you're watching Textron Gang.

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Contact us today and tell your story to the world in the most powerful way with Techron Group. Welcome back to the Techron Gang. We all love fresh fruits and vegetables, we'll, mainly vegetables in this case, but you might think you have to go to a, a farm, uh, way outside of a city to get them.

But now there's a new way to do it. I guess it's not that new. It's actually been a while that it's been happening, but the technology for this service is improving.

I'm talking about vertical farming, which is very popular in urban areas, and it's fascinating how much lettuce, for example, they can grow in such a small space. I decided to take a closer look at vertical farming and the tech behind it. Hi everyone, I'm Bonnie Schneider with your ego tech analyst in sites, the future of farming is indoors and upward.

Vertical farms powered by AI and robotics are stacking crops in LED lit layers from floor to ceiling. In urban warehouses, smart sensors and AI algorithms continuously optimize temperature, humidity, and nutrient levels. While automated robots handle everything from seeding to harvesting.

The result, a single facility can now produce the equivalent of 400 acres of conventional farming in just one acre of vertical space. Two key growing technologies dominate this space. Hydroponics where plants grow in nutrient rich water solutions and aeroponics, where roots suspend an air receiving nutrients through a fine mist.

These soilless systems enable precise control over nutrient delivery while reducing water usage by up to 95%. Plus, they can enjoy perfect growing conditions regardless of the weather. Outside vertical farming does face challenges including energy costs and crop limitations.

Plus the initial investment for vertical farms can be substantial. Where can you find vertical farms? Cities like Singapore, Dubai, Shanghai, New York City and Tokyo are currently leading the way in vertical farming by producing fresh food year round within city limits.

Vertical farming offers a new model of agriculture using less water, no pesticides and minimal transportation. An appealing solution for expanding urban areas. Now, you may not be aware, but more than half the world lives in cities globally, and that number is expected to increase in the decades to come.

So solutions like vertical farming that are leaning into tech and creating more sustainable food and sustainable agriculture are very exciting, um, in the way that they could hopefully supply more organic food, not using pesticides and also reducing water use. Or these vertical farms that I just spoke about use 90% less water than than large farms do. So I think it's a promising technology for sustainable agriculture.

And, um, you know, I I'm curious to see whatever the panel thinks. So I gotta tell you three times now, I've almost bought this thing, I think it's called Garden with a y in it, where it's like, it looks like PVC pipe. Have you guys seen this?

It looks like PVC pipes and they have little outs things. And you could put in different plugs for different vegetables or flowers and have a mixed use thing. And in a little corner of your room, you can create this like, beautiful thing that both feeds you, makes it smell nice, and it's pretty to look at.

Um, I don't doubt it. And it uses a little bit of hydroponics and stuff and there's some, you know, some tech to it as well and lighting. But, um, I just don't know at scale, right?

Because so much today of our food is so processed and done at scale, right? Could this make a meaningful dent in, in big Ag? Right?

And, and I'm all for it if it does, obviously. Well they're, they're doing this here in Ohio, um, and we're excited about it here. Uh, I just wanna throw, throw that out there.

Um, I think it can, I think it can be great for, um, for a lot of, uh, a lot of, uh, produce that we eat, especially things like microgreens and salads and so on. It seems to work very, very well for that. Uh, there's an organization or a a, a company in Akron called eo, um, that's gotten a lot of press for doing this in, uh, old industrial building, uh, in downtown Akron.

Um, there's another one out in Medina that makes, um, that is a, a real, uh, large scale producer of vertically farmed salads. And we buy them all the time. They're, they're tremendous.

They don't need pesticides because there's no pests. Um, you know, it's, it's, it's a really positive move and I think that it can make an impact. It's just not for all types of vegetables.

Right? And I think that that's one of the challenges here is you can't, you can't grow some things vertically. That's true.

Yeah. So what is the level of scale that we can get to with this? Because, uh, ultimately does this wind up being the digital equivalent of the neighborhood garden project, or is this kinda like something we can feed an entire city using?

I think it can be scaled within the cities. So when we're looking at local areas that need to grow food, um, it's possible. Now there is the downside of the cost setup that, that they can be expensive because you're talking about having the, uh, IOT and temperature sensors and that equipment can get pricey.

So it's not something that can be scaled cheaply, but, but it can be scaled. And cities, as I mentioned in my report, like Singapore for example, are, are leaning into this, um, in, in important way. And the conversation about food and big ag is, is definitely coming to the forefront.

People are looking for less processed foods and, and having not just a locals farmer's market, but even more local, you know, in the cities when you live, like in New York for example, you'll have a Union Square local, a farmer's market where they're driving a couple hours around the city and it's very exciting 'cause you're getting that local produce. But imagine if you're getting your lettuce that's half a block away. I mean, that, that's pretty, pretty exciting.

So I think, I think it is gonna be scaled, it's gonna take a while and it's gonna take some more cost and then the argument will be, okay, does the cost worth it to, to have pesticide free lettuce or basil or some of that go there? Well, Is it a question that it's much more expensive to do it that way? It can be with the setup, um, especially if we're talking about scaling it to, to the level of, of, of that with the technology.

Um, but more and more cities are doing this and having success with it. I mean, I, I like the idea of, you know, the family farming, you grow your own food, even if it's just for your family. It doesn't take a lot to just grow enough for your family.

Right. And, and what a, you know, what a kind of game changer that would be. I think the AI technology will also help it, it speed up and, and where we've seen it maybe 10 years ago versus now, I would like to see the math on that.

'cause you know, all the people are saying that it's less expensive to go use some giant field somewhere and ship it. You know, are we really factoring in the total cost of that? 'cause you know, when I look at it, I'm like, the cost of moving all that stuff and the produce and the trucks and the impact it has on the climate is, you know, not insignificant.

Well, I just heard about a startup using reinforced growing techniques. Ah-huh. You know, that, that may revolutionize this Maybe.

And for all you people who are only watching the C block go see the a block. So you know what he's talking about. Exactly.

Well, the nice thing about farming on a field is that it, it has, um, you know, this magical source of light that comes from the sky for about half the day. Yeah, that's true. The, the trouble with vertical farming is that indoor farming requires, um, artificial lighting and artificial lighting mm-hmm.

Can actually be a big power draw. And if you're, if you're using fossil fuels to generate the power for the artificial lighting, then maybe it's not so efficient. And the same thing is true of some of the other aspects of it moving around big pallets of, of soil with, with plants and so on, with forklift, uh, if you're using a, a fossil fuel powered forklift to do that mm-hmm.

That's not as great as using maybe an electric one. There's all sorts of aspects to it that do, uh, make it less suitable. com for example, you can see the scale already of some of these vertical farming techniques.

And um, you can buy this, uh, basically everywhere in the state. I think most other, uh, states have similar producers as well. Um, and they are able to, to produce this stuff cost effectively and competitively with farms.

Hey, we've been doing this, you know, artificial lights and plants growing since heck, I was in college, man, we had all kinds of plants in the, in The, remind me to tell you that story one time. I got in a lot of trouble for that. Has artificial lights too.

I just thought about that. I think yours might as well have electrically powered lights instead of using the sun. Yeah, it's like one resource for another.

You get the free sun, you know, outside, but then you have to use all the water. So, uh, it depends how you look. Well, let me just say, there's some crazy guy in Ohio I know always is on here talking about how alternative, getting cheaper and cheaper every day.

So there you go. We need to wrap up though this edition of Textron Gang. It's been a, a, a deep sea kind of day.

Um, I hope you've enjoyed it. We'll be talking more about this stuff, I'm sure in the days and weeks ahead. Um, Steven, Bonnie, Mike, thank you for joining.

Thank you for watching. As usual, we've got a full tech, strong TV lineup coming at you. Steven mentioned earlier, we've got, uh, AI Tech Field Day.

Is it Wednesday, Thursday, Steven, or Tuesday? Wednesday, I'm confused. It is, uh, Wednesday, Thursday we'll be live streaming on, uh, Textron, including of course Textron ai.

We'll have some familiar faces from the gang there, including, uh, of course, uh, John Schwartz and, and m Ashley. But also, uh, uh, John Willis is gonna be out there. Um, and we'll be recording, uh, in addition to doing the Tech Field Day, the AI Focus Tech Field day presentations, we're gonna be doing the gang, we're gonna be recording the gang live, uh, on site in San Jose.

So watch on Thursday and Friday for the Textron Gang episodes recorded live, uh, with me. Fantastic. Alrighty.

Hey, that's a wrap. Enjoy the rest of your day. Enjoy the rest of Textron tv.

Stay tuned. This, this is a breaking news kind of situation. We'll be covering it as best we can, but until then, this is Alan Shimo for Textron Gang.

Have a great day everyone. We're out.