Techstrong Gang – January 8, 2025

Hey, everyone, it's Happy Wednesday. Welcome here to Text and Gang, where we're still going to fact check. Hey everyone.

Alan Shimmel for Techstrong. Welcome to our show here for this fine Wednesday. I know across many of, uh, where many of you are.

If you're in the US here, it's cold. There's snow and wind and rains and cold temperatures. We even broke out sweaters down here in Florida.

I hope wherever you are, you're safe, sound, and cozy. Um, you know, I made a little joke in the opening there about where we still fact check if you haven't heard the news, you know, meta announced yesterday that they were gonna stop fact checking. They're gonna rely on crowdsourcing from the audience to comment on, on fact checking.

And just real quickly, what a sorry state of affairs we've come to. You know, I'm reminded of John Belushi on Saturday Night Live 25, 30 years ago, talking about, you know, they smoke hash on the streets of Mexico. But, but no, we can't hear how are we, what, what is, what is this coming to?

And, and, you know, we could blame meta, but they're just doing what Twitter's doing, whatever he calls it these days, is doing anyway, which is they don't fact check either. And maybe, and maybe that's what we deserve. You know, Andrew Clay Schaefer, one of the guys in the DevOps movement always said, the DevOps you get is the DevOps you deserve.

Well, the same thing goes, it's hold true for social media and society. The social media you get is the social media you deserve. If we as a society are not gonna hold our social media providers feet to the fire about stop polluting our kids' minds and everyone else's minds with bull crap, then we get what we deserve.

I'm gonna step off my soapbox now though, and introduce you to today's gang members. And if they want to comment on it, feel free gang. Um, first of all, we've got a brand new text on gang member to introduce you to today.

Her name is Sna sa sa Saha. I hope I said it right, Sagner. Yes.

Yes. Sagner, welcome to our show. It's great to have you here on the gang.

You know what? Introduce yourself to the audience. Thank you, uh, for having me, Alan.

Um, I'm Sag Saha. I just joined the Techstrong gang as editor, uh, protect Strong ai, and I'm thrilled to be on the show. Thrilled to have you on here, and it's great to have you here.

Speaking of editors, let me introduce you to another text drawing editor. She's been here a while. Um, Amanda Reni, well, she's edited just about all of our sites over the years and, and does a lot of special assignments too.

And it's Amanda Reni, like Mitchell says, like Reni, like lasagna. I don't know how he thinks that rhymes, but whatever. Amanda, welcome.

Welcome to Textron Gang. It's great to have you here today and Happy New Year. This is your first show of the new year, right?

It's Happy New Year. Good to have you. Um, I might as well continue with the, the, you know, the better looking group of our gang today.

Before we get to the Ory guys joining us, I think she's in CES. Are you out in CES today, Lisa, or we're out in CES Linger today. I fly out later today and I've got two full days on the show floor, and I cannot wait to get my Apple Watch rings to spin with all the steps I will be getting, seeing what's going on.

But I've been following the coverage with all, all the keynotes. It's been amazing. Very cool.

It's our own Lisa Martin marketing guru and well, radio hosts now. iHeartRadio host Yes. And Yes, Entrepreneur with her own agency.

Yes. And Textron gang member Lisa, thanks for joining us today. Alright, great to be here.

Moving from, from Lisa to the Ory Group, sporting his guitars, again, FU and vp, uh, analyst, Mitch Ashley. Hey, Mitchell. Welcome, welcome from the Rocky Mountain Snowy, Rocky Mountain, Denver, Rocky, Colorado.

We've gotten some snow over the last couple of days, so I'm sure the ski people are happy. Oh yeah. Oh yeah.

Good for you guys. And then, um, I don't know if this snow up in New York is there, Mike, our own, our own chief content officer, Mike Ard. There was a brief coding the other day, but I do have a comment on this, uh, meta thing I think we need to bring back.

Um, Sergeant Friday, just the facts, ma'am. You know, I've dragging it on Social media, fax, just the facts. So for, for extra points, what was Sergeant Friday's?

Partner's name was Joe Friday and Harry Morgan. Well, it was Harry Morgan. That was his real name.

Yeah. Yeah. Alright.

It was, it was a close one, but you know, it, the facts would be nice, but, but the fact that our social media hyperscalers are just abdicating their responsibilities around this is a sign of the times. It, It's, well, I think they're just abdicating their responsibilities around anything as much as possible. I get so frustrated with Facebook, like there's no customer service.

There's no way to get help with anything. It's so frustrating. Could be worse.

You could be on XZ Twitter, whatever it is. You know, Alan, I think we're just regressing back to bulletin boards, essentially. That's what we're social media has become, is just a free for all.

You know, comment on what you want. Maybe there's a moderator on it, but we don't Even have that. There's no moderators.

There is no, We don't have that now. So we're less than bulletin boards. Well, that's what made bulletin boards great.

Mitchell, you had moderators who though they didn't get paid really gave a crap. Maybe a OL chat rooms is a better Analogy. Yeah, maybe that's sort of is I, I just, you know, we're, we're devolving into a society of whoever screams the loudest.

All right, well, we can't agree to what a fact is either on social media or off social media. So, you know, it's just a reflection of the time. Yeah, good point.

Sad, sad. Touche. What a sad state of affairs.

Anyway, let's move on from that and, and we'll try to keep it factual as best we can here today. Uh, Mike, we, we've got some news. Well, CES as Lisa mentioned, is full of chock full of crazy futuristic, and that's what makes C-E-S-C-E-S, right?

Uh, AI empowered robots. It's a thing. Yeah.

Jensen Wong was the lead off keynote and he was talking about how they're gonna help companies overcome the limitations of physical environments when it comes to building robots in ai. And the issue is, when you go build an AI app, it doesn't really understand the laws of physics. So they're trying to create a virtual environment so that if you create a robot, you will understand that, um, it can, if it hits something that there's gonna be some resistance to that force and therefore, you know, it should be avoided.

But it can calculate what the impact of that is. And today, if you go do that, you have to actually go build a robot or the car or whatever it is, and smash it into something about a hundred times for it to learn. So they're trying to do that in a virtual environment.

And the goal is to reduce the cost of creating all these robots so that they will be millions of these things ultimately. Um, and then the second thing they talked about, which, you know, was kind of a little more immediate to some folks maybe, is they want to go build something called Project Digits, which is a $3,000 desktop system that combines arm processors and Nvidia GPUs for data scientists and developers to go build, uh, either these new types of AI apps or any type of AI app for that matter. And so, if you look at it, it seems like we're trying to say that there are all, like, you know, if you listen to how he presented it, he said there's multiple classes of robots, right?

Gen AI is a type of robot for software, and now we're gonna have all these physical robots. Some of them include cars and some of them include actual robots. And robots will come in all sizes and shapes as we've seen a CES already.

So I, I don't know, Alan, are you ready for the robot era? I, I would feel better if we had a RO law of robotics, right? Like in a law of three rules than the zero law of robotics.

Because I do think we're going to need to have some, it would be, it would be good if we got out ahead of this, you know, gen AI burst on the scene and Elon Musk and all these people were signing the letter about we should stop development. It could be terrible until they got their money into it and got their deal with it. But, um, it would be nice if we put some parameters on robotics right now with ai.

'cause I do think there is, you know, room for a lot of, uh, I mean, think about, you could have clone wars, right? An army of clones. You don't have to send soldiers anymore.

So if some dictator tin pan dictator here in the US or somewhere else wants to call out the troops and he's worried about whether American troops would fire on American citizens, well, you don't have to worry about that if you've got an army of robots. And that's, that's a scary thought. That's a scary thought.

On the other hand, I thought the c and CES stood for consumer electronics and, you know, dev dev computers or, or hyped out GPU dev machines doesn't really seem like a consumer product to me. But look, Jensen loves a keynote. Absolutely.

They're making a case for providing the tools for everybody to go build both industrial and consumer toys, right? CS is still a great toy fair of our times. And you know, we've seen a bunch of those robots being demonstrated this week.

But, um, ultimately though, I think you're right about not just the soldiers, but just simple liability issues. Let's say I had a robot that's minding my child, right? We talked about this in an episode last year.

The robot goes haywire and something bad happens to the child who's liable for that kind of thing. And I don't think we've thought all that through entire at all. I see robots in a different use case.

I guess, like when I think about robotics, I'm excited about the dangerous, uh, like rescue missions and things like that, that you could put robotics to help people in caved in, you know, caved in tunnels, rescue missions. And um, like we have an article on digital C though about window cleaning on sky rises and things like that, that they're putting robots to use for. So I think about those and I think that would be pretty exciting to have more robots in, in the more dangerous fields.

I don't know, I just have visions of Mitchell and I dressed as Laurel and Hardy winding up the March of the Wooden soldiers, you know, with big scary teeth. And what do you say, Mitch? Oh, I don't know, Laurell.

Um, anyway, Well, you know, we, we, we could be not too far away from him, you know, the real life robocops, right? So Yeah, I just, I just feel like we're living every science fiction movie we've seen, right? Any of our favorites are the Robocops Terminator Foundation or whatever, Terminator, you name it.

And in many ways we are, you know, sci-fi does predict a lot of our future for us. And you know, you've said many times I've said the same thing, which is, you know, this train don't stop, right? We're not, we're not stopping the I train to say, well, wait a minute.

What's the right thing to do? We'll, we'll bolt on things later maybe, hopefully even before it's too late. Um, there's the industrial path of this, there's the kind of worker path of this.

You were talking about that, uh, Amanda, about, you know, taking on dangerous jobs and, and things like that. Certainly great applications for it. There's the personal side of, you know, now my, my, uh, my zoom thing on the floor can also pick up my socks 'cause it's got an arm to go pick up something.

Okay, I appreciate that. But I've got a lot more than socks to pick up my props a lot worse than that. But, um, what, what's part of, to me where we're kind of collapsing the consumer versus tech and, and industrial is putting AI on the desktop, not just in consumer devices, but you know, the announcement of the digit, uh, the CCB 20, uh, the CCB 20 chip based system, that's a supercomputer on your desktop to do essentially real ai, not just development, but some level of operation.

You can imagine where that's going next to deploy out AI out to the edge, A signal that, you know, if, if they weren't thinking about it that way already, Nvidia very much is not just a compu a chip company, but they are an application of AI all throughout the supply Chain. Well, that's what they wanna be, Mitch. That's what they wanna be.

They're certainly, The money has to justify a three. They've got The trillion dollars It right now. Yeah.

You gotta do something for a $3 trillion valuation. And I think what you're seeing is Jensen Wong and the rest of the brain trusts, they're recognizing that they're not going to have that kind of sustainable growth. Mm-hmm.

Just making chips. They've gotta own the ecosystem. Well, don't make the income and they Gotta create, Just make the chips.

Right? You wanna own the whole ecosystem. Right.

And they, you know, they were doing it with software, right? The whole, I forget the name now, of this open source Truda Guda. Right.

Kind of owning that, but now they're going be, you know, I wouldn't be surprised to see them making robots at some point. Oh Yeah, absolutely. I think so.

And software, you know, that, that runs on the, you know, the Apple vision to be able to train those models, do it more effective, do cost effectively for real world applications. We've talked about in the past the need for some sort of Manhattan project for a GII might counter on saying we need a Manhattan project for AI safety protocols. 'cause it seems like one of the things that comes around here is that these LLMs are, um, I guess programmed in some level to try to get around the safety protocols as much as they possibly can in the interest of fulfilling their mission.

And the machine doesn't reason between the why of the safety protocol. It just kind of goes to execute whatever it is that it's being asked to do. And it seems to get around these safety protocols that people are trying to put in place.

I think we have a big problem here in terms of, um, the safety protocols that are in place seem to require a lot more r and d work than has been done thus far. Laws of robotics To that point, Mike, you know, they're, they're finding that what, what models have been trained on are very difficult to get it to do other things. I saw an example where someone was showing, trying to get, um, the GPT models to create a, an image of, of a, a set of clocks or watches that are set to five, past 10:00 PM uh, sorry, noon.

And they, you could do it with a lot of work, but it's been trained on so many pictures, so many images of watches and clocks that are set till 10 after 10:00 PM because that happens to be a very visual pleasing to present way to present watches and clocks, you know, with the arms kind of pointing up like that. And to get it to do something that is so ingrained in that now we're realizing, oh, that's something that it's, it's been trained so many times with so many, you know, instances of data to get it to do something else is, is really difficult. What other things like that have been programmed or trained into these models, right?

We're just discovering that, Hey guys, I feel like we're in a STEM class and we've got half the class of women and they're not participating. So, yeah. No, shut up.

Let's hear, let's hear from, let's hear from, from Lisa. Amanda, you chimed in a bit. What do you ladies think?

One of the things that that caught me, oh, sorry, slow that is, um, no, go ahead. The, the Nvidia partnership with Toyota for the next Gen of vehicles is, it looks like to me that this, is this a new focus for Nvidia from a go to market perspective to focus on the automotive industry. You know, Ellen, you bring up the point that CES is the consumer electronic show and, but NVIDIA's a household word.

We it's, it's all over the news every day. I know that happens here in Silicon Valley, I'm sure it's happening elsewhere as well. And what I, I also heard, I had a lot of, uh, colleagues that were there.

I watched it from the comfort of my backyard last night. Um, there was like a two hour wait to get in and that Mandalay Arena seats 12,000 people, so presumably it was full. So it was nice to hear, um, a jam packed keynote.

Probably one of the most jam packed with announcements I've heard in a long time. Um, of course, Jensen came out in a star, struck a very Vegas style black leather jacket. But I think the interesting thing is what they're doing there to really kind of expand, um, their go to market, like I said, with automotive industry, um, with what they're doing with robotics, I think it's exciting to hear where they're going so that they can grow and scale.

And to your point, it is about owning the ecosystem. Um, that's something that they're doing with top partners and I do it really well. Fair.

So you were gonna say something? Um, I was gonna touch on the responsibility part of it, uh, with, uh, so companies, the, the problem is made worse by the fact that companies have a vested interest in bypassing the laws. And, uh, uh, so like until, uh, the power consumption became a problem, no one was thinking about green data centers or, you know, responsible ai.

So I think it'll be a few more years before we start to see this, uh, heading down the way where companies are more mindful of following the laws and, uh, that kind of stuff. Yeah, unfortunately it, you know, there's a lead time for society and the legal system to catch up to technology. We, we've spoken about this in the past, and I, I think that's what we're dealing with.

But look, Lisa, I can't wait for you to get out there and give us a report from CES. I know, I know. Friday show is gonna be all jam packed 'cause there's so much there.

It's amazing. Can You do me a favor? I, you mentioned Toyota, I got some invite from BMW because I'm a BMW driver that they have some cool stuff going on at CES.

I'd love to hear from you. What, what, oh, you got it. What BMW's got planned.

I would love that. Uh, one of the three of the things that I'm really interested in and uncovering is, is, uh, from a consumer perspective, especially from my iHeartRadio gig, is some, what's going on with connected vehicles? What, what's differentiated BMW versus Toyota versus what, what, um, other companies are doing?

I wanna understand what some of the really, really cool, just crazy gadgets are that people would be like, you, are you kidding me? And then I also wanna understand more of those consumer goods that people be like, yeah, I would stand in line for that. So I've got my whole two days mapped out.

So you'll get, um, Friday show will be jam packed with what I uncover. So, Lisa, that that sounds great. And, and that kinda gives us a segue into our next block that we're gonna talk in here, which is your preview of what you've seen in CES so far.

But before we do that, let's take a quick break here on Textron Gang. We're gonna come back and talk more CES in just a moment. Modernize your business to fuel innovation and elevate customer experiences with the builder community.

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Welcome back to Text on Gang. Let's dig into CES 2025. The Consumer Electronics Show that drags hundreds draws, I should say, hundreds of thousands of people into Las Vegas every year.

The whole strip has taken over and there are this, the widest spectrum of cool technology gadgets from a consumer perspective and an enterprise perspective. We see as well. I'm very fortunate to get to go to the show this year.

I'm leading today, so I'll have two full days on the show floor. We talked about Nvidia and a block, and one of the interesting things that Alan brought up was that this is a consumer show, yet it led off with Nvidia and it was a standing room, only 12,000 seat arwa where the rockstar of enterprise ai. Jensen Wong gave a great update about what Nvidia is doing to expand into robotics, to expand in the automotive industry, et cetera.

But there's some other really cool things that I am particularly drawn to, and one of them is from Samsung. They've unveiled a number of very cool things I wanna share with you guys about they unveiled a Galaxy Book five Pro and vision ai. What is that?

It's a laptop that's integrated with Galaxy AI and it to include AI select from Samsung, which lets users much more easily search for information, um, for something with just a click. So making, bringing that AI experience to the end user. They also announced Samsung.

I'm a big Samsung TV fan, I've got several of them, but they announced their 2025 TVs. I wish I hadn't bought one a few months ago because vision AI is now being included in their TVs. And it basically features a click to search, um, feature that allows you to, if you're watching a movie, for example, to get information on a particular actor or background, whatever you're watching without disrupting the experience.

But what's further that they're doing from a TV experience, this is crazy, is they have unveiled Samsung food. No joke, they actually announced this on Sunday. This is a feature of the 2025 TVs.

It uses AI to recognize food on your screen and generate a recipe for it, but it can do more because there's also a Samsung Food mobile app. So if you're ordering groceries or food from restaurants that through the Samsung Food Mobile app, it will know that and it can actually provide you with a list of things that you need or that you already have to make whatever recipes you're seeing on screen. So, amazing technologies from Samsung, they've been doing great things for a while.

So I'm very excited to see how that works and who is using it already. Um, also from a Samsung, uh, perspective, Bailey, the, the robot, the, uh, personal home assistant that's been rolling around the CES floor for more than five years now. Finally, we're hearing from Samsung, they gave a loose kind of nebulous it's gonna hit the market in the next 12 months.

So I'm curious to, uh, Mitch's earlier point, can I do more than pick up my stocks because I need that too. So lots of great things, uh, from Samsung, but also Toyota talking about rockets. They were vague in that, but it's so interesting to see some of these companies we know as car companies really branching out into literally outer space to bring us new technologies and opportunities.

So that's just scratching the surface of what's gonna be at CES. Can I get a flying car? Car?

I bet you can. I'm gonna be looking for that. Alan, I'm gonna sign you up.

I, you know, I, well, we're a, well, Mike and Mitch, I, uh, we're a, we're from the Jetsons age, man. I thought we'd have a flying car by now That Bolton do a briefcase. That's gonna be one of the things I'm looking for.

Alright. Hey, I, I am excited about solving this first world sock problem though, because I'm looking forward to throwing my socks around Here. No, no.

The issue is gonna be not just can it pick up socks? Can it find the lost socks that the washing machining? Yeah, you can do That now.

I'm all for it. I wanted to find my cheese, my wallet, my cell phone, and then I'm really happy. Well, I put air tags on all that stuff.

Yes, I was gonna say air tags. So Lisa, on the television thing, do you think that I'm gonna, in the future, you know, conveniently see an ad from, I don't know, Butterball Turkey, followed by, you know, some insight as to Absolutely what really To go buy to make the perfect Turkey dinner. Is that how this is all gonna come together?

I think so. I will let you know once I dig in more, but I think it's such an interesting slash weird, um, development. But if there's a market for it, Samsung is all over it.

I think we're gonna be seeing a lot more interactivity with vision AI from Samsung that's gonna allow us to do a lot more than just food. But I think it's an interesting step in a direction that probably with the popularity of, of mobile, you know, delivery apps, I think they're tapping into something that's a pretty big market. And so I think we're gonna be prepared to be, I don't wanna say bombarded, I hope it's more subtle than that, but we're gonna, we're gonna be given a lot of opportunities to, to buy Turkeys Spot.

No, I I think from an Adverti I'm sorry, go ahead, Mitch. No, I, I think that's spot on, Lisa, because whether it's seeing the latest gadget or something they're talking about on the Today Show, when they do one of those segments, or you're watching a show and you know, KFC gets delivered and you pick your profile, right? I'm a DoorDash customer, I'm an Uber Eats customer, I'm a Best Buy.

Great. I wanna order that now. I don't have to go look it up in my app.

I could say that thing I just saw. Or would you, are you, what are you interested in? Here's a bunch of things that just were shown, and I know you're interested in these topics, so I think it's gonna really change the consumer experience of acquiring Food.

I think it opens all kinds of marketing advertising, right? Forget food for a second. Oh, totally.

Right? Yeah. You're, you are, uh, you, you know, you're in someone's apartment and you see a TV or a stereo or something and you know, you move your cursor over and it says 361 added to Miami Amazon list, Bob put in child protection so you don't get 52 orders from K.

How much can, how much can it see as to what you might be doing? Am I gonna be sitting in front of my television eating wings and then the television's gonna go? You want some fries with that from Uber Eats?

Yes, I imagine so. That's the creepy part though, right? It is creepy.

But speaking of that, in terms of the vision perspective, sorry Alan, something that I'm really excited to look at are these smart glasses that actually look like glasses. We saw Apple launched the Vision Pro about a year ago, the hefty price tag. Although Nvidia does have an interesting partnership with Apple using the Vision Pro by the way.

But we've seen these immersive headsets that are just not, the, the public isn't, isn't ready for that yet. Meta has launched, um, not just its Quest Pro at a much cheaper price point for people that want to dabble into what is still nascent technology, but this holiday with the XR smart glasses that look, look like glasses. So you're getting this vision with a, there's a ring that comes with it and it helps you control kind of what you see without having to tap the frames.

Um, so I think, yes, and I think, you know, we think about Google Glass from the last decade and the people we're concerned with, are you gonna be recording me if I'm, you know, in a pub with friends? This is an interesting alternative. And I Curious what Well, RayBan has had a similar, RayBan has Ray Van with Meta.

Yes. Yeah. RayBan and Meta have had that a lot.

Yep. I looked into it, but I need reader sunglasses and they don't do it in readers yet. Aquire about that Much.

Remember, remember were kids, we had comic books and the ad on the back of the comic books, The X-ray ones, x-ray Glasses. Yeah, Yeah. That, that used to set my adolescent imagination on fire right next to the muscle building.

Oh God. But, uh, I, I do think it's coming just like into the Ironman, Jarvis ai, you know? Yeah.

But on the issue of Samsung specifically, I got a bone here in my own personal thing. I wish they'd spent more time improving the durability and quality of their screens as much as they put into the gadgets and bells and whistles. You know, I, I invested in a, a Samsung eight k, like their hottest tv, uh, three years ago now.

And it, two years and two months, it developed a green line running down and I called Samsung and they said, you know, they had me run through all the diagnostics. They said, yep, yep. This is a very common thing.

You know, you need a new panel. I said, okay, when can you come do it? They said, well, as soon as you can fork over the money, because you only, the panel only has a two year guarantee, and you're at two years and two months that Samsung is now my Zoom platform here in the office.

'cause I don't mind a little green line for my Zooms, but I went out and bought a Sony and it's not eight K, but you know, I, I do wanna just call out that we all go for the shiny new objects and a lot of the, the screen technology itself, you know, 98 inch, 99 inch, a hundred inch TVs and all of this stuff, these, these panels, I, I actually had, my Sony had to have service this past week too. The HDMI ports weren't working. So the guy came, took it off the wall, took off the back.

It's the first time I've seen the innards of these machines. The panels are really thin and there's a motherboard power pack, you know, and some, uh, fans. But, um, they need to improve the durability and they, they're a little bit, you know, they're, they're so advanced and so much going on.

My Sony's a mini LED, but you know, no one wants to be shelling out three, $4,000 for a TV every two and a half years. I'll look into that, Ellen. Yep.

Screen technology tell, that was my 2 cents. I, I, I told it to them in there, you know, survey form. Anyway, I wanna Say I like the research aspect.

I think out of everything you mentioned, I'd use that the most because, um, like certain apps such as Amazon have a little bit of that where you pause when you're watching something and you can see who the actors are. Yeah. X-ray they call it, But some of them don't.

So for me, that would be helpful when I'm watching something to be able to pause it and get information about an actor or something. Or maybe A fact check even. Oh, mom, yes.

We don't want that. No, I like it. Yeah, that's a great point, Amanda.

All I gotta say is you better be really careful what you're doing in front of your television. There you go. Oh yeah, Yeah, potentially.

I mean, they're already listening to us. I'll, I'll bring up something about shoes, a random conversation about shoes and suddenly there's a commercial on the tv. It's on doing that.

Crazy. All right, Actually social media. Yeah.

Let's take a break and we're going to come back here for our C block. What a great day on Text and gang. We'll be back in a second.

Hey everyone, it's Sunny And Cher. Ladies and gentlemen, tech enthusiasts and Future Gazers Gather round the biggest, boldest, most mind blowing predictions for 2025 are coming your way at the Predict 2025 virtual event on January 9th. Oh, Sonny, you're predicting something.

Again, last time you tried this, you said laser dips were the future. How'd that work out for you? Hey, hey, Cher.

Not every prediction to hit, you know, but that's why we've got the real experts this time. Top analysts, visionaries and tech leaders. Sherry, what's going to rock our world in 2025?

So, no sunny predictions this time, no flying toasters making a comeback. Very funny share. But seriously, we're talking AI breakthroughs, cybersecurity game changers, the future of DevOps, cloud Innovations, and so much more.

And what about my favorite prediction? A smart mirror that tells you how fabulous you look every morning. That's real innovation.

You're already ahead of the tech share, but if you want to hear the really big stories in tech for 2025, you've gotta tune in on January 9th, the event kicks off at 8:45 AM Eastern and runs until 2:30 PM And the best part, it's all virtual. No stuffy conference rooms, no long commutes. Just grab your coffee, your laptop, and join us from anywhere in the world.

You know what else? It's not just predictions, it's insights, strategies, and a whole lot of fun. 0, predicting your jokes before you tell them.

That's a good one, Cher. But the real joke is if you're missing out on this, so don't miss predict 2025. That's right.

Mark your calendar's January 9th, 8:45 AM Eastern. Be there or you'll miss the biggest scoop on the future of tech. See you.

I predict 2025. Be there. All right folks, we're back with our final segment and we're talking about while open AI is talking about a new model they have and touting their reasoning capabilities, it's capable of doing math and certain amount of science, and it says it's about 20% smarter than the previous models.

And we are seeing the rise of these AI robots and agentic ai. And a lot of that comes down to, well, just how smart are these? LLMs Slog is joining us today and she wrote an article that looked into this for tech Strong AI should all check that out.

But longa, what is your sense of how smart are these reasoning engines gonna be and how smart are they gonna get? Because some folks are saying, you know, they're about as smart as a 5-year-old and other people are saying, you know, you can run your entire life off of. So, Um, yeah, Mike, I think we are at an interesting juncture right now.

Uh, what we are witnessing is a drive for making AI more alive, more intuitive, and ultimately more useful. I've talked about this in my article, uh, that in the first wave we saw companies going all in, building passively good, um, virtual assistants, and then embedding that technology widely across products. Now we are seeing with companies like Open AI and Google launching new versions of AI models, uh, that AI is moving up from being prompted to being more autonomous and more independent.

And by no means they're 100% perfect, still a reasoning can still be quite flawed, but they are much more improved than their predecessors. And, uh, these models, they have their reasoning capabilities. Some are claimed to even be at par with PhD students.

That's what the makers are claiming. But reasoning engines give these AI agents the ability to reason through a problem, analyze the data, find meaning in it, make contextual analysis of requests, break down, uh, complex problem into series of small steps, and then transform it into intelligent, uh, responses or actions based on, uh, rule set or logic. In short, they, they mimic human problem solving and ta task solving methods.

So I think things like, uh, finding meaning or exploring more than one reasoning path at once, or, uh, looking ahead and going back or anticipating a problem in advance or refining the steps and performances, uh, constantly to build better results. That's how AI agents will be, uh, uh, will be able to do mathematical reasoning, right? Perfect codes and solve domain specific problems in science, et cetera.

Um, now the fully autonomous AI agents may take still a little bit of time to arrive. 'cause again, it's all in the experimental stages, but the natural progression of those agents and co-pilots and the evolution will is definitely worth following. You know, I, I've been playing with the open ai, the the, the model you're talking about is the oh one model, I assume, right?

And I, I, well, that's, And then oh three, uh, yeah, recently launched oh three Oh oh, is oh three available now? No, they're just, they're just telling that, I mean, oh, because I've been using O one for the last couple weeks now, and you know, whether it's full of beans or not, I don't know. But when you give it a thing, it says thinking reasoning.

It tells you what it's doing while it's doing it. 0 because like if I wanted to draw a picture, oh, one describes a picture. It doesn't draw a picture.

Um, oh, one seems to be more aware, right? 'cause it used to be, I knew that the open AI model was drawing on an LLM made up of stuff. It stopped collecting info in 20 21, 23, whatever the year was where it says it, it seems like oh one supplements.

It's what it has there with what's available on the web, um, currently. And, uh, I, I'll give you for instance, and yesterday's show, we, we spoke of unfortunately about the passing of our friend Amit Juran, and I was, wanted to do a little bit of an article on it, and I had asked, oh, Juan, to help me write a tribute with, um, Amit, and though it had plenty of information on Amit, it refused to write it, it said, because it could find, no, this was before it was publicly announced. It could find no public announcement confirming his passing and therefore refused to write it, which I thought was pretty sophisticated, right?

That mm-hmm. Because it wasn't just what it had it in its LLM, it actually went out on the web just to verify that. And that, that was a step further than I've ever seen the AI go.

Definitely like with each generation, these models are becoming more thoughtful and uh, definitely that's something, uh, that I would see as a progress. You were seeing research, research happening right in front of our eyes, right? These are things are changing so quickly.

The way I see the market is you really have the people who are pushing the latest, you know, really advancing the technology, right? Coming out with the next three oh model, coming out with a whatever, you know, model that, that is specialized in a certain area, but you also have another part of the market that's f focused on commercializing it at a lower price point, getting it into more products, uh, spending less money on how to train the models, uh, versus the really expensive dollars that go into training the really large foundational models. So while we talk about the things that are in the news, oftentimes those are the things that are pushing the edge of that, of what models can do.

And when you hear about things like hardware and what, and NVIDIA's doing some of that, is trying to push it more into the consumer side of it as well. So I think you have to kinda look at this as a spectrum, right? What you're talking about are very much of where this is evolving to, and that will make it way, its way into newer and newer models that are more accessible to everyone right now.

It's in a few, and the next set of features or capabilities are more, you know, reasoning like or what it is. We'll kind of see that advance continuing and continuing. Agreed.

I, I think so. I mean, I think people are still struggling with this whole probabilistic versus deterministic conversation though when it comes to this stuff. Because if I have a workflow that's built around agents and I have this workflow that I need to be done the same way every time, and it has to be a hundred percent accurate each time, then the AI agent doesn't quite get there every time, and it doesn't gimme the same answer the same way every time.

So a lot of businesses are trying to figure out, right, where do I insert that into a workflow where I have to have it do the same thing over and over again? So I'm not quite clear how that's all gonna come together, but I think when I talk to people, that's where all the experimentation is right now. Yeah, I think, I think just the general, you know, large language model that'll do general purpose does everything, is part of the problem of with that Mike, is what we will need and what we see is models, LLMs, et cetera, that are special.

We'll have agents that are good at certain things, right? Not every agent's gonna be good at updating your software and picking up your socks, right? It, it, there'll be specialized tasks, domains, areas that they have to be very good at.

And the both the inputs and the outputs responses have to be tuned within a set of parameters of how specific, how consistent or not does it have to be? Because you can make the output consistent out of these models, or at least more consistent. Right now, they're not programmed to do that.

They're, you'll get a different answer giving the same prompt to a three oh or a a one oh model, you know, if tattoo PT all the time, it's kinda like mom and dad, if you don't like dad's answer, go ask mom or vice versa, right? You ask it again and you'll get a different answer that mm-hmm. Maybe that's more helpful or useful.

I, uh, you know, I'm reminded of a lesson I learned when I was, uh, at a company called Interline. com days. And we were trying to sell hosted versions of Oracle apps and PeopleSoft and Onyx and, you know, enterprise apps of the day.

Lotus Notes was a big one. And, and the lesson we learned there is that you're never going to get those apps a hundred percent to be a hundred percent of what you want out of the box. The best you shoot for is 80, 85%, and then you got a tune the other 15% or so, and that's, that was a pro serve gig.

We found out we started buying pro service companies. I think we're gonna find the same thing with off the shelf LLMs, right? And, and look, there's gonna be the hyperscaler LLMs I call them, and they'll probably be owned by the, the usual suspects in the hyperscaler crowd.

But then there's gonna be smaller LLMs specific LLMs, ag agentic kind of things that Mitchell's talking about. And even those are going to be, there'll only be 85%. You're going to need to fine tune 10, 15% in there to make 'em perfect for you.

And the, the folks that figure out how to get that to that 85% and how to make it easy to tune in, the other 15 will be winners, right? That I Think we're gonna see some more companies that specialize in that, like in bespoke LLMs unique for companies. We'll see more companies that specialize in that.

I, I think that's already happening, right? Anyway, it's exciting times. It's only January what eighth, and we're already rocking and rolling with this stuff.

I thought 2024 was where the AI conversation sucked everything up, but maybe not. Let's, we'll come back tomorrow to discuss this, Lisa. We're looking forward to your, uh, output on, or your update on Friday, Solana.

You get to wear your colors now. This is your, you know, you're an official gang member having done your first show. Okay, great article by the way, Solana.

Appreciate, appreciate it. Thank you. Very well written, Amanda.

Happy New Year and stay warm out there in San Angelo, Texas, in the big country. Mitch, Mike, I hopefully will see you tomorrow here on Textron Gang, along with some more gang members. Until then, this is Alan Shimmel.

We've got a full day of Textron tv so stay tuned for that. But for now, that'll call a wrap on Wednesday. Textron Gang, we're out.