Techstrong Gang – March 18, 2025

Hi, everyone. St. Patty's Day is over.

It's, we're back at it. Is there an AI chip crisis? We've got AI in Margaritaville.

You're watching Textron Gang. Hi everyone, it's Alan Shimel here for Textron Gang. Happy Tuesday to you.

We hope you had a fantastic St. Patrick's Day. If, if you celebrate St.

Patty's Day, everyone likes to celebrate St. Patty's Day, it seems. But, um, anyway, it's Tuesday.

It's back to work time, and we've got work to do and, and you know, there's lots of good stuff going on out there to talk about, and we've got some great people here to talk about it with. We, we've got a Core four for today. Lineup first.

Uh, we have the guitar man out in Colorado there. He's a Futur vp DevOps analyst, Mitch Ashley. Hey, Mitch.

How are you? Good. Good.

I'm gonna adopt a new theme song, inferencing Away Again in Margaritaville. Okay. I like that.

Rich. I like that. You didn't use AI to write that, did you?

No, I did not. Oh, because I figured AI just stole the tune from somewhere or something. I don't, It wasn't that good.

Yeah. Movie movie from Colorado to Hudson, Ohio in the world, in the data center world. Uh, it's Steven Fst.

Uh, Steven of course is CEO, founder of Tech Field Day Fu Company, and a bonafide gang member here. Yeah. Hey, Steven, how are you?

Pretty good. Pretty good. Um, local Mexican restaurant here had, uh, corn, beef and cabbage tacos, if you can believe it, for, uh, St.

Patrick's Day. Uh, so, um, I, I didn't, didn't partake In that. Couldn't do it.

Huh? I had, um, uh, corn beef and cabbage egg rolls over at Miller's Ale House. Sounds good.

Will they? Good fed Midling. You gotta put a lot of mustard on them.

Um, but anyway, yeah, so I'm glad to see though, at least you had a little bit of the spirit and then You got the spirit. You know, I, I should mention that our, our head, St. Patrick's Day, grand Marshall, I guess, had a lot of the spirit and couldn't make it today, so we'll, we'll see him tomorrow.

Um, but joining us here in our Boca headquarters is our, uh, sustainability, echo Insights analyst and editor Bonnie Schneider. Hey, Bonnie, how are you? I'm doing well.

And you know, my subject matter is green, so it works for St. Pat's. Absolutely.

This is, this is kind of your big holiday, right? It's a green holiday. Good for you.

Anyway, we're not gonna discuss a lot of green, but we are, let's kick it off with our first, uh, story for today. And that is this, I don't know if it's real or not, but some people are talking about it. AI chip crisis, right?

Uh, all of a sudden, I don't know, someone woke up from there, St. Patty's Day hung hangover and said, oh my God, we, we don't, we don't have enough AI chips. We're not gonna be able to make enough AI chips.

It's like a, a reoccurring nightmare for the AI crowd. Maybe we had two stories over in Gestalt it, which is part of the tech strong, uh, site, a family of sites. Um, Mitch, you wanna dive in on this with us?

Yeah. Happy, happy to do it. You know, like me, things we kind of feast or famine, we don't need any more chips 'cause we got, uh, deep seed has changed the whole model.

Well, now we're back to, oh no, we don't have enough chips. Um, both, uh, OpenAI and Meta were saying, look, we're, we're saturated. Our current GPUs that we have in supply are busy doing training and being used for customer services, and we can't buy enough of 'em.

They're not available. Uh, and of course, meta is working on its own, uh, chip. It's got something that's using in training, uh, though it's not an into production type systems, but we're back in the, we don't have enough of these and there's no bubble.

'cause we still need more chips. And whether any of those services are profitable yet, and making, you know, making lots of positive income on top of expenses is yet to be seen. But we're back in the, we need more chips.

You know, I guess it isn't, uh, we don't need my MTV, we need a, my GPU. We'll get dire Straits to rewrite that song. Or AI.

Or ai. There you go. You got the guitars to do it, man.

You could do it yourself. I, I, let's go for it. I believe in you.

There we go. We'll, we'll put a little, you know, uh, Irish Day spin on it or something. I dunno, what would do for Mike?

There's A lot of spin on this stuff, but like, on the, on the spin topic, um, I think the one that is really gonna be telling is, you know, kind of where rubber meets the road with the businesses and OpenAI is saying that they actually, um, that they're able to rent out access to their GPUs at a profit. Um, you know, if, if that's true, if Microsoft and OpenAI are saturated with, uh, GPU bound workloads and they're able to make a profit on it, well then I guess it's all true. Um, and I guess the whole deep seek thing, you know, it's interesting they optimized their model, but again, that was just one model.

There's a lot of other AI models out there, a lot of things beyond LLMs that are being developed. And, um, those are all gonna need, uh, GPUs as well. And then of course, there's the whole inferencing world, and, and yeah, maybe deep seek showed us that we can inference on the cheap, but, uh, it doesn't mean that we have enough.

No, and, and, you know, look, the whole o deep seek thing is still sort of, I don't wanna say controversial, but it is controversial, right? It, let's say it's not, it's still theory. And we're still trying to prove all that out, whether it's because of paranoia regarding it being, it it's from China or something else with it.

Jury's still out on, on the deep seek stuff there though. There's obviously something there. They did a little cheaper.

Uh, but here's, here's a couple of things. I'm a little confused with the OpenAI message. On the one hand, it's, oh my God, I don't have enough GPUs to do training and inferencing and, and to, to fulfill our business plans.

But on the other hand, hey, you know what? I've got an extra GPU capacity that I could rent out at a profit. Well, what's it gonna be, Bob one or the other?

Other? 'cause it, I don't know if those are, those are kind of mutually exclusive, right? Because if renting it out for a profit is a better outcome for you than filling out your business model that you don't have enough GPUs to do with.

What is that telling me? Number one, Well, keep in mind there's a difference between, uh, having, making a profit on a service versus the company being profitable. 7 billion.

I thought it was five In 2024. Um, that's what I maybe a five, a couple Billion Something. What?

That's a couples a Among among us, among Americans. Exactly. Now they're forecasting to be, I think it's like 11 billion this year, 214% growth increase, something around that range.

Um, so we'll see, you know, did they turn that corner? They didn't, I don't think they made any statements about profitability on that, but we'll see. They just took what, another 65 billion in funding round was their last round.

So there's a lot of money being thrown around. And so for some, for anybody to say, oh, yes, we can operate that as at a profit, well, I can get, you know, a thousand miles to the gallon on my car by sitting in my driveway too. Mm-hmm.

You know, it's, it's all depends on what conditions we're talking about. I, um, look, I I say, wait three to five years for the American foundries to come online and you'll have all the chips you want. If they can do it that fast.

Yeah. If they do it that fast and the rest of the world stops moving forward, That's the whole thing, isn't it? I mean, and, and, and we might hear that, oh, I don't know, maybe in this next block of stories too, it's not enough to say we can maybe in the future do something.

It's enough to, you know, we gotta be, we gotta be actually doing it. And again, like I said, the rubber meets the road when you're actually, when a company is buying stuff and selling stuff to customers, and customers are paying for it. And if that's happening, then awesome.

I guess the question is, do we, how much do we trust, um, OpenAI? But despite how much you trust OpenAI, I can't wait to see Microsoft's and Google's and Amazon's financials. I can't wait to see Core Weave.

When they go IPO and they start having to release financials, then we'll really know the state of this industry because, you know, you can say what you want when you're a private company, but when you're a public company and investors are watching and, uh, the SEC is watching, well, then it's gonna get real interesting really quick, uh, whether this is really a, um, uh, an AI boom or just another AI bubble. Agreed. Agreed.

Here's another interesting thing, though. You know, Mitchell, Steven, we grew up in the era of dedicated companies that made chips. They either had their own foundries where they produced those chips, or they designed the chips and, you know, and had companies like TSMC, uh, do the, make the chips for them.

But there was clearly a distinction of labor between chip companies and then companies who use those chips for software applications, computing, all, all of that, right? So in my time growing up, look, Intel was pretty much a monopoly, right? The old Wintel monopoly.

And of course, a MD came in there and, and kinda, you know, tried to rock the boat. But let's face it, for a long time they were just a, a nice half to stop the government from, you know, prosecuting Intel from Monopoly. Um, but then with mobile chips, and then of course with arm, and then, you know, apple started, went back to making their own chips.

We, we've seen this move over the last, let's say, 15 years of companies making, or at least designing their own silicon. But the chips still made a silicon. They still made a silicon, uh, you know, of designing their own silicon.

Now, with the advent of AI and, and the advent of, well, not the advent, but I don't wanna say the demise, but the sun setting of intel from what it was, we're seeing a move away from doing business with chip designers and makers to a lot of these big tech companies designing their own chips. Is it because designing chips has become that easy? Is it that cheap?

Like, why, why, why do you think we're seeing the sunset of the, of the pure play chip designers, if you will? Is there, where are we, Is there like a, a geopolitical issue involved with the too relying, you know, wanting to be more self-sufficient? Well, in, in the case of, of fabricating chips, clearly China and Taiwan have, you know, a, I don't wanna say a stranglehold, but a, a, a dominant position.

But Mitch, we never saw companies designing their own chips like this before. No, it was, it was Apple, Motorola, you had, you know, you mentioned a MD arm, really Arm really kind of opened things up. 'cause now you have an architecture that's reusable and many people, but this is, this has happened in several areas.

I know even in the, in the cable industry, um, Comcast moved from just buying product from vendors to really designing their own hardware and having people build it for them, of which the subset of that came from some of their other suppliers. Um, I don't know if they did their own chips or not, but I, I think the capability is so much easier to do today that you can outsource the fab of it, uh, to A-T-S-M-C and the skills. There are a lot of people who, uh, know how to design chips these days.

It's not sort of cornered in the market of a few companies. And I think it, it, what it does is it ends the reliance on expensive general purpose chips, like the Intel platform, which was always the biggest complaint of, you know, why is $450 of the $1,500 computer going to Intel, right? That's a lot of money that, that you're giving away to sell a product to a customer.

So I think there's a lot of incentive here. I think it's a strategy to diversify and, and have multiple supply chains, right? You know, meta is doing, had this chip idea kind of struggle with it, focused it on training and, uh, you know, it's, it's, they're using it to combat the, the lack of chips, at least for training purposes right now.

So I think it's a, it's the wave of the future. All the kids are doing it right. I think if we're gonna see this more and more commonplace, And I think we're gonna really see it on the inferencing side, um, you know, the developers of the models, uh, you know, they really want to use Nvidia.

They really, um, are all about that. I, I like these moves that we're seeing from companies like, uh, RIS and, um, Microsoft and, uh, Google and so on, deploying custom chips as a service in the cloud for inferencing tasks. Because I think that that may be where the Nvidia, I don't wanna say monopoly necessarily, but the Nvidia lock gets broken.

If you can do things as a service, then you can start really, um, arbitraging the cost of electricity and the efficiency of the chips and so on in order to really see gains, you know, financial gains instead of just pouring everything into bigger and bigger clusters of Nvidia GPUs. I, I look to the future where the, the move to custom silicon becomes a, um, sort of a, a custom silicon as a service world, where it becomes that much more beneficial to have more efficient custom silicon because people are able to quickly jump on it as a service instead of, uh, just thinking of, of these things as something that you, you, you buy as a capital expense. Agreed.

Well, I, I, I'll tell you this, chips have never been sexier, right? Than they, than they are in today's market. And in conjunction with that, you know, both of the articles in today's that are referenced in today's segment here come from Gestalt it, which of course, Steven, you started as part of Gestalt It Tech Field Day and Gestalt, it's, you know, been a site here for, what, about 14 years or something like this, right?

Yeah. A little longer than that. Um, yeah, we're getting up toward 20, if you can believe it.

And, um, you know, as part of the FU combination, we are working very closely with Steven and team. And, and so I mentioned Gestalt is part of the tech strong umbrella of sites. And, uh, I don't want to say too much, but we have plans, we have plans for Gestalt it and, and, and along with some of the other tech strong sites.

But the, the, the important thing I want to mention though, is that will be where you are, where we are going to, we are going to cover the chips scene, the semiconductor scene. So if you are a semiconductor fan and you find all of this custom silicon stuff fascinating, or dare I say sexy, stay tuned to Gestalt it and what comes there. And, uh, we're gonna, we're gonna cover that beat.

We've got some interesting folks ready to start writing on it, and it's gonna be a, it's gonna be a swell time, so stay tuned more for that. Let's take a break here on Textron Gang. We're gonna come back and, uh, play the latest multiplayer role game Quantum Quest.

Um, you're watching Textron Gang, Discover Textron Group, the epicenter of tech innovation. We are your go-to for reaching IT, leaders and practitioners worldwide. Our secret impactful content that sparks awareness, engagement, and top quality leads with us.

You'll access editorial websites, streaming videos, virtual events, custom content analyst research, and more. Join our satisfied clients. Let's revolutionize your tech journey.

Contact us today and tell your story to the world in the most powerful way with Textron Group. Hey, everyone, we're back here on Textron Gang. Um, you know, we, we've all been following the, the, uh, quantum story now for years.

I, I don't even remember when I wasn't following the quantum computing story, I guess really since the first time I saw my very first quantum computer at an IBM Think conference. I think it was in Las Vegas. It looked very much like a cappuccino machine.

I'll be honest. It was the copper machine with all these kind of tubes and stuff. But anyway, um, but we always felt, I always felt anyway that Quantum would probably not be during my career, maybe during my lifetime, but not hopefully, you know, I'd be retired.

But I gotta tell you that in the last two or three months, I am seeing just a ton of news around quantum and, and all of a sudden the, the forecast for quantum went from like 2035 to 2028 or 29. Now I've seen 2026. I don't know if that's real or not, but you know, Stephen, why not you?

I mean, there's so much news coming out. Is it, was there smoke, there's fire, or is this just smoke? Hmm.

Well, I, I'm not gonna bet against technological progress because what I've learned, and, um, fun fact, I actually studied the history of technology as my major in college. And what I've seen is that technology tends to advance in, in un in surprising leaps. And what people bet on is based on their mindset, their current mindset, and it's hard to move people forward.

And quantum, I think, is one of those things like nuclear fusion, like, frankly electric cars. Uh, a lot of the technologies that, you know, you look at and you say that is so incredibly promising and there's so many people working on it, and there's so many cool advances happening, it's gotta be right around the corner. But we just can't, we can't guess.

We can't say that that's right around the corner because like every technology, it only matters when it matters. It only matters when it's real. And so you see these announcements, like Microsoft made so much, so many waves, uh, last week with their, um, major Anna, um, with, with, with new physics, a new state of matter.

Um, and, and there was a lot of excitement about it. There was also a lot of skepticism about it. Anytime I hear about new physics, I say, that is not a product because it's gonna take a while for new physics to get somewhere.

Now, that doesn't mean it's not gonna get anywhere, it doesn't mean that this is all nonsense, but it does mean that, again, what really matters is when there's a real product with real customers that's really being used for some kind of productive use. And we're trying to get there with Quantum. So if you look at these articles in here, and so, so there's actually a new one that was, uh, just announced.

Uh, Zong Xi, I believe is a, uh, Chinese, uh, quantum, uh, computer that, uh, apparently is running, um, a specific test, uh, much, much faster than than conventional computers. Now that makes great headlines. Uh, you know, this one headline I'm seeing here, China, China achieves quantum supremacy one quadrillion times faster than the fastest supercomputers Yes.

In a single specific task designed to demonstrate how good quantum computing can be, but not a productive task necessarily. Not something that's actually going to, you know, invent a new medicine or figure out some new thing. No, it's, it's a, it's a theoretical task still.

And we're still theoretical in terms of where we're at with quantum computing. That doesn't mean it's not real, it doesn't mean, you know, there's a lot of skepticism about Microsoft's claims, and in fact, some of the people involved in the Microsoft, um, effort, their quantum computing chip effort have, have received some, um, withering glances from those in the know who've said, wait a second, these guys have fooled me before and it didn't come out right. Why should I believe them now?

And, and, and I think that that's the kind of attitude we should take for all of these things. Why should I believe you? Is this really real now?

We should cheer it, we should be excited about it. We should prepare for it. I'm all for the quantum resistant encryption initiative, for example, because if it's real, it's gonna change everything.

But until it's real, it's not gonna change anything. And unfortunately, that's kinda where I'm at with quantum computing. You, it's the, the quantum topic has been on sort of our topic list in, because in, in, uh, security we've been talking about quantum safe algorithms and things from quick encryption for some time not knowing is it gonna come in our lifetime?

When's it gonna come? You know, things have changed significantly in the last three to four years. And I think about what you were saying about, you know, the, the advances of technology being very unbalanced, you know, peaks and troughs, and when it's here, it moves fast type of thing.

It's kind of reminiscent of William Gibson's quote of the future's already here. It's just very unevenly distributed right now. It's just distributed into a few labs, right?

That's where Quantum is. And, and I agree with you, uh, Steven, how many places are we gonna get to near absolute zero to run these machines, to be able to get that kind of performance that's not sitting on my desktop anytime soon. Or even in, in the data center of a corporation.

Not saying it's not common, it will, but I think it's, it's, we, we at least are getting an eye into the future of what it, what it possibly can do, what opportunities and threats might be with it. Again, it's got the whole geopolitical angle of, well, we don't want China to be the dominant quantum Got a quantum gap, They can get too far ahead. Yeah.

It's sort of the nuclear arms race. Again, same race we're doing with ai. So we're, we're in this because information is so easily accessible and announcements get made, you know, proselytized of, we've done this, and yes, it's under these narrow conditions under this, you know, particular set of test conditions.

Okay? By the way, anything that is, uh, it involves, um, a new state of matter and multiple dimensions, I'm all for it. So that's what sounds like a positive advancement to me.

But anyway, it's, it's, it's, uh, it's here, but it's not very evenly distributed yet. And also, I'm sorry, I just wanna say about the interest level in it. I was, um, last year I covered this very big tech conference in Miami, emerge Americas, and I'm likely gonna be covering it next week.

And I was looking at the sections and I interviewed someone, uh, who as a quantum computing company out of, uh, new England last year, small company. And it was just one interview I did. Well, looking at the site now, one of the largest sections that they're featuring this, this year is quantum computing just from one year's time.

So the, the interest level is really skyrocketed just from this anecdotal experience. But You, but you know, guys, look, I'm not ready to say there's a quantum gap, but what you've got, this is a replay of the Cold War, right? We, I mean, back in the day, the Soviet Union and the US competed on everything, right?

Uh, and, and now, so today it's China and the us but it's that same thing. And you know what, A little healthy competition's a good thing, it's a good thing. But to your points, yes, there's always a, a lull a gap from when you first, you know, pure scientific research r and d and breakthroughs in technology to productizing these things.

So I don't know if Microsoft's new states of matter and dimensions are going to lead to a product anytime soon, but here's what I do know, pure r and d, when you pour money into r and d, you may not see the results immediately, but you do see results because si so much of what we do today is not easy, right? You've gotta, nuclear fusion is not easy. Quantum is not easy.

AI is not easy. We in this country are reaping the benefits for the AI research that we did in the fifties and the sixties and the seventies and the eighties. Sometimes it's that long until you'll see product from it.

And unfortunately, we are shutting down our research right now when we need it most. And you may not see the results of this in the next 2, 3, 4 years, but you will see the results of this in the next five to 10 years and 15 years when it may no longer be the China us it may be China and EU or China and other countries. Because without basic research, you don't move the ball forward unless just Steal Too, Too.

The problem with that too, Ellen, is when you wanna start a backup, it's not turn on the spigot. Nope. It's multiple years to back up to, I mean, it's maybe the level Or something off.

It's all these PhD students that are at our universities, and it's all the basic research that gets done at our universities, Right? We, you were talking about how long kind of show takes for things to really mature and appear in market from research. So pick autonomous driving.

I'm, I'm not autonomous cars. We, we talk, that's all we talked about for a while. You know, when Tesla was fairly new and everything is gonna be autonomous, we won't need any more Uber or taxi drivers.

YYYY There is some autonomous driving happening in a few cases, but it's not co anywhere far stretched from commonplace yet. No, maybe that's gonna happen three, four years, maybe it's 10 years. I don't know gonna be a big trust level with that.

But it takes a while for things to really be perfected enough to put it out into the wild when it is that impactful AI is that way, quantum's that way, et cetera. And that's, that's a great example because that shows, again, if you look at the history of technology, what you find is that technology affects us in unexpected ways, almost never in the way that you expect and is. And if you look at the development of material science and the development of, you know, semiconductors and, and all these other things, it, it comes at us in an unexpected direction.

And so we think, and, you know, to extrapolate it to now, we think that we're gonna have big quantum chips that are gonna be like super CPUs that are gonna have a new kind of math, and they're gonna solve all these problems in a completely different way. And yet what's actually coming to market may be something entirely different. Maybe it benefits us in a completely different way that we're not ready to see.

technology that amplifies the lights, the, the photonics that connect our computers together use quantum effects. And if it wasn't for basic research, we wouldn't have had those that are actually real technologies that are actually benefiting us. I, I would not put my money on any of the sci-fi predictions coming true for any technology, whether it's autonomous driving or flying cars, or quantum computers or, you know, superconductors.

But I would put my money on all of those technologies benefiting us in an unexpected way. Hmm. Yeah.

I'll take autonomous cars for 300, Alex. Mm-hmm. You know, here's the story there.

The leaning, autonomous driving work was being done at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh for many, many years now. Uber went in, I think it was Uber and Google were in a bidding war and basically privatized that whole project, moved them out to outta Pittsburgh and out to the Valley or to California. And, you know, now all of a sudden it became a very commercial project, and quite frankly, the progress that was being made kind of stalled.

And I think that's a perfect example where, when things are being done for basic research without a necess, without, without necessarily a product at the end of the line, but just research for research sake and then see what falls out of it. To your point, Steven, right? As in terms of commercial applications, you're doing science for science sake, not, not science to make this particular product.

I think it's much harder to do science for a particular project than to do science for science sake and see what comes from it. And it's a lesson that we un unfortunately will probably learn the hard way here now with, with all the cuts and, and, and stuff going on here. But nevertheless, quantum is out of the bag, right?

It's out there. We're seeing it. Companies will, you know, Google's Willow and, and, uh, and Microsoft's chip and, you know, we're, we're seeing continued progress in, in, in Quantum.

And I, I am bullish on it, bullish enough that I think next fall here at Textron, we're gonna do our first virtual event on Quantum lined up a few speakers already, and we're very excited by it. Right now. The working title is Quantum Leap.

Mm-hmm. I, I don't know, Mitch. I I see, I see a promo between you and I here.

That was a show in the nineties. That's right. Isn't That the trademark?

Well, that's what I gotta look. Can we get away with this? It's LEEP.

We're spelling it different. Well, it's satire. It's satire.

It's True. Oh, satire is protected by the constitution Fine Today, I think maybe. Um, but anyway, stay tuned for more we will be covering Quantum.

And by the way, quantum will also be on the Gestalt Techstrong It, so you, you could check out the latest developments there. But let's take a break. We're gonna take a little quantum break and we'll be back here on Textron Gang with AI and Margaritaville.

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.

Welcome back to the Techstrong Gang. Well, for over 55 communities, there's lots of different modern conveniences that might be offered. There's one community called Latitudes, margarita and Water Sound, that's in Panama City, Florida.

And they're offering a lot of tech along with the amenities that you typically find and leaning into the Samsung Smart Technology. These smart homes don't just turn the lights on or change the temperature to make you more comfortable. They do some efficiency items like leaning into solar energy, for example.

But this is where it gets interesting. They're helping seniors and potentially people at risk for health issues with medication management, um, monitoring if they are doing their exercises that they should be doing, what happens if they fall? Is there a video monitoring system that can quickly determine the person is, is injured and needs help?

So the, this goes beyond what we would typically see in a smart home, really geared towards health and wellbeing and safety for seniors. But of course, it comes with some controversy because that's a lot of personal data that's, uh, that's being emitted through through the process. Yeah.

Anybody wanna jump in? Before I do, I'll jump in. I Just want, I just wanna first note that this was in Florida, by the way.

Course. Course, Yeah. To send him off video.

Of course. It's, I'll just leave it there, but, okay. Sorry.

Mm-hmm. Steven, go ahead. So I, I was really interested in this story.

So I, um, well, first off, I'm on the board of a, uh, company developing a special needs community with here in Ohio. And, um, one of the things that weve been discussing, you know, I'm the tech and security guy, surprise, uh, chairman, uh, is that, uh, this, this, this question of privacy. Because on the one hand, you know, people with special needs, whether they are the elderly or they have health concerns, or they are developmentally disabled in some way, or physically disabled in some way, many of them can have tremendous benefits from technology.

It is beautiful to see what can, what a, a, a person can do, for example, with a talker device that allows them to communicate with the world. It is beautiful to see what somebody with a physical disability can do with augmented, augmented, uh, technology, robotic technology with, um, AI technology, with, with recognition and, um, and speech. This is amazing stuff.

But at the same time, we are deeply concerned with our community as well as in a situation like this Mar Margaritaville community, deeply concerned about the privacy implications here because, you know, people with special needs and people who are aging, um, you know, they don't necessarily want everybody to know all the details of their health and, and their demands. And, and, you know, this is an easily exploited community. And so my first thought when I saw this was, whoa, whoa, whoa.

Do I want my, my parents, um, you know, senior assisted living center connected to the smart things cloud? If you Google it, you'll see that there have been hacks, there have been data leaks, there have been exposures with this smart things platform that Samsung acquired in 2014. I am not entirely mollified by the claim that no data goes into the cloud because they're using smart things.

I don't understand how data doesn't go into the cloud in this situation. Um, and similarly, it's not all about like data in the cloud. In many cases it's exposure via the cloud, uh, via APIs.

So for example, you know, we're looking at things like cameras and motion sensors and, um, you know, face detection, video, all of those things. Yeah. They may be stored in the cloud as in the case with, you know, the popular, you know, ring and Nest and, and platforms like that.

But they may not be ex, they, they may actually be local, but if they're exposed via API or via a, um, you know, some kind of security exploit or something over the internet, then it kind of doesn't matter whether it's in Amazon's cloud or in, you know, your own private server sitting in Margaritaville in Florida, it's still exposed. And so I'm a little nervous when I hear about a whole community that's gonna be deploying the same platform for all of these things. I don't want somebody hacking into my mom's, uh, wheelchair.

Yeah. So I, I, I get it, Steven. I, and I think those are valid concerns, but to me, this is, you know, you gotta do your pros and cons and, you know, for a lot of these people, a lot of these commun, you know, the, the, the over 55 crowd, I'm in the over 55 crowd, right?

But I don't really consider myself fragile or anything yet. But the fact of the matter is, Bonnie lives down here in Florida with me. She could tell you a lot of these over 55 communities are closer to over 75 communities, right?

Or 90, or, you know, over 80 and, and so forth. And again, a lot of these people don't have the resources to have home health aides constant, you know, uh, help supervision, helping, you know, not, not necessarily nursing care, but maybe some of them do have some slight memory issues, or they just need help with mobility, right? And, and it's such, the quality of life is such a huge part of their whatever years God gives them left.

It's such an important part to have that quality of life. And at the same time, speak to people that age. You know, the last thing they wanna be is a burden, a burden on their children, on their loved ones, on their grandchildren.

They wanna be independent as best they can. They don't want to be wards of the state or the family. And this program right here offers a real helping hand, a real helping hand.

Now there's two aspects, and Steven, you hit 'em both. One is, all right, they could collect your data so they're gonna know how many bowel movements you have a week and sell that to the Metamucil people. Well, honestly, anyone who talks to my parents would know that too.

Well, that, and I was just gonna say, I don't think many seniors make that a, uh, secret confidential data. Yeah. Now you're son in India, and I can talk to, yeah.

But, you know, so, all right, so maybe someone could hack that kind of data. The, the scarier part, Steven, is what you mentioned, where they can hack your medical devices, right? We've seen this at black hats.

You can hack into a pacemaker. Can you imagine that? Terrible.

Imagine that, right? And, and so how do you safeguard against that? But I would rather see us safeguard against that than take this away from the people who, who this could make a, a huge quality of life improvement.

Because, you know, a life worth living is, is the kind of mantra here. And if this could help them with that, I, I'm all for it. And I'm not, I'm a security person.

I'm usually on the side of, of the security. But, you know, I, I've seen this firsthand down here. These people could really use this.

They can really, this is a, and at a time where people are worried about, I can't, I, I, I'm not gonna have a helper with me, right? Because that was a big, what a big thing down here was immigrants doing home health aide, right? Helping older people, taking them to the supermarket, to the mall, right?

You didn't necessarily have to be a, a practical nurse or a registered nurse, but just helping an old person get to get out. Mm-hmm. I see that all the time here, drive their car, right?

It's such, it's a huge, otherwise they're trapped in their apartment. It's huge. It, And it is amazing to see what these technologies can do for people.

Um, one of the big, um, things, I dunno if you guys have have seen this yet, but, um, there's, uh, basically teleservices mm-hmm. Where essentially you've got kind of an iPad like thing and, um, you know, you can basically call a person anytime for any reason. So it's not like my doctor, it's every morning when I get up, I can, I can call that person and just say like, what am I supposed to do?

Mm. Or I hear a beep. Yeah.

What's that beep? Yeah. And, and, and this person on the other end is, is a real human who's there to try to help you.

That's great. Be, and you know, you mentioned things like autonomous driving that could be incredibly valuable to bring, um, freedom and mobility to these people. Yeah.

Um, all sorts of sensors could be lifesaving. Uh, all sorts of, you know, assistive devices, think technologies that we take for granted, like, you know, IOT lights and locks and things like that could be just a tremendous benefit to these people. What I'm trying to say is, I, I, I'm, I'm just also worried that we have to make sure that we're balancing the security and the privacy protection, a aspects of those, and that we're making sure that these people aren't dependent on companies or technologies that could just go away because they don't think that this is a productive or profitable market anymore.

Don't worry. The federal government will ensure that for you, Steven. Yeah.

Yep, yep. Nothing is gonna happen to Social Security or Medicaid. No way.

No. How, You know, I think there's a, we've touched on the security part of it, which I agree with, with all of you on that. There, are there other parts when you talk about putting things at the edge?

'cause you usually don't have that much compute power in these devices. Um, you might have some decent network bandwidth, but you may not. But you also have to design things to say, well, what happens when the power goes out?

What happens when, when the network is congested or maybe even not available, or they need to take this technology with them to the grocery store in, in the, in the bus that, you know, picks them up on Thursdays to go shopping, whatever it might be. So there's a lot of thing, a lot of factors that go into things at the edge. 'cause they're very good at, at being sensors.

They're very, they're, you can cost effectively build sensor sensors into devices. It's hard to build AI and build a lot of processing at the edge, at least right now, cost-wise. So, you know, I, I'm all, I'm all for in innovating and trying new ideas and see what can be of help.

You have to worry about all the edge conditions when you talk about, So this is why this, this particular one in Florida in general, I think is a good proving ground because Mitch, the edge here could be the community, right? You could build a data center in the clubhouse, Have your own private why wireless network. No, you, they do it.

I mean, I, I know I, you know, you build the data center server closet in the clubhouse that serves the community and, and you are on the edge. But when I go to see, that's literally what my, What I have done is build a data center in the clubhouse in my community. Exactly that.

There you go. But even in that scenario, when you, you know, you hop on the plane or get in the car and go see your granddaughter in Milwaukee, how dependent upon those things are you, what can you take with you? How does that work?

Well, that, that's, yeah, that's another thing. I mean, So even though you can build infrastructure all around you, well, The answer there is tell your granddaughter to take the plane from Milwaukee down here. The weather's better anyway.

Um, anyway. Hey, we, we've gotta call Araf on this version of Textron Gang. Before I do though, we got a lot, we got a busy week as usual.

We, we have our, uh, uh, Textron TV show, you know, line up immediately following the gang like we do every day on today's show bar, we have, uh, one of your videos. Yeah, Yeah. I did a video on the big tech leaning into nuclear energy.

Um, I know you guys discussed it. I took a a little bit more extended look at it. And that's on Tech Drunk tv.

You know what, do check that out. Go. You could go look at, uh, last week's, uh, gang, where we did discuss, you know, what's happening in the nuclear energy world.

But do check out Bonnie's video on that. Also, we have playing some of our scon interviews that I did last week in Orlando with some great stuff up there. And then I think, not today, but Wednesday and Thursday, Stephen, right?

We have, uh, a tech Field Day. Is it Networking Tech Field Day? Is that it?

That's right. Uh, yeah. Networking tech field.

And actually to the point of the stories on this episode, uh, at nine on thir on what Wednesday, uh, March 19th, we're gonna be live streaming a session with BT British Telecom. They're talking about the quantum, the impact of quantum technology on telecommunications. And they're specifically gonna be diving into a lot of the questions that we discussed here today on the gang.

Uh, we're also gonna have some community sessions from, uh, Jason Gird and Scott, uh, Robbo, the Field Day delegates. Um, we're gonna have, uh, versa Networks, uh, talking about, uh, services at the edge. And then on Thursday, we're gonna welcome, uh, back Selector, which is a company that recently presented at, uh, cloud Field Day as well to talk about the way that they're using AI to manage, uh, networks, to improve network administration.

com to learn a little more about that. Excellent. Excellent.

And we have, uh, we have Kon coming up in a couple of weeks too. Yes. We will be live in London at Cube Con.

Mitch, you'll be there with me, Mike Ard, hopefully. Can I go in your suitcase? Sounds exciting.

Come, come right along. You are more than welcome. Welcome.

You know, I'm Gonna hide in the, the, the, the, the landing gear of the plane That didn't work out so well for the general. Yeah. Um, anyway, hey, this has been a great show.

We'll be back tomorrow, but do check out everything here we're talking about. We hope you enjoy today's text on gang. Have a great Tuesday, everyone.

Stay tuned for more text on tv. We're out.