← All TWiT.tv Shows (Audio)
All TWiT.tv Shows (Audio)
This Week in Tech 1066: A Supercomputer in Your Pocket
03:04:21
CES & the Next Leap for On-Device AI Power
Loading summary
Transcript1,048 lines
- [00:00]
A
It's time for TWiT this Week in Tech. It's our annual CES wrap up and we have three great hosts who were at CES this year. Padre, Father Robert Padre, SJ, Jennifer Pattison Tuohy from the Verge, and Jason Heiner. CES, it turns out, was a pretty interesting show this year. From robots that fall over to toilets that take pictures of your business. We will cover it, all of it, next on TWIT podcast.
- [00:32]
B
CE love from people you trust.
- [00:35]
A
This is twit. This is TWiT this Week in Tech. Episode 1066, recorded Sunday, January 11, 2026. A supercomputer in your pocket. It's time for TWiT this Week in Tech. Hello, everybody. Time to talk about the week's tech news. And of course, this week was ces. And so we have traditional yearly CES panel. Jennifer Pattison Tuohy is here. She is a senior reviewer at the Verge and covered all sorts of stuff at ces. How many days at CES did you spend?
- [01:17]
B
Oh, gosh, I got there on Saturday and left on Friday.
- [01:20]
A
That's too long.
- [01:21]
B
That's too long.
- [01:22]
A
I'm sure you felt the same way.
- [01:23]
B
Yes, I did.
- [01:25]
A
One of our. One of our regulars, Scott Wilkinson, wears a pedometer at CES every year and covers 30 miles, typically. I mean, just a huge. Yeah, a lot of foot sore.
- [01:35]
B
Yeah, it can be pretty exhausting. But it's also like for a tech nerd, it's like the Oscars and Christmas and the super bowl all at once.
- [01:43]
A
Well, maybe this year. Yeah. Also with us, Jason Heiner. He is former editor in chief at ZDNet, now editor in chief at the Deep View, which is an AI website and newsletter which you should subscribe to because it's free. And actually, Jason is making his second appearance this week. You called us from McCarran Airport at Vegas as you were leaving Las Vegas on Wednesday.
- [02:04]
C
Yes, yes.
- [02:05]
A
We got a quick report. But now I want all the deets.
- [02:09]
C
The full deal.
- [02:10]
A
All the deets. And also with us, our annual reporter from ces, Father Robert Balasaire, the digital Jesuit. Many years now, he's been. The only sad thing is, in years past, when I had a studio, you would come with a bag full of stuff, of goodies.
- [02:25]
D
Yep, yep.
- [02:26]
A
Where is that bag now?
- [02:27]
D
That bag is being raided by my parents. They like the blinky things, they really do. So they're taking those.
- [02:34]
B
Oh, good.
- [02:34]
D
But I did have a better on me and I did 43 miles this year.
- [02:39]
A
Oh, gee.
- [02:42]
C
Oh, I thought the bag was going to be at an undisclosed location in Vatican City.
- [02:45]
A
That would have been Robert's. Famous for wearing sandals. I hope you were wearing more better shoes.
- [02:51]
D
I had better shoes this year. Although there is only one thing in the bag that I Absolutely, positively, 100% will not share with anyone, and that is a. I. I don't know if I can even name it. It's an unreleased product that uses a brand new chipset that gives me a standalone Supercomp data center.
- [03:10]
A
In your pocket?
- [03:11]
C
No, no.
- [03:11]
A
It's come with a nuclear reactor.
- [03:13]
D
It's about the size of a, of a, of a book, but it's 256 gigabytes of memory connected to a next generation AI chip.
- [03:22]
A
This is the next thing I bought the Framework desktop with the Strix Halo processor and 128Gigs for running local AIs. So this is the, this is the goal. This is where we're trying to go. I have to. Before we go any farther, though. Of course, AI and robotics were the talk of the convention this year, and we'll talk a lot about this. We also have Robert's Casey Kasem style. Top five picks from ces. We'll start with number five and we'll end with number one later in the show. But before we do anything else, this is my pick from ces. Jennifer, you want to set this clip up?
- [04:00]
B
So I spent my week at CES tracking down humanoid robots that could do my laundry. I had an inkling that this might be a theme. And it turned out it. It really was.
- [04:08]
A
In past years, those robots have not been so great. In fact, one of them I know was actually being run by a human at the home office.
- [04:16]
B
Yeah. So there was a. There's been a lot of humanoids in the news this year. It's been a big. Well, 2025 was a big year for humanoid robots coming into our homes and bipedal.
- [04:26]
A
Two hands.
- [04:27]
B
Exactly. Most of them have been controlled, as you say, by someone remotely. And the sort of. The big thing here is, you know, the hardware looks like it's ready. Like, these robots are really impressive looking. The ones I met, quite a few of them could, you know, have really good dexterity. But the issue is the software. And to your point, and they're not autonomous yet, so they are, but not. And on the show floor, they weren't.
- [04:53]
A
Because for logistical reasons, noisy radio signals are terrible.
- [04:57]
B
Yeah. They can't kind of create.
- [04:59]
A
You don't want to damage any humans. That kind of.
- [05:02]
B
Right. And one. They were. Most of them were Being controlled by, like, Xbox remotes from someone like the man behind the curtain. And the one. One that we're about to meet was actually being held up by carabiners on a big frame before.
- [05:14]
A
Let's take a look. Yeah, it's like. It's like one of those Steadicams.
- [05:17]
B
Yeah. This guy weighs 170 pounds. So he's. He's hefty and he's. He's from a company called Xeroth and he's called Jupiter. And he is designed to be a household robot.
- [05:29]
A
So this is what scares me, is if these aren't necessary, if they're not. But it's like having a chimpanzee in your house. They have a lot of strength, and if they're not fully controlled, they could hurt you back. Well, watch what happened. This is. Jennifer was interviewing the robot.
- [05:47]
B
I guess Jupiter weighs 170 pounds and hurts when it falls on you, which it did.
- [05:55]
A
No, I didn't touch. It fell on you.
- [06:00]
B
So I tried to reach as it came towards me. My instinct was to try and help it, you know, and stop it. And I put my hand out and. Oh, my go.
- [06:09]
A
It's heavy.
- [06:10]
B
It really kind of tweaked my wrist. I, like, slacked my team. I was like, I need to file a worker's comp claim.
- [06:16]
A
Oh, you could.
- [06:17]
D
It makes you. You're a humanoidist. Because if that was not a humanoid robot, you wouldn't have tried to catch it.
- [06:23]
A
That's exactly right.
- [06:24]
B
I think you're right. I think you're right.
- [06:25]
A
If there were a big metal box falling over, you'd have run.
- [06:28]
B
Just jump. I know, but yeah, it was. It was. And then they all rushed around it and it was. Oh, yeah, it was very sad. I felt very bad for poor Jupiter in this big moment.
- [06:39]
A
You can catch that and Jennifer. Jennifer's many articles on the Verge. That video is also on the Verge's front page. And if you want to see the actual event, it was 3 minutes and 40 seconds in.
- [06:53]
B
But yes, one reason why they are not going to be in our homes anytime soon. I think the LG version, which we, you know, was also big news. The Cloyd with the wheels is a bit more realistic, except for if you have homes with stairs, that then becomes something of an issue. But, yes, that was. It was a lot of fun meeting all these robots. And I actually walked around. I carried a bottle of laundry detergent the entire show, asking each one if they could open it. Because I'm like, if you're going to.
- [07:26]
A
Do my laundry, that's kind of critical.
- [07:28]
B
You have to open my laundry bottle.
- [07:29]
A
And none of them, none of them could open it.
- [07:32]
B
No one was willing to give it a go, sadly.
- [07:35]
A
Were you using Tide pods or did you have.
- [07:37]
B
No, you see, that's what they all. That's what they said. Just do pots. I'm like, well, I want you to open my laundry bottle.
- [07:43]
A
What about the Downy? What about the Downy? You got to be able to open a bottle.
- [07:46]
D
If it's going to be a home robot, it's got to be able to do the pickle jar test. Right?
- [07:50]
A
I mean, that's the thing.
- [07:52]
B
It felt like a kind of key. If it can't open a bottle, what is it going to be doing in my home? That's.
- [07:58]
A
It feels so bad for your family because you bring these home.
- [08:03]
B
I showed the video to my kids and I was like, I showed them the switchbot one. I'm like, we're probably going to have that in our home, like in a few months.
- [08:11]
D
Mommy.
- [08:11]
C
No, no.
- [08:13]
A
I think the cats are going to be a little more perturbed than the kids.
- [08:16]
B
They're old enough. The cats have gotten used to things because we have so many robot vacuums.
- [08:21]
A
You still like. Last time you were on, you liked that vacuum cleaner that couldn't get under your bed, but was at least a little smarter than the iRobot automatic.
- [08:28]
C
Yes.
- [08:28]
B
Yeah, I still like that. I think it's a great product.
- [08:31]
A
Well, let's stick with robots for a little bit. Somebody's got to do a cut down of robots falling over because there were multiple occasions besides the one that hit you, of robots attempting backflips. And there was one, he did a backflip, he kind of got wobbly, stood back up, but then his hand fell off, which is not good as it happens.
- [08:53]
D
I mean, come on.
- [08:54]
A
As it happens. Then there's another robot I remember just saw just. It just collapsed like in a. It was like pickup sticks. Like, not just like your robot fell on its face like a human would. This robot just went like a rag doll.
- [09:10]
B
Well, the one that. Into the hall and started like punching people and then punch, like punching in the air and then I think punched itself in the face and knocked itself out. My colleague caught that one on video. I haven't seen the video.
- [09:25]
A
It's probably not good for us to take too much human pleasure in the failings of these robots. Thinking.
- [09:33]
D
I went to a vendor in, in the west hall who had a robot out and she was telling me that they had turned off the more aggressive auto balancing features because unfortunately when you turn all of that stuff on robots, they'll try to move their limbs to rebalance. When they're grossly off balance and it looks like they're punching, it looks like they're attacking. So they said as a safety measure near other, near people, they turn those features off.
- [09:59]
A
I think the leading robot company, at least in the US there may be some Chinese companies that are ahead of it is Boston Dynamics.
- [10:06]
B
Yeah. And they had Atlas there.
- [10:07]
A
Atlas.
- [10:08]
B
But Atlas is not designed for the home. So I, Alice, is very much designed for factories. Although they've hinted, hinted that there may be a home robot in its future. But. So we didn't, we didn't go visit Atlas because he, he can't do my laundry. But apparently its demo wasn't particularly impressive. The reporting on the verge was, you know, he just kind of walked out there and turned around and walked back and.
- [10:32]
A
Well, he's gonna. They've made a deal with Hyundai.
- [10:36]
B
Right. And it's going to be in the factory down the road for me. So I'm excited to go check.
- [10:40]
A
You can go look at it. Do the laundry at the Hyundai factory. Yeah. No, it makes sense because robots have been building cars for years. This is not new. Not humanoid robots. Jason, why are we. So why do we obsess? Yeah, why are. Yes.
- [10:53]
D
I don't get that.
- [10:54]
C
Why are we so obsessed with robots?
- [10:56]
A
With robots, humanoid.
- [10:58]
D
I mean, so much more functional if you don't worry about making it a.
- [11:01]
C
Humanoid form factor, the future of robotics. And I think maybe that's why they're getting a little bit of a rebrand. And that CS was part of this and certainly 2025 was a big part of it, of rebranding robots as physical AI, meaning that they're, you know, physical AI doesn't have to look like a human. Even the robot word robot has come to essentially mean humanoid robot to most people. And so physical AI means, you know, AI that is embodied in some, you know, way that in the real world that can do a number of things. And I'm going to, I'm going to say something that really impressed me and it's going to sound maybe a little bit boring, but there was in the Siemens keynote they talked about and I saw a demo of this in North hall. They had this PepsiCo robot that really, it was just it. And I'll get to why it's actually revolutionary, because it's going to sound dumb. It was basically a giant arm that picked up something from A skid. A product, either, you know, drinks or chips or whatever, right? Bags, boxes, cartons of them, and move them from one thing to the other. No big deal, right? That's been happening for long, long time. Very cool. Or, you know, maybe not that cool, but what it was, was, the difference was they now have this digital twin. So when you combine AI with world models and physical physics models, what it can do is, you know, a lot of times it would take this robot in the past. You know, somebody would design it, One team would design it, the other team would sort of get it and figure out how to put it in the real world. It would mess up things and it would, like, run into things by accident and they're like, okay, well, we've got to put the angle higher and all that. Well, with this, with this new model, these, this digital twin model, it's called Digital Twin Composer. This was something that was announced at the show. It can not only help you design a robot or, you know, physical AI of different kinds, but it can help you simulate using the world models that can help you simulate all of the things that it can do. And so with this robot arm, they, they said that when they brought it to CES to do the demo, they had never seen it before. They had not, you know, used it to, to set up what the demo was going to do, but they simulated on the world model. And so instead of what would have taken two days and two or three days and a bunch of eng. To like, you know, stage it and make sure it worked right, and all that took less than two hours because they had already done all of it, they were able to simulate all of it. And so that's going to enable them, with this sort of physical AI to deploy things in factories, in hospitals, in all kinds of assembly lines and other things much, much faster and at a much higher scale and for a lot cheaper. And so sort of this influx of, of robotics about to happen now thanks to the combination of, of, of AI, but not just AI, but these sort of next generation models, these, these world models that are coming in probably going to be one of the big Trends of, of 2026.
- [14:11]
B
Yeah, that's what the guys I would, the, the interviews I did with the robotics roboticists was like these. They can't do what you want now, but very soon, using world models, they will just be able to watch you and then do what you do. So, like, you just need to show the robot how to do the laundry and it will then just do it like they were saying. That that's the sort of next step. And right now, I mean, Switchbot was the other humanoid robot that we got to interact with. And they showed me some videos of all the. They have like a huge warehouse in China with tons of little rooms where they've just got the robots doing things like making beds, doing the laundry, making breakfast, like just repeatedly to try and train them to do this. And then the thing that the Switchbot is the one. The one row.
- [15:01]
A
Yes, the one row.
- [15:02]
B
Yeah, one row. That's the one. They say they're going to ship that this year for under $10,000, and that will be in our homes this year. But then the xeroth CEO told me that they train the robots on TikTok, which made me very worried.
- [15:17]
D
So the robots will be doing dances while folding your laundry.
- [15:22]
A
This is a kind of. Was a. I don't want to say dead end, but this was the initiative some LLM AI companies took, which is to make tools that are human. Like, right. Like chat. That's basically what chatbots are. So it's like you're interacting with a human because they think that that's what we want. But it turns out, at least in my opinion, the most useful AI, whether it's robot or LLMs, isn't emulating humanity, but doing specific tasks.
- [15:50]
B
Yeah, and that's what actually the end of my video summarizes. Like, we don't need a humanoid robot to do everything in our home. What we just need is the current robots we have in our homes to do, to be better at what they do and maybe do a little more. So I actually saw a robot vacuum style. Like, it looks like a robot vacuum, but it had a larger arm. And this was at the dreamy booth. And it could open the washing machine, load the clothes, move the clothes into the dryer, and then take the clothes out of the dryer and put it in the basket. And it had little cameras in it so it could actually sort the laundry so it could take, you know, it could see the whites and the colors. It could even like analyze the washing labels so that it could make sure it puts the delicates on and. Or the, you know, be able to do. So it's a concept robot, so it wasn't like something they kind of announced. It was just like in the corner of their booth, but it was like, this is. This makes more sense to me. And in theory, it could roam around the house and pick up clothes for you too. But yeah, like, you don't the idea. And I spoke to the CEO of Roborock as well, who's the robot vacuum manufacturer. And he made the same point. He said, we're going to make the robots that we have in the homes better at what they do, so they're very, very good. And then maybe give them some additional capabilities. So you'll maybe have two or three robots in your home doing your chores, but not just. Not one robot emulating you. Though what LGs Cloyd demonstrated, which is what I think is much more realistic and actually very much to your point, Jason, about being able to create, you know, personalize AI, bring AI into your home, is it could create. It could connect to all your smart home appliances and control them. So it doesn't need to open the washing machine. It can just tell the washing machine to open. Because it's a smart home hub. It doesn't need to. That makes more sense to make the dishwasher run. It just turns the dishwasher on using smart home connectivity. Same thing with the oven, you know, so it can control all the appliances, and so it's sort of orchestrating them for you, just like your smart home hub is. And then it fills in the gaps that the robots can't do themselves, which is perhaps like putting the croissant in the oven or taking the laundry out of the laundry machine.
- [18:12]
C
Jennifer, did you see the one that go. The one that goes up the. Take itself up or down the stairs?
- [18:18]
B
Yes. The Robo Rover. Yes. I think that. That. That was my pick of. My robot pick of ces. I was like this. We finally did it. A robot vacuum that can not only climb stairs, but it can clean them, too.
- [18:34]
A
Yes. Because everybody's got perfectly clean floors, but their stairs are disgusting.
- [18:38]
C
Stairs are a mess, right? The stairs are a mess.
- [18:42]
B
Yeah. So it can.
- [18:42]
A
It's kind of cute. It's got, like, little lever legs. Yeah.
- [18:48]
B
And I did. I did a. Yeah, it can. It. It can leap as well. So it can kind of jump over things.
- [18:53]
A
Now I'm scared.
- [18:54]
D
I don't know if I want to jump in robot.
- [18:57]
B
Just little leaps, just to get, like over a transition between a room. Because that's one of the challenges robots vacuums have in your home. They get stuck, you know, on high transitions or big, big thick leg legs of chairs. So, yeah, this. The Robo. Roborock Saros Rover. It's a concept, but they say it will be coming to market.
- [19:17]
C
It'll come.
- [19:17]
B
And it. It goes up. It's quite slow, but not. Not really slow. Not as slow as the laundry folding robot. But it climbs up the stair and then it lifts one leg up and pivots and then vacuums along the stair and then brings its other leg up, climbs up to the next step and it kind of on, it teeters on its wheels a little bit. A couple times I was thinking, oh, it's just gon going.
- [19:40]
A
Yeah.
- [19:40]
B
But they say it has, the engine has like built in like braking and you know, so it can figure out where it is and not, not go backwards. Keeps going up. They didn't show it climbing down the stairs, they just showed it going down a slope. But they did before ces, they did show us a demo video and briefings that did show it going downstairs as well as up. And it can also like lift one leg up and sort of clean along things. So I think the idea there is that maybe it could like clean other surfaces. Not just steps, but any kind of surface that's maybe, you know, like maybe even a table. Not that I don't know if you'd want your robot vacuum to clean your table, but you know, it could, it could get into different areas because, and this is Roborock's president's point about making the robots that we have do more and do better rather than do everything, which I think, I definitely think is the way we're going with home robotics.
- [20:34]
C
I was just imagining, you know, I think it was really good to have. And eventually I'm sure these things are going to get good. They'll climb the stairs, they'll, they'll, you know, scale the stairs. They'll do all of, they'll clean the.
- [20:42]
A
Stairs, suck your face like the half life face suckers leaping into you.
- [20:47]
C
That too. All of it. The. But I, I was just imagining having one of these and then you're like, you hear thump, thump, thump, thump. What was that? Oh, it was. The two thousand dollar robot just fell down.
- [21:01]
B
Yes. No, that's. Well, there kind of has been a problem with robot vacuums from the beginning.
- [21:06]
D
Boom.
- [21:07]
C
It's very, very.
- [21:07]
A
There's gonna be things like that for a long time where we have accident accidents.
- [21:14]
D
I mean, personally I, I would, I would want robotics, I would want two robotic arms mounted to this to the ceiling in my dining room slash kitchen because they'll help with chores. I'd probably want an arm or two in the laundry room, but other than that, I don't really need a robot following me around the house. Those are the two places that are gonna have the most use for any sort of robotic help. And those are the places where you can really easily define the tasks that need to take place. And I think fixed arms work so much better than trying to make it work with a robot that follows a humanoid or not.
- [21:50]
A
Roborock is one of a number of Chinese companies that basically put roombas out of business. Right. I mean, are the Chinese lapping us on all of this? Yeah, Dreamy.
- [22:03]
D
They're iterating a lot.
- [22:06]
B
Dreamy. So Dreamy came out in 2020, I think they launched their first robot vacuums in the US and they are now. So they had their first booth at CES maybe two years ago and it was quite small, but like robot vacuum booth next to Roborock. Now they had two booths, one in the Venetian, one in the lvcc. And when I went, I went there to interview the president and the PR guy said to me, oh, we just signed the contract for our booth next. When you have the largest booth in the history of ces.
- [22:36]
A
Oh my God.
- [22:36]
B
Not our largest booth, but like the largest.
- [22:40]
A
And there have been some pretty big booths.
- [22:42]
C
Yeah, they had a block, they had.
- [22:45]
B
A car, they had wash appliances, they had smartphones. This is dreamy. They had smart home appliances, smart home devices. They had a whole like Dyson rip off room where with all the hair dryers, like they had everything. They're not just doing. Robots are their main thing, but they have become a huge multi appliance, kind of like robot robotics and household appliances like Shark Ninja and Rimba together, plus, you know, whirlpool and then cars. I remember going crazy and I heard there was a really interesting article in the South China Morning Post.
- [23:21]
C
Is that.
- [23:21]
B
Am I saying that right? Just before Christmas saying that, and this is unconfirmed, but the dreamy CEO had sent out an email to all employees and was giving everyone an ounce of gold as a bonus.
- [23:32]
A
Oh my God, yes. What is that, 5,000 bucks or something? Wow.
- [23:36]
D
Back to the.
- [23:37]
A
The heyday of cbs.
- [23:39]
B
They're doing very well.
- [23:42]
C
Go ahead.
- [23:43]
A
Sorry, Leo, I'm just. I shouldn't bring politics into this, but we've banned Chinese EVS because they're so much better than our evs. We've just banned all drones made outside of the US because we don't like it that their drones are so much better than ours. I am. This, this, this. It feels like you're putting a big target on your back when you say we're gonna have the largest booth in the history of ces. I. I don't. There's nothing to say about it. I don't.
- [24:11]
C
You know, two years ago, I remember the first when I was, I was still at ZDNet and we reviewed the first Dreamy. I think it was like one, it was their first big product. It was like the Dreame 40 maybe.
- [24:24]
B
Yeah, the L40. Yeah.
- [24:26]
C
Thank you. And the crazy thing was it had really just come to the point where roborock had just taken over from Roomba as like they were clearly now the best, you know, they had the best products, they, they had the best pickup, the best sort of battery life, the best, you know, navigation, all of it. And it was like, wow, Roborock is, is the, you know, 800 pound gorilla and dreamy came out with their first product and it was better than, than, than roborocks and is like ever since then roborock has just been, you know, scrambling to try to catch up and Dreamy. I was so impressed that how did they come out with their first product? Clearly they just looked at what all they were doing and they're like, oh, there's a couple of things that could be better and we'll just make those better. And, and it was better at almost everything. You know, with its first gen. Is.
- [25:12]
A
There a security or privacy concern with this? I mean these, these autonomous devices in your house map your home. They have cameras.
- [25:23]
D
Yes, but the same sort of security issue you're going to have with having Amazon appliances everywhere. I mean any sort of autonomous vehicle in your home is going to have a map of your home. That's how it moves around. It's going to generate that. And a lot of that processing does not happen on the device. It's going to happen to the server that it's connected to on the other side of the cloud. So is there a security issue? Absolutely. What could you do with, with that information? I mean you could do nefarious things, but people would have to really target you to do it.
- [25:54]
A
So it makes more sense frankly for Amazon to, to look and see what furniture you have so they can show you the right ads than for the Chinese to look and see what furniture you have so they can invade our shores. I don't know, I don't know what I mean.
- [26:07]
B
And this is why the matic we mentioned earlier is one that I really like because it does all its processing locally. You don't need a cloud. There's no.
- [26:14]
A
I like that, honestly.
- [26:16]
B
And if that's something you're concerned about. Yes, I, I, you know, Chinese manufacturers is, is there are. So ecovacs had a pretty bad incident recently which is another Chinese robot vacuum manufacturer where their robot Vacuums got hacked and they were like chasing people around and yelling at them in their houses, which is obviously terrifying. And there are like user metrics you can put on the robot so you can disable the camera. There are. Roborock actually came out with a whole line without cameras. So if you, you know, you can still use the vacuums without having a camera in your home. They have like a pin in order to enable the camera and the camera, all of them when they are recording, because you can use them to like check in on your home. And Dreamy's. One of Dreamy's features is. And Narwhal, which is another one. There's a lot of them is they can go find your pet for you. So if you're out of the house and you want to check on your pet, the robot can go and look for the pet for you. But the robot will say as it's moving and recording. Live View enabled. Live view enabled. So that there are lots of safeguards, I suppose, but ultimately anything connected to the Internet, you are going to have security risks. But now with matter, you have got the capability of using some of these devices. Just with a local platform, you obviously lose some of the capabilities because if you. So you could connect. I think Dreamy and roborock both work with matter, so you could just set up the robot via Apple home. Although if you want the mapping features, you do need to use the Dreamey app. So, yeah, there's still little ways to go until we can get local control of some of these devices. But I think that's the way we're going to see some companies coming out to sort of differentiate themselves because there obviously are concerns around that.
- [28:05]
A
I do think the Dreamy Halo hair dryer, which isn't that great an award too. Why isn't that you there, though? I don't.
- [28:14]
B
There is a video of me. I used it because this wasn't plugged in. This was an unveiled. Oh, it was just sitting there, but so I went to the Dreamy booth and got my hair dried by it.
- [28:22]
A
It was for people who don't. Aren't seeing the video. This is a thing that is as tall as a human almost. I mean, it's. It's a big arc that sits on the floor.
- [28:30]
C
Like half circle.
- [28:31]
A
Yeah, yeah. Does air come out of the whole thing? No, just the top.
- [28:35]
B
Yeah. So no, it's the top top. So you can.
- [28:37]
A
This is a back to the stand hair dryer that we got rid of in the 60s.
- [28:41]
B
It is.
- [28:42]
D
It looks like that's like the Dyson hair.
- [28:44]
B
Young people. And I didn't want to say.
- [28:47]
A
Yeah, remember you used to go to the salon and you'd sit under the hood with all the other guys in curlers. And this is like that.
- [28:55]
B
It does it. It reminded me of that a lot. It's got it. So it uses AI to track, like, movement. So in theory, the they told me.
- [29:05]
A
Does it track your hair?
- [29:06]
B
You should be able to just move your. Tracks your head. So you can move and it follows your head. And also it moves around your head. I'm gonna drop the link of me.
- [29:17]
A
So it's rotating.
- [29:20]
B
Oh, my God, this is crazy. So it's moving for you.
- [29:24]
A
So instead of having having to hold a blow dryer, which gosh knows is really an onerous task, and you don't have to go to a hairdresser to do it for you, you can have the dreamy halo dry your hair.
- [29:37]
B
Yes.
- [29:39]
D
I need to pitch to defcon this year that we're going to create a village with nothing but these smart appliances and just let hackers go crazy. All the ways you could hurt a human inside this little village.
- [29:52]
B
No, it does have. It's a lamp. So the whole.
- [29:56]
A
Of course it is, because why not?
- [29:59]
B
And then it also. It shoots, like, moisturizing air. So it's supposed to, like, be a scalp treatment for you. Does it do the end of the. The run?
- [30:08]
A
Yeah, I see it on your Instagram.
- [30:10]
D
Like essential oils.
- [30:12]
B
Yes, like, that kind of thing. It's meant to make you feel JTP healthy. There's me, and.
- [30:17]
A
And you went in with your hair wet. No, you didn't.
- [30:19]
B
No.
- [30:20]
A
All right.
- [30:20]
B
And it also was just kind of so you could see it moving a little bit. It's like, move, because you. As you dry your own hair, you move.
- [30:27]
A
You move it. Yeah. You don't want a big hot spot at the top of your head.
- [30:30]
B
Yeah. So it's moving for you, then.
- [30:33]
D
It's just an air fryer. That's different.
- [30:38]
B
It was. It was. They said it's gonna be 700 bucks.
- [30:41]
A
They say it's not available yet, but.
- [30:44]
B
No, but they showed the video of it of, like, you sitting on a couch, and it just kind of.
- [30:49]
A
Jennifer, you're such a trooper. I can't believe you had to go around all of these different things.
- [30:54]
D
I mean, we're making fun of it, but it looks nice.
- [30:57]
A
Yeah, it does. Wood furniture.
- [30:59]
B
You could have it in your lamp.
- [31:00]
A
It could be in your living room. Oh, that lamp. That's my hairdryer, too.
- [31:04]
B
Yeah.
- [31:06]
C
I Need to let the lamp. Hold on a second. I'll be right there. I'm gonna let the lamp dry my hair.
- [31:11]
A
I could see buying this for my wife just as a gift, just for a. I mean, it'd be a fun Christmas gift.
- [31:18]
B
Yeah.
- [31:19]
D
And then my mom would use it to dry the kitchen rack.
- [31:21]
B
Unique. Mom.
- [31:24]
A
Why is it dreamy in the kitchen trying all the rags drying all the stuff? Well, I do want to talk about the computer in your pocket, Father Robert. We'll get to that. There's so much to talk about. Chips. This was an interesting. It sounds like a very interesting ces.
- [31:41]
C
It wasn't dull.
- [31:42]
A
Yeah, not dull. It was a lot. Yeah, a lot. Jason Heiner's here from his brand new the Deep View. Great to have you, Jason. Jennifer Pattison Tuohy from the Verge. Father Robert from the Vatican, the Digital Jesuit. Now Father Robert has put together a countdown, a Casey Kasem style countdown of your top five gizmos from ces. And we're going to do it as Casey Kasem does backwards. So now starting our top five countdown of CES hits, here's number five from the show floor. Hit it.
- [32:22]
D
Ces. What we used to call the Consumer Electronics Show. It's the mecca for industry professionals, engineers and those who are just interested in the latest and greatest in technology. Now with millions of square feet of exhibit halls and thousands of vendors, it can be difficult to zero in on the technology that you're looking for. Which is why I did the hard work work for you. I'm Father Robert Belaser, the Digital Jesuit and this is Padres top five from CES 2026. Number five, the Strut EV. Not everybody who needs a mobility device. I need it and safely operate mobility device. That's the basic problem that led Singapore based robotics company Strut to create the ev. To address that problem, a suite of sensors and processing that they call their EV Sense system system. It uses a combination of cameras, lidar time of flight and ultrasonic sensors to give the system a 360 by 360 degree view of the environment around the EV. This allows not only see, understand and avoid people, hazards and obstacles, but also to autonomously bring its users safely to their destinations. I want this combined 4 motor active drive, motion and suspension system that will dynamically adjust torque. The EV works well on carpet, carpet, gravel, concrete, wet surfaces and the like. It tops out at 7 mph, has a max payload of 350 pounds, can climb grades of 13 degrees and has an all day replaceable cartridge Battery that can charge from 20 to 80 capacity in 30 minutes. In co pilot mode, the EV Sense system smooths user inputs to prevent jerky motions and applies the hover chair from Wally to prevent collisions or driving into unsafe areas in three axes. This is for my plus mode sense will automatically adjust the heading to get you there while going around. Found any obstacles? Basically it's drive by. So I'm not driving it right now. I'm hungry. Oh, it's just in Pathfinder and they say I'm hungry. Full autonomous operation. Just can either use a map to point out where they want to go or they can use the context sensitive voice assistant, for example, say, and the.
- [34:29]
A
EV was Showstoppers or Pep in the Kitchen.
- [34:32]
D
This was launch price and the advance $7,500 MSRP. The Strut EV is well below the average price for an advanced wheelchair. It could be the perfect tech for those who need a little help getting around.
- [34:46]
A
That's very cool. Now we're going to take all of these and put them together. There's a seven minute feature we'll put up on our YouTube channel, on our twit news YouTube feed so you can see all of them. But that was number five and Father Robert's hit parade. And we will get to the rest.
- [35:02]
D
I was so enamored because I've been looking at nice wheelchairs for my father because he's having trouble moving around. But the problem is 7, 500 bucks.
- [35:11]
A
Is a good price.
- [35:12]
D
It's a, it's actually, it's 5300 right now. It'll go up to 7, 500.
- [35:16]
A
Oh, okay. Well, 53.
- [35:17]
D
But 15,000 is what I was looking at for a standard electronic motorized wheelchair.
- [35:22]
A
Oh, that's great.
- [35:23]
D
The problem with that is if you can't drive it, if you don't, if you no longer have the ability to drive, you'll be driving into walls and the wheat into people. This will not let you drive into our house.
- [35:32]
A
Oh, that's fantastic. Wow. The only thing that's missing, I'll be honest with you, it needs a scissor lift. So you can say up and it goes. It goes up.
- [35:41]
D
Wow.
- [35:42]
A
That's all it needs. It just needs that and then done deal. If I could sit. Yeah, if I could sit at the bottom of the stairs and it would just push me up the stairs.
- [35:51]
D
Now, Leo, one of the other things that I was thinking of is we have a retirement home for Jesuit priests in Los Gatos, California. And we had to ban scooters, mobility scooters, because the guys were running into each other.
- [36:04]
A
Yeah, you know, we were, we were jousting.
- [36:06]
D
They were not jousting, but when you live with someone for 60 years, you develop a lot of grudges.
- [36:12]
A
Oh, they were intentionally running into each other?
- [36:14]
D
I think so. I think so.
- [36:17]
C
Ramming each other.
- [36:18]
D
Wow.
- [36:18]
C
All right.
- [36:19]
A
We'll have more.
- [36:19]
D
Accidentally running over people's feet.
- [36:22]
A
It was weird. We'll have more in our top five countdown with Father Robert Humbert, Jennifer Passatouille and Jason Heiner. Our show today brought to you by Redis. Brand new sponsor, but not new to us because we've been using Redis for our website for 10 years at least. Redis is R E D I S and I think if you're a geek, you know the name is the real time data platform that powers ultra fast applications. We use it for caching, you can use it for data storage, for search, vector embeddings, AI workloads and more. With a global user community and adoption across startups to Fortune 5 companies, Redis continues to innovate on speed, scalability and developer experience. It's a very good experience. Ask Patrick, our engineer. Redis helps developers ship faster, scale instantly and keep apps blazing fast even under heavy load at the center of the platform. The Redis Cloud. Redis Cloud is the fully managed version of the fastest and most feature rich version of Redis on the market. By choosing this Redis as a service, you can easily start utilizing Redis 8 in production and scale to real time speeds effortlessly. Redis Cloud is purpose built for performance and simplicity. It's what we use. And I have to say there have been times when our website would be down if it weren't for Redis where we screwed things up. And Redis because it's cached to site, keeps it going. We love Redis. Extremely low latency and high throughput. That's important to us because you know, you go to a website, if it doesn't load in a second or two, you feel like something's wrong, you might even leave. It does automatic scaling, global availability. We have a global audience. You probably do too. Simple setup and a generous free tier. In fact, I want you to check out the free tier. Redis Cloud. It's the real time context engine that gathers, syncs and serves the data you need to build accurate AI apps that scale. To learn more or try Redis Cloud for free, just search for Redis Cloud or you can go to their website. Redis IO R E D I S IO thank you. Redis for years of Making our website ultra reliable and for sponsoring this week in tech. So glad to have you in the twit family. All right, what is in your pocket, Robert? You got a supercomputer in your pocket. Really?
- [38:43]
D
I've got a super. I can't. It's, it's.
- [38:46]
A
You can't talk about it.
- [38:47]
D
NDAs attached to it, but let's just say it comes from the largest maker of AI chips in the world.
- [38:53]
A
Okay, we know who that is.
- [38:54]
D
Okay, we know who that is. It's their next.
- [38:56]
A
Do you have Vera Rubin in your pocket?
- [38:58]
D
Possibly, possibly.
- [39:00]
A
She happy to see you.
- [39:01]
D
It's in the format of their Spark. So if you've seen their Spark, it is basically a mini data center in a box. This is using the newest of the processors. The two part that you can't mention.
- [39:14]
A
I understand. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.
- [39:16]
D
Now the nice thing about it is we're going to be using it mostly for video creation. And you can do everything local. You don't even have to remotely touch cloud resources to be able to do it. And I can put together a 4k video lasting about 30 seconds in about 90 seconds.
- [39:33]
A
I mean the.
- [39:34]
D
So fast, it iterates so quickly. It's amazing.
- [39:38]
A
And does it run the other software? It's not running Windows.
- [39:41]
D
No, no, no, no, no, no. This is all, this is all Linux. This. So it's a standalone server. Server that, that you can basically send prompts to. You can send prompts and it will continue to iterate. You could also load up your own LLMs.
- [39:52]
A
So you can have multiple processes going at once. Exactly, exactly.
- [39:56]
D
So we've got this box, ostensibly it's for video, but also we. Where I work, my day job, we're in a place where we often have these conferences that have conversations that we call them internal forum, which means it cannot leave that room. It's not secret. It's just sensitive information. We cannot use any of the current popular translation services because they all require us to send those conversations away. That's a no go. So we're going to be trying to host our own small AI data centers that do nothing but real time translation. That's where this thing really comes in. It's where it's really going to shine. So I like this. It's a nice trend of taking just enough compute power. Power and putting it into your local network, your local campus so that you can do everything in house. I'm, I'm a big, big proponent of that.
- [40:49]
A
Well, I am. Yeah. I mean, honestly, I was talking before the show Maybe we'll talk a little bit after the show. We'll certainly talk more about it on other shows like Intelligent Machines. But I am head over heels in love with Claude Code. Or Claude as French friends call it, Claude Code. And in fact I just ended up this morning paying for the max version, the 250 bucks a month max version because I'm so blown away by what it can do. But ideally that's a lot of money. Ideally I have a lot of hardware here. I could run this stuff locally for privacy reasons, for security reasons, for cost reasons. I would love something like Claude to run my household so I could see some real applications for this. Now. Now, this imaginary company that you can't mention the name of, do they envision it as a commercial only product or do they see a home use for it at some point?
- [41:41]
D
I mean it's going to be commercial only, but it will leak its way into enterprise. It's never going to make it into home, not in its current configuration. Just because even though it's far more efficient, it's still kind of power and water hungry. So you wouldn't want to do that.
- [41:58]
A
What are you carrying? A pump and a reservoir with you in your backpack. How water, huh? It's gotta be a sealed system, right?
- [42:07]
D
Yeah. To be able to get decent throughput on this thing for an enterprise, you would need to water cool them. In fact, we'll see that later on in one of the segments. But the blades, the data center that Nvidia set up in their suite in the Fontainebleau, it's amazing how much they have to put cooling into the development of the solutions. It's no longer an afterthought. They have to have that upfront because these things are putting out so much thermal energy that if you're not thinking about that from the get go, it's just not going to work.
- [42:39]
A
Jensen did do a quite a fun speech, talked a lot about all the new things. I'm not saying that this is an Nvidia product, but I'm segueing now to Nvidia. Sorry. Although Jason, Jeff Jarvis said he really wanted to interview Jensen's leather jacket. He's very impressed by.
- [42:58]
C
Yeah, I mean the leather, the leather jacket, the black leather jacket is the new, the new black turtleneck. Turtleneck for sure. I, I, I tweeted this one was.
- [43:09]
A
Looked like alligator or something.
- [43:10]
D
He, he pulls it off though. He kind of does. Right.
- [43:13]
C
Greg Brockman came on the, the president of OpenAI came on the, sorry, the AMD keynote and he when he came on, he came on in a black leather jacket and I tweeted out. This is my most popular tweet of the whole show. I like breaking news. Greg Brockman has arrived at the MD keynote in a black leather jacket. This is serious. And that was by far my most interacted with tweet of the entire show.
- [43:41]
A
That's hysterical. Well, maybe it's the new look for the new new billionaires. So we'll get to AMD in a second. Nvidia announced a new platform called Vero Rubin.
- [43:52]
C
Yes.
- [43:53]
A
I presume she is a computer scientist.
- [43:56]
C
Space. Yeah, scientist.
- [43:58]
A
Space scientist. Okay. Does this replace Blackwell or is this.
- [44:04]
C
It does this is the next generation Grace Blackwell.
- [44:07]
D
Vera Rubin. So it's Vera Rubin. Vera is a cpu, Rubin is the gpu.
- [44:13]
A
So there's a Blackwell in the Ruben? Ruben?
- [44:16]
D
No, no, no. It's. It's a brand new chip, brand new piece of silicon. It uses NV Link 6. So it's double the bandwidth to each GPU and two GPUs are. Two Ruben GPUs are paired with each Vera CPU on the same piece.
- [44:28]
A
The Reuben is the gpu. It's like a sandwich. And the Vera is the cpu.
- [44:34]
C
He said there's like six chip. This makes up essentially six chips. One of them is Vera, one of his Ruben and then there's four others.
- [44:40]
A
Wow. The interlink and all that. The thing is she's an astronomer who reshaped how scientists understand the property of galaxies.
- [44:49]
C
Yes, very cool.
- [44:51]
A
The Ruben GPU, the Vera CPU, both built on TSMC's 3 nanometer process. But it's the bandwidth is the interconnect that is I think very important.
- [45:02]
D
It's amazing.
- [45:03]
C
You know they were already double. Yeah, they were already had a huge lead. Right. In AI chips like this is no secret. They have 90% market share. They have. If they stopped taking orders today, they have everything that they're going to make in 2026 is already sold. Right. So they have so, so much demand and that's why they're you know, essentially been printing money for, for three years. And even with that, you know there are competitors trying so Trainium from Amazon, you have Google with their TPUs, you have AMD of course trying to also grab a piece of the market. You know the next biggest according to AMD, according to, yeah most places to Nvidia at 90% is AMD with 5%. And yet they, their next generation chip, this very Ruben chip we weren't expecting for about another six months. So this is kind of about six months ahead of schedule.
- [46:03]
A
Well, it won't be out till later this year though.
- [46:05]
C
That's right, it won't be. But we expected them to kind of announce the full details of it, you know, know, probably mid year.
- [46:11]
A
One of the things that comes up for me is we see these companies, you know, Xai Elon Musk's company and Meta, of course, and Microsoft spending billions of dollars building these data centers with the latest chips that are now obsolete.
- [46:29]
D
It's worse than that, Leo, because we know for a fact because of the power consumption of the Blackwell chips that that there's a very large percentage of the black belt chips sold that are not powered on. They can't power them on. So they bought them because they had.
- [46:43]
A
An overheating problem when they first came out.
- [46:45]
D
Exactly, exactly. So you've got a huge chunk that are doing nothing except waiting for more data center capacity. Well, if you look at how much more energy efficient the Vera Rubin is going to be over the Grace Blackwell, it, it actually makes economic sense to just no longer use the Blackwell chips that you've got in reserve. Just buy all brand new Vera Rubin chips.
- [47:09]
C
Now for the, this is for the, especially for the folks who are on the leading edge of like training.
- [47:13]
A
Yeah, you can send those Blackwell chips to, to us.
- [47:16]
C
You'll take them?
- [47:17]
A
We'll take ebay, put them on ebay.
- [47:19]
C
You know what, we will sell those and they'll, they'll do.
- [47:22]
A
That's not fully ingest at some point, right. It might be a couple of years off. This is the thing that I find most interesting. I'm again, Claude. Code is so good, but it's running off of anthropic servers trained with very, very expensive hardware. Probably being sold at a loss by anthropic. But this stuff trickles down.
- [47:41]
D
Yes, it does.
- [47:41]
A
Right. Is it, is it reasonable to think that in six months or a year or even if it's two years, I will have that kind of capability sitting on, on my desk here.
- [47:52]
C
Very reasonable desk.
- [47:55]
D
And I mean the problem is they sell them in blades so they, they're completely.
- [48:00]
A
All right, I'll have a server closet. Okay.
- [48:03]
D
Well, I mean. No. How big is your server closet and does it have three phase power?
- [48:07]
A
But you've got something in your pocket. Liquid cooling.
- [48:10]
D
Yes. So that's very special use case. So instead of putting it into a blade, they put it into a individual case.
- [48:18]
A
Well, it's not tied then to the blade. You could do it in different ways. Right.
- [48:22]
D
I guess I'd have to Say isn't there not.
- [48:24]
A
I think they, there'd be more of a market for that than there would be for a robot. And it, I mean look, maybe those robots are going to cost thousands, maybe $10,000. Right.
- [48:34]
B
If, if for 90,000.
- [48:36]
A
90.
- [48:37]
B
That's what one of the, the Jupiter, he said it would be. 90,000. Who's gonna buy that?
- [48:44]
A
That's gotta be a kind of limited market.
- [48:46]
D
There are a lot of people who are gonna pay a lot of money to have robots fall on them.
- [48:51]
A
It'll be like a car, car event. Right? It'll be like a car. And will you need it as much as you need a car?
- [48:57]
C
I mean Optimus, they talked about that, that essentially the price will be similar to a, to a car with Tesla, you know, Optimus. But, but you know the thing with, to your point Leo though, the, the chips, the thing is is the, these high end chips are going to be, you know, essentially they do the same thing they. For training for. With a quarter of the number of GPUs. Right. Which is incredible. For inference I believe in. And father Robert can. Yeah.
- [49:26]
D
10X inferences.
- [49:28]
C
10X exactly. So, so, so 10x for inference, 4x for training. That's going to let you do so much more with the same amount of chips. Now one of the counter trends that's happening right now.
- [49:40]
A
Before you go on. I got it because I'm, I, I need to know these terms. So when you create an lln, you train it. And that's, that's training. That's the first expense. Is that the most CPU or GPU intensive part of the process?
- [49:55]
D
It depends what kind of model you're making.
- [49:56]
A
Okay. Okay. But if you're building, yeah. If you're building ChatGPT 5.2 or Anthropics Opus 4.5. Yeah, that's, that's the inference. Then you do a lot of post training and reinforcement learning and stuff. What's the infrastructure? Inference is that when I'm using it.
- [50:14]
D
That's every time you ask something of an LLM it's generating an inference token. That's.
- [50:19]
A
So that's, that's the user cost. And is the user cost higher than the training cost?
- [50:25]
C
It's not now, but it will be. Right. Remember, only 13% of the world, people in the world have actually used generative AI to this point.
- [50:34]
A
Which is surprising because OpenAI says 800 million people use Chat GPT every month.
- [50:39]
D
Months.
- [50:40]
C
Well, sorry, only 13 use it on a monthly basis. You know, have used it once. Maybe.
- [50:46]
A
I must be in the top a little higher, maybe 10th of 1% because I'm using it all day right now.
- [50:53]
D
There, there is one more spec that's important for the conversation and that is per watt, per watt of power used. Vera Rubin does eight times the work of Grace Blackwell. So it is far more power efficient. Which again that's why if you're sitting on a lot of Blackwell product right now, just waiting powered up, you would be looking at and going, you know what, in a year the, the Vera Rubin is going to be cheaper because the power costs are so much less.
- [51:19]
A
As somebody in the flow connects pointing out in the chat room, remember the $6 million man was $6 million. So 90,000 is a deal. The counter trend though is we have the technology, technology.
- [51:35]
C
We're going to see, we're going to see that. I'm, you know, because it's so expensive to run AI, right? There's this real ROI problem for businesses. And so what we're seeing is small language models, SLMs and domain specific language models. There's a real move to using them and optimizing them. I did a story in December on this company, Neurometric AI that their whole thing is they're going to help you find the way to optimize your workload to a specific model. And you can, it'll be like up to like a tenth of the cost and higher performance. And so, and you can use older hardware, you could use Blackwell, you could use hardware two or three generations old. So you're still going to, it's not like Blackwell people are going to throw them in the trash or something. They're still going to use them. They're just going to use them for smaller, you know, things where they don't need, need them as much.
- [52:29]
A
In fact, this argues for less focus on these kind of generalized chat bots and more specific stuff. A medical AI, for instance, that would help a doctor with diagnostics. That could be a smaller model, run much more inexpensively and really frankly be more useful and accurate because it just does that. Yes, that makes a lot of sense in the context of what we were talking about, this general purpose robot versus purpose built robots. It makes more sense. Not that totally a dozen robots running around the house all the time.
- [53:02]
D
Well, the sustainability question really has to be.
- [53:05]
A
That's a hard question.
- [53:06]
D
Regular conversation. Yeah, it's terrible. You've got Elon Musk who is going to be spinning up a new 2 gigawatt data center. And remember, you lose about 1.8 gallons of water to evaporation. For every ton hour of cooling. That means for his 2 gigawatt data center he's going to be losing about 79 million gallons of water a year.
- [53:29]
B
Out of that math in your head.
- [53:31]
A
He's very good that way. It's like a little AI himself. I mean look, golf courses probably lose that much as well. I mean we have to decide what we want to spend our water budget on and evaporate. Doesn't mean it goes away forever. It comes back down.
- [53:46]
D
But they are pulling from municipal water sources. Well, that's a problem. The, the Meta data center in Arizona, it's already pulling from a place that has very little water.
- [53:55]
A
Right. I don't know why they're building these data centers in water deprived areas. Well, tax breaks I guess.
- [54:02]
C
Meta is building one in Louisiana that's essentially the size of Manhattan and Hyperion it's 2 gigawatts so and it's going to scale up to 5 gigawatts and essentially the size of Manhattan. But the interesting thing I did to want wonder this because it's, you know, LA is essentially a swamp. So I thought well, the water is to get a hold of, suck it.
- [54:22]
A
Out of the bayou. There's also power and unfortunately at least some of Elon's plants are running on natural gas which is a horrible polluting form of energy. Although I, I what, what is interesting is all of this puts pressure purely economic, not necessarily environmental, but it has the same impact on these companies to become more efficient, to go to nuclear power and renewable power to use less energy, to use less water. And they seem to be doing that. Yeah.
- [54:50]
C
On Friday they got it just became, sorry, I'll just say Meta became the number one buyer of nuclear power in the US On Friday. They signed a huge, huge deal.
- [55:05]
A
Like five more plants or something. Yeah.
- [55:07]
D
Or you could do it the way that they're doing it here in Nevada which is the. There's three data centers that are going in and they all have an agreement with Nevada Power that the cost of building the new plants, at least two to three new plants at a price of 1.2 to 2 billion a pop are going to be paid by the ratepayers, so.
- [55:25]
A
Oh, that's good.
- [55:26]
D
That's fantastic.
- [55:27]
A
Oh yeah. What could possibly go wrong there?
- [55:30]
D
Jeez.
- [55:31]
C
Yay.
- [55:33]
A
Well, there's some warring parties at all of this but I think at least for now the world has said we want AI whatever the cost. So AMD Lisa Su they have new, they've replaced or not replaced, but they're going to Have a successor to the Strix Halo.
- [55:54]
D
Right?
- [55:54]
A
And new Zen 5 APUs. AMD's. Is AMD lapping Intel in this?
- [56:04]
D
I mean, not lapping. They lapped Intel.
- [56:07]
A
Done. Done deal. They're, they're, Intel's in the dust. Although Intel's new processors are actually surprisingly good. But when it comes to AI, AMD is, is the, is the leader here.
- [56:18]
D
They're not as AI optimized as AMD's new chips.
- [56:20]
B
Right.
- [56:21]
D
AMD and AMD Silicon has, they have a lot of headroom. So if they really wanted to push, they could, they could push intel out of existence. But that's.
- [56:30]
A
What about Qualcomm and its chipset, the Snapdragon? Is it competitive?
- [56:36]
D
I mean, arm. You've played with ARM chips. Some of them are competitive. Most of them are not.
- [56:42]
A
Right. The Strix Halo I have over here on my framework is great. I have an Apple Mac mini, and Apple's done some pretty amazing things. And they have NPUs and they have unified memory. And so they have some hardware that's pretty good for AI. Right. Nothing like Vera.
- [57:01]
D
It all comes down to where Qualcomm is finding its profit center. Its profit center is not in super powerful intelligent devices. It's in all devices.
- [57:08]
A
Right.
- [57:09]
D
And so that's where they're spending their.
- [57:10]
A
R D. Well, you know what else is getting smart Legos.
- [57:16]
C
Yeah, I.
- [57:17]
D
This was my favorite thing. I didn't put it in my top five, but I love, loved this.
- [57:21]
B
This was our best in show by far. Like, no one disputed it at all.
- [57:25]
A
Tell us about it. What is this is a smart brick.
- [57:29]
B
So sadly, I didn't get to see it myself, but I heard everyone raving about it because it actually wasn't on the show floor. It was one of those, like, you have to go have a meeting, gotta.
- [57:37]
A
Have a meeting booth, gotta go to the hotel.
- [57:39]
B
But Sean Hollister, who is our unofficial LEGO correspondent, just had a blast. And there's a great video of him playing with the toys. But basically it just makes Legos come to life. So each brick it. So, so there's special, these special bricks come in the set. There's, I think three sets that are launching in March and they have Bluetooth, so it works on a little Bluetooth mesh, like a local Bluetooth mesh, to communicate. They have NFC chips. And then what happens is when you put it in, say you put one brick in with like Luke Skywalker and R2D2 in a little, in one of their jets, planes, spaceships, and it knows which, which character is in there, and it can talk and respond like the character making noises. Like R2T do noises, and they can connect to each other. So they. There was one demo I saw where Lucas Luke's Darth Vader was talking to Princess Leia, and they were kind of communicating in a different language. So it's like everything that you did as a kid to make the toys talk to each other, but it actually doesn't now.
- [58:49]
A
You don't have to do that anymore.
- [58:52]
D
It is exceptionally stupid. It is a waste of time, and I want them so much fun.
- [58:58]
A
It's gonna sell to adults.
- [58:59]
D
Obviously, there's an X wing, and then there's the emperor's throne room. You need all three.
- [59:03]
B
Yeah.
- [59:03]
A
So it's not A.I. we're not talking A.I.
- [59:05]
B
Here.
- [59:06]
A
No, these are just.
- [59:06]
C
No, they're like. Like, our product has no AI it's dumber than anything you have seen at the show. And it's also the coolest thing that you've.
- [59:13]
A
It can measure distance and orientation, so it has accelerometers in it. So it's more than just NFC talking.
- [59:22]
B
Yeah. It never.
- [59:23]
C
If you take the X wing noises.
- [59:25]
D
And you fly it around. Yeah. It whooshes.
- [59:29]
C
It lights up and makes Star wars noises, which is.
- [59:31]
A
But how. You know, the next generation is not going to know how to go, pew, pew, pew, pew. You.
- [59:38]
C
SC.
- [59:39]
A
Toys are going to do it for Leo.
- [59:41]
D
The next generation can do their own thing. This is.
- [59:43]
B
They only work 45 minutes, like battery life.
- [59:46]
A
So it doesn't take AAA batteries.
- [59:50]
B
No, it has a little. Comes with a little charger thing. You pop the bricks on the charger, so you get 45 minutes of play time before they have to be charged again. And, yeah, I mean, it is. We saw a lot of AI in toys at ces, which is not a good thing.
- [60:07]
A
No. In fact, there's our own. Senator Alex Padilla has introduced a bill in the Senate, U.S. senate, banning AI in Toys for kids.
- [60:17]
B
Yeah. And this. This is just a way of taking, you know, technology, taking the experience of playing with your toys to that next level that. That level you always wanted when you were playing with them as a kid. And I don't think. I mean, I'm sure there's some naysayers saying, well, yeah, but aren't you just destroying your own imagination? You can't use your own imagination. Don't have the toys do it for you. But you still are playing with them. You are still creating an experience with the toys. It's just a more augmented and with more Fun and more engaging. So hopefully maybe keep kids away from engaging things online and playing with engaging things in real life. It feels like a. A win win here, really.
- [60:55]
C
I think that last point.
- [60:56]
B
Expensive.
- [60:57]
C
I think that last point is the most important one because I had plenty of toys where. And my kids had plenty of toys where you had the button that made the noise of the ship, you know, and you. It didn't. It didn't mean you didn't make noises, other noises. Right. But. But it was more engaging and it becomes. It can compete a little bit better in some cases with some of the. The digital.
- [61:17]
A
You know, you put Palpatine on his chair and he plays.
- [61:23]
C
Exactly the death march.
- [61:27]
D
This is adult me. An adult me can afford all the toys that child me couldn't get.
- [61:31]
A
So, yeah, that's. Who's gonna buy. You know what I love about this is LEGO lost the patent. You know, it expired for its bricks. So anybody can make LEGO bricks now. But they are innovating in ways that preserves. I mean, I'm sure this is patented. That preserves their advantage. That's good. I'd like to see that. It's nice triggering an alarm.
- [61:51]
D
Yeah.
- [61:51]
C
You know, the AI toys, we talked a little bit about this on. On Thursday, on Wednesday. Intelligent machines as well. But this was one of those that felt like all of a sudden, it's not that there hadn't been them. There hadn't been AI toys before at ces, but while this sort of like emotional support toy, you know, thing was really disturbing.
- [62:15]
A
Tell us about that. You mentioned that on Wednesday, but a lot of people didn't see it. There are emotional support toys, multiple ones.
- [62:23]
C
And yeah, there's this one that was like, essentially a sock with an eye that like, follows you around the. It is as silly as it sounds, that follows you around the room. It tries to learn what makes you laugh, what makes you smile. And I loved that. You know, we wrote about these very skeptically and said, like, look, putting all of these toys out in the world that are aimed at helping, you know, be emotionally supportive for your kids because. Because they're trying to help solve loneliness and isolation and that kind of thing. And we sort of question, like, doing all this before thinking through all the implications feels like it's pretty dangerous. And our audience responded 50% immediately. And this was an AI audience, right, that said, no, they wouldn't want this. And then only 25% said yes. And then the other 25 were sort of like, we're, you know, still trying to decide. And one reader wrote in so coherently, it's said, you know, isn't the promise of AI that it should do more things for you and you can spend more time with your kids, not that you should, you know, buy emotional support toy for them. And, you know, let's face it, most.
- [63:27]
A
Parents are looking for ways to spend less time so their kids, let's be honest. Right.
- [63:32]
B
I think the emotional support toys are also for the adults, though, like we saw.
- [63:36]
A
Well, this is for old people, this one. And from the Mind with Heart Robotics is for elderly people who, you know, not only do parents not want to spend time with their kids, they don't want to spend time with their parents.
- [63:48]
B
There was one we saw called Little Milo that actually was picked as our best, most irrationally loved product at CES because it was so cute. And it was designed for people who can't have pets but would like to have a dog. And it's a little. It was tiny bit creepy. And a lot of the comments on the article were like, well, well, this is. I mean, it's made by a robot vacuum manufacturer from China. So just a little. Yeah, the Little Milo. But he was so cute.
- [64:18]
A
What's he look like?
- [64:20]
B
He is a dog. It looks just like a dog. And remember the dogs from, like the 80s that everyone bought speakers like Aibo, Sony's. No, no, no, no. Not even as robotic as that. Like, it look, it was a dog that could kind of just go.
- [64:34]
A
That's all you really need a dog to do, really, let's be honest.
- [64:37]
B
And move around, wag its tail. And this one can't even move. But it. The idea behind it is it's supposed to. I mean, it uses AI to kind of develop a personality based on how you interact with it and become an emotional support for you. And it's. It's meant for adults. It's not meant for kids.
- [64:54]
A
Is this a market? Do you think that's going to take off?
- [64:56]
B
It seems. I think there is like, it. There is. You know, one of the biggest epidemics in the world is loneliness. And we're seeing a lot of companies come out with products to help with things like aging in place or loneliness for elders who are living alone. Not. They can't. You know, it's not because they don't have the ability to leave the house, but they're just sort of stuck and lonely. They don't have people visiting them. There's one robot that I've actually been following at CES since 2018 that's very successful in its space called LEQ and we've actually talked about LEQ on the show before, I think, and they were at CES again this year, and they've been using AI to help the robot become much more useful to the person. Because the main point of it initially was conversation. It's one of the only proactive eyes on the market. So it prompts the person it's living with so that it's trying to get them to talk and communicate. Because if you're an elderly person living alone, you don't. You don't speak sometimes for, you know, days because you're not. If you're not talking to people. So this, the idea behind this one is proactive. And with AI they're now using, they've turned it into more of a health agent that's actually fully monitoring the person and looking for any potential issues.
- [66:18]
A
Oh, that's different.
- [66:19]
B
Connect with their health providers. So you connect it. You can connect it through the app with your health providers and it can help understand your. Not just your emotional issue, emotional health, but also physical health. Like, she only went to the bathroom. I don't know this, because this is maybe a little private, but, you know, it could be something like she only went into the bathroom four times today, maybe, or she went too many times today, and this could be bad. This is something we need to relate to the health agent. You know, think proactive things to keep monitoring. I think that. But, you know, in terms of having devices like this in your home, when I said this to the LEQ guys, like, but isn't it kind of sad that we have to use a robot to do things like this rather than have people helping us? And he's like, yeah, if we could. If there were enough people out there to just spend time with the elderly, I would love to be put out of business. But there just aren't and people are lonely. And this is something he thinks, and it has been shown to help. They did a trial in New York City for a couple of years. Yeah.
- [67:20]
C
When I was at zdn, we actually worked on. We interviewed people who had used it. So they talked about the things they liked, they talked about they didn't like. It's a. It's a story from Sabrina Ortiz at ZDNet that. That really interviewed people and on balance, they found it quite useful and helpful and were wanting to keep using it after the trial.
- [67:43]
B
Yeah, it's.
- [67:43]
A
It feels like it would be better to get a dog, though, than a robot.
- [67:48]
D
So we did. We did a.
- [67:50]
B
Hard to look after.
- [67:50]
A
I guess it's a lot of work.
- [67:52]
D
Yeah, my day job has a lot to say about loneliness and human interaction. And so we did, we did a limited study about four years ago and we took a bunch of these AI companions, put them into the hands of some people who needed some sort of companionship, and it helped. I mean, the test for neuroplasticity looked very, very good. You had people who were engaging far more than they would if they. They were alone. And surprisingly, the one metric that we really enjoyed was the fact that the residents who used these devices tended to reach out to real humans more than they would have otherwise.
- [68:34]
A
That's interesting. It's a kind of a wedge to kind of move them in that interactive direction. It's really true.
- [68:41]
B
One of the neat things about LEQ is they do between users, they do like a bingo night every Wednesday. So everyone with an LEQ plays bingo and then they also have these talks and they actually go live with a tour guide in a city like say, you know, at the Vatican or in Paris, and the tour guide is showing them around live. It has a little TV screen and you can actually ask questions and say, oh, look over. Can you move over this way so I can see what's over here? And like, so that it's really helping. It's not just a computer talking to you. It's kind of helping bridge a connection to people. I think. I think we're going to see more of this, actually. The founder of iRobot Got, which went bankrupt this year, last year, his new endeavor. He hasn't gone public with exactly what it's going to do, but the name is Intelligent. Oh, it's Familiar Machines and Magic, the new robotics company. Familiar Machines and Magic. And I think, and I spoke with him, I interviewed with him on the Vergecast a while ago and he kind of hinted at how, you know, this loneliness epidemic could really be so help. We could help solve it with robot, robotic companions. So I think we'll be seeing something from him along these lines too. So I think, yes, I think it is something that, to answer your question, Leo, it is. It is a trend we're going to see more of.
- [69:56]
A
It's sad that we need it, but maybe we do.
- [69:59]
C
Yeah, it is. And we shouldn't also try to find ways to do. Get humans involved too. Like one of the things that I do in my spare time is work with, you know, youth literacy programs. And one of the things we do with is getting kids, if they want to sort of find ways to make their community better. And one of the ways is often going and visiting, you know, people who, who are lonely, like in their community. Like, hey, can, can we, can we think of anybody, you know, who is, doesn't have many people to visit them and, and do it? So like, we should also find the human ways to do this in addition to the technology.
- [70:31]
A
How much is Lil Milo the most irrationally loved project product from the Verge?
- [70:36]
B
I don't believe there was a price or release to date.
- [70:40]
A
This is, and we should mention this as we do every year, that a lot of what you see at CES is pre release. May never be released.
- [70:47]
B
That's right, yeah.
- [70:48]
C
Now we did see, speaking of pre release, products that have run into challenges, the company that did the Jibo Robot, maybe the most famous CES robot of, of all time, which I owned. Of course you do, I bought.
- [71:00]
A
Of course you're Leo.
- [71:02]
C
You know, and, and, but they have another product and actually two of the most, maybe polished of these products that were especially aimed at kids were by them. And part of it was because one of the products they've actually had out for a while, it's called the LUCA robot Luka. So the LUCA robot is a robot that reads to kids. So it reads books. And they've already sold something like 10 million of these worldwide, I think mostly in Asia. But the LUCA robot, there's a new version that has AI that they showed off at the, at the show. The LUCA robot not only will read to kids, can you put a physical storybook in front of them and it can read to them and it is very cute, but it also then can interact with them. Right. It's more uses AI to, to interact with them in terms of the storytelling. And then they had another product, the, this other product, the LUCA A. It's like a tablet. It's essentially like a ruggedized tablet that has a, a camera on it and they can go around and it sort of you, it hangs around their neck. This is aimed at like, I think like kindergartner, first grader sort of kids, they go around and they, in the real world and it works in like museums and things like that too. They can take a picture and then ask questions of the things that they're. They're seeing. So they were pretty advanced. I, I was a little bit shocked at how advanced some of these things were. And these were one of the ones that, because they were so good, I, I was kind of asking them questions about privacy. I was asking about like, what models do you use? You know, where does the data go? They had Good answers and clearly they had thought through some of that and some of these products, their products are already in market. So that was good. But I, I still just had a lot of questions about, wow, getting kids sort of almost like addicted to sort of daily interactions with technologies. You know, some of my, my question about that would I wanted to have give that to a kid, you know, a kindergartner, first grader, preschooler. I'm not sure.
- [73:07]
A
It feels dystopian. It feels like 1984, a brave new world where children are raised in creches and you know, they don't, they have mechanical tenders and minders and so forth. But, but as Darren points out in our club Twit user group, if it solves a problem and we don't have another solution, maybe we say, oh yeah, it should be solved better. Yeah, but if we don't have another solution. Yeah, then better that than nothing, I guess.
- [73:32]
C
Help fill the gap.
- [73:33]
D
Yeah.
- [73:33]
A
Well, let's continue with Father Robert's top five countdowns. We're going to go to number four now in the Father Robert Kit parade, the best of seas.
- [73:44]
D
Number four. Four. The Dynsys Z1 exoskeleton. I first started to integrate exoskeletons five years ago, and to say that they were early would be generous. The 2026 models are light, long lasting and far more comfortable. Of the units that I tried, the most comfortable and intuitive was the Densis Z1. Made from carbon fiber with a design that contours to your legs, the Z1 is a knee exoskeleton for those who suffer from joint pain. A single charge on its swappable battery will provide up to 9.3 miles of climbing assist, during which time it will offload up to 150kg of weight, provide up to 20kg of lifting support, and reduce stress on your knees, making you feel up to 44 pounds lighter. I tested a Z1 at the Dinsys booth and it really is a strap in and use experience. I could immediately feel the assist while walking, standing and kicking, carrying. There is no input required aside from regular leg motions, and the device is smart enough to know how much to engage the assist function. At just over $1,000 a unit, it's a solid option for anybody who needs a bit more stability while walking, those who are standing for long periods of time, and the outdoorsman who doesn't mind going a little Robocop.
- [74:57]
A
It's kind of like a E bike for hikers.
- [75:00]
D
It is. You know, the first one I tried A few years back it, it was cool because yeah, you felt like Iron man, but it was extremely clunky and it was not comfortable.
- [75:10]
A
Right.
- [75:10]
D
The Z1 was the first one where I, I, I thought I could wear this all day. I, I mean I look funny, but I would totally wear it.
- [75:19]
C
All right.
- [75:19]
B
Our reporter Sean Hollister wore1 around CES the entire show both this year and last year, different models. He reported about it last year and then this year he wore the WWII Robot Robotics 1.
- [75:32]
D
I would totally do that. Oh my gosh.
- [75:34]
B
It's great for see. Yeah, I mean it helps because you're walking so much. Yeah, yeah. He loved it and they. The one he wore last year was quite clunky and the one he wore this year, you barely even noticed it was on him. So there's def. These are definitely getting a lot easier and actually he, it packs down into a little box like this big. So it's really easy.
- [75:54]
D
The Z1, it fits into a case that's like this big. Big.
- [75:57]
B
Yeah.
- [75:58]
A
So interesting.
- [75:59]
D
Yeah.
- [76:00]
A
Kind of an unexpected area. Let's take a break, Got lots more to talk about. We're doing our CES wrap up with three who were there and one who was not and is very happy. Jennifer Patterson Tuohy from the Verge. Father Robert Balasar, the Digital Jesuit and Jason Heiner. His brand new publication covers AI the D Deep View of AI and that's a free subscription if you go. Is it thedeepview.com subscribe.
- [76:29]
C
The deep view.com yeah.
- [76:32]
A
Very nice, very nice. Great to have all three of you. Our show today brought to you by Bit Warden. We love our friends at Bitwarden. It's the password manager I use and recommend. I'm of the strong opinion that if you're going to use any product that involves cryptography, it should be open source. So that you know it's using good cryptography practices that it doesn't have a backdrop that really does what it says it does. That's Bitwarden, the trusted leader in passwords, pass keys and Secrets Management. 10 million users across 180 countries and more than 50,000 businesses. And that's important. Business needs strong authentication password managers, for lack of a better phrase, when you're protecting one account or thousands, Bitwarden will keep you secure with consistent updates all year long. They are always adding new features. Another advantage I think of open source, the new Bit Warden Access Intelligence. This is for enterprises. Organizations can use it to detect weak, reused or exposed credentials. Immediately guide remediation directly with the user here, let's fix it. Replacing risky passwords with strong unique ones that closes a major security gap every business has to be aware of. Credentials are today still the top cause of breaches. Bad passwords, weak passwords, reused passwords. But with access intelligence they can become visible, prioritized and corrected before the exploitation happens. Bit Warden also has something new that I'm really excited about. It's called Bitwarden Lite. Bitwarden Lite delivers a lightweight self hosted password manager. This is ideal for people like us, home labs, personal projects, environments that want quick setup, minimal overhead. Bitwarden just wants to make sure that everybody needs a password manager should have a password manager even in a simple environment like that. Bit Warden is now enhanced with all of flavors of Bitwarden with real time vault, health alerts and password coaching features. This is great for business. It helps users identify weak, reused or exposed credentials. Actually it's great for everybody, isn't it? And take immediate action to strengthen their security. Now if you're using or have been using your browser's password manager, you'll be glad to know probably shouldn't be. And Bitwarden now supports direct import from your browser from Chrome, Edge, Brave, Operating Opera and Vivaldi. Direct import copies imports the credentials from the browser right into the encrypted vault. You don't have to create that separate plain text export file, which is always a risk that simplifies migration, but it also helps reduce the exposure associated with, you know, manual export and deletion steps. You gotta remember to delete the clear passwords in your download folder. G2 winner 2025 reports Bitwarden continues to hold strong as number one in every enterprise category. Six straight quarters now. And Bitwarden setup is so easy. When I move from that other password manager to Bitwarden, it was like this. They support importing for most password management solutions. It's just very straightforward and As I mentioned, GPL open source, regularly audited by third party experts, very secure. It meets SoC2 Type 2 GDPR, HIPAA CCPA compliance. It's ISO 27001:2002 certified. You really need to try it and your business get started today with Bitwarden's free trial of a teams or enterprise plan. And as an individual, it's free forever. Unlimited devices, unlimited pass keys, individuals. There's no reason not to use it. Bitwarden.com TWIT use it at business2bitwarden.com TWIT this is the only password manager I recommend. This is the one you should use bitwarden.com bitworld, Twitter. Thank him so much for supporting. This week in tech, Meta showed its wristband. Now they had this wristband. I know. Jennifer, I think it's Victoria who uses the Meta Ray Ban display glasses. Victoria Song is a big fan of those. Have you tried those at all?
- [80:38]
B
No, I've. I'm actually got. These are smart glasses, but they don't have. What? They don't have a glass sneaky.
- [80:46]
A
Ah. Which ones? Which ones are you wearing?
- [80:48]
B
These are actually the Amazon Echo frames.
- [80:51]
A
And do you like them or you just wear them?
- [80:55]
B
I actually got these specifically because I just wanted audio for me. I wasn't looking.
- [81:00]
A
That's one thing metas do very well. That sound is very good on those.
- [81:03]
B
Yes.
- [81:03]
A
Is it good on the frame?
- [81:06]
B
It's fine. No, I think the metas are better. But I got these for 100 bucks. Where.
- [81:12]
A
Have your prescription in them too. So they're. They're your spectacles. Okay.
- [81:15]
B
They are. I use them as my glasses and all I wanted at this stage was audio because I think at some point I'm gonna want what is coming with smart glasses. I just don't feel like we're there yet, so.
- [81:26]
A
Yeah, I agree.
- [81:26]
B
My. My stop gap.
- [81:28]
A
There's also the privacy concern.
- [81:30]
B
Heavy.
- [81:30]
A
Of having a camera.
- [81:32]
D
Right?
- [81:32]
B
Yes.
- [81:32]
D
Would you be banned from taking those on a cruise ship? Because I know most cruise ships are banning them now.
- [81:37]
A
Yeah. Msc, I think it's announced that they're not going to allow them in public spaces. You can have it in your cabin Royal as well.
- [81:42]
B
Anything with a camera. Yeah. I mean, because this doesn't do any recording. These don't do any recording. It's just like having speaking.
- [81:49]
A
You know, for years, museums said no cameras in the museum. We don't want to take pictures. But now everybody has a smartphone. How are you going to ban that? I think we're just going to have to get used to the idea that people are going to be.
- [82:01]
B
Victoria took her Meta Ray bans to Italy and she. She wrote a story about. About seeing lots of Renaissance butts and how he used the Meta glasses to say, okay, tell me about this, but.
- [82:16]
A
How many butts have I seen today? Meta.
- [82:19]
B
And she said it was great for that, that experience, getting that information right to her without having to pull out her phone.
- [82:25]
A
I love that idea.
- [82:26]
B
Yeah, just say, tell me about it.
- [82:28]
A
It's a tour guide. Yeah.
- [82:29]
B
Yeah.
- [82:30]
A
There were a lot of glasses at the show this year. Xreal was there. Of course, Google's got their XR Were you impressed by any of them? Were any of them particularly something to write home about, or is it more of the same?
- [82:44]
B
So V said, no, I didn't see all of them.
- [82:47]
A
She was like, this is kind of her beat.
- [82:49]
B
Boring this year. A lot of iterations, I think. And like I was sort of saying it's like we're still waiting to get to that next point. I saw it a couple people testing one with like a little scroll screen, like what the metas are going to be doing and showing you. And you have a little ring to scroll through what your meta's.
- [83:10]
A
Put a teleprompter now in their display so you can read ads. As I walk around the show floor.
- [83:16]
B
It would, I mean and you could see a lot of use case for that for, you know, in business and for any sort of professional, like having been able to pull up that kind of information right in front of you. But I just feels like from what I understand, I didn't see any of these devices myself because I was chasing robots. But is that you? That nothing's quite at that level where it's gonna be mass market adoption yet.
- [83:40]
C
There's still breakthrough. Yeah, none of them are ready to break through quite yet. I do think the Teleprompter 1 is pretty interesting for. So I use. Used the. During this past year, I used the even realities G1 and G2 products that have a teleprompter built in. And I use it in two things on stage where I had to sort of write, you know, some remarks and go up and say them. And it worked great. I thought it was, it was very good. Nobody noticed that it was a teleprompter at least didn't say anything to me. And several of my asked, you know, and I told him like, hey, I was using. They're like, well, no, I would never would have known.
- [84:17]
A
Is it listening to you? How does it know what you're reading?
- [84:20]
C
Yeah, so it's a, it's a teleprompter and it sort of automatically uses AI to, To, you know, automatically move it forward so you're not scrolling it yourself.
- [84:29]
A
So one of the things I don't like about the meta is the display is just in one eye kind of down.
- [84:33]
C
Yeah.
- [84:33]
A
Is it. How does the, how do the even displays do it?
- [84:37]
C
Yeah, that one's in both eyes. So it's, it's monocolor though. So it's, it's. It's only green.
- [84:41]
A
It looks like a green screen. Yeah, but that's fine, right?
- [84:44]
C
It's Fine. And it's bright, it's much brighter. It feels much brighter than the. I've also used the Meta Ray Bans display and the problem with it being in one eye is it does feel pretty washed out, you know, because of that. You turn it up really bright, but it's still not great.
- [85:01]
A
One of the things I'm really interested in is, is the idea of having, and this is why I'm interested maybe in the metal as an AI assistant there to talk to, to ask questions of. I really want a heads up display so it can go. That's Jennifer Pattison Tuohy.
- [85:16]
B
You, you want the facial recognition, I want face recognition.
- [85:21]
A
I want that store. Don't go in that store. That's a great place to get pho. That kind of thing. I want that kind of. Because, you know, as I become more and more enamored of AI, I kind of want to have it with me.
- [85:34]
B
That's one of the reasons, what makes me why I pulled the trigger on the frames, even though these are kind of an older generation now, is it does have a plus. Oh, it does, yes. So they brought it to the glasses and the buds and then also the, the bee is. I think it'll be coming.
- [85:52]
A
Oh, you still have your bee? Yeah, Amazon bought them.
- [85:54]
B
I just got one at the show. They gave me one to try.
- [85:57]
A
I got it a year ago when they announced a CES last year. Yeah, wore it for six months.
- [86:03]
B
I saw. You said in our Verge comments, actually that you were getting rid of it.
- [86:06]
A
Yeah, because Amazon bought Amazon.
- [86:08]
B
I know. So I spoke to them about it at the show. The founder was there and Maria's great.
- [86:14]
A
We've interviewed her and very nice, very, very nice people and they say what that it's going to, we're not giving that data to Amazon and they've added.
- [86:23]
B
Additional privacy and protection layers. Like no one can access any, any of the recordings, not even B. There's no, you know, they've reinforced their privacy because obviously there has been a lot of concern from users around that. But Amazon and B haven't announced exactly what's going to happen with B and Amazon, but it does seem fairly likely that we're going to see this sort of sink into the Alexa plus ecosystem sooner rather than later as another input method for their AI, which they're very much trying to take outside of the home, which they've been trying to do for, for a long time, but with not much success. But now it seems like, I think they're, they're gearing up to be a.
- [87:04]
C
Competitor here Leo, if you want you know a good language model on a pair of glasses like so you have it access all. All the time. The thing is you don't really want the Metas because it uses Llama 4 and it's just not very good.
- [87:18]
A
Yeah, yeah I've tried it. No, I have. That's the first generation.
- [87:21]
C
Yeah but if you use the Solos glasses so S O L O S or roKid R K ID those you can both use GPD5 on so you have access to sort of the latest.
- [87:36]
A
And they look pretty nice too. They're not bad looking glasses. These are the Solos.
- [87:40]
C
They're very similar. They. They all look a lot like you know the Meta ray bands. Right. The original sort of black arrayments. Some of you know the Solos have different ones you can. You can use but you know okay.
- [87:54]
A
That'S a little geeky looking I admit they're pretty nerdy.
- [87:57]
C
I think the. The ones that even reality's G1s are probably and G2s are probably the best looking. They really. They are made designed by Swiss designers. They're made to be like premium glasses and so I find them sort of as the best esthetically you know of the ones that are out there. The software is still catching up but it also will do. It has their own models and then it has. You can use chat GPT essentially with it as well but the software is. This hardware is amazing. The software is still catching up. I'm sure it'll get better. But the Solos and the Rokid the software works a little better on those two.
- [88:39]
A
I should mention that the A word plus Amazon's Echo AI assistant is now available on the website to everyone in early access.
- [88:50]
B
Real push to. I said to take a out of the home.
- [88:55]
A
It ain't. You know what it's not bad. One of our Echo devices got upgraded and Lisa my wife was talking to it and was kind of wow, I'm kind of having a. She used to swear at the other one kind of having a nice conversation because it would follow up you of kind could you can ask it more difficult questions. I notice Google's doing the same thing with their voice assistant. They've added Gemini to it and of course part of the reason both are moving in that direction is because Apple at some point in the next few months we think is going to release Siri with that kind of capability. Probably based on Gemini white box.
- [89:29]
C
Gemini. Yeah they probably won't use Gemini as the word Gemini in it but you know yeah, right, yeah.
- [89:36]
A
Siri couldn't get it. He's dumber.
- [89:38]
B
So Amazon has a head start here in terms of being in the home space. They launched that agentic AI version of Alexa a lot sooner than any of their competitors. And whilst the agentic elements are still a bit shaky and I have tested a few of them, it does. It can actually do things for you, which is something that none of the others have really accomplished yet. Although the chances are they will get leapfrogged at some point. Here though, I think they use a variety of different models behind the scenes, so who knows? Exactly. I think Claude is one of the partners for Amazon.
- [90:17]
A
I guess I'm all in on cloud now that I'm spending so much money. Yeah, I better use cloud. I have mall. Right. I've had the $20 subscription for everybody. Didn't pay for Grok. I have an a non consensual blue ticket, as Cory Doctorow calls it. But I still got Grok. Grok is in a lot of trouble. It's generating non consensual deep fake nudity at scale. At scale.
- [90:46]
D
It's impressive. Yeah.
- [90:47]
A
In fact, they've been banned now from Indonesia, a number of countries. The US refuses to do anything about it. Apple and Google are getting a lot of heat because they, despite, especially Apple, despite its long standing rejection of adult content, has done nothing about the X app in the App Store. And Elon's only response at first was to apologize and then now he says, well, you can't have it for free. If you want deep fakes, you're gonna have to give me money.
- [91:18]
C
I mean, it does limit the number of users that can do it for sure, but it doesn't solve problems.
- [91:23]
A
X is such a cesspool. Anybody still using it, X, get out while you still can't. None of you use X, do you?
- [91:30]
D
I. I haven't been on X for a year and a half now, I think.
- [91:33]
C
Yeah, I mean it, it is still for everybody. I know it's still a place where people announce things.
- [91:40]
A
When Bob Weir passed, my wife said, did Bob Weir die? And I said, well, let me check. Where do you go? You go to X.
- [91:47]
B
There is still pockets as well of certain industries that kind of isolated themselves on X and they don't, they're not really involved with the Milan.
- [91:56]
A
That's what you have to do, is you.
- [91:58]
B
Yeah. And so some things you do hear.
- [92:00]
A
No evil, see no evil.
- [92:02]
B
Someone the other day who was saying, yeah, they would love to get off X, but the vc Twitter is still a Huge space. So for journalists in particular, it's something.
- [92:15]
A
That, well, we have an excuse as journalists, we kind of need to visit the cis.
- [92:19]
B
I don't really engage on it, but I do check.
- [92:21]
A
Oh, I never engage.
- [92:22]
B
Yeah.
- [92:23]
D
Security Twitter disassembled about a year ago.
- [92:26]
A
A year and a half ago, as did Science Twitter. Science Twitter, I think Black Twitter.
- [92:30]
D
I had it working properly because the little block bot that I had created, which would no longer work with the new version of Twitter, by the way, it was fantastic at, at weeding out the most toxic users who would even remotely interact with my account.
- [92:45]
A
Block him.
- [92:46]
D
But, but then that, you know, then he started charging more for the API and that just became a non starter.
- [92:54]
A
We are going to talk in just a bit about the toilet that looks at your poop. But every ces. Every ces, unless you know that's one of your picks, I don't know. Let's find out. Number three on the Father Robert hit parade watch number three.
- [93:11]
D
The Jackery Solar Marsbot. Imagine living off grid and never having to worry about properly placing your solar panels for energy camera capture. That's possible with the Jackery Solar Marsbot, an AI enabled autonomous vehicle that is part robot, part power bank. At the top of the bot are six solar panels that are safely stored in the bot's hat that is held by a double axis arm that allows for 60 degrees of tilt. In that hat is a light tracking sensor that determines the optimal inclination of the solar panels for capture. The lighting system automatically rotates the bot and angles the hat bot before deploying its panels for up to 600 watts of power generation. When deployed, the unit's AI can waypoint to optimal charging locations, follow users and automatically return the bot to its charging station on overcast days or when its energy storage is full. The unit I played with has a 5,000 watt hour battery, a complement of USB C, PD110 and 220 volt outputs, and up to 3,000 watts of constant power. That's enough to keep a small off grid cabin fully powered for two days. Days even without additional sunlight. So it's, it's totally niche. I get it. I get.
- [94:20]
A
How much power can you generate with a little panel though?
- [94:23]
D
I mean it's not that 600 watts, 600 watts.
- [94:25]
A
But how long does it take to do that?
- [94:27]
D
Well, I mean that, that's the thing about the solar tracking. So rather than having to build your house or your cabin so that it.
- [94:34]
A
Properly put that thing in the yard and then you put it in the.
- [94:37]
D
Yard and you let it, you let it go. Go from spot to spot, always optimizing its solar capture.
- [94:42]
A
Actually. That's really cool.
- [94:43]
B
Yeah, it is neat. They, they actually, I mean that came out, they launched that a couple of years ago. I'm not 24 ever shipped though, Right. Or did it. Well, maybe announce it in 23, but yeah. It is a neat idea though. The thing that really caught my eye at CES from Jackery was the gazebo, the solar panel.
- [95:02]
D
Oh, the solar gazebo.
- [95:03]
A
Yeah.
- [95:03]
D
That was cool.
- [95:04]
A
Okay. You know, I don't have any where to put a gazebo, but what. So this is, this is a. It sits outside and actually doesn't look like a gazebo. It looks like a little, little house out there.
- [95:16]
B
Yeah. And it has 2000 watts of solar panels and an integrated lighting and a pull down projector screen and outlets and you can put the jackery power stations in it so that you can basically.
- [95:28]
A
So is it a man cave?
- [95:29]
B
What is it outdoor? Yeah, it's an out. What's an outdoor.
- [95:32]
A
Oh, it's a. Oh yeah, yeah. You'd put it in your patio. Yeah, it's like a solar cover for your patio. I see.
- [95:38]
B
Yeah. So you just hang out.
- [95:39]
A
Oh, that's clever.
- [95:40]
B
I know, but like 15,000.
- [95:42]
D
Oh, now Leo wants it.
- [95:44]
A
Well, if you put in. We used to have. Our old house had 30 or 40 solar panels. It was much more than $15,000. But it was great. I mean we were off the grid. We had two Tesla batteries and I never had to worry. This is interesting.
- [96:00]
D
I think I've wanted to be off grid for a while. Just get a piece of land in the middle of nowhere, Nevada. And I'm kind of getting into the, the renewables now, so.
- [96:09]
A
So 2,000 watts, 10 kilowatt hours a day. Is that. I guess that's enough to you, you know, small house. Refrigerator. Could I have a refrigerator?
- [96:22]
B
I mean, so this isn't really for living.
- [96:25]
A
No, no, no, I know, but this powers the house. It's attached to. Attached to. It's not right?
- [96:29]
B
No, I think it's just powering itself. Oh, I don't know, maybe I'm wrong. I think it's just so that you can power your outdoor appliances and things.
- [96:38]
A
Oh, I see. I want to power the house.
- [96:42]
D
The rule of thumbs is per person, you're gonna be budging about 2,000watt watt hours a day. Oh, so this would be enough to drive your.
- [96:51]
A
A family of five could have exactly live off this. Yeah, well that's to live underneath the.
- [96:56]
B
Gaze in that respect, if you could plug it into your internals, it looks like you could.
- [97:02]
A
Yeah, looks like you could put it into your house.
- [97:04]
B
Especially like my house. I can't put panels on all of my.
- [97:07]
A
I don't want to put them on the roof.
- [97:09]
B
Yeah, well, I also have too many trees. Like, we could only put panels in like a little corner. And now if I could put this in a sunny spot in my yard, I could get more powers. Instead of, of just sticking the solar farm in your yard, you put a nice gazebo in your yard.
- [97:25]
A
Yeah, I, yeah, does come up with.
- [97:29]
B
Some pretty innovative stuff.
- [97:30]
D
So, yeah, I did like their. They've got a power station that it's not. You can't submerge it, but it is basically waterproof and that I kind of like because you're going to be using a lot of these out in the outdoors. So.
- [97:43]
A
Right. See what else here? Oh, the Throne. What? Did I do my ad yet? Oh, I was going to do an ad. I'm sorry. Let me do the ad and then the Throne. Then we'll check out the Throne. You're watching this week in tech, our CES episode. All the great stuff that may never make it to your house. With Jennifer Pattison Tuohy, Jason Heiner and father Robert Balisare. Our show showed. Okay, it's coming from inside the house. Our show today, brought to you by this brand new sponsor. And I'm really excited. I don't even know if you know about this, Robert, but this is really cool. Meter. Meter is the company building better networks. And it was created by two network engineers who really knew the pain points that network engineers face. Legacy providers, inflexible pricing, it, resource constraints. Right. You never have enough budget, stretching you thin, complex deployments across fragmented tools. The network is mission critical to the business. But as a network engineer, often you're working with infrastructure that just wasn't built for today's demands. I want you to know about Meter. Newer company with a brilliant vision. It's got full stack networking infrastructure from the ISP to the hardware to cellular. This is why businesses are switching to Meter. Full stack networking that's built for performance and scalability. They design their own hardware, they write their own firmware, they build the software, they manage the deployment if you want them to, and they provide support so you can have everything from them come out and put the whole thing in and run it and everything to. I mean, you get your choice of how you want it. You know, you got your job, you set it up, they help you as a support team. They offer everything from ISP procurement to security to routing to switching to wireless to firewall. I talked to these guys, I was so impressed. You know, they'll go into companies. You know, it's not unusual for company to acquire warehouses with their own kind of wireless infrastructure from you know, 2002. Right. They come in and they make it so. Not only so that the warehouse is fully operational, but it integrates with your existing stack back at the home office. This includes power cellular if you need it, DNS security, they will help you with VPNs with SD WANs. And these multi site workflows really are a solution, all from one company. One solution. Meter Meter, single integrated networking stack scales from major hospitals. If you've ever spent any time in hospitals, you know it's the worst place for connectivity, right?
- [100:31]
C
Right.
- [100:32]
A
Meter solves that. Branch offices, you know, out in the boonies. And you gotta get to the home office. Warehouses, large campuses, data centers. You know who uses Meter? Reddit, the Assistant director of technology for the Web School of Knoxville. Perfect example. He said, we had more than 20 games on our campus between two facilities. Each game streaming via wired and wireless connections. And the event went off without a hitch. We could never have done this before Meter redesigned our network. That's a direct quote. With Meter, you get a single partner for all your connectivity needs. That's nice too, because if something doesn't work, the ISP doesn't say, well, it's not our fault. It's all part of the plan, right? From first site survey to ongoing support, without the complexity of managing multiple providers or tools. Meter's integrated networking stack is designed to take the burden off your IT team and give you deep control and visibility, reimagining what it means for businesses to get and stay online. And these days, if you're not online, you aren't in business. This is table stakes. Meter built for the bandwidth demand of today and tomorrow. We thank Meters for sponsoring go to meter.comtwit to book a demo. Now that's M e t e r.com twit to book a demo. This is the new standard for networking. Brand new, very exciting. Meter.comTwit I want you to check it out. Meanwhile, the throne is checking out your poop. As Daniel Cooper says it Engadget. Who doesn't want a camera in their toilet? Now this isn't a whole toilet. This is just a camera you hook onto the side. We do see these every year at ces.
- [102:20]
D
Yes.
- [102:24]
B
Why is there demands and well, you.
- [102:29]
D
You can learn a surprising amount of very accurate information about the state of your body by what comes out of it. So all of these come.
- [102:39]
A
That's why doctors are always asking for samples, right?
- [102:41]
D
Exactly, exactly. I mean, it shows what your metabolic rate is. It shows if you've got any buildup of toxins. And if you can have a piece of technology that just sits in that receptacle all day, why wouldn't you? Yeah.
- [102:59]
B
I can think of lots of reasons.
- [103:03]
A
I am shocked, shocked. Jennifer Pattison Toohey, that you don't actually have one of these in your lab.
- [103:09]
B
Yeah, no, no, I leave all that stuff to the Sean holster.
- [103:14]
D
Followed you around with a little bag. You'd be okay with that, right? I mean, because that's, that's your beat.
- [103:19]
A
So. So no, no Best of CES award for the whoop for the poop toilet.
- [103:26]
B
I do think that the P1 from last year did win an award. There was one things you see thing.
- [103:32]
A
Yeah.
- [103:34]
B
But yes, that this is, I mean, the measuring, the metrics, looking, you know, having every part of our body and movement tracked.
- [103:44]
A
It's the quantified self, baby.
- [103:46]
B
Yes, that's where we. Yeah, and then we feed it all into your smart home AI and then your home can kind of respond to you and say, no, do not take the big steak out of the fridge. It's bad for you. It's going to tell you what you're allowed to do now. And then we're all going to be in trouble.
- [104:04]
A
I mean, really, we're all. Look, I mean, I wear an Apple watch, I wear a continuous glucose monitor. I wear an aura ring. I mean, we're all, you know, kind of putting on these devices. I admit they're still a little bit less than, you know, fully operative, but we're getting there.
- [104:23]
C
In fact, Apple, remember ChatGPT Health was just released this week too.
- [104:28]
D
Yeah.
- [104:29]
C
Announced and not, not fully released.
- [104:31]
A
I want to hook that up so that you hook up, you put it on your iPhone and you hook it up to your Apple Health. Right. I signed up.
- [104:37]
C
I haven't gotten it too. Yeah, multiple sensors. You can upload, you know, your test results to it. You can do all kinds of things. Now what they said is, you know, the Fiji Simo, the CEO of Apps, said that 200,000 people a month are already uploading their. And asking about health questions and uploading their data. I can say that I knew two people, people this past year who had something come up in their health. They essentially were going to have to get a, an Appointment with a specialist that was a month away. So they got sort of a negative indicator, right? And they were like, okay, we'll schedule appointment for the specialist for you look at. So they freaked out, right? Because like you do like, oh my gosh, you know, I've got something that's going to be terrible. And in both cases, cases, these are two separate people that just reached out to me and told me this. In both cases they took, they went on their health portal, downloaded the test themselves, uploaded to Chat GPT in one case and Claude in the other case and they said, you know, read this for me, should I be worried? And in both cases it gave them very detailed interpretations of the, of the data.
- [105:58]
A
Some risk there though, isn't there for Lucas, Hallucinations of inaccuracies. I mean, I don't know for sure.
- [106:02]
C
Yeah, but in both cases, but it was enough that before they went to the specialist, they had some cases, they were like a little relieved. And in one case, so the one was relieved and when she went to the doctor, when this person went to the doctor, they told them something very similar. The other one, when they went to the doctor, they shared that, that they were. And they said, hey, this is what I got from Chat GPT. And the specialist looked at, it's like, wow, that's pretty good actually. That's really, really, that's really close. Can you, can I, can you leave this with me, you know, so I can have a copy? And so it was, it was really interesting. So I guess my point is just that people are doing it already. There are all kinds of reasons to be wary about uploading, you know, very sensitive data that could have, you know, very negative ramifications if it were leaked and someone accessed, you know, your health data to, to a source like Chat GPT. But, you know, at the same time, we have to expect that this is coming not just from OpenAI but from all of the others. You know, as well remember Google and Apple and Amazon and other have been trying to do things like this for years and get people to put all their health data in their ecosystem systems.
- [107:19]
A
Yeah, well, or in your toilet. As, as the case, in the toilet too.
- [107:24]
C
Uploading.
- [107:25]
D
Amazon wants to send everyone free toilets. They can have all that data for free.
- [107:33]
C
The razor blade scheme.
- [107:34]
A
Moving on. Jennifer, your favorite device of CES was the AARA smart lock. It's funny, I just replaced all my akaras with Schlage. Did I make a mistake?
- [107:45]
B
Which Schlage mistakes? The, the code.
- [107:49]
A
Yeah, it's a home kit enabled.
- [107:52]
B
Yes. You didn't make a mistake. That's a great lock. If you're happy with Apple home key, that is.
- [107:58]
A
That's what I wanted. I wanted to walk up to the door and have it open because you make a mistake. Yeah, I did.
- [108:06]
B
Fortunately. Well because the Schlage won't be able to do that. The new Schlage which they announced last year and still hasn't launched launched. We'll be able to do it.
- [108:14]
C
Okay.
- [108:15]
B
But what is so special about the U400 is it's the first smart lock to support Apple home keys. Hands free unlocking.
- [108:25]
A
That's what I wanted.
- [108:25]
B
Uses WB and that has. So this. There's two locks because I could do.
- [108:32]
A
That with my car now and I really like that.
- [108:34]
B
The same technology. It's exactly the same technology. And so. So this is just. So it was announced a couple of years ago that Apple was going to support this in home key. So it's the same concept as home key but the home key that you have with the Schlage. Tap.
- [108:49]
A
Right. So yeah. Yeah. I don't.
- [108:52]
B
Nfc.
- [108:52]
A
Yeah. I don't mind tap because I'm a little nervous that the door will just.
- [108:57]
C
Open lock when you don't want to.
- [108:58]
B
So this is the. This is what's taken a while for the technology to come out because obviously you've had it. But this is something you have in the car too is it does have directional awareness.
- [109:08]
A
The UdWB makes a big difference.
- [109:10]
B
Yes. It knows that you are approaching from which direction you're approaching and actually when you set up the lock in a Cara's app or in the home Apple home app there's a little. You can turn off approach from direction. So you can turn it. So it's just from. I didn't know that from the front of the door.
- [109:27]
A
Don't come in from the side if you want.
- [109:29]
B
But you know my house, my pipe path is along the side so I want that on. But you can control where it's detecting you from. But it. One of the key things is it does not open when you are walking from inside your house.
- [109:45]
A
That's something I had to turn off in my car because my car. I'm above my. The garage right now. My car would unlock like you know all the time it was going. So I finally had to say and BMW just added this feature.
- [109:59]
D
Yeah.
- [109:59]
A
When I'm at home, don't do that.
- [110:01]
B
Yeah. So this. No, this is designed to. It will not unlock from. If you're anywhere inside the house.
- [110:07]
A
Good. That's what I was worried about.
- [110:09]
B
And it will not unlock if you just walk past the house. It knows intent of directions so you.
- [110:14]
A
Have to be walking up to it.
- [110:16]
B
Up to the door. And also it knows velocity. So if you're walking slowly, it will unlock a little bit later like so it's going to unlock at the same time. No matter how fast you're moving, if you're running, running in and running to get in a quicker. So you can what, no matter what, as you get to your door and open the handle.
- [110:36]
A
That's cool.
- [110:37]
B
It's, it's, it's, it's very impressive and that's why I chose this lock because it's the first one that supports Apple HomeKey. But what's really interesting here and which is why it was more relevant at CES because Apple Home is quite a niche system still, even though there's a lot of people that use it and it's still small. But Apple is part of a new protocol called Alero, which is a smart lock standard that is going to bring all of the home key features that tap to unlock and the UWB hands free unlocking to any platform.
- [111:11]
A
So Apple, Samsung and Google are involved.
- [111:14]
B
They'Re all part of this and all the major lock manufacturers are part of it as well. And it's specifically. And one of the big concerns people have about this obviously is well, if someone steals my phone, can they unlock my house? Well, if someone steals your key, can they unlock your house? I mean that isn't something that's going to go away. But the nice thing about a smartphone is you can remotely wipe it. Can't do that with a key. But you do, it does require you to turn off the facial recognition or fingerprint unlocking that you might have on your phone because it's not going to work with the whole hands free point is that you, not completely just for this lock.
- [111:57]
A
Wait a minute, wait, wait a minute. When do I turn it off?
- [112:01]
B
So when you set up Hands Free unlock in Apple Home, it will say Enable Express mode, which you may have seen with the home key NFC feature, which means you can use this without authenticating by unlocking the phone. So because it's faster, you, you still have to have authenticated that you're, that it's your phone at some point within the last, I think it's 24 hours is the time window. So if you, you know, if your phone was lost for a while and someone picked it up, it wouldn't, they wouldn't be able to use it. But yeah, it does require you to turn off, turn on express mode which bypass is facial recognition or pin. PIN code authentication. So if you are worried about it from that perspective then this is not a technology for you. But it is. I mean it is hands free. You do not need to touch your door other than to unlock it. But door manufacturers are working towards automatic opening as well. We've actually seen there was a new company that just launched last December called doma from the founders of all August which was the first smart lock that had this hands free unlock capability but that used Bluetooth, WI Fi and GPS and three radios working together invariably meant it was not very accurate. But this is a very specific radio to antenna phone to lock technology that in my. I got to test this before CES and it worked flawlessly. It was a really good experience. And what's great about this new standard OLERO is, is it's bringing this technology to every platform and every manufacturer across handsets and locks. So it's not going to be just limited to Apple going forward.
- [113:44]
A
Hallelujah.
- [113:45]
B
Which is. Yeah. And it's a great example of how standards are working in the smart home to make the smart home a lot easier and more accessible. And it's not just for homes either. This could also be used for offices businesses. So you could just be basically use your phone as a key for everything which. Yeah, I mean I can. There are obviously the other. The concern about security is hacking and they do. This is one of the reasons it's taken a really long time to launch this standard that. Well, not really long but they were supposed to launch it early last year and it's now not launched. It's launching this quarter is. But they use asymmetric. I'm going to test my memory right here. It's asymmetric security. So it's not. So every time the code is sent between the two devices is different like.
- [114:38]
A
The rolling code for your garage door.
- [114:40]
B
So you're not going to. Even if someone did manage to hack in and get the code the next time it's going to be different. So that should. I mean obviously once it's in the real world we'll see if there are any flaws, but they feel pretty, pretty confident. I spoke to the head of Valero at CES and they wouldn't give me the exact details yet because the spec hasn't been released. But they said they feel pretty confident that the security is, is really high. And I said this is being developed by a number of companies. So they're working and you know For a lock manufacturer like Schlage and Assa Abloy and Yale Quickset, they're all on board and they've. When I spoken to them, they've all said that they feel like this is a real game changer for the smart lock space. So that was my pick.
- [115:26]
A
Just bought the Schlage.
- [115:27]
D
Sorry, I don't think it'll work in my place because our locks have like seven pound keys.
- [115:38]
A
I don't think that's.
- [115:40]
B
I mean, at this. At this point, I. I'm not sure that's retrofittable to the bc. BC buildings.
- [115:47]
A
Yes.
- [115:48]
C
Anything before the dark in your case means you could bludgeon another human being with it if they try to mug you.
- [115:56]
D
Our smart locks is. There's. There's a Jesuit brother standing by the door who will unlock it for you.
- [116:01]
A
Or a Swiss Guard with a helper than that. Yes.
- [116:03]
C
Much smarter.
- [116:04]
A
Yes.
- [116:05]
B
Oh.
- [116:05]
D
Which by the way, Leo. So I was very enamored by the anti gravity drone that was being displayed at ces. I really wanted to get one from my office.
- [116:13]
A
Yeah.
- [116:14]
D
And I got the expense approved. And then I got a message from a friend in the Swiss Guard who said don't. Don't bring that.
- [116:21]
A
No drones. Are they really from Switzerland, by the way? The Swiss Guard?
- [116:26]
D
They are, they are. Although there is a Filipino Swiss Guard two years ago. He was the very first one. You just have to be born in Switzerland. So his parents. Philippines. There you go.
- [116:35]
A
Yeah, that's really. So they kind of on loan to the Pope from Switzerland.
- [116:41]
D
It's a choice. It's a choice assignment. So they only sent and their best. And the people who are a bit.
- [116:46]
A
The best people in the best clown outfits.
- [116:48]
D
Precisely. And the pay is not great, but it's completely untaxable and you continue to receive half of it for the rest of your life.
- [116:59]
A
Oh, nice.
- [117:00]
D
If you complete your tour. So it's kind of nice.
- [117:03]
A
That's pretty cool. What about this lock in that you have on your article? It looks like it's in a time tunnel. What is that all about?
- [117:12]
B
So that's a different. Different smart lock. That was. So this is another really interesting technology around smart locks is wireless charging. And this lock in was showing off a new type of wireless charging that it's using. Because now that. That.
- [117:29]
A
That thing around it isn't just like for show, that's actually charging it. The. The time tunnel it's in.
- [117:35]
B
No, that was just for show.
- [117:37]
A
Okay. It does look like it like that's how you go through that and you see all charged up.
- [117:42]
D
I was about to say, wait a minute, that. So it's radiating stuff. I.
- [117:47]
A
Is it, is it, is it wireless charging?
- [117:49]
B
If you scroll down in the article to the, the section where I mentioned the lock, there's a little picture. There's a picture and you can see the little puck you have. There's, you have to click to the right.
- [117:59]
A
Oh, it's got a little puck.
- [118:01]
B
It's a little puck, yes. If you click to the right there's another image there and the puck is plugged in. And then.
- [118:07]
A
So that's reasonable because otherwise I'm putting in batteries every few months.
- [118:11]
B
That's the issue with smart locks right now. And that's why locks are limited right now, because you can't. So you've seen, you've probably seen on the show floor this year. There were facial, facial recognition 3D facial recognition locks. There were palm vein unlocks. This one, this lock in particular has so many different ways you can unlock with finger vein, palm vein 3D recognition that the handle is a palm reader. So as you hold the door.
- [118:39]
A
I like that. What's a finger vein though? Is that different fingerprint?
- [118:44]
B
Yes. And that's. The palm vein is the same, uses the same technology. So it's actually reading the blood, the blood running through your veins rather than the fingerprint. Because fingerprints can be, can be manipulated. They can be also.
- [118:59]
A
Is there something you think about the blood running through my veins?
- [119:03]
B
The vein pattern is unique on your palm and your finger. So it's considered more accurate than a fingerprint. So but, but it has, so it has three biometric unlockings. It has two cameras. It has a. For the built in video doorbell and then it has the interior and exterior touchscreen which that with the cute little avatar. So you can create an avatar that greets.
- [119:25]
A
Yeah, it's a cute little guy in there.
- [119:26]
B
Yeah. And the, but between it's got. Continuing like a regular door lock. If it had four double A batteries would last like a day with all this technology. But because this one is widely charged, wirelessly charged, it can power, you know, it can do things that most door locks can't.
- [119:43]
A
How long though? I mean do you have to put the puck on every day?
- [119:46]
B
So no, the puck sits with a 4 within a 4 meter range somewhere in the house. As long as it has line of sight, you just plug it in in.
- [119:54]
A
So it is radiating.
- [119:55]
B
It's. It's using wireless infrared charging, optical charging to just continually power the lock. And it said that if the, if your power goes out in the home and the lock is not being charged. It should last up to a week which is obviously wouldn't be good in real, you know, a regular use. But as long as if you were out of power for a week you, you have.
- [120:16]
A
It'd be good like if your cat slept on the puck and kept it from charging, you wanted to keep working.
- [120:21]
B
It would still work for a while, you know. Yeah. And so you know this lock itself is very expensive and it's also a mortise lock which most people aren't going to be using us. So that's the European style or the really fancy high end doors will have the mortise lock. It's, it's not a deadbolt basically. So it's, it's the sort of real mechanical. I think when you, when you go into like an apartment building quite often they have mortise door locks. So it's, they're more expensive, much heavier. It's. Yeah. Someone just dropped a picture of it in the chat that shows it has a lot. It's a different type of technology from a deadbolt. So you're. But they do have a deadbolt version. But what's interesting here is when you have wireless power there is so much more you can do with the technology in your door. And then this one does also support matter and they said they will have UWB support in the future too so. So it would have the hands free unlocking. So lots of exciting things going on in the door lock space.
- [121:20]
A
You might have a mortise lock in your Vatican housing. It's a kind of old fashioned kind of lock.
- [121:27]
D
No, seriously, our locks are embedded into.
- [121:29]
A
Marble so you can have a marble mortise.
- [121:34]
D
Our house is really, really. Part of our house goes back 500 years and part of our house goes back. The new part of our house goes back 120 years.
- [121:44]
A
Oh the new quarters.
- [121:45]
C
The new one.
- [121:46]
D
Yeah.
- [121:47]
A
Yeah. Now you could also get a why Things Body Smart scale. I think I have the predecessor to this. It's got a handle that you hold while you're stepping on the scale.
- [122:00]
D
That should be part of the smart lock that should go outside and you just have to weigh in.
- [122:04]
A
Checking your veins.
- [122:06]
D
Yeah.
- [122:06]
B
This is interesting because this was. And Victoria wearables reporter was talking about this on our best of video that it's representing a kind of longevity. A shift from health tech to be about losing weight or tracking to tracking your immediate condition to be about longevity and making helping you sort of focus on health in the way that that is going to help you yeah. My long.
- [122:34]
A
My body scan scale says I am two years older than my. Chronological.
- [122:39]
B
Right. Yeah. And this, this is supposed. Supposedly does, you know, measures a number of metrics, but one of them is specifically through your foot sweat, which I.
- [122:51]
A
Yeah, no, I do the foot sweat test. I don't know what it's telling me, but I know you have to stand on the scale and it's. And it. I don't know, is it sending electrical current through my feet? I don't. It's doing something.
- [123:05]
C
Something, something.
- [123:06]
D
Leo, do you. Do you remember we had a y. Things in the studio that broke?
- [123:11]
A
I might have been my. Why things.
- [123:14]
D
It might have. Yeah. Like 10, 10, 11 years ago it broke. And on. Know how we improved it?
- [123:19]
A
Oh, God.
- [123:21]
D
A small MP3 player so that when you see someone stepped on it, it.
- [123:24]
C
Would go.
- [123:27]
A
Oh, you're too heavy. That might have been my old one because it was tweeting my weight for a while.
- [123:32]
D
It was, it was not appreciated.
- [123:35]
C
Oh, I remember that. I remember that.
- [123:38]
B
Yeah. I think this one is supposed to sort of. She was saying it sort of helps take away the focus on just your weight. Just weight more about other, other elements of your.
- [123:49]
A
It does my heart, feet. It does, it does a little, you know, 32nd EKG basically. But it always says this one, this.
- [123:59]
B
One is a non invasive metabolic health. So this is to do with. So maybe you don't have to use a toilet camera. You can just use.
- [124:06]
A
I don't know how accurate though this can be with foot sweat. I mean.
- [124:10]
B
Yeah, yeah. Well, she said there is some. There is scientific evidence to back up some of this, but we'll see once she's had a chance to test it.
- [124:20]
A
Victoria also liked this l' Oreal LED face mask.
- [124:26]
B
Yeah. Just because you could dress as Vecna for Halloween, she said.
- [124:30]
A
Yeah.
- [124:30]
D
Oh.
- [124:32]
C
There is, I will say, like, there's a. A really good scale. It's a Chinese knockoff company called Greater Goods that has like a smart scale.
- [124:41]
A
I have their 30 bucks. They're. They're. Yeah. I have their blood pressure monitor. It's really good.
- [124:47]
B
Yeah.
- [124:47]
A
30 bucks.
- [124:48]
C
They make really, really good stuff. The scale is like 30 bucks versus like 100 or 200 bucks.
- [124:52]
A
Oh, no, like this, this Y things is 500 or 600.
- [124:55]
C
500 bucks.
- [124:56]
A
Yeah.
- [124:57]
D
It probably comes off the same assembly line. So I mean.
- [125:00]
C
Right, right. There's also that. There is also that. So anyway, it's at five o'.
- [125:05]
A
Clock. I'm kicking off. All right, you good guys, come on in here. You get the next show gift.
- [125:10]
C
So if anybody doesn't want to spend 600 bucks but wants to have like, you know the, the basics of. Yeah, the smart scale that still manages to get your foot sweat. Yeah. Digital digitally analyzed. Greater goods, 30 bucks Amazon.
- [125:24]
A
That foot sweat is a bioimpedance spectroscopy, if you'd like to know the actual name. Oh, there you go. Yes.
- [125:31]
B
Sounds really fancy.
- [125:32]
A
Right on bis. The goal is to simulate the sweat glands I'm reading from Victoria's piece that are inside your feet with a tiny safe current. We measure. I, I do this. I don't know what it's telling me. We measure the human maximum activity response from those sweat glands. If the activity is high, it means your glands are healthy.
- [125:53]
D
If not, it means that it's electrocuting you to make you sweat.
- [125:57]
A
Actually it's good because I am a type 2 diabetic and as you know, one of the consequences of diabetes is that you can get your feet amputated because you don't have good circulation. So it's actually good for it to test that. I don't know how useful it is as a diagnostic anyway. I get on it every day and stand there, it feels like for an hour while it's measuring all that stuff. It says you're old.
- [126:24]
D
The information from your smart blood pressure reader from your smart.
- [126:28]
A
Well, that's what I'm saying. You put it all in the chat GPT.
- [126:31]
D
Yeah.
- [126:31]
A
And then it could say either my watch is stopped or you're dead. Let us go back to Casey Kasem. I think we're at number four on the top. Well, actually it's number two. It's our fourth, but it's number two. In father Robert CES picks watch number.
- [126:52]
D
Two two LG Mobility. Tucked away into the center of the LG booth on the show floor was their tech demonstrator for their mobility display solution. A combination of a transparent OLED display embedded into a windshield, the car's sensors, and an onboard AI that delivers important context aware information to the driver. When I first saw it, I thought that it would be too much that the information would become a driving hazard. But it would appear that LG has put in the engineering time to make sure that only immediately usable and actionable data is present. Presented to the driver. For example, potential hazards ahead, information about the vehicles surrounding the user, GPS directions presented by highlighting turn information, red light duration and enhanced vision in low visibility environments. In a vehicle that has full autonomous driving, the screen can switch to visual displays that keep the users engaged and looking forward, helping them to Keep at least a partial eye on the road while their vehicle has control.
- [127:49]
A
That's really cool. Were there a lot of car products at ces? I know they took the cars out of the south hall.
- [127:56]
D
They're all in the west.
- [127:57]
C
All that's the new fancy hall.
- [128:00]
A
Oh, the west hall is. Oh, okay.
- [128:02]
B
Yeah.
- [128:03]
A
Well, when we come back, we could talk a little bit about car to other car technology. You're watching our CES wrap up with father Robert Ballis there. Jennifer Pattison Tuohy and Jason Heiner. So glad you're here, especially our club members. Thank you for being here. Our show today brought to you by Delete Me. Oh, man. When you go online and you do a little search for your name, I don't recommend it, you will be kind of disappointed, saddened, scared by how much personal data is out there on the Internet. Anything people want to know, your name, contact info, even your Social Security number, your home address, information about your family members. Because all of this data is being compiled completely legally by data brokers. And the worst part is data brokers can sell this online to anybody, whether it's marketers, government, law enforcement, foreign countries, anybody on the web can buy your private details, including your Social Security number. And this can lead to identity theft, to phishing attempts, doxing, harassment. But now you can do something about these data brokers with DeleteMe. See that address? JoinDeleteMe.com TWIT. You know, I live in public. We are very vulnerable. In fact, we've been phished many times. That's why I recommend and that's why Twit uses, in fact, every company should be using this for their management. Delete. You should use it as individual, you should use it as a company. It solves the problem. It keeps us protected. Delete Me is a subscription service that removes your personal information from hundreds of data brokers. And the worst part is there are more every single day because it's still lucrative business. You'll sign up, you'll tell delete me exactly what you want deleted. And their experts take it from there. You do control it, you know, if you say, well, no, don't delete everything, just delete this. They, they will. You tell them what you want, then they will go out, they will delete it. But this is why it's a subscription service. They continually monitor. They will send you regular privacy reports showing what they found, where they found it, what they removed. But it's not a one time service because these data brokers change their names, new ones spring up and frankly, it's a little bit of a sketch business. Right. So they, even though you've told them, don't keep my information, they go, well, this is new information and they'll start repopulating in a profile. Delete Me is always working for you, constantly monitoring and removing that personal information you don't want on the Internet. To put it simply, Delete Me does all the hard work of wiping you, your family, your business's personal information from data broker websites and keeping it off. Take control of your data. Keep your private life private. Sign up for Delete Me. We've got a special discount for our users. We use it it, we recommend it. Get 20% off your delete me plan when you visit joindeleteme.com twit and use a promo code Twitted checkout. The only way to get 20% off is to visit joindeleteme.com TWiT and enter the code TWiT at checkout joindeleteme.com twit and the offer code is TWiT. It really, really works. And I can say that from personal experience. Ah, okay. Well, cars was it? I don't know, Jennifer, you probably don't cover cars particularly.
- [131:25]
B
No, I didn't make it into the west hall at all actually because it's a Trek. But I did see the Dreamy car. Dreamy had a car.
- [131:33]
A
Dreamy had a car. This is crazy. These companies are.
- [131:37]
B
I know.
- [131:38]
A
Was it a home automation car? Does it drive around inside Just a.
- [131:41]
B
Car and it didn't do much, but it was very green, which I liked. Our editor, Autumn automotive editor picked was it the Mercedes?
- [131:53]
A
Yeah, he liked the Mercedes, the self.
- [131:55]
B
Driving and got to test it and he was really impressed with this new kind of level two. Is it of the four?
- [132:03]
A
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Level two is.
- [132:05]
B
That was the best.
- [132:06]
A
Not. Yeah, I mean we, you know, we're not going to get anytime soon to completely autonomous vehicles. So the smart thing to do is to be reasonable about, about what you can do. This is Mercedes Drive Assist Pro. And Andrew Hawkins, who's a very good automotive reporter for the Verge, said there was the, it was the only thing there that they could actually test. They let him drive private partially autonomous driver assist. Everybody's being very careful since Elon's been sued and the state of California said you're not going to be able to keep selling Teslas if you keep saying it's autopilot. So everybody's being very careful about what they claim.
- [132:50]
D
Yeah, you know, west hall this year without BYD BYD actually did make a notable splash last year.
- [132:57]
A
They were at CES last year. Even though you can't buy them in.
- [133:00]
D
America, they were there and they were showing off.
- [133:02]
A
Chinese TV maker, number one car maker in the world now.
- [133:05]
C
Y.
- [133:06]
D
So this year we had the Sony Alfia one, which they had last year. So this just incremental increase on the prototype. They had the Wayo Ojai, they had the Tensor Robo car and then the b. The BMW ix3. I think that was the big one because they actually had part of the parking lot so you could go outside now. I. I wish they had done what Mercedes did. Must have been 20 years ago. They used to have the thing called the Mercedes test drive. They had taken over one of the parking lots and it was actually a little course.
- [133:35]
A
Well, that's fun.
- [133:35]
D
So you could check out a vehicle and take it around.
- [133:38]
C
Yeah.
- [133:39]
A
He actually went up to San Francisco to take a test drive.
- [133:43]
B
Yeah, he never comes to ces.
- [133:45]
A
Oh, lucky fella.
- [133:47]
B
But, yeah, the BMW, I think, is the one that has Alexa plus in it too, right?
- [133:51]
D
Yeah.
- [133:51]
B
Yes, it does.
- [133:52]
D
Yes.
- [133:53]
B
So I saw that they had that in the Amazon booth. You couldn't drive it, though.
- [133:56]
A
Yeah. I will never turn on Alexa. In my BMW. I use Apple's CarPlay. But the BMW voice is so awful. Some of these car voices, it's like, come on, this is not even close to the standard now.
- [134:13]
D
But the big announcement was that with every BMW ix3 that you buy, you get. I think, think it's 15 cases of Drakar Noir.
- [134:22]
A
So at least you smell good as you're driving around. You know, your Verge folks liked. Allison liked the. Everybody likes the Galaxy Z Trifold, the three.
- [134:36]
B
Yeah.
- [134:37]
A
But I've heard some reliability issues with it, so I'm not sure you'd want to buy it.
- [134:41]
D
If you fold it more than 10,000 times, probably you'll start to get some creasing. But I mean, foldable tech is actually quite durable. If you want to damage it, you can. But if. If you're treating it gently, it lasts forever.
- [134:56]
A
I'm. I have the Galaxy, the latest Galaxy Fold just the two, fold the seven. It's quite nice. It's very thin. I am very excited about what Apple's going to do. Rumored to be doing later this year, I think. Think that might be the one.
- [135:12]
B
Yeah. Maybe. Doesn't say. They had the. They had the.
- [135:16]
A
The Samsung screen was there, which they took away.
- [135:20]
B
Did you get away? Yeah, yeah.
- [135:22]
A
Did you get to see it before they took it away?
- [135:24]
B
We just Saw it an empty hole on the display where it was supposed to be.
- [135:29]
A
Well they weren't apparently they weren't supposed to be showing it but of a.
- [135:33]
C
Tell on that one for sure. Yeah but you know the, the Z Fold seven. The. I hate calling it that. The, the Fold seven is the first one that's like okay when it's closed it feels like a regular phone and you're like great and then opens up. So that was. It's so close. It's. It's like 90% of the way there. So I feel like this year you know we get a lot closer and the Apple one will be you know I think really good and the ones from you know the, the, The Honor Magic V5 was even a little better than the, you know the Chinese phones have been even better for a couple of years. The Fold 7 is really catching up to them. I did want to go back so I think this is going to be a big year for foldables. I do want to go back to one thing on the the cars that was. I think the most significant thing wasn't anything that was shown there because most of it was really all stuff we'd heard before seen before for or it was not that exciting. But in video announced the alpha Mayo model. So it's the first chain of thought reasoning model and they released it as an open model. So a lot of the problems with for. For these vehicles is. And you kind of expressed it Leo. It's like it's not that they don't have the hardware to do it it's the software. The software software is. Is where a lot of the problems are and Alpa Mayo Nvidia that is.
- [137:00]
A
By the worst open model that is the worst name. Alpa Mayo sounds like it's a dog food sandwich. What is Alp A LP A M.
- [137:10]
C
A Y O I know, I know. It's a special kind of mayonnaise that you only can sound good only eat when you're in the, in the Alps or something like.
- [137:21]
A
So it's. It's safe reasoning based autonomous vehicle.
- [137:25]
D
It utilizes the power of the edge. So they had it at the Amazon booth in the west hall. It was one of the vendors there and essentially they're trying to. To move away from the old foundational model where you had the huge LLM that did everything and they're allowing the local compute power to take over some of the specifics. So you, you take the foundational model but then you build in your driving habits the environment in which your car will normally exist and it, it's supposed to be a more efficient way to, to give your car self driving.
- [137:57]
A
Okay, when are we going to see.
- [137:59]
C
These world models too? Right?
- [138:00]
A
I, I do know that that the Mercedes that we talked about has an Nvidia chip in it and Nvidia AI in it. When is Ala Mayo.
- [138:11]
D
Yeah.
- [138:11]
A
Going to come to my car?
- [138:13]
C
But I know, I know. Alpa Mayo. So the thing is, is it's, it's, they're releasing as an open model, you know, obviously works on, on top of their hardware. But it's gonna, this is gonna I think help some of these car makers that are really struggling with the software side of things. Yeah, it's going to help them advance potentially, you know, a lot further. This is, this is definitely Nvidia saying let's adv advance this self driving car thing a lot faster folks. And since you're struggling with it so badly, we're just going to give you all the technology. We're going to, you know, the software to do it and we're going to make it available openly. You can use our hardware to do it and we're going to streamline this so that we can speed up the, the development.
- [138:54]
A
All of this Alpa Mayo by the way, is one of the most conspicuous peaks in the Peruvian Andes. It's a mountain. Perfect. Perfect.
- [139:03]
C
Thank you for clearing that one up. That's the first I've heard it. That's the first I've heard it. Yeah, it's not a sandwich. But you know, the most interesting thing that happened in self driving cars, that it wasn't at ces but it happened in the last month and I feel like it was a bit under the radar, was actually Rivian going all in on AI. You know, they announced this in, in December and they announced a couple specific things that are, that are really interesting. They've been, they've been working on this essentially for four years and they took, took the wraps off of it. They announced that they're making their own chip. They have one of Tesla's former engineers that's now their head of autonomy. They released their own chip. So they're sort of going to have all of their own processing power similar to Tesla. They are integrating lidar into the vehicle. Right. So one of the problem with the edge cases of self driving is that you know, in the dark, in other things, radar and lidar, which Tesla vehicles don't have, it makes it really tough when it's in the dark, when it's raining, when you have sort of These other edge cases, it's going to have that. It used to be. And Tesla said we're never putting lidar in because it's just too expensive. Because it used to cost 10 to $20,000 to put LiDAR in the vehicle, but now it's only cost a few thousand dollars. And it doesn't have those big G giant spinning things on the vehicle anymore. It's actually looks like just above the visor, you know, of the car, there's this little thing. So, you know, Rivian is taking this really far. And essentially they said they're working toward level four autonomy.
- [140:42]
A
That's true autonomy at that.
- [140:44]
C
That's true autonomy where you can send the vehicle to go pick up your kids, where you, it can drive you to the airport and then drive itself home and park it itself, you know, in the garage. And so I thought that all of that stuff that they, you know, announced and they showed sort of some of the pathway to doing that. And they're also about to release in this vehicle that is much more affordable, under $50,000. The average new vehicle in the US is $50,000. So releasing an under $50,000 vehicles that was huge, would be, would be big for them. This could be like Riv Rivian's breakout year. Similar. Like when Tesla released the Model 3. It feels like Rivian is building toward its sort of version of the, you know, the Model 3, but also, you know, autonomy, a pathway toward autonomy at the same time. And they see their vehicles as potentially being able to be used as, you know, robo taxis, but also to be for people who want to keep a vehicle and use it and have, have autonomy in the sort of the level four sense, you know, that they have a path to that too. So I thought that was the most important one. They weren't at ces, but it hasn't gotten much airplay. And I think that one is worth keeping an eye on because Rivian has, has shown the ability to make really good vehicles and they really apparently have a very clear path on autonomy as well. So we'll see. It's a, it's a prove it moment for them in 26. But impressed by what they talked about in the.
- [142:12]
A
They are overachievers over there at Nvidia, aren't they? Just amazing. They're so, so dominant.
- [142:18]
C
Yeah.
- [142:19]
D
You know who wasn't feels like this is, this is their version of Google, Google's Pixel program, where they wanted to show the manufacturers what's possible with the tools that they, they're providing. Right. So you Know, you. You give this. This hardware SL software pack to a small manufacturer, and you say, what sensors do you have available? You do plug them in in and see what happens. I love this idea.
- [142:41]
A
What. What were you saying, Jennifer? What. What was at CES, besides the donut light that.
- [142:46]
B
The IKEA. They made their debut at CES. They even have an IKEA.
- [142:52]
A
Oh, what's that?
- [142:53]
B
This is IKEA's new Bluetooth speaker that costs $10.
- [142:57]
A
Okay. Does it sound.
- [142:58]
B
It's pink. You compare it with up to 100. It has couple a quick pairing button.
- [143:04]
A
Oh, I like that.
- [143:05]
B
I got to demo this. They had 10 in their room. They didn't have.
- [143:10]
A
Be fun to put this all over the house, though.
- [143:12]
B
I know. And then. Yeah, because so I was playing music through one, and then you just hit the little button on the top, and there's a different. And it pairs to that, and then you just press a button on the next one, and then you just end up with a hundred little tiny speakers singing out. As an.
- [143:28]
D
As an agent of chaos, I approve of the this idea. Does it.
- [143:31]
A
But does it sound okay? I mean, they're very small.
- [143:34]
B
I mean, it sounded fine in the room going, no, not too tinny, but, you know, $10 in a really fun gadget. And their main kind of thing, though, was the lighting. And there they've moved.
- [143:48]
A
You love these donut lamps.
- [143:50]
B
The donut lamp, what is it?
- [143:51]
A
The Farm Blixit Van Bleak Sit.
- [143:54]
B
Yeah, sorry. This is. This was called the Cat, if you're looking for speaker. But so the big thing with IKEA this year is they have just announced that they're launched. They're moving their entire smart line to matter over thread from zigbee. And they have a new hub. Well, the hub came out a couple years back, but the hub supports matter and thread. And so it's just making their smart devices so much simpler. And obviously, that's a key part of IKEA value Prop is inexpensive and easy to use. And now with this. This donut lamp, which actually came out, the first version came out a couple years ago, and it's viral. It's all. It was all over TikTok and it was actually. You would sell out very.
- [144:34]
A
Do you have any in your house?
- [144:36]
B
No. So they want. They gave me one to take back, but I'm like, I can't fit this in my suitcase.
- [144:40]
C
It's pretty big.
- [144:41]
B
It's big.
- [144:42]
A
Yeah.
- [144:42]
B
So I was like, I'll go with the tiny Bluetooth speaker. Thank you. So that I'm hopefully gonna get one to try. But it comes paired with a Bilira remote, which is their new smart remote. Works over matter over thread. But when it, when you get it out of the box, it works. You can use the remote without needing any connectivity. You don't need to connect it to your wi fi or do anything. It's got built in smarts so you can adjust the colors and the dimming and then if you want you can connect it to matter platforms. So like use it with Apple Home Home or SmartThings or Google Home or Alexa. Just a much simpler smart home experience which is the whole point of matter. That interoperability and ease of setup we will see once we get to try it. But they also had a bunch of smart sensors that they just launched that are all super inexpensive. Everything you can buy like a smart light bulb, a color changing smart light bulb for. I think it's gonna, they said it's gonna be about $5. Which is when you think back to when Philips Hue first launched with 100 bucks. It's just the smart home is becoming so much more accessible and affordable and IKEA moving into this space and coming to CES for the first time in its history is kind of a big sign of that shift towards the mainstream here with, with the smart Connect.
- [145:59]
A
And just imagine how much fun you're going to have when people come over and you say have you seen me paired with the beauty remote on the D Regira hub? And people will go, huh, yeah.
- [146:12]
D
Are those inflatable or they, they look really cute.
- [146:15]
A
Is it, is it a soft glow?
- [146:18]
B
Yeah, it sort of has like a, a frosted fin. Not frosted.
- [146:21]
A
I like that. It's an accent light. It's not a reading light.
- [146:25]
B
Right, exactly. But you can, you can do. There's multiple colors you can change it to. It comes when you pair it. The remote that it's paired to to lets you cycle through like 12 different scenes that have been specially designed to fit to look good on the donut lamp. But then you can also choose your own as well as light warm to white light, warm to cool white light if you want more. So you could use it for task lighting. I suppose if you, you can hang it on the ceiling so you could have like two donuts hanging behind you and that would be nice and.
- [146:55]
A
Well, I'm thinking of it in my media room. It would be. I like. I don't want a bright light in there. I want to just kind of an ambient glow. That'd be kind of cool. Can you tie it to what's on the screen? You know you can get those ambient lights that do that.
- [147:07]
B
Yeah.
- [147:08]
A
So those Hue has something like that.
- [147:09]
B
Hue has that. And actually Hue came with a really interesting feature. If you have Hue bulbs, you will probably be very interested in this. It's called Spatial Aware and it uses. So you basically get your phone and you map where you, your hue lights are in your home and then it can use. They've remastered their scenes to create, to create the way the light works in the scene to fit into your home. So for example, if you are doing a sunrise scene or a sunset scene, the lights in the front for example would be more sort of red and dim and the lights behind you would be darker and blacker to sort of really emphasize like the feeling of the sunset. And now if you ever use a Philips hue scene, if you've got say eight or nine hue bulbs around your room or some light fixtures, you'll find that one light over here is pink and then the light in the ceiling is blue and it's all a little kind of random. Whereas now they've switched with these, this new Spatial Aware feature, everything will be much more in tune with the way, and this was a quote from them, the way the lighting designer intended. So it's basically bringing really high end lighting design into your home. And I, I did an article on it with a, with a video. It really is hard to describe. You have to see it to really understand the impact, but it is a big difference. So they would cycle through like this was what the old scene looked like and then this is what it's like with Spatial Aware and it's like, like night and day looks so much better. But you do need the new Hue Bridge Pro for it to work because.
- [148:49]
A
It uses another hub.
- [148:54]
B
But it is because I've always struggled a little bit with smart colored lighting like you mentioned with the connecting to your tv. That's fun if you've got the right lighting setup to be able to kind of have a bit more of an immersive ambient feeling. But, but just turning my light bulbs different colors in my sitting room doesn't always. I'm more like warm white and cool white is great during the day, but multi colors never really worked. But this really makes it seem like wow. Actually I can see the purpose of having color changing lighting in my, not just in the gaming room or not just in the TV room because it just makes it made the room just feel so much more sort of immersive and, and like enjoyable to be in.
- [149:37]
A
So yeah, it's good for lazy husbands because I don't have to put Christmas lights up. We just have outdoor lighting. I can make red and green, and now I'm done.
- [149:45]
B
There you go.
- [149:46]
A
That was it. Yeah.
- [149:48]
D
I just. I just told my mom about that, that I could actually put up Christmas lights that could stay up the entire year. And I've never seen her enthusiastic about tech until I told her that.
- [149:58]
A
Really?
- [149:58]
B
Oh, my husband, too. My husband was a big fan of. When I said, here, we've got some permanent outdoor lights you can try, do you mean I don't have to climb up the ladder every day?
- [150:06]
D
Exactly.
- [150:08]
B
But we'll have to see how long the permanent part actually lasts.
- [150:11]
A
You've actually. You know what, I have to give you credit, Jennifer, because for a long time, home automation, especially at ces, was always like, oh, so close. But not, you know, oh, you know, who's going to really want to spend 15 hours setting all this stuff up and then it's obsolete the next week and then it doesn't work the week after that. But it's. I feel like looking especially at your article, the smart home gadgets that you impressed you there. We've come a long way that this stuff is starting to really kind of make sense. Is that right?
- [150:44]
B
Yeah. This really felt like the year the smart home kind of grew up. It was less about silly, crazy gang gadgets doing weird things in your home and more about here. We've made this stuff better and this stuff works, and this stuff will actually.
- [150:58]
A
It works together, which is a big deal.
- [151:01]
B
It is a great. It was a great show for smart home standards like Matter and Thread and a LERO and even some Z Wave. And, you know, there, it's like this standardizing things in the smart home has made the issue of interoperability getting closer to going away. And what that transition translates to is that manufacturers now can focus their efforts on making products less expensive that do more, because they don't have to spend all of their time figuring out how to work with five different platforms, which, you know, for most of these huge manufacturers was a huge amount of work and often didn't work very well. So you ended up with frustrated customers. Now they've got a clear, solid connectivity layer that they can use that connects to all the different platforms. So it means that. That they can focus their efforts on more features, bringing better things to your smart home devices and making things less expensive. I mean, Ikea's new smart home products that they launched this year are less expensive than their old smart home products that they've had on the shelves for a few years. So it's really a sort of sea change as we sort of see the smart home become more mainstream. And I mean, nothing's more mainstream than Ikea, to be fair.
- [152:17]
D
Wouldn't it be amazing if IKEA was the company that finally made all those alliances worth it?
- [152:22]
B
Yes. Well, this is. So I did a panel this year on a matter panel. We had Amazon, Google, Samsung, Ikea and Acara were on the panel. And the IKEA guy and I had talked a lot about the billsuda remote that I mentioned that you use to control the donut lamp and you can use it to control anything in your.
- [152:45]
A
I believe that's pronounced BC.
- [152:51]
B
So the big issue though is that there is one smart home platform that does not support buttons in matter, and that smart home platform is Google Home. And so the Google Home guy was on the stage and I teed up the IKEA guy. I was like, so what's, what's been great about matter for you and what have been some of the problems? Like there been problems with the board platforms and he didn't go for it. But, but this is, yeah, this is the, this has been an issue. No one understands why Google does not support buttons. But the guy, he did say to me afterwards, he said, I actually, I think he even posted it on LinkedIn. He said there will be once. Once all these. Once there are millions of buttons in people's homes. IKEA buttons in people's homes. I'm sure Google is going to start.
- [153:41]
A
So what, when you say a button, what do you mean a button?
- [153:45]
B
So, okay, so you have smart light switches that's supported in the standard. So on off button is a button, is a wireless light switch. So essentially, so it's not like a.
- [153:57]
A
Button, like just a button. It is a term of art for a wireless switch, basically.
- [154:03]
B
So it is. Well, it is a button.
- [154:05]
A
I mean, is it always a button?
- [154:07]
B
This is a button. This is a Philips Hue button.
- [154:09]
A
Yeah.
- [154:10]
B
And the Bill Racer remote is a button. So it's. But it's a button because it's not wireless because it's not wired. So it can be.
- [154:18]
A
Does Apple support buttons?
- [154:20]
B
Yes. Apple does Amazon does everyone else? Just Google, just not Google. And this, wireless switches are, are a big part of the smart home because what's great about them is that you can control. So you can connect it to a light and have it turn the light on and off, but you could also connect it to lights in a different room or to your robot vacuum Cleaner. If you want to press the button and the robot vacuum cleaner starts, you can connect it to anything in your smart home. So it just gives you a lot more flexibility. And because one of the key issues with the smart home to date has been not having physical control controls for things. There was too much reliance on voice which is. Is hard and not always accurate.
- [154:59]
C
Having delayed, sometimes delayed.
- [155:02]
A
The delayed is really the most annoying thing. When you say lights on and yeah.
- [155:06]
B
Nothing and physical controls are so key in the smart home. I'm looking around because I have buttons to show you but yes it makes a big difference to be able to control with physical because it's not just the person, the tech, the tech guru in the home that knows how to control the home. It's everyone in the home that needs to be able to control.
- [155:26]
A
If you're going to replace switches you need to have something equally good.
- [155:30]
B
Yeah.
- [155:30]
A
To replace it or better.
- [155:31]
C
It's a pretty good.
- [155:33]
B
That's the point.
- [155:34]
A
Yeah. But if it's not even as good then it's just a non starter.
- [155:37]
B
Yeah. So buttons are like the. One of the. We see a lot of really interesting elements, innovations and in buttons and you see like if you go into a really high end home and they'll have a, a panel like that looks like a switch but has like three different or four different buttons that are labeled and that's essentially that concept but without needing to wire it into your home. And you can control anything in your home. Turn, press one button and all your lights turn off and the shades go down. Press another.
- [156:08]
A
But so that's instead of a display. I mean I, I thought that the stand like the high end was like an iPad or a big display hanging on the wall with switches. Not, not really. People want physical something that clicks especially in homes.
- [156:21]
B
High end feel it in the dark. They don't want iPads. Yeah. You need something tactile. That's, that's interesting. That's the case as well. So we and buttons have sort of been on the verge of becoming a thing in the smart home for a while but have been frustrated by interoperability because it only really works about no works if it works with everything in your home. It's like if I can only turn on half of my lights because these ones don't work with Apple home and this. But you know.
- [156:47]
A
But how does the button know you program the button.
- [156:50]
B
Yeah, you program. You have a button.
- [156:52]
A
Can you do multiple taps?
- [156:54]
B
So yeah, there'll be short press, long press, double press. There'll be. Yeah so there'll be lots of different options based. Depending on which button you have. There are many, many options out there. But yeah, it's basically something that can control another device wirelessly without being, you know, it's normally battery powered. So. And it's. I've had. I've been on a crusade for good buttons for years, so I really.
- [157:18]
A
No idea. This wasn't on my radar.
- [157:21]
C
They're getting there.
- [157:22]
B
I'm getting there. I'm getting there. I'm excited.
- [157:25]
D
Wait, weren't we told that removing buttons was a bold visionary? That's right.
- [157:30]
C
It's more.
- [157:30]
A
But look, she's got a whole bunch of.
- [157:32]
B
This is the Bessa. How do you.
- [157:34]
A
Oh, the be.
- [157:35]
C
Here it is.
- [157:39]
A
No, no, they say no, there it is.
- [157:41]
B
Yeah, there it is.
- [157:42]
A
Okay, so it's just. There's no words on it. There's no controls. It's just honor. It's just a switch.
- [157:50]
B
You push 2. There's one on a. One on the top and one on the bottom.
- [157:54]
A
Okay.
- [157:55]
B
And this one's a fairly basic button.
- [157:57]
A
How do people know what the button does? I mean, they also have a.
- [158:00]
B
Have one that has a scroll wheel so you can like raise your shades. Lower your shades, turn your volume up. Lower your volume. That is an issue.
- [158:08]
D
How.
- [158:08]
B
What it does is an issue. So if you put this on your wall, you can kind of in your living room, you kind of assume, okay, it's a light switch. I press it and my lights turn on. I press and hold my lights dim. You know, but some manufacturers come out with little stickers so that you can like put a little sticker on it.
- [158:25]
A
Tell you not in a high home.
- [158:28]
B
No, I mean the high buttons.
- [158:32]
A
Oh, you can. You need a laser button engraver.
- [158:35]
B
Yeah.
- [158:35]
D
With traditional buttons, you just push the switch and see what it does.
- [158:38]
B
I mean, come on, who knows what this is going to do, but you're.
- [158:44]
A
Placing a switch that has. Goes up for on or down for off. And I have to say, in some countries it's down for on and up for off. And that's extremely confusing. Confusing, right. Have you been to those countries?
- [158:58]
B
This can do so much more. That's. That's the difference.
- [159:03]
A
Okay, let's take.
- [159:04]
B
And Also, this is $4, whereas the buttons.
- [159:06]
A
Right.
- [159:07]
B
About a year ago were $40.
- [159:09]
A
I have Lutron switches all over my house.
- [159:11]
B
Yeah. So you have Pico remotes. Do you have Pico remotes?
- [159:14]
A
I do you.
- [159:15]
B
Those are buttons.
- [159:16]
A
That's a button.
- [159:17]
B
That's a button. There you go.
- [159:20]
A
I didn't even know I Had that the buttons.
- [159:22]
B
I guess a remote is the better way of saying but it is. But it's remote. Kind of makes it diminishes the concept. Because you think you remote control one thing with a remote, right?
- [159:31]
A
I've lived here a year and a half and I still haven't figured out what. What the buttons do.
- [159:37]
D
Leo, go push all the buttons.
- [159:39]
C
It'll come.
- [159:40]
A
I do. I push them like there's an on and off, and then in the middle there's an up and a down and it's just, it's. I'm confused.
- [159:47]
D
Have you tried double tapping? Double.
- [159:49]
A
No.
- [159:49]
D
I didn't even know you could do all that.
- [159:52]
B
I don't think you can on the pico, actually.
- [159:54]
A
Oh. All right, let's take a break because you've been very good, boys and girls. And now it's time for the number one CES gadget from father Robert.
- [160:07]
D
Robert Number one, the Nvidia Rubin. Let's be clear. There is so much about AI, especially at ces, that is just noise in the hype cycle chamber. I ignore most of it because, well, there's only so many AI enabled appliances and dancing robots that I can take. However, as part of my day job has me analyzing the AI landscape for significant developments. There was one CES release that caught my attention above all else. Nvidia's announcement of their new Rubin platform and their Vera Rubin chips. The platform is actually a combination of six different components. The Verus CPU, the Rubin GPU, the NVLink 6 switch, the Connect X9 Supernic, the Bluefield 4 DPU, and the Spectrum 6 Ethernet switch. By tightly integrating all six components, Nvidia has greatly reduced the bottleneck between each enabling rack scale integration. In layman's terms, all the silicon in a Rubin data center spends more of its time processing and less time waiting. In practical terms, vera Rubin is 3.5 times faster than Black well, requires one quarter the number of GPUs needed for LLM training, and is 10 times more efficient in inference token costs. Again, for my day job, I'm most interested in the fact that it provides eight times the amount of inference computing power per watt. While AI still requires an enormous amount of power and water for data center scale operations, such a large increase in efficiency with a little tweaking of the silicon is an extreme, extremely welcome sign. That's it. While there was plenty of interesting tech at the show, these were my five favorite things. If you feel like I left out your favorite, feel free to reach out to me on Blueskyadresj Till next time, I'm Father Robert Balaser, the Digital Jesuit closing up CES 2026.
- [161:57]
A
Robert's entire report from CES is available on our will be available on our Twitter YouTube channel channel, on the news feed or if you subscribe to our Twitter news feed. I love the time lapse, especially the one everybody taking the picture. How did you do that, Robert? That's really well.
- [162:12]
D
So that's part of the CES B roll.
- [162:14]
A
Oh, it's good.
- [162:15]
D
I like it does provide some decent, high, high quality footage. That's and I used to do my own time lapses, but theirs are top notch.
- [162:23]
A
Yeah. And you don't want to leave a camera sitting there for hours anyway, that seems like that's not exciting. All right, we'll wrap up our CS coverage in just a little bit with Jennifer Pattison Tuohy from the Verge, Jason Heiner from the deep view@thedeepvue.com and Father Robert Balisare, the Digital Jesuit. Our show today, brought to you by NetSuite. Every business is asking the same question these days. How do we make AI work? For us, possibilities are endless. But maybe guessing is a little too risky. And you certainly can't sit on the sidelines. That's not an option. One thing is almost certain. Your competitors are already making their move. They're using AI. You can't wait. With NetSuite on by Oracle, you could put AI to work for you today. You've heard of NetSuite? It's the number one AI Cloud ERP, trusted by over 43,000 businesses. It's a unified suite that brings your financials, your inventory, your commerce, your HR and your CRM into a single source of truth. That connected data, though, is what makes your AI smarter. It doesn't have to guess. It knows it has the facts at its fingertips and can intelligently automate routine tasks, deliver actionable insights. It can help you cut costs. It can help you make fast AI powered decisions with confidence. It's because it's not just another bolted on tool. It's AI built right into the system that's running your business. So whether your company earns millions or even hundreds of millions, NetSuite helps you stay ahead of the pack. Right now, get NetSuite's free business guide demystifying AI at netsuite.com TWiT the guide is free to you at netsuite.com TWIT that's netsuite.com TWiIT we thank NetSuite so much for supporting this Week in tech. Well, it sounds like this was a good cell CES to go to. Better than in other years. Jason, you think?
- [164:22]
C
I mean, you know, CES is on an upswing again, certainly because of. I, I felt like there were a number of years there, maybe 20, 19, 2020. In 2020 was the super spreader event. That likely was what spread Covid the.
- [164:38]
A
Last CES I went to.
- [164:40]
C
Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, it really felt like CS was, was contracting. It was trying to find its identity and then. And then it felt like in a sense that there was a little bit of a death blow, you know, from the, the COVID era and would it. Would it bounce back? But really what has happened the last few years is, I mean, the show is up over 145, 000 attendees again. There were 4,500 vendors there. There were like over 5, 000. That was really the case where CES has. And there is one stat that I saw on LinkedIn. Somebody in PR posted that 80% of the vendors now are either enterprise or they have consumer and enterprise.
- [165:26]
A
See, that's interesting because even though they don't call it that, maybe the Consumer Technology association was smart when they said it's just ces. It doesn't stand for Consumer Electronics show, because it isn't just consumers by any means.
- [165:37]
C
It's not. It really has become an AI show and an enterprise show. There's a whole pavilion that's enterprise. Now, obviously the automotive piece has become a huge part of CS and has been for a while with autonomous being the key. You know, for a while there, it was focused on really electrification, but it really has moved to be almost entirely about autonomous and, or the, the market, like the accessory market and partner market for. For. For auto. So all of that is to say that it is much more of a B2B kind of show than it's ever been. And that seems to be what has made it, you know, continue to grow and expand again. At the same time. The. There's still plenty of things like, as, as Father Robert and Jennifer have mentioned, like, there's still plenty of consumer stuff to be seen to be experienced there. This is the place that a lot of companies are now coming again to launch products, which had really been the case. That's where I was starting to wonder if it had a future because people had stopped launching products at ces. They were launching them themselves, they were launching them separately. They felt like it just got lost in the sea of things at ces. And so that's when it Felt like it, you know, it was starting to lose some of its favor. But there were. There were consumer companies, in addition to enterprise companies actually launching things and announcing them at ces. So it does feel like it's on an upswing. It has some new energy. I don't know if it was the best CES ever. There were years where I remember there were, like, huge launches even 10 or 15 years ago. The. I don't know if anybody remembers sort of a doomed product, but the Palm there, they're essentially the trio. The. The successor to the trio. What did they know before the tablet? The Palm Folio.
- [167:33]
D
Like Palm Folio.
- [167:34]
C
The Palm Folio. Thank you. So that launched at ces. Right. So it was a huge. One of the biggest product announcements of the year. This is. I think it's the Palm Pretty. Nine, Right?
- [167:46]
A
The Palm Pretty. About the Pre. Yeah, I think you're right. Bonito. That's what I was gonna say. Yeah. I love that Pre.
- [167:53]
C
I did, too. If it wasn't so stinking slow and the software could not work.
- [167:58]
A
But.
- [167:58]
C
But remember the charger? It had this, like, very. Like this charger that was like a little stone. You just put it on, like.
- [168:04]
A
Yeah, beautifully.
- [168:05]
C
Beautifully designed.
- [168:06]
A
That was a gorgeous device.
- [168:08]
C
Yeah, it truly was. But there was. There's not anything like that that's happening. Happening, you know, anymore. For sure. But. But there were a lot of things that were pretty real there. And so it is a show that is sort of regaining its. It's. It's.
- [168:23]
A
It's interesting because, you know who wasn't there? Apple. Intel. Microsoft.
- [168:30]
D
Microsoft.
- [168:30]
C
Intel is kind of there.
- [168:33]
A
Who? They partner up. Intel had a. Intel. Did they have a keynote?
- [168:38]
C
No, but they, like, they were. They had. They had the rap, the monorail. They had partner things going on.
- [168:45]
A
Ads.
- [168:45]
C
And actually, you know who bought all the ads?
- [168:48]
D
Ohio. Ohio. Ads were everywhere.
- [168:51]
A
The state of Ohio.
- [168:52]
D
The state of. Open your business in Ohio, move to Ohio. They were on every column going to the West Hall.
- [168:58]
A
Okay. I never. I don't really think of Ohio as the next Silicon Valley, but technology.
- [169:06]
D
There used to be a time when there was a CES blackout. For two to three months before the.
- [169:11]
A
Show, there were no releases.
- [169:13]
D
Yeah. And then that started going away. I like. I like that that's coming back. I like to be surprised at the show. You know, I remember that the down year for me was maybe 15 years ago when. Where a quarter of the products were iPhone cases. And that was. Yeah, that was the rock bottom for me for ces. And like, Jason, I think it's on the way up. This was better than last year.
- [169:36]
C
The.
- [169:36]
D
The traffic seemed to be more enthusiastic, the people were asking the right questions. Press were actually looking at things that might be future products. So, yeah, I, I'm. I, I actually walk away from most CES thinking not much here.
- [169:51]
A
This. I thought it was interesting, both Nvidia and AMD made big, big chip announcements. I mean, that's not where you think of them going to make those big announcements, but they did you think Computex or somewhere, but not there. Car manufacturers is there. Jennifer, it's amazing what has happened with home automation. That used to be. I remember there was a home automation pavilion in the back of the south hall or somewhere and it was all just the Tower of Babel. Nobody talked to anybody else. It was zigbee and Z Wave and. And now it's, it's starting to coalesce as a real pla. A real technology platform that people are interested in.
- [170:32]
D
Sorry, a quick question to either, either of you too. Did you make it over to the foundry?
- [170:39]
B
Only at the very end of the show. And I, Yeah, I didn't. What was the point of.
- [170:44]
A
What was the foundation blue?
- [170:46]
C
Oh, yes. So this is Quantum. So. So Quantum is like one of the next big things, but it has its own. So Quantum Computing had essentially its own pavilion in the Fontainebleau, which is like the new sort of.
- [171:00]
A
That's the new hotel. Yeah. The CES Foundry is where you see AI Blockchain and Quantum Innovation, they say.
- [171:08]
B
Right.
- [171:08]
A
I wonder.
- [171:08]
D
We went and it's kind of their blue. It's CES Blue Sky.
- [171:11]
C
Yeah, basically, yeah, I did.
- [171:15]
A
Was there a lot of Quantum innovation at the Foundry? There was.
- [171:18]
C
So we reported on this in the Deep View. So Nat Rubio Licht wrote about this and interviewed a bunch of them, you know, and has followed the Quantum thing. There are things that Quantum can do. So this is another area where some of this chip stuff, it's. It's going to be interesting to see how it plays out, because there are things that take a lot of power, a lot of GPUs and all of that, whereas Quantum can do it in an absolute fraction of the. Of the time to do it. And so there are. But. But these are. Obviously you're not going to use it to solve math problems. You're going to use it to solve like the most, the hardest, most complex things. And so Quantum is very real in terms of when you know it's going to be a thing. It's like anywhere from sort of one to Three years. But there are, there are companies that are actually commercializing it now. So this is no longer a lab project. There are companies that are getting a lot closer. It's no longer just IBM talking about it and a couple others. It's getting pretty real. And really with AI, there's a use to put it to before, we just think, we used to think it was only going to be a security, a cybersecurity, you know, algorithms sort of thing. And, and with AI, where they're being really big computational problems to solve, it's going to have a reason for being and, and also a reason to fund it and to make, make it, you know, make the ROI worth it. So anyway, we do have a, we had a, it was in our newsletter last week and there's a separate story on the Deep View that, that details the quantum stuff.
- [172:52]
A
Interesting.
- [172:53]
D
Wow.
- [172:54]
A
So yeah, I mean that shows you that CES is still a cutting edge conference where you're going to hear about stuff that is actually relevant. Not just new iPhone cases. There were, we didn't even talk about a lot of new PCs announced monitors. Verge picked the LG OLED monitor, which.
- [173:13]
D
Is a beautiful lifestyle.
- [173:14]
B
You know what we didn't talk about at all, what, which is the origin of CES is the TVs.
- [173:21]
A
Yeah. Oh yeah, you're right. Normally it's all about TVs, isn't it?
- [173:26]
D
Was there any big screen that's 1 millimeter thinner?
- [173:30]
B
Woohoo.
- [173:30]
A
You know, I keep waiting for microled to happen. I think that's the next technology. That's that. But maybe it's harder for them to get it working than people knew because they've been showing these giant micro LED screens for almost a decade now without any real consumer products.
- [173:48]
D
It's a great central hall is normally nothing but screens.
- [173:52]
A
It's right. In fact that's where the big main entrance is and there's usually a waterfall of monitors.
- [173:58]
B
Well, the really interesting thing was Samsung did not have a booth on the show floor.
- [174:03]
A
What?
- [174:03]
C
Yeah, it was in the Win. They had a, they had, they essentially had their own pavilion in the world in the Win.
- [174:09]
B
So and they had like a little like check in table at, in the central hall where you could go and check in to go over to the wind.
- [174:17]
A
Oh, and did you ride the Elon's little underground tube to get there special Samsung.
- [174:27]
B
But it was, it was, was someone, one of the Samsung execs I spoke to said that basically they were fed up of doing. Well, not fed up, but they said they used to. So they had their big show floor booth, but then they would also have suites full of things in. In other areas.
- [174:42]
C
Yeah.
- [174:42]
B
So they wanted to just put everything together and they said they couldn't get a big enough space.
- [174:46]
A
They have so many products.
- [174:48]
B
Yeah. So that. So TCL took over their big space.
- [174:52]
A
Oh, interesting.
- [174:53]
B
Which was kind of interesting because one of the strangers stories are new. We've got a new TV reporter, John Higgins, at the Verge, and he wrote a story about how TCL is kind of coming for Samsung and lg.
- [175:04]
A
Yeah, well, they have been for a while. The Chinese manufacturers. It's funny, you know, it used to be American manufacturers and then it was Japanese manufacturers, Sony, and then South Korea said, no, we can beat them. And it was Samsung and lg, which used to stand for Lucky Gold Star Bar and was in the back of the drugstore.
- [175:24]
D
And now they tried to rebrand it as Life's Good.
- [175:27]
B
Life Is Good.
- [175:27]
A
Life is Good. Life is Good. It's still Lucky Gold Cert. I mean, and now it's TCL and Hisense. The Chinese companies are coming hard after these guys with lower costs, lower prices and newer technology, although. Right. But my sense is that LG's panels are still widely agreed to be the best panels out there. And Samsung.
- [175:49]
B
The best.
- [175:49]
C
Yeah, they're the best.
- [175:50]
A
Yeah.
- [175:51]
B
Yeah.
- [175:52]
A
I. We didn't talk about the Lenovo expanding laptop screen. They've got these rolling screens. The key you. The Verge picked one of the keyboard computers. Was it the HP Elite? I can't remember which one you guys like?
- [176:07]
B
People are very excited about that. I'm surprised that idea hasn't happened sooner, honestly, when you.
- [176:12]
D
It's called the Commodore. Exactly.
- [176:15]
A
I know.
- [176:15]
D
We had it at the beginning.
- [176:17]
A
Is that for your table? I don't understand.
- [176:19]
D
200.
- [176:20]
A
Yeah. I don't get that. But at least PC manufacturers are trying new form factors and that keeps it kind of interesting.
- [176:27]
D
Right now they're just trying to get memory. That's what they're trying to do.
- [176:30]
A
That's right. Good luck with the RAM kids.
- [176:33]
D
Wait, I wasn't mean to ask you about that podcast. And they're begging. They're begging for allotments. I was asking about that Padre. You said that little box that you got from Nvidia has how much ram in it? 256 gigabytes. So that's like, what, $10,000 computer?
- [176:48]
A
Yeah, they bought all the.
- [176:49]
D
I didn't say it was from Nvidia, by the way. So just. Oh, right, right, right.
- [176:53]
A
No, we don't know whose it was. I love my framework desktop. It was 128 gigs of RAM and it was very pricey for that, but it would be double, probably double the cost today, which is amazing.
- [177:04]
D
I. I squirreled away about what, half a petabyte worth of memory for some projects that I was doing, and, and then the memory prices went crazy and I'm seriously considering just selling it all and banking it until the memory prices come back down.
- [177:20]
A
You're doing memory arbitrage, aren't you? I knew it.
- [177:22]
D
Oh my goodness.
- [177:24]
A
RAM arbitrage. Well, I want to thank you guys. You made this a very interesting show and you made CES sound like a very interesting event, which is in the past, not always been easy. Thank you so much, Jennifer Pattison Tuohy, senior technology reviewer at the Verge, where she came covers Smart Home at Smart Home Mama on the Blue Sky. Your husband will probably have something to celebrate a little later on tonight, so break out some champagne.
- [177:53]
B
Okay.
- [177:54]
A
I'm just giving you a hint.
- [177:55]
D
My wife in the sported light.
- [177:57]
A
When the. When. Yeah. Get the buttons ready. We're ready to have a party. Break out the buttons and the little $10 speaker. Jennifer is a regular pate on Tech News Weekly with Micah Sargent every month. And we just love having you on. Thank you, Jennifer.
- [178:18]
B
I'm on this Thursday? I think so lots.
- [178:20]
A
Oh, wonderful. We'll listen Thursday. We'll have more CES information, maybe more buttons will make their appearance. Mr. Jason Heiner, it's always a pleasure. I really appreciate you giving us a quick preview on Wednesday on Intelligent Machines and the in depth preview. But that's because you're the EIC at the Deep View, free to subscribe. I keep asking you that. I don't understand. How does that, how can that be?
- [178:46]
C
I mean, it's. It's a newsletter. That's our primary thing with about half a million subscribers.
- [178:51]
A
Nice.
- [178:52]
C
It's only been around for two and a half years. They've built something really amazing and. And I left ZDNet to come to the Deep View to work on covering AI every day and to build a next generation media company. So we're newsletter today, but also lots more to come.
- [179:10]
A
As usual. Jason, you're on the cutting edge. I think this is absolutely the future. Very, very exciting.
- [179:15]
C
Thanks for having me.
- [179:16]
A
Leo.
- [179:16]
C
Always a pleasure to see you.
- [179:18]
A
Always a pleasure. And Father Robert Balasar, the digital Jesuit Padre. SJ on Blue Sky. Look at, look for his Jesuit pilgrimage app on iOS and Android too.
- [179:32]
D
And Android. And Android. Yes. You can hear my voice if you Listen to enough of those. The stories that come through the app.
- [179:38]
A
Yeah. And. And the Flipper Zero that I gave you, don't bring that to the mayoral inauguration. Apparently, New York City's banned Flipper Zero. Just want to let you know I.
- [179:47]
D
Saw that, and that's a little strange. Although I've disguised mine because my Flipper now wears a clerical collar.
- [179:54]
A
Oh. Oh. It's been ordained. Well, anything you want to plug? Anything going on in the. In the world of Father Robert?
- [180:03]
D
A whole bunch going on. I just got back from the Holy Land and from the Middle East. The next couple of weeks, I'll be all over the Midwest of the United States and probably down in Puerto Rico, in Belize. Got to make a couple stops. Stops in South. South America. Probably heading to Venezuela.
- [180:20]
A
Are you on a mission? Really? Going to Venezuela?
- [180:23]
D
There's a bunch of stuff that needs to get taken care of, so. Yeah.
- [180:26]
A
Well, my goodness. Okay.
- [180:29]
D
So if you see me, it means I'm still alive.
- [180:32]
A
Okay.
- [180:33]
B
Okay.
- [180:33]
A
Yeah. Be careful in Venezuela.
- [180:35]
D
Wow.
- [180:35]
C
Rain for you.
- [180:36]
A
Yeah. Yeah.
- [180:38]
D
Just different. It's different. But, Leo, it's always great to come back. It feels like coming home.
- [180:43]
A
Yeah. We love having you on, Father Robert, all three of you. You're three of my favorite people. Catch father Robert's full CES coverage on the TWiT news feed or on YouTube. YouTube.com twitnews I can't remember. But anyway, go to YouTube.com twit you can find it there. Hey, everybody. Leo Laporte here with a little bit of an ask. Every year at this time, we'd like to survey our audience to find a little bit more about you. As you may know, we respect your privacy. We don't do anything. In fact, we can't do anything to learn about who you are. And that's fine with me. I like that. But it helps us with advertising, it helps us with programming to know a little bit about those of you who are willing to tell us your privacy is absolutely respected. We do get your email address, but that's just in case there's an issue. We don't share that with anybody. What we do share is the aggregate information that we get from these surveys. Things. Things like 80% of our audience buy something they heard in an ad on our shows, or 75% of our audience are IT decision makers. Things like that are very helpful with us when we talk to advertisers. They're also very helpful to us to understand what operating systems you use, what content you're interested in. So enough Let me just ask you if you will go to Twitter TV Survey 26 and answer a few questions. It should only take you a few minutes of your time. We do this every year here. It's very helpful to us. Your privacy is assured, I promise you. And of course, if you're uncomfortable with any question or you don't want to do it at all, that's fine too. But if you want to help us out a little bit, twit TV survey 26, thank you so much. And now back to the show. Thank you, Jennifer, Robert, Jason. Thanks to all of you. A special thanks to our Club Twit members. Without your support, we would not be around. To be frank. If you're not yet a member, please do check it out. Twit TV Club Twit. You get ad free versions of all the shows and a lot of extras. Our AI user group is really beginning. Very interesting. I think it's some of the best AI coverage out there right now and your support makes all that possible. Twit TV Club Twit. We do this week in tech every Sunday, 1400 UTC Pacific Time. That's 1700, not UTC, 1400 Pacific Time, 1700 East Coast Time, but that is 2200 UTC. And I say that because you can watch it live. We stream this live in our club Twit Discord, of course, for our club members, but also on YouTube, Twitch, X.com, facebook, LinkedIn and Kik. So if you want to watch live and chat with us live, visit any one of those sites between a broad about 1400 and 1700 Pacific Time on a Sunday after the fact. On demand versions of the show available at our website, twit tv twit or on YouTube, YouTube.com thisweekintech that's for the audio only, but it's a great way to share clips if you see something you wanna tell somebody about. After the fact. On demand versions of the show, also available by subscription and it's free. Just find your favorite podcast client and subscribe. That way you'll get Twitch the minute it's done. Thanks to our producer and technical editor, Mr. Benito Gonzalez. Thanks to all of you for being here and we'll see you next time. Another Twit is if you can. He's amazing.