← Software Engineering Daily
Software Engineering Daily
SED News: NVIDIA Bets on Intel, Meta’s Demo Crash, and Anthropic’s Explosive Growth
00:53:23
SED News is a monthly podcast from Software Engineering Daily where hosts Gregor Vand and Sean Falconer unpack the biggest stories shaping software engineering, Silicon Valley, and the broader tech industry. In this episode,
Loading summary
Transcript70 lines
- [00:12]
A
Hello and welcome to SED News. This is a different format of Software Engineering Daily, which we do monthly, where we just take a spin through the latest news, headlines, things like that popped up in the main news. We then dive into a deeper topic during the middle and then we take a look at some hacker news highlights towards the end. So as usual, we just like to kind of have a catch up on what's been going on on our side. So I'm Gregor Vand and with me is Sean Falconer. Say hey, Sean.
- [00:42]
B
Hey there. Good to be back. How are you doing, Greg?
- [00:44]
A
Yeah, yeah, good, good. So what's been going on over. I guess I always lose track of months these days. So your September, Sean, how was your September?
- [00:52]
B
I was on the road a bunch, so I was gone to Europe for 10 days. I did five cities in Europe for work. A lot of speaking customer engagements was fun, but it was very, very exhausting. So I'm glad to be back in the US for a little bit. But I do leave again for Europe next weekend, so I'm in kind of my heavy travel schedule for the year, so I'm just trying to survive at the moment.
- [01:13]
A
Yeah, well, we managed to catch you flying in for this episode, so that's much appreciated. Yeah, on my side. Yeah, it's just been, I guess, sort of ramping back up month and obviously conferences, etcetera, Starting to tick back in. I mean, this week in Singapore is what's called token week. I have nothing to do with crypto or tokens. So it's a bit of a strange week when a bunch of people that look different, shall we say, to the usual Singapore population descend on the city. But I went to a sort of enterprise. I wouldn't say the company, but I went to sort of like an enterprise AI conference and certainly I think reception was quite muted. I would say they were really pushing their agents. They have a special name for those agents, but if I say the name, then you'll know the company. So they were pushing their agents and really trying to sort of bring up their customers on stage to talk about what they've been doing with them, which just wasn't a great reception. We're talking some quite basic RPA type things. So it was certainly interesting and I do think that's maybe just over this side of the world. We're not quite pushing out the. That said, it's an American company, again, I won't say which one, but it was an American company. I'm just not sure if that's sort of the level we can be expecting of agentic conferences right now.
- [02:23]
B
Yeah. Do you think, based on your experience, that at least the part of Asia that you live in is maybe a little bit behind the United States or other parts of the world when it comes to AI adoption? I certainly noticed that, at least in parts of Europe that I was in, I ran kind of a luncheon there for executives, and I started by asking everybody in the room which companies were actively building something in AI right now, even if just PoCs and demos. And not a single person raised a hand, which is quite a contrast from my experiences in the us. They're all very interested in this topic, but it felt like they were a little bit slower in the adoption curve.
- [02:57]
A
Yeah, no, I mean, I think that's probably a fair assessment. I mean, obviously. Yeah. Where you're based, San Francisco, in the Valley, for sure. That has to be pretty much the place that's getting adopted first. Certainly from where I look and sit over here. Yeah. I think it's just there's still inertia, and I think people are still sort of in the businesses that are. Like, if I think of the customers that came on stage at that conference, let's just say big shipping companies or something to that effect, I think there's still just a bit of inertia around. Well, why should we change our ways of doing things just so that the CIO can say that they've cut costs? And I think that was the big theme of that conference, was CIOs saying that they could cut costs here, there and everywhere using AI. So I thought that was an interesting theme. And we're talking agents to help you reduce your SaaS spend. And having employees be able to talk to a chatbot and say, how can I reduce my spend on this platform? Which is quite on the nose, given that this was obviously a SaaS platform in itself. So, I don't know, it was kind of interesting.
- [03:59]
B
Nice. Yeah.
- [04:00]
A
Okay. So moving on to the main headlines. These are things that pop up in the main news outlets. The more niche stuff comes a bit later from the hacker news. So the big one that we're looking at to begin with is Nvidia investing in Intel. So we did look at this last month in terms of. Well, we looked at intel last month. They had an investment from the US government to the tune of 10% of the company that was on the basis of. We called it too big to fail. It's sort of almost like too important to not do. Well, they weren't exactly failing, but they were Certainly starting to lag. So that was an interesting play. But what's interesting here, so this is a 5 billion investment by Nvidia and this has been partly in talks though for over a year. And so the timing of all of this is what's more into question rather than how much and so on and so forth because the US government sort of popped up two weeks before this was inked saying they'll take that 10% whereas the talks with Nvidia had been going on a long time. So Nvidia have made another investment as well, which we'll get onto. But I mean, what is your take on this one, Sean?
- [05:11]
B
It's interesting. I think it kind of goes back to what we talked about last time where at least from the government side the semiconductor industry is this critical infrastructure like energy or defense now. And there's a lot of concerns over this single point of failure in terms of our dependence on the Taiwan chip manufacturers there. What's this mean if anything ever happened? So I think US wants to shore up their bets, but I think it's a strange day in tech when it seems like the government has moved faster than the world of technology in terms of their investment. I don't know if that was the catalyst for Nvidia to move forward with this or what, like why it took so long. But in all of this between Nvidia, intel, any idea what's going on with amd? Like where do they stand with all this?
- [05:55]
A
That's a great question. We just don't seem to, I mean, I guess just maybe in the slightly more US leaning press, but we don't seem to hear a lot really about amd sort of exactly where are they? So I think that's maybe something we can look ahead maybe next month even we can try and maybe dig in a bit and see where they are on this one. I mean Nvidia have also made this investment 100 million into OpenAI. So it's kind of going both forks of the road here. 5 billion into intel who are what's called a fab. They can literally make chips. There's only very few companies that can do that. I believe it's them. It's tsmc, the Taiwanese behemoth. Samsung can do it. There's probably some poke in this relative terms Poki Chinese outfits that can do it, but I don't think anyone from outside of China are using them. So yeah, I feel that's probably where the Nvidia sort of, they're hedging their bets a little bit on who might end up making some of their chips. But yeah, the 100 million into OpenAI. What does that kind of mean, do you think?
- [06:57]
B
In a lot of ways I'm sure OpenAI is a huge customer of Nvidia and their GPUs. So I saw like a meme about it where essentially Nvidia is handing over money to OpenAI and OpenAI is giving the money back for this relationship that they have. I mean, I don't really have a sense for what I guess Nvidia is probably it's in their best interest essentially for these model companies to do well. It's kind of like you look back at Google in the early days of the Internet. Google did a lot of stuff where they probably lost money to just get more people online because ultimately it's better for Google the more people who are online because that means more people searching, more ad revenue and so forth. So they'll make it up eventually. And I think maybe from a strategy standpoint, Nvidia is probably thinking similarly. It's like, okay, well the better these model companies do, the bigger they become, essentially that is good for our business because they're so dependent on us today.
- [07:53]
A
Yeah. There might also be distill problems with Microsoft and OpenAI, sort of how they're going about their relationship. And this could be a sort of technology geopolitical, if you want to call it that move where OpenAI are saying or showing that they've got kind of the heavies in their corner from a hardware perspective as well. So there's probably a whole bunch of things at play here. So very interesting. We'll obviously see how this develops and yeah, we'll maybe follow up on amd, try and bring them back into the foreground perhaps next month and see what we uncover there. So moving on. This could have been a hacker news thing, but it did hit the main headlines which was Meta's classes, intro, demo failure. So this is their AR classes offering. They kind of, at least from the shiny videos that they were showing, it was Red Bull, people on skateboards going down hills. And I was expecting them to, I don't know, head up, display the speed or something. But instead of which the guy was asking what's the speed limit on the road? Which all seemed a bit of a damp reception. I would say it was one of the most death defying skateboard things. And he's asking what the speed limit is. I know they have to do that for probably many legal reasons, but it just didn't make a great Video, in my opinion. Anyway, they went onto a demo and this was with a chef and the chef said, so help me put this recipe together. Which is funny that a professional chef needs that to happen, but let's roll with it. But then the response from the glasses was, well, you've already done, blah, blah, blah, so now do this. And of course he hadn't even started yet and he tried again, he said, no, no, I haven't started yet. What do I do first? And it responded again, well, you've already combined the ingredients. And so he just said, right back to you, Mark. And of course the explanation given was wi fi, which I don't think anyone's buying. Yeah, I mean we've seen sort of AI demos fail before, but this seems like spectacularly bad.
- [09:54]
B
Yeah, I mean there's some great spectacular failures of demos. There's the big one from Microsoft years ago where they had the blue screen of death during the demo of one of their flagship operating systems and so forth. In some ways I have empathy for them having given a lot of live demos, like anything can happen. But I'm not surprised that this makes headlines, besides the fact that it's meta Zuckerberg and everyone loves a train wreck. People love to see the failures, but I have a hard time and maybe I'm just not the target demographic for this, but we keep trying to make these AI powered eyeglasses work. Google, they had their attempts, there's been other attempts. Who's this for? Does anyone actually want this? Maybe I'm just let me know if I'm out on an island. You want this. But it's like Jobs gave us Internet in a pocket. Zuckerberg's trying to give us Internet in our faces. I'm just. Why? Why do we need this?
- [10:47]
A
Yeah, I mean, we're actually going to get into this in a bit more detail kind of in the main topic, when we look at sort of where the devices effectively devices hardware from the big players. And we're actually going to highlight Snap there as well because they've kind of already had a bit of a. I would say it looks very clunky. I don't know from the actual experience of it, it looks of a very clunky AR experience, but that's been aimed, I believe, more at the younger demographic, which is sort of Snap's user base. So as you call out, this is, I think being aimed at certainly adults and which adults actually want to have something on their face that. And I think the only version of this I can think of that would get me interested as an adult, at least for now, is I'm a cyclist and if I had my, I've got quite big frame Oakley sunglasses and if they could project say the speed or some stats, because sometimes I am looking dead down at the road, which is where my computer is, and that could literally cause me to crash if I look at it too long. So it'd be quite nice to kind of look ahead and be able to see a bunch of stats that I would quite like to still be monitoring. That's it though. I don't want to walk down the street and have kind of Minority Report. That's John Smith over there. Or I don't know, but I think.
- [12:03]
B
Maybe you don't want to be at a dinner party and it feeds you nuggets to help you with networking. So you remember people's names and little tidbits about them, like a politician of some sort and you have somebody in your ear, except you have Jeeves feeding you this information.
- [12:17]
A
Yeah. So this is also really interesting because again, we're going to get onto this, I think in the main topic around the modality of the device with the AI, if you want to call it that. But just to sort of. Yeah, a little anecdote is like, I have seen a quite high powered exec that I know on LinkedIn and he said if you could give me something where I can walk into a room and it can tell me who all the people are, then I will buy that tomorrow. But I mean, again, I think that's quite a specific. I'm not wandering into gala dinners every evening needing to remember so and so's other half and so on and so forth. So I don't know, this seems quite a niche still. Quite niche.
- [12:56]
B
I also wonder, that's a great thing to be able to do. If you can do it naturally or you have some other way of doing it, if you're the only person in the room that has the capability. But if everybody's the same and everybody has these glasses on, does it kind of devalue the experience that, oh, I know your name, but clearly I got it from this device that fed it into me. And you also know my name because you're also wearing the exact same hardware on your face.
- [13:22]
A
Yeah. So again, I think that's what feels strange about this. Walking into a networking event with a pair of glasses on that everyone knows is that pair of glasses. I mean, way back you just touched on it there. But yeah, Google Glass. I mean, I lived in New York when Google Glass was released and I remember getting into a lift, an elevator, with someone going to a networking event and he was wearing Google Glass. And I said, oh, is that Google Glass? And he just went, yeah. And then I think some people might remember that people wearing these glasses got the slightly unaffectionate term of glass holes. And unfortunately I experienced at least one version of that, which is just sort of, well, if you're going to wear this thing on your face with a camera and so on, then at least be prepared to talk about it. And this person wasn't. So, yeah, we'll see.
- [14:05]
B
I mean, I think the big thing, people have been trying to make virtual reality, augmented reality work for a long time, and I think the most compelling example and widespread use of augmented reality might have been Pokemon Go from like eight years ago, or whatever it was when that blew up. And then I haven't seen a really compelling example of virtual reality as well. Going back to the Virtual Boy Nintendo failure from 1990, when I was at Google, I saw some updated stuff that took like an hour to set up with all these cameras and things. And then I was like, this is only marginally better than what I saw in 1990.
- [14:44]
A
Yeah, well, as they say, we're going to touch on quite a lot of hardware stuff shortly. So let's just go back to the headlines briefly. The next one is actually in the gaming space and Software Engineering Daily does cover quite a bit of gaming these days. Yeah, this is quite a big one. Electronic Arts. So they're known for the Battlefield franchise, which is obviously direct competition. Well, some people argue not, but I think it's sort of direct competition to Call of Duty, but obviously very different approaches to the same idea. And they have a bunch of sports franchises as well, but anyway, they're being acquired for its 50 to 55 billion from private equity, which also includes, I believe, the Saudi Arabian fund. So I guess what we're seeing here is this is actually coming before Battlefield 6, and there has been a lot of talk about Battlefield 6 because the last two installments of Battlefield were not well received by the core players. So whilst EA's stock price has been going up and that would indicate maybe a good time to sell it. There's commentary here around, but why would you sell it before this big release? And of course, maybe it looks a bit like execs just sort of saying, we're not prepared to take the hit if it goes wrong here. So we need an outline. So it does look good in the sense for gaming that these big private Equity are looking at this as real investments these days. But at the same time, the timing does seem a bit strange in relation to these big blockbuster game franchises. Any thoughts, Sean?
- [16:20]
B
Yeah, it's kind of interesting. I saw actually, if you look at EA's stock price from January to now, it went from $116 a share to $202 probably since the analysis. So it's really blowing up. And over the last few years, it's kind of been relatively the same, kind of bumping up and down and then it has a big spike. But if you sort of project it over time, it's been steadily growing. It's not like it's a completely zombie stock or anything like that. But I'm curious with. There's been a lot of stuff in the industry with companies kind of either staying private forever or even going from public to private. And I wonder if there's any of that thinking involved on the EIA side is, hey, let's go back to being private, run this without sort of the pressure of being a public company and all the things that come along with that.
- [17:07]
A
Yeah, it seems to just be a cycle on both sides. I mean, we saw. I mean, the strangest case of this was Dell, where Dell was private, went public, went back to private and I think is back to public again. So it's done it yo yoed around in this case. Yeah, I think this has to be just down to the top leadership of ea. I think it's both. There's obviously a lot of expectations with reporting, et cetera, when you're a public company, as well as this release. If this goes wrong, I'm sure there's a lot of stock options that are going to go wrong with it. So I kind of just see this as. I mean, and they've obviously done whatever they've done to kind of structure this or make the private equity buyers feel comfortable that this release is going to go well. I mean, I've seen quite a few videos online where they've produced these huge events where they've brought all the press down. I say press, but we're talking very influential gaming YouTubers to come and play the game. And one guy that I follow, he does a lot of gaming history. He was actually involved with the making of the game. They got him in on various sessions. He wasn't really allowed to talk about what input he was giving, but the fact that they've actually got real gamers in to come and help develop this game. So I think there's sort of just a Lot. There's a lot riding on it, but there's probably a lot more. I don't play these games. For anyone listening, you're probably wondering, why am I talking about? Nothing to do with the game itself. I don't play them, but I just find it interesting, the business behind them. So, yeah, talking of staying private, the next sort of headline was Anthropic Series F. That was just to check the numbers on that one. 13 billion investment. 183 billion post money. I mean, these numbers all just sound a bit kind of airy fairy at this point. I think the headline here, though, is.
- [18:48]
B
Databricks just had their huge round. I think their valuation was 100 billion. I mean, it's like 100 billion is a new billion. It seems like it's crazy.
- [18:57]
A
Yeah. But again, here we are, no ipo. Why do you think that is, Sean?
- [19:02]
B
I would think it seems like they're following a lot of the same strategy that databricks and some of these companies have followed, like if you can continue to operate privately and as long as you can figure out a way. Now, Anthropic is a much younger company than databricks, but with databricks, they figured out a way that they can allow their employees to liquidate some of their assets so that their options actually have value. There's a lot of advantages to continuing to stay private. The challenge when you're public is every quarter your report card is available for the world to see. And there's a lot of things that you have to do as a company to address your board of directors, address your public shareholders. There's a lot of scrutiny with that. And if you want to be able to move fast and kind of independently, you have a lot more freedom to do that when you stay private. I think the stuff with Anthropic is insane. Their revenue growth. They reported 1 billion in revenue at the beginning of the year in 2025. Now they're at 5 billion. We're nine months in. So they had a 5x revenue run rate jump since the start of the year. That's insane when you're talking about billions of dollars. They have a $500 million run rate in three months with quad Code. That's really, really impressive. It's just numbers I've never seen before in my 20 years of working in the industry.
- [20:20]
A
Yeah, I think that's a good call out. Yeah. Claud. Code has clearly contributed quite significantly to just that growth. And obviously we're seeing companies like Cursor. Back in August, they introduced Cursor cli, at least in beta, but very much GA now. So yet again we're seeing the foundation model producers being able to capture so much of the market when it comes to the use cases. Have you tried building a text to SQL Chatbot?
- [20:51]
B
If your AI agents don't understand your data, its definitions, queries and Lineage, they're forced to guess. And bad guesses mean risky assumptions. That's where SelectStar comes in. SelectStar automatically builds an always up to date knowledge graph of your data, capturing metadata like lineage usage and example queries. So whether you're training an AI model or deploying an agent, your AI can answer with facts, not assumptions. Stop the wrong SQL queries before they happen. Learn more at selectstar.com.
- [21:27]
A
At the beginning you'd have companies like Cursor who could leverage these models but then really amplify them. And here is Anthropic coming along, just saying. Yep, we can actually do that too. And I think arguably to many developers better. And they've angled in on financial reporting, specialty products, which again, there are other companies, other completely separate companies trying to achieve that and you just think, well, you're going to have to add something really special to then beat out the company that's developing the models themselves. So yeah, as you say, Sean, these numbers are insane.
- [22:01]
B
Anthropic's done a really good job of positioning themselves as the enterprise ready AI native company, whereas OpenAI had a tremendous amount of success with a consumer facing product of ChatGPT. And I think now they're trying to build that muscle within the company, but they're certainly playing catch up to where Anthropic started.
- [22:21]
A
Yeah, for sure. Just to round out as you say, at the end of the day, if they can raise the money and they don't need to go public, then that's a great place to be. Stripe has very much adopted that model for its entirety and doesn't look like, at least from why I understand, that's changing anytime soon. So I think it's really just when are we going to see some IPOs that make sense? I mean the only one we've seen that's been a kind of success story recently was Figma. They were about to be bought, Adobe tried to buy them and that was shot down by antitrust and instead Figma went public and that's been held a success overall. I mean I'm sure there was the usual pop at the beginning and it's gone down a bit, but overall Figma is a very profitable business, at least from the numbers they put out before the ipo. So that's a great win for the average investor because again, the argument here is that the average investor is simply losing out year on year because there are no companies that they're allowed to participate in. And just to sort of sidebar that, I was just listening to the acquired the ACQ2, which is when they interview someone and it was Toby Lutke from Shopify, I'm a big fan of his. And they reminded the listeners that Shopify went public at 1.25 billion. And that just seems insane because it's now about 200 billion. But if you think about the fact that an average investor like you or I could have got in at the IPO and 200x'd our money and that's just not possible. Where we're sitting right now, we're watching just series E, series Fox at these valuations. Where's the growth for the average person going to come from?
- [23:57]
B
Yeah, I don't know. You got to go work for one of these companies, I guess.
- [24:03]
A
Correct. Yeah. Very interesting. So just a very final. We're going to hit on time for our headlines here. But just a final one was interesting that sort of hitting the main news now is sort of more, I wouldn't say niche AI, but going beyond just, oh, here's the next model. And Wall Street Journal touched on Google's Genie 3, which is like a world model that is sort of where the training can be done, say on videos. But then the actual model itself is where you can, if you imagine almost like a video game that then looks like video. They show an example, say of driving a boat around Venice. But it really does look like. I mean, it's very photorealistic. So, yeah, kind of interesting how these in the background really advancing. If you look at what Genie 2 looked like versus Genie 3, it's like PlayStation 2 versus PlayStation 3 and 4. That kind of leap in those kind of advancements. Yeah. Have you got any sort of touch points with these?
- [24:58]
B
I think it makes sense. You got to get some, especially for certain types of use cases or environments. There's got to be some step function jump beyond what you can do with purely large language models. And Transformer model today, where LLMs are really good at patterns in language. But how do they understand the world around them? How do you teach them certain rules or physics? You have to use simulation as a training ground. It's a little bit like using flight simulators to train pilots. It's kind of very similar to how humans might Learn certain skills. Can you put these models in certain environments where they have to learn in a sort of simulated environment where you can create what the consequences of doing the wrong things are. So they actually are able to determine sort of the patterns of these new types of environments, these sort of world models, as they call them.
- [25:48]
A
Okay, so that was kind of the main headlines. We're going to move on to our main topic which is just looking at where devices and hardware have netted out at the moment. So we're going to be looking at the big companies. I mean this is kind of slightly anchored by Apple and sort of the announcements of iPhone air that just sort of sets the tone for. But where are we going with hardware and devices? And obviously as software developers we're trying to think about what are we actually developing for into the future. Because I think a lot of people are saying, well, are we really all going to be walking around with smartphones into the future? Because we're kind of all getting a bit fed up with them. There's some really nice, I don't even want to call them dumb phones. They're way pared back devices like the minimalist phone. It kind of looks a bit like a Kindle mixed with a BlackBerry which can run any Android app you want, but just in a very pared down monochrome kind of environment. Which I think speaks to the times of yeah, we're getting fed up with smartphones, but yet we're still seeing a lot of developments of hardware. I realized we didn't really talk about our predictions from last month, but the one that I made does feed into this, which kind of also helps set the tone a bit, which is I predicted that based on a bunch of hardware bricking incidents from software updates that there would be one of those and there wasn't. I just said PS4 just as a joke. But what did transpire was that Nest Thermostats, which is owned by Google, have decided to completely discontinue their support for their Gen1 and 2 devices. Now that's pretty insane because these are thermostats wired into houses and they're basically saying, you know, all that functionality as to why you bought it, you know, with WI fi and you can control it from wherever. Oh yeah, well we're going to completely discontinue support for that and you just need to use it like a normal thermostat on the side of your house or side of your wall. So there are big consequences here, like which devices and hardware are we adopting, which modalities Et cetera. So we're going to look at Apple, we're going to look at Meta again. We have obviously talked quite a bit about them in the headlines. We're going to look at Google, we're going to look at Snap and just kind of look at what's going on here. So the first company as talked about is Apple. I think just sort of hit the high notes here, which is iPhone. Air has been released. People are a bit underwhelmed by it. If we then look at where were they trying to go with hardware and devices that again, developers thought, okay, should I be developing for this? Well, the Vision Pro, that was a sort of three and a half grand failure. It didn't really get great adoption. It was a very clunky device. I saw someone wearing it in a bar in New York and it just looked ridiculous. I mean, I think they were obviously just wearing it to show their friends and the friends were using it in a bar. But you would not take this thing to a bar normally. That's pretty strange. And they kind of canned the Vision Pro ultimately. And then if we actually look at where are they quite strong right now, it's actually the MacBook Pro which is with their Apple Silicon or I mean the MacBook Air as well, Apple Silicon, basically where they've moved away and they decide to double down on their own chips, which I mean, I think has been a huge advantage for software developers as much as especially running models locally, as much as video editors, et cetera. And we also probably will touch on AirPods which is their secret breakaway success products, which obviously I say secret, just I think people don't really realize just how much money they probably make from AirPods and AirPod Pros.
- [29:12]
B
Yeah.
- [29:13]
A
So I'm going to set the scene there with Apple. What do you think on where is Apple right now, Sean?
- [29:18]
B
It seems like on the laptop front they're making the right kind of moves where they're investing in making their laptops like be able to run AI models and AI workloads more efficiently locally, which I think makes a ton of sense. Like if that's the way the world is going and you want to be able to do that from a development standpoint or even certain applications will have certain models probably running within them at some point, then you want to have the hardware to be able to support that. I think where Apple as well as a ton of these companies that are focused on next generation hardware is, they're all kind of trying to figure out what is that next iPhone type breakthrough of hardware, and we haven't really had that. People have tried different things. We already talked about all the glassware sort of failures. Is that the next thing? I don't think so. Maybe I'm wrong. There's Humane that tried the AI pin, where I actually kind of liked some of the thesis behind their idea, but the hardware ended up being kind of clunky and it was a little slow.
- [30:25]
A
What was that? What was the AI pin?
- [30:26]
B
Oh, yeah. So it was this little pin that you could wear and it had no screen, but you could talk to it. So it was voice activated. And then if you needed a screen, it could kind of like you could use your hand and it would draw with like a sort of laser pointer on your hand to show you some representation. But it also had cameras in it so you could just point at it. The whole idea was to create some sort of passive piece of hardware that wasn't as intrusive as getting your phone out to do something when you wanted to like, snap a picture or you wanted to capture a moment at like a concert or something. You're not just like, you know, looking at all those things through a phone and not experiencing themselves was kind of the. The idea behind it, and I like that. But they weren't able to deliver on it, at least yet in terms of being able to create those experiences. So a lot of these companies, I think, are struggling to try to figure out what that is. I wish I knew. I don't know. But I think you raise an interesting point about the AirPods. I think with the AirPods, you see them everywhere. And I think as somebody who maybe you don't know anything about headphones, and especially headphones that don't have something to really keep them in your ear, how hard that is to really nail with people where you have to be able to fit this to all kinds of different people's ear sizes and have something that just universally works and stays in and connects to any device very quickly. That's a really, really hard thing to pull off. And I think Apple did it, so they did it spectacularly. And I think that's part of the reason why AirPods have been so successful.
- [31:54]
A
Yeah, for sure. Yeah. I mean, I own a pair of the last gen AirPod Pros. They have done pretty well. I mean, the case on them has always been the issue. They've got these little connectors for the charging, and in this climate which is very humid, these connectors basically corrode very fast. So I've gone through like two cases just on that basis, even trying to clean the little connectors with alcohol and all that kind of stuff. And to your point, my wife has a pair from another manufacturer and they kind of basically broke after like a year. I've tried the Bose, they're kind of quiet comfort. But earphones as opposed to headphones. I'm wearing a pair of the headphones right now. But these are the earphones that we're talking about. And to your point, they're actually quite difficult to get in your ear and that puts me off thinking that could be a daily modality for anything beyond like. Yeah. So it's a tricky device to get right. Apple seemed to have got it pretty right. And then they added in the health aspect of basically the latest gen can function as a hearing aid, which is pretty spectacular. So I think looking ahead it's like, but what could we do more than that? The one that comes to mind to me is translation. Could you walk around Japan and someone's talking to you and it's just being filtered through and being translated real time like you're sitting in the UN or something? They have their earpieces with.
- [33:20]
B
Yeah, I mean the universal translator to some extent. That's what Google when they first launched their Pixelpod or I forget exactly what they were called, but I had a pair. You're supposed to be able to kind of tap it and then you could engage. The assistant was built into it and you could ask for translation. Of course the demo looked amazing, but in reality it was a lot clunkier. It didn't work very well. I mean part of the challenge with a lot of those things is they have to rely on a network connection and then it ends up being slow. But there are things now with the. There's a bunch of people who've worked on compressing whisper models so they can run on an iPhone. Could you get some of this translation down into a. A model that can run directly in the phone so you can do most of that translation there and then you don't have to round trip to the network. I feel like that is certainly something that's not that far away.
- [34:15]
A
Yeah.
- [34:17]
B
Capital One's tech team isn't just talking about multi agentic AI. They already deployed one. It's called Chat concierge and it's simplified in car shopping using self reflection and layered reasoning with live API checks. It doesn't just help buyers find a car they love, it helps schedule a test drive, get pre approved for financing and estimate trade in value. Advanced, intuitive and deployed. That's how they stack. That's technology. At Capital One, you're a professional software engineer. Vibes won't cut it. Augment code is the only AI assistant built for real engineering teams. It ingests your entire repo, millions of lines, tens of thousands of files. So every suggestion lands in context and keeps you in flow where other tools stall. Augment code sprints. Unlike Vibe coding tools, Augment code is built for shipping to production and you don't have to switch tooling. Keep using VS Code, Jetbrains, Android Studio or even Vim. Don't hire an AI for Vibes. Get the agent that knows you and.
- [35:17]
A
Your code base best. Start your free trial@ augmentcode.com so I think the thing to highlight there with Apple generally is just that they do have a hold on this piece of hardware that is pretty ubiquitous these days. And I think arguably they've got the best hardware kind of in there, which is pretty critical to if you're trying to then deliver these as you're kind of calling out very low latency experiences or use cases using AI because either the AI component needs to be done locally on your device and then it's just Bluetooth to the device or as you say more likely it needs a network connection and then you're talking like, well that's actually where 5G would help. One of the few kind of maybe consumer use cases for 5G at the moment would be sort of this ultra low latency round trip stuff. So yeah, interesting to think about. If we just kind of move on, what are the other players doing? Well Meta, we have touched on them quite a bit so we probably won't dive into them quite so much. But they had the Ray Ban glasses and then the new glasses are I think also Ray Ban. It's just that this is now the AR version or they're Oakley. I can't remember which manufacturer they're teaming up with for this new set of glasses, but they are going all in on the glasses stuff and as we touched on that seems like a slightly interesting modality to be really focusing on, especially for the adult market. And what other use cases could we see? Well, we kind of touched on them things like networking, being able to know who's around you or head up display like experiences for sports. But I don't know, I mean just as a sort of software developer, I wouldn't say these get me terribly excited. I'd probably be thinking more about the audio side of things where you can deliver these more subtle experiences as you're walking around you can still enjoy the environment around you unhindered visually. It's just that you're getting a bit of information audibly perhaps. But meso see it differently, I think.
- [37:24]
B
Yeah, I do think that there's a lot more we can do with audio medium. I think we'll see that as well. People have been trying to do that for a long time with the Google Assistant and Siri and Alexa and all these. I'm setting off everyone's devices right now, but. But this didn't really work that well, you know, it's kind of a letdown and you end up using them to set timers for cooking and asking what the weather is. So they kind of end up being not that important. Like they're useful but not. You could live without them. They don't have that like killer use case. But if you could just converse. And I know people are starting to do this with. If you turn sort of chatgpt into like the audio model where you can just sort of have a conversation with it, then it becomes an interesting way to learn certain things. And we just haven't had historically the powerful enough models to be able to do that properly. Where audio can become the engagement medium. We created keyboards and we created all these input devices not because they were convenient to people. We taught ourselves to use those things. We taught ourselves to use a mouse, taught ourselves to type so that we could communicate with the computer. But now are we in a place where we can finally make it rely on sort of the ways that we are used to communicating, gestures, speaking, all these types of things and use that as the medium as input into a computer?
- [38:46]
A
Yeah, absolutely. So looking at Google, I mean they for a long time were getting quite big into devices. Hardware connected home, touched on the nest earlier, but they are the one that kind of. It's odd because they've obviously got a lot of money, throwing a lot of resources at hardware. I know people that have worked in hardware at Google, but at the end of the day I don't think they've made a lot of money from hardware. This is just usually a sort of conduit to deliver Google services, basically, which is quite different to Apple who do make money on hardware and they do make money on services. Yeah. So Google, we've just kind of seen them fade away a bit, I would say when it comes to. We're not seeing any breakout product or sort of experimental product like we've seen with both Apple and Meta Pixel phones. They're making a big song and dance about the AI capabilities of pixel phones. But again, that's not category defining. That's just, yeah, you have a great phone. Obviously they're trying to define it as this is the best Android phone.
- [39:43]
B
And I think they mostly do that strategically to push the overall Android market. I don't think they're trying to own the Android hardware market. The number of pixel phones they actually make is still relatively small. It's more like, can we create a really, really great Android phone that's all our stuff and show what the capabilities are? So that way anybody building an Android phone can't have excuses that blame the operating system or something like that. So, yeah, they're not really trying to own that market. I wonder part of it. Maybe they were burned too much on some of the hardware investments they made in the past and they didn't really work out for them. I think in some ways they're kind of focused on the right things. If you look at what they're doing in the AI market, they're focused more on models and infrastructure for AI, which I think they're really, really good at. They're very, very good at scaling efficiency. And they mostly have used hardware as a means to, I think, strategically protect their business. Or it's like they can essentially afford to give it away or sell it at a loss because they'll make it up on the other end of selling ads and getting more people on the Internet. So I think it makes sense that they probably are not over investing in this market right now.
- [40:56]
A
Yeah, I totally agree. I think it's just an interesting observation of where they were with hardware, as you say. There's quite a few projects they had for the last 10 years on that front, consumer hardware, but not investing heavily in it now. And it does make sense in the landscape. Finally Snap, which is a bit of a wild card here, but you know, I've been reacquainted with Snap only recently, but kind of then realized just how much effort they're putting into their, what were called spectacles. And then I believe they're going to kind of morph into just specs, which is, you know, a sort of branding thing. But in June this year they said that there's going to be a huge update coming out. So I believe that's coming quite soon. And they did release very recently snap OS 2.0. And that's very much thinking around and that's like the developer platform and how can developers interface with Snap, but very much how this very much is setting it up for whatever's coming with Specs as well. So it's very interesting because I heard a podcast with Evan Spiegel, the CEO, co founder, founder, and the way he was talking was he sort of said this is the future of the company. Now I know he kind of has to say that. I mean, it is a public company, so he's got to really get behind whatever they're doing. But I guess it was interesting that this device was what he was saying the future of the company was. And again, I think the demographic is interesting because the demographic, again, as I've learned more recently, is younger. It's a social network that is, or social platform, whatever you want to call it, that is more accepted for high school age kids to use. And whereas a lot of parents are not okay with high school kids being on these platforms, that seems to. And even younger, I believe. But this is one that sort of seems to be on the okay list for a lot of parents actually. So it's kind of interesting that company that has that demographic are going all in on these glasses where AR is a huge thing and they really push this idea of AR with your friends. That does open up some really interesting possibilities software wise. Like you touched on Pokemon Go, Sean. I mean, I can imagine probably a whole bunch of collaborative AR experiences that you might be able to have with glasses. At the moment. The biggest problem I see with it is just it looks an incredibly clunky device and you wouldn't wear this thing outside of your home. So this is kind of almost like VR glasses just are a bit nicer.
- [43:27]
B
Yeah, I mean, I think the standard is so high to be able to build a device like that that people would be willing to wear in public on a regular basis. I haven't seen anything that's like even close to what the general public would accept now. It's reasonably acceptable behavior that people are looking at their phones when they're in public and so forth. But to be wearing something and be okay with it, it is something that draws attention to you. And also being okay with that, that's just a smaller audience than what you ultimately are probably going for. When you're a company that's investing in this, you want something that's universally appealing to people and that's a hard thing to pull off if it's not just a technology, but it's also part of how people see you and it's part of fashion.
- [44:14]
A
Yeah. As you say, even Meta's Ray Ban glasses still looked a bit kind of like something that isn't a pair of actual sunglasses. So yeah, it's going to be interesting. Just, I mean, I don't think I've seen anyone wearing them out and about, but I've definitely heard of people saying that they do wear them because they've got little speakers as well. But yeah, I guess we'll see. So kind of wrapping this one up. If we were to put together what would be the ideal combo here is sort of something along the lines of if you took Apple's UX attention, if you added Meta's experimentation, Google's AI, and then let's give them the snap's sort of long term vision because they seem to be the only ones actually committing to quite a specific thing and saying this is it. That seems to be where the ideal device might appear from. But that's what makes it interesting. We've got all these players taking quite wildly different approaches. So yeah. Moving on to our favorite bit of the show, Hacker News highlights. I feel there was like so much over the last month I really struggled to pick what I was going to bring up. This time there were too many. The one that definitely scratches my itch when it comes to like developer off the deep end. This was posted by Bogdan the Geek. And that I believe is also. That was the blog of the person. So this person posted it. It was called hosting a website on a disposable vape, which was just fascinating, as this person points out. It seems incredibly paradoxical to call a vape disposable when it has a 24 MHz Cortex M0 processor, 24 kilobytes of flash storage, 3 kilobytes of static RAM and a few peripherals USB C. That doesn't sound disposable to me. And I think he was sort of hinting he would not want to be a big tobacco lawyer in a few years. He's probably going to have to explain what on earth these devices were being branded as disposable. At the end of the day though, this person was able to host a website on this disposable vape when it was so top of Hacker News. Admittedly it was crashing, as you'd expect. I did manage to access it today, so it does work. This person had posted the blog post as well. Obviously somewhere else he'd hosted on both the vape and a regular server just to kind of make sure people would read the article. I mean, absolutely fascinating that this is even possible. And I like the one quote from him that I'll just sort of pull out. I just read out the specs a minute ago. But he said you may look at those specs and think that it's not much to work with. I don't blame you. A 10 year old phone can barely load Google and this is about 100x slower. I on the other hand see a blazingly fast web server which is just. I love this person can look at that hardware and sure enough they were able to get very low latency ping out of this thing, which yeah, just very ridiculous and fun.
- [46:54]
B
There's so many of these ridiculous projects online. I love it. I mean we're giving meta hard time and other people had our time from launching ridiculous products, but if someone put that on Hacker News, I'd be all over it. I love people using their brainpower and their time for some sort of ridiculous side project. And actually in that vein, the Hacker News article that I had was this article about someone built a way to play the game Snake in your URL address bar so you can check it out. It was posted by, I think, I don't know if you Makat or Makati is the person's name. You know, Snake is the game where you're, you know, moving Snake around and it keeps getting longer and you don't want it to collide and basically they jam that into your.
- [47:38]
A
I'm playing it right now. This is so fascinating. Yeah, I tried to open up on my phone yesterday and it didn't work. But yeah, I'm playing it now on the desktop.
- [47:45]
B
Yeah, I think you have to do it on a computer.
- [47:47]
A
Yeah, yeah. This is hilarious. Yeah. If you remember Snake, you know, onkia screen was kind of square. So the obvious difference here is it's a very long rectangular shape that you're trying to navigate within. But I mean, hey, it works. It's pretty amazing. The other one that caught my eye, this is posted by user and so it is the 3,000 year old story hidden in the sign. So you know, sign what we think of for emails so and so blah blah.com turns out that the history of this is the at was it meant amphrasand, which is a unit of measurement that the Greeks used. So they'd sort of say I want like 5Amphrasands of flour or something. And it then got kind of used by accountants apparently. And that's why the sign was even put on a keyboard in the first place basically back in the 70s. And of course then when Arpanet was being developed, that's when the person creating email effectively had to look on the keyboard and be like hey, what shall I use to help people? So and so and so. And that was the sign that was picked. So it sort of has absolutely zero history in terms of that actually being anything to do with directing you at something. It was to do with measurements initially and accounting and it's now become obviously synonymous with email. So I found that. Never knew that. And that was just something that somebody posted. Very interesting.
- [49:14]
B
Yeah. And the last one I had, which is very thematic for our conversation around hardware today, is that someone has built the first ipod controlled game called Ride Pods where you use your head movements to basically to control like car or motorcycle thing as you. As you drive around.
- [49:31]
A
Oh wow. Yeah, cool. Looks a bit like a motorcycle thing and yeah, very kind of like PlayStation era, but like. Yeah, well, just talking about AirPods. Yeah, exactly. Being this modality. Well, exactly. They've got I guess motion sensors as well. So.
- [49:46]
B
Yeah, I didn't realize that. I guess must be. Maybe that's how they kind of control sort of the level volume or something like that as you move around in.
- [49:55]
A
That sort of vein. This is just from memory. There was someone who posted about actually the fact that there is a sensor in the hinge of a MacBook that tells you the exact degree of open and shut. It's very difficult to get at it from the API apparently, but someone managed to get there. And what did they do? Well, of course they hooked it up to the sound of a creaking door. So most useful thing you can do, open it and obviously show the degree on the screen but also make it sound like a creaking door.
- [50:22]
B
Hacker News needs to start having. Or maybe we start this. Maybe Software Engineering Daily needs to do this is the IG Nobel Prize for random engineering hobby projects on the Internet.
- [50:35]
A
Yeah, we should do like the SDD News or SD Daily Awards at the end of the year or something like that. I like that.
- [50:40]
B
Yeah. Most ridiculous use of engineering talent.
- [50:43]
A
Yeah, absolutely. Just wrapping up on the Hacker News. This was just a sort of feel good story which also shows the power of Hacker News. It was posted by JustSkyFall who ran, I believe this person ran an online coding academy for thousands of children and teenagers. And they had a Slack bill originally of about 2k a year or 5k a year. Not nothing, but very reasonable to handle this number of people. A Slack popped up and said within a week or two weeks your bill is going to be 195k. And of course they just said well this is impossible. We're going to move to mattermost. But luckily I mean, I say luckily it would have been probably overall great if they could have moved to mattermost, but that's a huge undertaking. So luckily hit the top of Hacker News got a lot of attention and the Slack CEO reached out and the update to the post was that a good outcome had been reached and this was no longer a problem. So good to see that Hacker News can really influence some good things outside of these crazy fun projects that we also find we're hitting on time predictions as always. What do you think you'll see across the next month, Sean?
- [51:51]
B
Yeah, so I was trying to think about this. So Salesforce has their big annual conference here in San Francisco in a couple of weeks. Dreamforce. This is somewhat ridiculous prediction. I'm sure they're going to make a lot of AI announcements, but I'm going to go out on a whim and say that Salesforce launches their own large language foundation model at Dreamforce.
- [52:10]
A
Interesting, interesting. So like foundation model from Salesforce. Okay.
- [52:14]
B
Yeah.
- [52:15]
A
What is my prediction? It's funny, I haven't even vaguely thought about this. Well, I'm just going to pull from Hacker News this time. I'm going to predict that we see someone like one up the disposable vape. Like someone manages to host a website on something that's even more esoteric than a disposable vape. I think we're seeing people constantly trying to one up each other on some of this hardware stuff. So yeah, that's a completely random but fun prediction that somebody will manage to get a website running on something that's even less than a disposable vape. Well, with that fantastic prediction, it's time to wrap up. Thank you so much for tuning in to Sed News. Great to see you again, Sean. Thanks.
- [52:57]
B
Yeah, you too. Always enjoy these conversations. We covered a lot of ground today.
- [53:01]
A
Yeah, yeah, we did. Yeah. Hopefully we'll cover just as much next time. So do join us next time on set news. We'll see you then.
- [53:09]
B
See ya.