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Brian McCullough
Welcome to the TechMe Bright home for Friday, May 30th, 2025. I'm Brian McCullough. Today why Meta's big deal with Anduril is a big deal for the entire tech industry. Microsoft is kind of not joining, but also kind of all in on the handheld gaming race. Count hugging face as someone else serious about AI robots and in the long reads, more signs that the AI job apocalypse might already be upon us. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. Looks like Zuck and Palmer Luckey have made up Meta and Anduril are partnering to build Eagle Eye, a line of XR products like helmets that enhance soldiers hearing and vision and enable control of AI weapon systems. Quoting the journal, Lucky's defense company Anduril Industries and Meta said Thursday they will together build a line of new, rugged helmets, glasses and other wearables that provide a virtual reality or augmented reality. The system, called Eagle Eye, will carry sensors that enhance soldiers hearing and vision, detecting drones flying miles away or sighting hidden targets, for instance. It will also let soldiers operate and interact with AI powered weapons systems. Anduril's Autonomy software and Meta's AI models will underpin the devices. The collaboration brings together a social media giant that has long been the target of Washington scrutiny and a weapons maker that is a rising star inside the Pentagon. The partnership offers another example of Silicon Valley's ideological evolution and Big Tech's expanding embrace of defense work. I should look at this as I have succeeded, lucky said in an interview. I have successfully persuaded not just Meta, but many others that working with the military is important. Meta in recent months has recruited former Pentagon staff to join its ranks, an effort to navigate the labyrinth of the defense procurement process. In November, it opened up its AI Models for Military Applications, a new business line for a company whose profits have been powered by online advertising. In a statement, Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said the Eagle Eye technology will help US Soldiers to protect our interests at home and abroad. Meta and Anduril have jointly bid on an army contract for VR hardware devices worth up to about $100 million. If awarded, it would be Meta's most significant tie up with the Defense Department. The contract is intended to vet headset prototypes that are part of a larger $22 billion army wearables project, of which Anduril became the lead vendor in February after Microsoft failed to deliver a functional VR headset. Anduril said the collaboration on the headsets have already mostly funded themselves is going forward irrespective of winning the army contract Anduril is betting other parts of the military will also be buyers. The Meta partnership delivers a victory lap to Lucky, whose entrepreneurial roots and much of his fortune can be traced to VR. At age 15, Lucky founded one of Silicon Valley's early VR headset companies, called Oculus VR. In 2014, Meta, called Facebook at the time, bought the startup, making him a billionaire. But Zuckerberg fired lucky in 2017 following a controversial political donation. End quote. Yeah, that's why I say they've made up for years. In various public comments, Lucky seemed to suggest that he took personal offense at being outed from what was then Facebook, despite the fact that the whole Meta VR effort was incubated by the acquisition of his Oculus. But also, as Bloomberg points out, this deal shows how much has changed in the past couple of years in Silicon Valley, where developing war tech was once considered a hard red line. For starters, Anduril Industries is a defense tech company co founded by Palmer Luckey, the man who created the Oculus VR headset that was acquired by meta platforms for $2 billion in 2014, only for Luckey to be pushed out when it emerged he had financially backed a pro Trump campaign group. That he would be welcomed back with open arms is yet another sign that such stances are no longer taboo in the halls of Silicon Valley companies. It could be argued they never should have been. Second, developing technology for war had been considered a hard red line for many of engineers working within those leafy campuses, at least in the era after the dot com boom. At Google, for instance, workers in 2018 held walkouts and forced executives to abandon projects related to military use. Today, defense applications of technology are something companies want to shout from their rooftops, not bury in the basement. Again, it could be argued that should have always been the case. Who will create tech for US Military, if not US Tech companies? In Meta's case, there's another factor at play. Mark Zuckerberg's deal with Anduril, which you assume is just the start of Meta's military hardware ambitions, offers a lifeline to its ailing Reality Labs business. The unit has lost more than $70 billion since the start of 2019. Advancements in quality haven't led to jumps in sales. I've written before that fitness applications are a great selling point, but apparently too few people agree with me. A newer form factor, sunglasses made in partnership with Ray Ban, have shown potential but still represent a niche product. So instead, maybe the killer app for mixed reality is indeed a killer app. My mission has long been to turn Warfighters into technomancers, lucky is quoted as saying in a press release. And the products we are building with Meta do just that. A prototype of the eagle eye helmet being developed by the companies is due to be delivered to the Pentagon this year, Luckey told journalist Ashley Vance in a podcast published alongside the official announcement. He compared its utility to what a player wears in the video game Halo, a heads up display offering reams of intricate information on targets and locations, plus an AI assistant Cortana relaying critical and life saving directions. What's also striking about this shift is that it is a sign the historical flow of technological innovation is being turned around. Silicon Valley began as a region set up to develop chips for military tech, before the assembled talent branched out into making products for businesses and consumers, such as the personal computer. Many breakthroughs have followed this direction of travel, the Internet, the microwave gps, superglue to name a few. But it is now increasingly the other way around. As Lucky put it during the podcast discussing the deal, it turns out that Meta's headsets are just as useful on the battlefield as they are on the head of any consumer. See also Artificial intelligence developed first and perhaps at the cutting edge always by private sector tech companies. The opportunity is too big to pass up and too lucrative to hold grudges. Lucky says he was willing to work with Meta again because it had become a much different place from from the one he was booted out of, end quote. So either Microsoft didn't get the memo that handheld gaming is the hotness right now, or maybe this is a sign they did. Sources say Microsoft has sidelined its native Xbox handheld project to focus Instead on Windows 11 gaming performance for third party OEM handheld devices like an Asus model debuting later this year. Quoting Windows Central just to emphasize here, it's not Xbox's Asus device Canon that is being pushed back. It's Microsoft's own internal Xbox handheld that has been shelved for now. I have a variety of codenames for this unseen device, but it's unclear as of writing which exactly is the correct one. At the moment, it seems there are three prototype devices in development for Microsoft's Gen 10 effort, with the handheld being parked for now. Indeed, Microsoft still wants to build its own Xbox Handheld in the future, but Microsoft has decided to prioritize its teams to improve Windows 11 gaming performance specifically for devices like the Asus Partner device project Canon. It's possible that the existential threat from SteamOS, which on paper delivers better gaming performance than Windows 11 itself, has informed these decisions Our sources have indicated to us that Microsoft is still deeply invested in developing its own Xbox gaming handheld technology in the future, but it was announced internally today that the priorities are moving more deeply towards third party OEM handhelds in the interim project. Canon is the codename of Microsoft's partner Xbox Handheld with Asus. We understand that Canon is still targeting a launch for later this year. The hardware side is essentially finished tentatively. We believe this device is to be among the first using the AMD Z2 extreme, but we are still working on solid confirmation for that. There's a significantly boosted effort between the Xbox and Windows teams to improve the experience. On the software side, devices like the Asus Rog Ally and Lenovo Legion Go already run on regular Windows 11 and the Xbox layer and apps have gotten better, but there's still a lot of improvements that could be made. It was always a bit unclear if Microsoft's handheld was designed to be A native Windows 11 PC gaming style handheld or more of a native Xbox console style experience, but we potentially now have the answer. It seems that it was indeed meant to be a device that could run full Xbox games, but Microsoft has decided to prioritize its teams on the partner opportunity around devices like Canon, at least for now. I've been told that Microsoft still has big ambitions and is investing heavily to deliver a native Xbox handheld, but the shift is about prioritizing and allocating resources. Right now there have been no layoffs or anything like that as a result of this reprioritization. End quote Want to take a family photo and studio Ghibliit? Okay, but what if you want that same photo to look like a Pixar character? What if you want several options that still are referencing the single first photo? Well, iterations like this are now possible as Black Forest Labs has released FluxOne Context, a suite of AI models that let users generate and edit images using both text and images as inputs. Quoting TechCrunch, the most capable of the models in the new family, called fluxone Context, can be prompted with text and optionally a reference image to create new images, writes Black Forest Labs in a blog post. The FluxOne context models deliver state of the art image generation results with strong prompt following, photorealistic rendering and comprehensive typography, all at inference speeds up to 8x than current leading models, the company writes in a post. Unlike traditional text image models, Context understands both text and images as input, enabling true in context generation and editing. Unlike some of Black Forest Lab's previous models, FluxOne Context Pro and Flexone Context Max can't be downloaded for offline use. However, Black Forest Labs is making an open context model, fluxone Context Dev, available in private beta for research and safety testing. Black Forest Labs, based in Germany, was said to be in talks to raise $100 million at a $1 billion valuation toward the end of last year. Many of the founders hail from Stability AI, the creator of the notorious stable diffusion image generating model. Backers include Andreessen Horowitz, Oculus co founder Brendan Uribe, and Y Combinator's Gary Tan. In the months since it emerged from stealth, Black Forest Labs has released a number of new image generating models and enterprise focused services, including an API. End Quote As a small business owner, you don't have the luxury of clocking out early. Your business is on your mind 24 7. So when you're hiring, you need a partner that grinds just as hard as you do. And that hiring partner is LinkedIn jobs LinkedIn makes it easy to post your job for free, share it with your network and get qualified candidates that you can manage all in one place. LinkedIn's new feature helps you write job descriptions and then quickly get your job in front of the right people with deep candidate insights. Either post your job for free or pay to promote promoted jobs. Get three times more qualified applicants at the end of the day, the most important thing to your small business is the quality of candidates. And with LinkedIn you can feel confident you're getting the best. Based on LinkedIn data, 72% of small and medium businesses using LinkedIn say that LinkedIn helps them find high quality candidates. You can let your network know that you're hiring too. You can even add a hiring frame to your profile Picture and get two times more qualified candidates. Find out why more than two and a half million small businesses use LinkedIn for hiring today. Find your next great hire on LinkedIn. Post your job for free at LinkedIn.com Ride that's LinkedIn.com Ride to post your job for free. Terms and conditions apply. I can tell you that as you round 45, those everyday aches and pains you've heard about all your life suddenly become not so theoretical. That's why I got interested in Qualius Analytics. Since taking Qualius Analytic, I felt like I've turned back the clock. I have higher energy, less soreness after exercise and a big boost in productivity. Senolytics are science field revolutionizing human aging. A big culprit behind that middle aged feeling can be senescent cells, AKA zombie cells that linger in your body after their useful function, wasting your energy and resources. Let me break it down. The accumulation of zombie cells can lead to less energy, slower workout, recovery, joint discomfort and basically feeling old. 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Ricci Mini is a desktop unit that can move its head, talk, listen and be used to test AI apps. This robot release was made possible in part by the company's acquisition of humanoid robotics startup Pollen Robotics, which was announced in April, according to delang. He added that the team gave Hugging Face a new capability required to make these bots. Hugging Face has been making a concerted push into the robotics industry over the past few years. It launched Lay Robot, a collection of OpenAI models, data sets and tools to build robotic systems, in 2024. End quote. Time for the weekend. Long read suggestions and the first one builds off of something we talked about this week. The New York Times says that for some recent college gradu, the AI job apocalypse may already be here. You can see hints of this in the economic data. Unemployment for recent college graduates has jumped to an unusually high 5.8% in recent months, and the Federal Reserve bank of New York recently warned that the unemployment situation for those workers had deteriorated noticeably. Oxford Economics, a research firm that studies labor markets, found that unemployment for recent graduates was heavily concentrated in technical fields like finance and computer science, where AI has made faster gains. There are signs that entry level positions are being displaced by artificial intelligence at higher rates, the firm wrote in a recent report. But I'm convinced that what's showing up in the economic data is only the tip of the iceberg. In interview after interview, I'm hearing that firms are making rapid progress toward automating entry level work and that AI companies are racing to build virtual workers that can replace junior employees at a fraction of the cost. Corporate attitudes towards automation are changing, too. Some firms encourage managers to become AI first, testing whether a given task can be done by AI before hiring a human to do it. One tech executive recently told me his company had stopped hiring Anything below an L5 software engineer, a mid level title typically given to programmers with three to seven years of experience because lower level tasks could now be done by AI coding tools. Another told me that his startup now employed a single data scientist to do the kinds of tasks that required a team of 75 people at his previous company. Anecdotes like these don't add up to mass joblessness, of course. Most economists believe there are multiple factors behind the rise in unemployment for college graduates, including a hiring slowdown by big tech companies and broader uncertainty about President Trump's economic policies. But among people who pay close attention to what's happening in AI, alarms are starting to go off. This is something I'm hearing about left and right, said Molly Kinder, a fellow at the Brookings Institution, a public policy think tank who studies the impact of AI on workers. Employers are saying these tools are so good that I no longer need marketing analysts, finance analysts and research assistants. End quote. And finally today, this is not tech. But did you know Led Zeppelin financed the production of Monty Python and the Holy Grail from open culture and a YouTube video discussing this quote. Monty Python and the Holy Grail isn't a big budget spectacle, and nobody knew that better than the Pythons themselves. Necessity being the mother of invention, they turned the project's financial constraints into one of its many sources of humor, fashioning memorable gags out of everything from coconut shells substituting for horses to sudden shutdowns of filming that that ends the story. But as explained in the canned history video above, putting together even the modest sum with which they had to work was hardly a straightforward endeavor. Turned down by studios, the Pythons sought out the only financiers likely to possess both sufficient wealth and sufficient belief in an absurdist TV comedy troupe making their first proper film rock stars. This was the mid-1970s recall when a group with a few hit albums could find themselves making quite literally more money than they knew what to do with. Such was the case with with Pink Floyd, for example. After releasing the Dark side of the Moon in 1973, Monty Python for their part, had put out not only three seasons of their BBC series Monty Python's Flying Circus, but also a variety of purchasable goods like books and LPs. The latter made them the music industry connections that they could use to enlist the likes of not just the Floyd but also Led Zeppelin, Jethro Tull, as well as record labels like Island, Charisma and Chrysalis. As Eric Idle tweeted much later, Zeppelin contributed £31,000, Pink Floyd's company £21,000 and Jethro Tull's Ian Anderson £6,300, £627,000 in more recent value, or nearly £850,000 in US dollars in total. Altogether, Monty Python and the Holy Grail's budget came to £282,000 in £1974 by no means a king's ransom, but just enough to put together a comic take on the Arthurian legend. No more conventional investors than the Pythons were conventional filmmakers. The rock stars and other music industry figures involved made no visits to the set, nor offered any notes on the work in progress. One suspects that they were happy just to Monty Python project, and even more so to receive the tax break offered for films produced in the uk. In the event, of course, they all made their money back many times over with a cut of the Broadway musical adaptation Spamalot to boot. The film's immediate and outsized success can't have been far from the mind of George Harrison, that great enemy of the taxman, when Idol called him up a few years later asking for the money to make Life of Brian. End quote. No weekend bonus episodes for you this week. Talk to you on Monday.