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Welcome to the Tech We Ride Home for Wednesday, November 12, 2025 I'm Brian McCullough. Today, forget Text to Video AI. We're rapidly moving into the Text to World generating AI. What if you showed up to your Airbnb and the fridge was already fully stocked? It seems like there's no uncanny valley when it comes to AI generated music. And does the big short guy have a point when he concerned trolls about the AI capex build out? Here's what you missed today. In the world of tech, when your business evolves, so does your risk of data loss. But with Veeam, your data is always on the map. Partner with Veeam for coverage that keeps you moving and get protection for workloads of all shapes and sizes, even the ones you haven't created yet so you can stay resilient as you scale. With Veeam, it's all good. Get workload coverage that works for your business. @veeam.com that's V E E A M.com A legend in the world of AI has launched a new model Phi Phi Le's World Labs has launched Marble, its first world model, to let users turn prompts, photos and other media into editable 3D environments after a recent beta. Quoting TechCrunch, the launch of the generative world model, first released in limited beta preview two months ago, comes a little over a year after World Labs came out of stealth with $230 million in funding and puts the startup ahead of competitors building world mod. World models are AI systems that generate an internal representation of an environment and can be used to predict future outcomes and plan actions. Startups like Descartes and Odyssey have released free demos, and Google's Genie is still in limited research preview. Marble differs from these and even World Labs own real time model RTFM because it creates persistent downloadable 3D environments rather than generating worlds on the fly as you explore. This, the company says, results in less morphing or inconsistency and lets users export worlds as Gaussian splats, meshes or videos. Marble is also the first model of its kind to offer AI native editing tools and a hybrid 3D editor that lets users block out spatial structures before AI fills in the visual details. This is a brand new category of model that's generating 3D worlds, and this is something that's going to get better over time. It's something we've already improved quite a lot, justin Johnson, co founder of world Labs, told TechCrunch last December. World Labs showed how its early models could generate interactive 3D scenes based on a single image. While impressive, the somewhat cartoonish scenes weren't fully explorable since movements were limited to a small area and there were occasional rendering errors. In my trial of the beta preview, I found Marble generated impressive worlds from image prompts alone. From game like environments to photorealistic versions of my living room, scenes morphed at the edges, though that's apparently been improved in today's launch. That said, a world I'd generated in the beta using a single prompt looked better and matched my intent more closely than the same prompt does now. Marble's take on creative control starts with input flexibility. The beta only accepted single images, forcing the model to invent unseen details for a 360 degree view. With the full launch, users can now upload multiple images or short clips to show a space from different angles and have the model generate fairly realistic digital twins. Then we have Chisel, an experimental 3D editor that lets users block out coarse spatial layouts, think white walls, boxes or planes, and then add text prompts to guide the visual style. Marble generates the world decoupling structure from style, similar to how HTML provides the structure of a website and CSS adds in color. Unlike text based editing, Chisel lets you directly manipulate objects. I can just go in there and grab the 3D block that represents the couch and move it somewhere else, johnson said. Another new feature that gives you more editing control is the ability to expand a world. Once you generate a world, you can expand it up to, johnson said. When you move to a piece of the world that's starting to break apart, you can basically tell the model to expand there or generate more world in the vicinity of where you currently are and then it can add more detail in that region. Users who want to create extremely large spaces can combine multiple worlds with Composer mode. Johnson demonstrated this for me with two worlds. He had already built a room made of cheese with grape chairs and another of a futuristic meeting room and space. Marble is available via four subscription tiers free which allows four jets generations from text image or panorama standard at $20 a month for 12 generations plus multi image video input and advanced editing pro at $35 a month gets you 25 generations with scene expansion and commercial rights and max at $95 a month. All features and 75 generations. Johnson thinks the initial use cases for Marble will be gaming visual effects for film and virtual reality. In gaming, Johnson sees developers using Marble to generate background environments and ambient spaces and then importing those ass game engines like Unity or Unreal Engine to add interactive elements, logic and code. It's not designed to replace the entire existing pipeline for gaming, but to just give you assets that you can drop into that pipeline, he said. For VFX work, Marble sidesteps the inconsistency and poor camera control that plague AI video generators, per Johnson. Its 3D assets let artists stage scenes and control camera movements with frame perfect precision, he said. While Johnson said World Labs isn't focusing on virtual reality applications right now, he noted the industry is starved for content and excited about the launch. Marble is already compatible with the Vision Pro and Quest 3 VR headsets, and every generated world can be viewed in VR today. Marble may also have potential use cases for robotics. Johnson noted that unlike image and video generation, robotics doesn't have the benefit of a large repository of training data. But with generators like Marble, it becomes easier to simulate training environments. You might soon be able to show up to your Airbnb rental and almost instantly have a fully stocked fridge. That's because Airbnb plans to launch a three month pilot on January 5th to let guests order groceries via Instacart within its app for rentals in Phoenix, Orlando and la. Quoting Bloomberg, the short term rental company will offer kitchen stocking through a three month pilot program, Airbnb said in an email Wednesday sent to some hosts. During the pilot, Airbnb will pay hosts $25 for every completed order and a $100 bonus for their first one if they receive guests pre orders and put them away before they check in, according to a copy of the email viewed by Bloomberg News. The pilot program is open to select hosts with available listings in Phoenix, Orlando and Los Angeles, according to a help page on Airbnb's website. Guests will be allowed to place an Instac within the Airbnb app up to three weeks before their stay, an Instacart spokesperson said in response to a Bloomberg inquiry. The new grocery ordering option is the latest addition to Airbnb's services offering that launched in May, which lets guests book a la carte hotel like services such as personally cooked meals, massages, fitness training and hair makeup and nail appointments. Chief Executive Officer Brian Chesky has said experiences and services will help add $1 billion or more in revenue a year, though he cautioned last week that it may take years before the new product lines become material part of Airbnb's business. The integration with Airbnb also marks the latest embedded partnership that Instacart has announced in recent weeks as it seeks to increase orders and deepen customer loyalty in the face of growing competition from DoorDash and Uber. Last month it rolled out its ordering interface to grubhub's app. Ryan Hamburger, Instacart's vice president of commercial partnerships, said at the time that the company is focused on striking similar partnerships over the next six to 12 months so it can meet customers where they already are. We know there's an uncanny valley problem for AI, pictures and video and even audio as we've heard on this very podcast. But maybe there is not an uncanny valley for a specific type of audio which would be music like at all. Quoting Reuters A staggering 97% of listeners cannot distinguish between artificial intelligence generated and human composed songs, a Deezer Ipsos survey showed on Wednesday, underscoring growing concerns that AI could upend how music is created, consumed and monetized. The findings of the survey, for which Ipsos polled 9,000 participants across eight countries including the US, Britain and France, highlight rising ethical concerns in the music industry as AI tools capable of generating songs raise copyright concerns and threaten the livelihoods of artists. It also showed that most listeners want clear labeling on AI generated music, music streaming platform Deezer said. The study found that 73% of respondents supported disclosure when AI generated tracks are recommended, 45% sought filtering options and 40% said they would skip AI generated songs entirely. Around 71% expressed surprise at their inability to distinguish between human made and synthetic tracks. Deezer, which has 9.7 million subscrib, has seen daily AI music submissions rise to more than 50,000, about a third of total uploads, up sharply from 18% in April. Deezer said more than half of the respondents felt uncomfortable at not being able to tell the difference. Pollsters also asked broader questions about the impact of AI, with 51% saying the technology would lead to more low quality music on streaming platforms and almost 2/3 believing it will lead to a loss of creativity. The survey results clearly show that people care about music and want to know if they're listening to AI or human made tracks or not, deezer CEO Alexis Laterner said in a statement. End quote and quoting Music business worldwide, although fully AI generated music currently accounts for only around a half of 1% of all streams on Deezer, the company maintains that fraudulent activity remains the primary motivation behind these uploads. The platform says IT removes all 100% AI generated tracks from algorithmic recommendations and excludes them from editorial playlists to minimize their impact on the royalty pool. Deezer has been among the most aggressive streaming services in detecting AI generated content. Building on its broader efforts to combat low quality uploads. The platform previously launched an artist centric payment model with Universal music group in 2023 and reported deleting 23 million quote useless tracks as part of those efforts. In September, rival Spotify reported that it had deleted over 75 million spammy tracks and unveiled a suite of new AI music policies. End quote. We all remember the choices that shaped the course of our lives in business. World renowned venture capital firm Sequoia Capital calls them Crucible Moments. Their podcast brings you inside the pivotal decisions that defined some of today's most influential companies. Hosted by Sequoia's Rule of Botha, Crucible Moments Season 3 pulls back the curtain on the untold stories behind companies like Stripe, Zipline, Palo Alto Networks, Klarna Supercell and more. I loved the recent episode with the founder of Zipline and how even late to the game, they are leapfrogging the bigger players to bring true autonomous drone delivery not just to hospitals, but now to customers of the likes of Walmart and Chipotle. I might win that burrito delivery bet someday soon. Tune in to Sequoia's new season of Crucible Moments to discover how some of the most transformational companies of the modern era were built. Crucible Moments is available everywhere you get your podcasts and@CrucibleMoments.com is the daily commute making your muscles feel stiff? Well, there could be a natural way to help relieve that discomfort. Cornbread Hemp creates premium USDA Organic Full Spectrum CBD gummies designed to help with stress, body aches and sleep. Their products are made exclusively from the hemp flower, the most potent part of the plant for maximum purity and effectiveness. Every batch is third party lab tested to ensure quality, safety and consistency. In short, Cornbread Hemp gummies are formulated to work with your body, not against it. Right now, Tech Brew Ride Home listeners can save 30% on their first order. Just head to cornbreadhemp.com brew and use code BREW at checkout. That's cornbreadhemp.com Brew and use code Brew. Michael Burry, he of the Big Short fame, is causing a stir by warning that hyperscalers are underestimating AI chip depreciation. It's possible some big players know this, and that might be contributing to the recent wave of tech layoffs. Quoting Bloomberg. Costing tens of thousands of dollars each, Nvidia's pioneering AI chips make up a hefty chunk of the $400 billion that big tech plans to invest this year. A bill expected $3 trillion by 2029 but unlike 19th century railroads or the dot com boom's fiber optic cables, the GPUs fueling today's AI mania are short lived assets with a shelf life of perhaps five years. As with your iPhone, this stuff tends to lose value and may need upgrading soon. Because Nvidia and its rivals aim to keep launching better models, customers like OpenAI will have to deploy them to stay competitive. So while it's comforting that the companies spending most wildly have mountains of cash to throw around, OpenAI aside, the brief useful life of the chips and the generous accounting assumptions underpinning all of this investment are less consoling. Michael Burry, who made his name betting against US Housing and who's recently turned to the AI boom, weighted in this week warning on X that hyperscalers industry jargon for the giant companies building gargantuan data centers are underestimating depreciation. Far from being a one off outlay, there's a danger of AI CapEx becoming a huge recurring expense. That's great for Nvidia and company, but not necessarily for hyperscalers such as Google and Microsoft. Some face a depreciation tsunami that's forcing them to be extra vigilant about controlling other costs. Amazon has plans to eliminate roughly 14,000 jobs. And while Wall street is used to financing fast depreciating assets such as aircraft and autos, it's worrying that private credit fund are increasingly using GPUs as collateral to finance loans. This includes lending to more speculative startups known as NeoClouds, who offer GPUs for rent. Microsoft alone has signed more than $60 billion of Neo Cloud deals. Magnetar Capital, Blackstone and Macquarie Group are among those providing such financing. Nvidia, meanwhile, is reportedly looking at using special purpose vehicles to raise debt to buy and rent chips to customers such as OpenAI and Elon Musk's XAI. The problem is we're about to go from tens of billions of debt that's funding quickly depreciating GPUs to hundreds of billions of dollars. And then there could be serious trouble. Gil Luria, head of technology research at D.A. davidson, tells me such worries may seem arcane when tech firms boast of colossal revenue and sizable productivity gains from AI investments. But tech investors may have forgotten how much depreciation hurts. Starting from around 2020, hyperscalers began extending the depreciable life of servers to about six years from as little as three years, meaning the earnings hit from their heavy spending was more spread out. At the time, this seemed justified because the pace of computing advances known as Moore's Law appeared to be slowing and tech companies found ways to keep their equipment running longer. Those changes have certainly helped profit. Meta Platform's January decision to adopt a five and a half year useful life for most of its servers and network assets, up from four to five, previously boosted its net income by close to $2 billion in the nine months to September. Of course, GPUs don't suddenly become useless when a new version arrives. Not everyone needs Leading Edge Kit to train frontier AI models. Processors can be repurposed for less demanding AI inference and other computing tasks, or they can be resold in emerging markets. And software innovations can extend their economic life. The head of Alphabet's AI and infrastructure team, Amin Vadat, has said that its seven and eight year old custom chips, known as TPUs, have 100% utilization. You won't always need a Porsche 911 engine to run these workloads. A VW engine will do fine, says Anurag Rana, senior technology analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence. As GPUs become an asset class, their residual value will depend on a cocktail of unknowables, warns short seller Carrisdale Capital. This includes future semiconductor architecture shifts, hyperscalers developing their own custom silicon, and trade politics such as the US Export ban on advanced chips to China. I'd add that electricity constraints holding back data center construction could make it less economic to operate older, less efficient chips. If tech companies underestimate how rapidly processors lose value and technological relevance, they may have to book impairments. In the short term, you'd expect to see reported profit much higher than cash flows because the former doesn't include all the upfront capital spending. But if they this gap persists, it could be a sign that replacement costs are starting to bite and earnings are overstated. Rose tinted neocloud financial models may be undone if GPUs lose value quicker than expected. A lack of demand or AI breakthroughs that are less thirsty for computing power could create a need to offload chips en masse. Nvidia's soaring stock price is the simplest barometer for AI mania. But it's the more opaque, more complicated world of debt, finance and accounting depreciation that could yet puncture the AI bubble. My friends, my dear friends, Europa Universalis 5 is finally out, and it has a strong potential to completely ruin or at least take over my life. The last two nights in a row I've been up till 3am playing as Scotland, trying to take advantage of the Hundred Years War to try to kill England and take over the whole of the British Isles. If you are a certain kind of nerd, either you need to run right now and install this game or else you should avoid it like the crack cocaine that it is. Talk to you tomorrow.