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The Roomba Hits The Wall
00:21:05
Your Roomba is circling the drain with iRobot filing for bankruptcy. Remember credit default swaps? Turns out they’re not just for hedging housing anymore. Nano Banana looks so realistic because it’s mimicking your sub-par smartphone camera output. And why can’t everybody participate in early stage startup investing?
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Close your eyes, exhale, feel your body relax and let go of whatever you're carrying today. Well, I'm letting go of the worry that I wouldn't get my new contacts in time for this class. I got them delivered free from 1-800-contacts. Oh my gosh, they're so fast. And breathe. Oh sorry. I almost couldn't breathe when I saw the discount they gave me on my first order. Oh sorry. Namaste.
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Visit 1-800-contacts.com today to save on your first order.
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1-800-Contacts. Welcome to the Tech Brew Ride home for Monday, December 15th, 2025. I'm Brian McCullough. Today your Roomba is circling the drain with iRobot filing for bankruptcy. Remember credit default swaps? Turns out they're not just for hedging housing anymore. Nano Banana looks so realistic because it's mimicking your subpar smartphone camera output. And why can't everybody participate in early stage startup investing? Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. You may have noticed that your CRM system has become crazy with bots and agents all of a sudden at the Tech Brew Ride Home. We love AI, but not when it's used to commit fraud or launch ransomware. Fortunately, Memoto, the creator of continuous verification, now offers the next generation of Continuous Captcha. Memoto. Continuous Captcha diverts only the agents and bots attempting to gain access to your CRM through registration forms. With Memoto, good agents can do what agen do enable your customers to have more productive experiences on your website or app while stopping bad agents from defrauding you and your customers. It's a win for everyone except the cybercriminals. Right now, our listeners can purchase a year of Mimoto continuous captcha for $5,000, a 20% discount on their lowest price plan. To learn more, head to Mimoto AI Ride Home. That's Mimoto AI Ride Home. IRobot has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy and reached a restructuring agreement to hand over control to its secured lender and main Chinese supplier, Shenzhen Pica. Quoting Bloomberg, A common stock of the company, founded in 1990 by engineers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, will be wiped out under the proposed Chapter 11 plan filed in Delaware on Sunday. The bankruptcy plan will allow iRobot to remain as a going concern and continue to meet its commitments to employees and make timely payments in full to vendors and other creditors for amounts owed throughout the court supervised process, the company said in a statement. In the filing, the company listed between 100 and $500 million of assets and liabilities End quote To recount the Sad saga of iRobot, let's quote from TechCrunch. There's something painfully American about the arc of iRobot, the company that taught your vacuum to navigate around the furniture. Founded in 1990 in Bedford, Massachusetts, by MIT roboticist Rodney Brooks and his former students Col Angle and Helen Grenier, the company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on Sunday, punctuating a 35 year run that took it from the dreams of AI researchers to your kitchen floor and finally to the tender mercies of its Chinese supplier. Brooks, the founding director of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab and the robotics field's resident provocateur, spent the 80s watching insects and having epiphanies about how simple systems could produce complex behaviors. By 1990, he translated those insights into a company that would eventually sell over 50 million robots. The Roomba, launched in 2002, became the rare gadget that transcended its category to become a verb, a meme and, to the amusement of many, a cat transportation device. The money soon followed, with the company raising $38 million altogether, including from the Carlyle Group, before going public in a 2005 IPO that raised $103.2 million. By 2015, iRobot was flush enough to launch its own venture arm, prompting TechCrunch to rightly declare that robot domination may have just taken another step forward. The plan at the time was to invest 100,000 dol to $2,000,000 and up to 10 seed and series A robotics startups each year. It was the kind of move that marks a company's arrival the moment when you're successful enough to fund the next generation's dreams. Then Amazon came knocking. In 2022, the corporate giant agreed to acquire iRobot for $1.7 billion in what would have been Amazon's fourth largest acquisition ever at the time. In a press release announcing the tie up, Angle, who'd been CEO since the company's inception, spoke about creating innovative, practical products and finding a better place for our team to continue. It seemed like a fairytale ending, the scrappy MIT spinoff absorbed into the Everything store's sprawling empire. Except European regulators had other ideas. Indeed, amid threats they would block the deal, they believed Amazon could foreclose rivals by restricting or degrading access to its Marketplace. Amazon and iRobot agreed to kill the deal in January 2024, with Amazon paying a $94 million breakup fee and walking away. Angle resigned. The company's shares nosedived. It shed 31% of its workforce. What followed afterward was a slow motion collapse. Earnings had been declining since 2021, thanks to supply chain chaos and Chinese competitors flooding the market with cheaper robot vacuums. The Carlyle Group, which provided a $200 million lifeline back in 2023, ultimately just prolonged the inevitable. Carlyle finally sold that loan last month, presumably at a discount, though it didn't specify either way. Well, when the terms from 2008 come roaring back, apparently Credit default swaps tied to a handful of US tech groups have climbed 90% since September as investors seek ways to protect against an AI debt bust, quoting the FT trading in products that pay out when companies default is soaring as investors hunt for ways to protect their portfolios against the risk that the artificial intelligence boom turns into a bust. Volumes in so called credit default swaps tied to a handful of US tech groups have climbed 90% since early September, according to data from clearinghouse DTCC. The expanding use of these strategies underscores how some investors are growing uneasy about a rush of bond deals by tech companies to finance AI infrastructure, which could take years to generate returns. The rush to hedge against potential defaults comes as Wall Street's tech sell off was reignited last week by earnings from software group Oracle and chipmaker Broadcom that had fallen short of investors lofty expectations. The debt and equity of companies linked to the tech boom have whipsawed in recent months as traders scrutinized earnings reports and debated how competing AI products from companies such as OpenAI, Google and Anthropic would affect demand for chips and data centers. The uptick in CDS trading has been particularly pronounced for Oracle and cloud computing company CoreWe, both of which are raising billions of dollars in debt to secure data center capacity. A new market for meta CDS sprang up after the company sold $30 billion worth of bonds to finance AI projects in October. CDS are used for default protection, but also to hedge against or bet on swings in bond prices. Single name CDS volumes are up significantly this quarter, particularly for the hyperscalers building huge data centers across the U.S. said Nathaniel Rosenbaum, an investment grade credit strategist at JP Morgan. A senior executive at a large U.S. credit investment echoed that sentiment, noting that CDS trading in single names has increased markedly with folks increasingly using baskets on the big tech companies or on Oracle and Meta specifically. How do you protect yourself and create a hedge? The most common way is a basket of technology cds, the person added. Appetite for CDS for highly rated US Companies was thin to non existent at the start of the year, when tech groups were primarily funding their AI spending through their hefty cash piles and strong earnings. The market warmed up once those companies began to tap debt markets to cover their mounting costs. Meta, Amazon, Alphabet and Oracle raised a combined $88 billion this autumn to fund AI projects, with JP Morgan predicting that investment grade companies are on Track to raise $1.5 trillion by 2030. End Quote. Amazon has rolled out a feature called Ask this Book to the Kindle iOS app, letting readers ask questions about plot or characters and authors can't opt out. Quoting PCMag called Ask this Book, the new feature allows users to highlight any passage from a book they've bought or borrowed on their iPhone's Kindle app and ask questions about what they're reading without leaving the page. For example, it can fill readers in on plot details or explain who certain characters are. Amazon didn't disclose exactly how many books the feature is currently available for, but said thousands of bestselling English language books have been enabled. The company said the feature will roll out to physical Kindle devices and Android in 2026, though no fir date was given. However, the tech giant has provided few details about how the new feature actually works, and the tool could prove controversial in today's hotly contested AI copyright environment. In an interview with publishing industry magazine Publunch spotted by Booksite Reactor, an Amazon spokesperson said, to ensure a consistent reading experience, the feature is always on and there is no option for authors or publishers to opt titles out. Amazon also reportedly failed to answer PubLaunch's questions about what licensing rights it is using to enable the new tool, adding nor did they elaborate on the technical details of the service and any protections involved. For example, it's not clear how Amazon plans to prevent AI hallucinations or whether the text could be used for AI training by large language models. If you're interested in trying the feature anyway, head to Ask this Book in the In Book menu, or simply highlight any passage as you read. You can then tap one of the suggested questions or type your own in to get answers from Amazon's new tool and keep the conversation going with followers questions. In another potential plus for forgetful readers, Kindle is also introducing a recaps feature. Amazon says this works much like the previously on segment before a TV show, providing a quick refresher on storylines and character arcs in Kindle books you own or have borrowed. End quote. If you're a small business owner, you probably assume that your biz is flying under the radar with hackers and cybercriminals that FOL folks is where you'd unfortunately be wrong. Teams of any size can be a target, but the good news is, even the smallest teams can foil cybercrime. 1Password provides simple security solutions to help small teams manage the number one risk that bad actors exploit. And that's weak passwords. However complex your security needs, Get1Password provides centralized management to make sure your company's logins are secure, whether you have dedicated it staff or not. Take the first step to better security by securing your team's credentials. Find out more at 1Password.com Ride and start securing every login that's the number1Password.com Ride to say compliance is complicated is an understatement. Constantly worrying about SOC2, ISO, HIPAA, CMMC, FedRamp, and more can leave your head spinning. Even worse, a misstep can get pretty costly for your startup. That's why Delve is designed as an AI native compliance platform. Delve uses AI agents to handle headaches like taking repetitive screenshots for you, monitoring your tech stack for security gaps in real time, auto filling security questionnaires in your browser or in CSV, and creating secure data rooms to send to prospects and auditors. Their team can personally work with you in Slack to get you 100% compliant and manage your whole audit for you. Over 1000 of the fastest growing companies get compliance done in Delve, including lovable, bland, micro one instantly and 11x for listeners. They're offering an exclusive $1,000 discount on any compliance framework. Check out Delve co Morning Brew and start using AI for compliance. That's Delve co Morning Brew. The Verge says AI image generators like Nano Banana have increased their realism of late by mimicking phone camera traits in contrast exposure and sharpening to avoid the dreaded uncanny valley. That's the thing about AI images they often tend toward a neutral, bland middle ground. Your request for an image of a table will look basically right, but it will also feel like the result of a computer averaging out every table it's ever seen into something lacking any actual character. The things that make an image of a table look like the real thing or reproduction of your own facial features, for example, are actually imperfections. I don't mean the bizarre artifacts of AI trying to understand letters of the Alphabet. I mean a little clutter, messiness, and lighting that's less than ideal. And lately that also means imitating the imperfections of our most popular cameras. Google updated its image model less than a month ago, touting nanobananapro as its most advanced and realistic model yet. It's able to draw from real world knowledge and render text better. But the thing I find most interesting is that it often mimics the look of a photo taken with a phone camera. Contrast or lack thereof Perspective Aggressive sharpening exposure choices so many of the images this model generated for me bear the hallmarks of phone camera systems. Whether you're aware of it or not, you're probably attuned to this look too. The small sensors and lenses in our phones use multiframe processing to overcome their limitations compared to a bigger camera, and these photos are optimized for viewing on a small, smaller screen. Although that means phone photos have a certain look compared to more artistic representations of a scene, boosting shadows to reveal more details and cranking up sharpness to make subjects pop. Apparently Google's image generator has absorbed this style too. Google isn't alone in offering a more realistic look to generated images. Adobe's Firefly image generator has a control labeled Visual Intensity that lets you tone down the glowy AI look. The results look less pristine and more like they were captured with a real camera, maybe more of a professional camera than a phone camera, which makes sense giving Adobe's target audience of professionals. But even Meta's AI generator has a slider for stylization which dials the realism up or down accordingly. Elsewhere, video generation tools like OpenAI's Sora 2 and Google's VO3 have been used to create visual clips mimicking the low resolution, grainy visuals of security cameras. When the AI only has to be as good as a cctv, it can be pretty convincing. Finally today over the weekend, the Wall Street Journal took a look at the recent efforts to give retail investors access to private markets where shares of startups like OpenAI Trade and the opportunity and risks of doing so. For most Americans, the universe of stocks they can invest in is rapidly shrinking. The number of public companies in the US is half of its peak in the late 1990s. That's that's not a problem for the rich, though. The ultra wealthy are able to buy and sell shares of the buzziest private companies via invite only transactions long before they list the shares on public stock exchanges. That's created a two tier market. One tier is a private club of sorts where a privileged group can obtain shares of companies still in their early growth stages. Everyone else is left with older, slower growing names. The dynamic is exacerbating the wealth disparity in the US as the growth in the net worth of the richest Americans is far outpacing all other income group. Some policymakers and economists see this as an existential threat to the US Economy. The most powerful critic is the chairman of the securities and Exchange Commission, Paul Atkins. Atkins is trying to entice more companies to go public and trying to open up access to private markets to a much wider group of investors. Young companies like intel and Apple decades ago sold shares to the public to raise money to hire employees, build factories and fund development of new products, Atkins says. Insiders got returns, obviously, but the public really shared in those, atkins said. Nowadays, it's completely reversed. This summer, President Trump signed an executive order to make it easier for employers to include private markets and other non traditional offerings in retirement plans. The order also asked the SEC to consider changing who can invest in private markets. Critics of the plan argue that the guardrails that limit access to private markets are necessary to protect unsophisticated investors. Instead of easing those requirements, they say, private companies should be held to a higher standard, which in turn could nudge more companies to go public. As it stands now, for instance, private companies aren't required to disclose their financials to their investors. That's one reason that investing in private companies isn't for the faint of heart. Without a clear picture of a company's revenues and costs, it's difficult to put a value on its stock. Once an investor does buy shares, there's often no easy place to sell. A cottage industry of brokerages have popped up in recent years to tap into the fervor for buying private stock. There have been instances of fraud. Finance executives argue that if they standardize buying shares of private companies, fees and fraud will fall and the liquidity of the market will increase. Also true, these Wall street firms stand to collect bigger fees themselves. If private markets become an even bigger business, this market could be huge, said Charles Schwab chief executive Rick Wurster on Bloomberg Business Radio last month. Charles Schwab last month agreed to buy Forge Global, which lets investors buy into buzzy companies like SpaceX and OpenAI, in part through SPVs. That came Morgan Stanley agreed to buy Equity Zen, a rival private stock marketplace. In December, Nasdaq Private Market announced a partnership with wealth management firm Sarity Partners to give Serity clients access to private company shares that NASDAQ Private Market sells on its platform. If securities and Exchange Commissioner Paul Atkins is successful in widening access to private companies, it won't mean that small time investors will be invited into the inner circle. However, Sam Altman and Elon Musk won't suddenly be calling someone with $10,000 in their brokerage account to see if they want to participate in a new funding round. Instead, mom and pop investors will use platforms like the ones that Charles Schwab and Morgan Stanley have agreed to buy. In an interview, Atkins declined to discuss such platforms, but said the average Joe should be able to invest in private companies just like the rich, as long as there are guardrails. So they're not buying quote the worst thing on the block with high fees. Why should ordinary investors be closed off in so many ways? Atkins asked. Hey, thanks to those of you that sent me notifications that I made your year end wrapped lists, but check out what a listener did Patrick Barry spun up a specific rapt for this podcast over on GitHub Hub with some interesting data. For example, according to this this year I did a total of 311 episodes. There's an average of 5.5 links per episode. The most linked to news source is Bloomberg followed by the Verge. The most mentioned company this year was OpenAI with 377 mentions, followed by Apple, Google and Meta. There's tons of fun additional stats on there as well. So bottom link in the show notes is is to this Mutant ride Home specific wrapped. Check it out. It's cool. Thanks Patrick. Talk to you tomorrow.
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