Brian McCullough (0:04)

Welcome to the Tech Meme Ride home for Tuesday, June 24, 2025. I'm Brian McCullough. Today a new Xbox branded Meta Quest Amazon is expanding same day delivery even more what does it mean for the AI race if ChatGPT seems to be out competing Microsoft's copilot offerings in the enterprise space? Why is Wall street leading the way on AI adoption? And what exactly is Miramoradi's big new AI startup going to do? Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. Microsoft and Meta have unveiled the $399 Meta Quest 3S Xbox Edition, offering a few updates to the $299 Meta Quest 3S available in extremely limited quantities. Quoting Windows Central in the box, you get the 128 gigabyte Meta Quest 3S headset, not the more powerful 3. Two Meta Quest controllers, a pre paired Xbox Bluetooth controller, a Holol style Meta Quest Elite strap, three months of Meta Horizon plus and three months of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate. The Standard Meta Quest 3S costs $299 at Amazon, but when you start adding things like the Elite Strap, Xbox Game Pass the controller, and so on, this bundle actually works out to be a pretty good deal. The headset and controller themselves come in an Xbox carbon black colorway complete with Xbox style velocity green accents and it looks incredibly nice. I must say the Elite strap included is a huge step up from the regular Velcro fabric straps typically include included in these headsets and comes with a HoloLens style dial for incremental adjustments. This is a vastly more comfortable option than previous VR headsets I've used, so kudos for that. As much as I've railed on VR in the past, I have to admit the Meta Quest 3s experience is a huge, huge step up from other headsets I've used, primarily due to the inside out. Tracking the Meta Quest 2 was an absolutely frustrating experience. Having to create boundaries and set floor heights every time you wanted to use it was a chore. Wearing a huge blindfold on your face while losing access to your hands for anything other than controlling VR was simply an ear irritating experience that really required personal investment. Certainly not the most relaxing way to game. By any means, the Quest 3S is a huge step up. Thankfully with the Quest 3S you can now control windows with hand tracking, freeing up your hands to actually do things like navigate and in this case hold an Xbox controller. It feels more natural and dare I say, more hololens like albeit without Hololens absurd price tag and total lack of support for apps. It also doesn't have HoloLens strange letterboxing limitation. Either you can get into Xbox Cloud Gaming without ever needing to reach for the Touch Play controllers or enter a full and often nauseating immersive 3D environment. With Xbox Cloud Gaming pre installed and the Xbox Meta Controller prepared, you're pretty much ready to go out of the box. A quick sign in and you can immediately begin playing anything on the Xbox Cloud Gaming catalog and bring your Xbox console saves with you as well. You can pin windows to follow you around the house, set them to be extremely large cinema sized displays, multitask with other windows side by side with a YouTube video, or even shut off the cameras and immerse yourself in a virtual environment of your choosing. With Xbox Cloud Gaming's latency improving all the time playing space, Marine remastered felt virtually one to one native on 5 GHz WI Fi 6e Xbox cloud gaming feels like it's improving every time I use it, which is ideal for anyone who picks up the Meta Quest 3? S Xbox edition for this specific scenario. End Quote Amazon says it plans to bring same and next day delivery to tens of millions of people who live in more than 4,000 smaller US towns by the end of of 2026. Quoting the Verge Items categorized as everyday essentials, including groceries, beauty products, household goods or pet food will now be available to small town or rural customers for same day or next day delivery. If they are prime subscribers, they get unlimited free same day delivery when spending over $25 at checkout. Amazon has already expanded its speedy delivery options to customers in over 1000 small or rural communities and people are buying these essential items at a higher rate than before. Amazon says over 90% of the top 50 items purchased for same day delivery are everyday essentials items. The company was able to accomplish this massive expansion by spending a lot of money $4 billion according to Amazon, on building new facilities and hiring new delivery drivers. It's also transforming existing delivery hubs in these smaller communities into hybrid facilities where Amazon packages can be prepped for final delivery. And the company is using machine learning to better predict what items each communities buy in large quantities so it can make sure to have those items in stock for faster delivery. This includes the most popular and frequently purchased items like wireless headphones, coffee pods, crackers, paper towels and diapers, and curated to fit local preferences like Wild Bird Food in Dubuque, Iowa, Travel Backpacks in Finlay, Ohio and After Sun Body Butter in Sharptown, Maryland Amazon says, End quote the NHTSA says it is investigating incidents of Tesla's Robo taxis apparently violating traffic laws like by entering opposite lanes as seen on social media. And hey, one of our old friends of the POD is quoted right here quoting Bloomberg. In one video taken by investor Rob Maurer, who used to host a Tesla podcast, a Model Y he's riding in enters an Austin intersection in a left turn only lane. The Tesla hesitates to make the turn, swerves right and proceeds into an unoccupied lane meant for traffic moving in the opposite direction. A honking horn can be heard as the Tesla re enters the creek lane over a double yellow line, which drivers aren't supposed to cross. In two other posts on X initial writers in Driverless Model Y's shared footage of Tesla's speeding A vehicle carrying Sawyer Merritt, a Tesla investor, reached 35 mph shortly after passing a 30 mph speed limit sign, a video he posted shows. In a separate livestream from Herbert Ong, a YouTuber with more than 123,000 subscribers, he commented that the vehicle was going faster than the posted limit of 35 miles per hour. It's going 39 right now, which is perfect, right? Because I don't want to drive at 35 and it's driving at the same FL of traffic, Ong said. If everyone else is driving at this speed, you want to be at the same speed. Representatives for Tesla and the Austin Police Department didn't immediately respond to requests for comment on the videos. The automaker recalled more than 362,000 vehicles in February 2023 after NHTSA said its driver assistance system may allow cars to infringe on local traffic laws. A spokesman for the city of Austin said it hadn't received any safety incident reports regarding Tesla's robotaxis over the weekend. End quote. Meanwhile, Waymo has launched its Robo taxis in Atlanta, available exclusively in Uber's app covering a 65 square mile area. Quoting the Verge, Waymo's vehicles will only operate within a 65 square mile service area that includes Atlanta's downtown, Buckhead and Capitol View neighborhoods. The vehicles don't drive on highways yet, nor will they make trips to the airport. Another thing to consider Simply calling an Uber in Waymo's service area doesn't guarantee a robotaxi will show up like in Austin. The companies will start with a small fleet of vehicles and grow from there. Customers can increase their chances of being matched with a Waymo vehicle by opting into autonomous rides in the ride preferences section of their Uber app. The rides will cost the same as a typical Uber X, Uber Comfort or Uber Comfort electric ride. Once the Waymo vehicle arrives, customers can unlock the door, open the trunk, and start the ride from the Uber app. Rides can also be started by pressing the button on the rear touchscreen in the vehicle. Uber will manage fleet services including vehicle cleaning, maintenance, inspections, EV charging, and depot operations. The company is contracting with avmo formerly Moved Cars to handle these tasks. Waymo is still responsible for vehicle testing, roadside assistance, and certain elements of rider support. The companies will obviously share in the costs and the revenue produced by the Robotaxi service, though both companies have declined to share the split End quote ever wonder what ChatGPT and Claude are actually doing with your conversations? Have you ever even stopped to think about that? We all know Alexa listens to us and recommends products based on our conversations. Meta retargets us based on our browsing and engagement history. But now, in this new AI era, there's a new privacy problem to consider. Think about what else we tell these AI platforms our thoughts, our dreams, sensitive questions, business ideas, etc. They take all this information, tie it to your identity, and then sell it to various third parties and governments. ChatGPT literally has the former director of the NSA sitting on their board right now. That's why I've started using Venice AI, who is sponsoring today's podcast. Venice AI is a generic AI platform that is private and permissionless. They utilize leading open source AI models to deliver text, code and image generation to your web browser. There's no downloads, no installations of anything. Venice AI doesn't spy on you or censor the AI. Messages are encrypted and your conversation history is stored only in your browser. This is a cause I can get behind. If you want to join this too, and you want to use AI without fear of handing over your most intimate thoughts to a corporation or the government, you can get 20% off a pro plan using my link Venice AI, Techmeme and Code Techme that is Venice AI Techmeme and Code Techmeme. If you bypass security to save yourself some time, you're probably not alone. But fortunately, with one password, Extended Access Management, security and productivity no longer have to be at odds. Work happens everywhere. 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I've trusted 1Password for all my businesses for over a decade now. They're amazing. Join me go to 1Password.com ride to secure every app, device and identity, even the unmanaged ones. Right now my listeners get a free 2 week trial at 1Password.com Ride all lowercase that's 1Password.com Ride this is interesting vis a vis the strategic struggle going on right now in AI interviews with more than 24 Microsoft customers and salespeople show that Microsoft is apparently struggling to sell Copilot to enterprises, as many employees at enterprises seem to prefer ChatGPT. Quoting Bloomberg, OpenAI has done a tremendous job of making their product fun to use, said Senior Vice President Sean Breach. Copilot is still a pretty important tool, he added, but more so for use with Microsoft products such as outlook and teams. OpenAI's nascent strength in the enterprise market is giving its partner and biggest investor indigestion. Microsoft salespeople describe being caught flat footed at a time when they're under pressure to get Copilot into as many customers hands as possible. The behind the scenes dogfight is complicating an already fraught relationship between Microsoft and OpenAI. It's unclear whether OpenAI's momentum with corporations will continue, but the company recently said it has 3 million paying business users, a 50% jump from just a few months earlier. A Microsoft spokesperson said Copilot is used by 70% of the Fortune 500 and paid users have tripled compared with this time last year. Gartner analyst Jason Wong said many companies are still testing Copilot with relatively few employees, leaving room for various software vendors to win customers. But for now, he said, it's kind of a showdown between OpenAI and Microsoft. Both companies are essentially pitching the same thing, AI assistants that can handle onerous tasks researching and writing, analyzing data say potentially letting office workers focus on thornier challenges. Since both chatbots are largely based on the same OpenAI models, Microsoft Salesforce has struggled to differentiate Copilot from the much better known ChatGPT. According to people familiar with the situation, Microsoft's ubiquity should theoretically give it an advantage. The Windows operating system dominates the workplace and the company is baking AI into the world's most widely used suite of productivity apps. Traditionally, Microsoft salespeople have been able to persuade customers to buy the newest Whiz Bang because it works well with their existing software, cybersecurity defenses and procurement practices. The company's salespeople knew ChatGPT dominated the consumer chatbot market, but expected Microsoft to own the enterprise space for AI assistance thanks to decades long relationships with corporate IT departments. But by the time Microsoft began selling Copilot to businesses, many office workers had already tried out ChatGPT at home, giving the Chatbot a major first mover advantage. It doesn't help that OpenAI updates often take weeks before showing up in Microsoft software, thanks in part to bureaucratic snarls, the people said. Spataro says Microsoft does its own testing on each OpenAI release to ensure it'll improve user experience and maintain security standards. Not every change that is being made to the models actually is net positive, he said. With many office workers already familiar with ChatGPT and convinced that it's a better product, some companies are letting employees test both assistants. New York Life Insurance another Microsoft customer is rolling out ChatGPT and Copilot to all 12,000 personnel. After monitoring the trial and seeking feedback, the company will reevaluate which tools it wants to use for the long run, end quote. Or you can just go it alone. I find it interesting how Wall street is kind of leading the way on AI adoption internally. Apparently Goldman Sachs has launched a generative AI assistant of its own company wide internally to boost productivity and says around 10,000 employees are already using the so called GS AI assistant, quoting Reuters with the AI tools official company wide launch, Goldman joins a long list of big banks already leveraging the technology to shape their operations in a targeted manner and help employ and day to day tasks. Citigroup has AI tools such as CitiAssist, which searches internal bank policies and procedures, as well as Citi Stylus which helps with document summarization and comparisons. Morgan Stanley has a chatbot that helps financial advisors in interactions with clients, while bank of America's virtual assistant Erica focuses on day to day transactions of retail clients. The GSAI assistant will help Goldman employees in summarizing complex documents and drafting initial content to performing data analysis, according to the internal memo. Finally Today in the AI race, don't forget about this dark horse Mira Moradi's new startup Thinking Machines Lab reportedly raised $2 billion in what would be the largest seed round ever, far surpassing Yuga Labs $450 million seed round back in March of 2022. Quoting Crunchbase it is a round of unprecedented hugeness. The $2 billion Andreessen Horwitz led financing that Thinking Machines reportedly just closed at a $10 billion valuation is by far the largest seed round in the Crunchbase data set. It's not even close. The next largest US seed financings have all been in the $200 million to $450 million range. In addition to its record setting size, another standout characteristic of the Thinking Machines round is how little surprise it generated. This seems largely due to its status as a brainchild of top OpenAI alum. If OpenAI managed to secure a recent $300 billion post money valuation largely driven by the prowess of its team, it's reasonable to expect great things out of its early leaders in their solo ventures as well. End quote. But we're still kind of in the dark about what Thinking Machines is going to do, right? Well, quoting the information TML plans to use forms of reinforcement learning, a common AI development technique that rewards an AI model for accomplishing certain goals and penalizes it for other behaviors, said a person who spoke to Maratti. TML plans to customize mod on specific business metrics its customers track, known as key performance indicators, which typically relate to revenue or profit growth, multiple people who spoke to her said. Investors that have spoken to Maratti refer to TML's business model as RL for business. TML may be banking on the idea that customers of AI may be willing to pay a premium for models customized for their industry, such as customer support, investment banking or retail. TML may still pursue other enterprise AI ideas as well. The startup also plans to develop a product for consumers, though it isn't clear what that product might look like, according to a person who has spoken to TML employees. At one point, employees contemplated developing a consumer chatbot that would compete somewhat with OpenAI's ChatGPT, said another person who spoke to Marathi. TML is developing its AI using Nvidia powered servers it rents from Google Cloud, according to a person who has spoken with TML employees. That could give Google a reason to invest in TML with the hope that it spends more money to rent such servers as it grows. Google has made other such investments in AI startups such as Anthropic Safe Superintelligence and Character AI, among others. Other cloud providers also hope to work with Marati. For instance, in mid April, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy met with her in San Francisco, according to a person who was told about it by Maratti. Maratti has told investors the company hopes to leverage existing open source models, which aren't as powerful as closed source models like OpenAI's, but have gotten close to them in terms of performance. As DeepSeq recently showed, it isn't clear whether TML is using Deep Seq specifically. TML plans to pluck specific AI model layers to the sections that process information in phases and combine them. Doing so would shorten the amount of time it takes to develop TML's models, Moratti told investors. This technique is similar to model merging, in which researchers combine two or more models trained for different purposes to create a single AI that exhibits the strengths of the original two without requiring additional training. Such an approach could help TML get a product to market faster, Murati told investors TML's technical expertise could make the startup an attractive acquisition target for bigger firms. For instance, Meta Platform CEO Mark Zuckerberg has talked with Muraty, among many other startup founders, about the possibility of making an investment or acquiring her company in recent months. Though those talks didn't get far, said a person with knowledge of the situation. To potential acquirers, TML may resemble what DeepMind looked like more than a decade ago. After hiring dozens of machine learning doctorates and other experts in London, Google acquired DeepMind for more than $500 million in 2013 for the talent, beating out Zuckerberg's Facebook, which also sought to buy the team. DeepMind CEO Demis Hassibas now oversees Google's AI teams. End quote. Nothing more for you today. Talk to you tomorrow.