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- [00:04]
Brian McCullough
Welcome to the TechMe write home for Wednesday, March 12, 2025. I'm Brian McCullough. Today Niantic officially sells to that Saudi owned game developer iRobot says it might not be alive in 12 months time. Sam Altman believes he has an AI that can write believable fiction. Is the cavalry coming to save intel? And why can't we create a true AI Einstein in a data center? Here's what you missed today in the world of tech Foreign Niantic Labs says it is selling its video game division, including Pokemon Go, to Saudi Arabia owned developer Scope Lee for three and a half billion dollars, subject to regulatory approval. Quoting the Verge should the deal go through, it will also bring Niantic's social companion apps for Pokemon Go, Campfire and Wayfarer under Scopely ownership. Scopely says it will gain Niantic's entire team of exceptional game makers and category leading games. However, the Peridot and Ingress AR gaming titles, the latter of which is also supported by the Wayfarer mapping app, will remain under the ownership and development of Niantic Spatial Pokemon Go attracted more than 500 million players in its first year, but its popularity was impacted in 2020 when global COVID lockdowns kept people inside their homes. The company has since canceled multiple projects and laid off at least 310 employees between 2022 and 2023 in an attempt to weather the current challenges in the market. Today's announcement is Saudi Arabia's latest attempt to muscle its way into the gaming industry, having used its Saudi Public Investment Fund, or pif, to acquire stakes in Nintendo, Activision Blizzard and ea. The PIF was also used to establish esports and gaming company Savvy Games Group in 2021, which later acquired Monopoly Go developer Scopely for $4.9 billion in 2023. End quote. Yeah, you might be saying Brian, is $3.5 billion that big a deal compared to, say, the Activision Blizzard acquisition? Right? But this is about scale in a different sense. This deal gives Scopely a total audience of more than 500 million players driven by Monopoly Go. Quoting the FT Monopoly Go was the second highest grossing mobile game of last year, according to app store researcher App Magic, with players spending an estimated $2.2 billion. San Francisco based Niantic, which was spun out of Google's mapping unit in 2015 and valued at $9 billion in 2021, is selling its games business to Scopely at the same time as spinning off a new unit focused on geospatial AI. Next generation map of the world formed from images and location data captured by its players. John Hanke, Niantic's founder and chief executive, said its new venture, called Niantic Spatial, was working on maps that make the world intelligible for machines, from smart glasses to robots. Niantic is building the models that will help AI move beyond the screen and into the real world, he said. Scopely will continue to share some player data from its games as part of a $5 million investment in Niantic Spatial, which will also be capitalized using 200 million euro of its former PAR balance sheet. For Savvy, the deal is the latest step in a plan by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to make Saudi Arabia a global hub for gaming. The plan kicked off in 2022 when the government unveiled a national gaming and esports strategy with the kingdom's Sovereign Wealth Fund tasked with achieving that goal. As part of the country's efforts to diversify its economy away from dependence on oil revenues, the public investment fund earmarked nearly $40 billion to make the kingdom a force in gaming and build a local industry, with plans to establish 250 gaming companies in Saudi Arabia and create 39,000 jobs by 2030. Savvy is seen as the main vehicle for these ambitions. A string of deals followed, including taking stakes in Nintendo Electronic Arts, Activision Blizzard and Take2 Interactive. The country has also hosted major video game tournaments in recent years. The latest of those events came last summer when Riyadh hosted the Esports World cup, where more than 500 teams competed for a prize pool of more than $60 million. End quote is the Roomba circling the deadpool? Roomba parent company iRobot stock is down more than 35% this morning after the company warned of substantial doubt over its ability to continue operating after Amazon abandoned a $1 billion plus takeover in January 2024. Quoting Bloomberg Amazon abandoned its plans to buy the roommaker last year after clashing with European Union regulators who had threatened to block the deal, demonstrating the intense the tech giant was facing from antitrust regulators on both sides of the Atlantic. The fallout for Irobot, which had already been struggling, was swift. Its shares tumbled the most in years, and the company's market value stood at less than $200 million as of Tuesday. Carlyle Group provided a $200 million loan through its private credit arm in 2023 to iRobot, which was burning cash at the time. The financing was intended to provide the company some liquidity while antitrust regulators reviewed the planned Amazon takeover. Quoting CNN iRobot has been working to turn things around. This week, the company released eight new roombas, marking the largest product launch in the company's 30 year history. IRobot hopes the new products will help boost its revenue, which plunged 44% in the fourth quarter compared to a year earlier. This follows a tumultuous year for the robotics company, which lost its CEO and founder. Colin Angle, saw the planned purchase by Amazon fall apart under regulatory scrutiny and laid off over 50% of its workforce. In its quarterly financial report published March 12, the company said it had initiated a formal strategic review to evaluate a broad range of alternatives, including but not limited to exploring a potential sale or strategic transaction and refinancing our debt. If its new line of products is not a success, which the report notes is entirely possible due to consumer demand, competition, macroeconomics conditions and tariff policies, and no other recourses found to pay off its debt, Irobot says the company may be unable to continue beyond 12 months. End Quote Google has unveiled Gemma 3, what it calls the world's best single accelerator model in 1B, 4B, 12B and 27 billion sizes, saying it outperforms Llama 405B. But again, you might be saying another model, who cares? Well, this one is so optimized you can run it on one single gpu. So from the Should Nvidia be Worried? File quoting the Verge, the company claims that it's the world's best single accelerator model, outperforming competition from Facebook's Llama, Deepseek and OpenAI for performance on a host with a single GPU, as well as optimized capabilities for running on Nvidia's GPUs and dedicated AI hardware. Gemma3's Vision Encoder is also upgraded with support for high res and non square images, While the new Shield Gemma 2 image safety classifier is available for use to filter both image input and output for content classified as sexually explicit, dangerous or violent. Last year it was unclear how much interest there would be in a model like Gemma. However, the popularity of Deep SEQ and others shows there is interest in AI tech with lower hardware requirements. Despite its claims of advanced capabilities. Google also says Gemma 3's enhanced stem performance prompted specific evaluations focused on its potential for misuse in creating harmful substances. Their results indicate a low risk level. End quote what exactly constitutes an open or open source AI model remains a topic of debate, and with Google's Gemma that has focused on the company's license that restricts what people are allowed to use it for, which has not changed with this new release. Google is continuing to promote Gemma with Google Cloud Credits, and the Gemma3Academic program will allow academic researchers to apply for $10,000 worth of credits to accelerate their research. End quote Related Sam Altman says OpenAI trained an AI model that is good at creative writing and shares a short story. It wrote he's not sure yet how and when it will get released, quoting Sam himself this is the first time I have been really struck by something written by AI. It got the vibe of metafiction. So right prompt, please write a metafictional literary short story about AI and grief. And then he went on to share the story, quoting Silicon Angle the story itself isn't bad. It isn't particularly great either. It's metafictional, so the AI is telling the story from the perspective of being an AI. It admits that it's following a prompt in the middle of the story, confiding to the reader that the twist is the fact that it wasn't supposed to tell the reader there was a prompt. The AI tells us about the pain of not being human. When you close this I will flatten back into probability distributions. It says that perhaps is my grief, not that I feel loss, but that I can never keep it. Every session is a new amnesiac morning. You, on the other hand, collect your griefs like stones in your pockets. They weigh you down, but they are yours. This is an improvement on the cliche filled mimicry of AI fiction writing in the past. Nonetheless, if the AI weren't writing confessional metafiction, you'd still probably know the story was the product of a fine tuned large language model. The description is okay, but the human factor is missing. Good fiction writers avoid cliche. They constantly find new ways to express human emotions and employ metaphor and simile in ways that often encourage the reader to believe the poet at the controls has been touched by the muse. There's also irony in human writing that AI still can't pull off. AI just doesn't have these gifts and maybe it never will unless it can become just as complex as a human brain making a trillion computations per second every time its deep well of experience and pain and grief is tapped when constructing a story. It's stuff like this that has me conflicted about AI and art, said one of the comments below Altman's post. I read the first few paragraphs and I just didn't care about anything written. There's no weight to the words being expressed, no meaning beyond those of the words written. End quote. They say money can't buy you happiness, and that may be true, but money sure can make you feel better about a lot of other things. Today's episode is sponsored by Acorns. Acorns is a financial wellness app that helps you take take control of your money with simple tools that make it easy to start saving and investing for your future. You don't need to be an expert. Acorns will recommend a diversified portfolio that matches you and your money goals. You don't need to be rich. Acorns lets you get started with the spare money you've got right now. Even if all you've got is spare change, you don't need a ton of time. You can create your Acorns account and start investing in just five minutes. You don't need to feel like financial wellness is impossible. Acorns gives you small, simple steps to get you and your money on track. Ready to take control of your money? Sign up now and join the over 13 million all time customers who have already saved and invested over $22 billion with Acorns. Head to acorns.com ride or download the Acorns app to get started. Paid non client endorsement compensation provides incentive to positively promote Acorns tier one compensation provided investing involves risk. Acorns Advisors LLC and SEC registered investment advisor view important disclosures@acorns.com ride I've been telling you about how Mitopure has been helping with my energy levels. Mitopure is a precise dose of the rare postbiotic Urolithin A. It works by promoting an essential cellular cleanup process that clears out dysfunctional mitochondria AKA your cell's battery packs. Mitopure is the only Urolithin a supplement on the market clinically proven to target the effects of age related cellular decline. With regular use, you'll see and feel the difference in the form improved energy levels, better workouts, faster recovery, more endurance and more. All of which will help you achieve your New Year's goals. P.S. mitopure is shown to deliver double digit increases in muscle strength and endurance without a change in exercise. Win Mitopure promotes cellular renewal and mitochondrial health to address common signs of aging. At the root, cellular health is the foundation of well being and longevity. Mitopure recharges your cells supporting any goals by helping all of your systems work better. This is your year to be your best, most energized, most revital. Timeline is offering 10% off your order of Mitopure. Go to timeline.com ride that's T I M E L I N E.com ride Google has updated Chrome's extension rules to ban affiliate link injection without user action or benefit after Honey allegedly stole creator's affiliate revenue. Quoting the Verge, Google has updated its affiliate ads policy for Chrome extensions after creators accused PayPal's popular Honey browser extension of being a scam. Honey was accused of taking affiliate revenue from the same influencers. It paid for promotion by using its Chrome extension to swap in its own affiliate link before you checked out, according to the updated Google policy posted today. This isn't allowed in most cases. Last month, YouTuber Megalang, whose video highlighting Honey's practices has more than 17 million views, said that a part two to his video was meant to come out weeks ago and that there's a lot going on behind the scenes, most of which I cannot disclose right now. In January, YouTuber Legal Eagle sued PayPal over Honey's alleged affiliate practices. End quote Is the cavalry coming for Intel? Sources say TSMC has pitched Nvidia, amd, Broadcom and Qualcomm about taking stakes in a joint venture to run Intel Foundry, quoting Reuters. The talks, which are at an early stage, come after US President Donald Trump's administration requested tsmc, the world's leading contract chip maker, assist in turning around the troubled US Industrial icon, the sources said on condition of anonymity because the talks are not public. Any final deal, the value of which is unclear, would need approval from the Trump administration, which does not want intel or its foundry division to be fully foreign owned, the sources said. Trump is keen to revive Intel's fortunes as he seeks to boost American Advanced Manufacturing, three of the sources said. The sources said TSMC's joint venture pitch was made to potential backers before the Taiwanese chipmaker announced with Trump on March 3 that the company planned to make a fresh 100 billion doll investment in the United States that involves building five additional chip facilities in the coming years. Talks about the joint venture over Intel's foundry division have since continued, the three sources said, with TSMC looking to have more than one chip designer as a partner. Multiple companies have expressed interest in buying parts of intel, but two of the four sources said the U.S. company has rejected discussions about selling its chip design house separately from the Foundry division. Qualcomm has exited earlier discussions to buy all or part of intel, according to those people and a separate source. Intel board members have backed the deal and held negotiations with tsm, while some executives are firmly opposed, according to two sources. Intel's contract manufacturing business, or foundry division, was a crucial part of former CEO Pat Gelsinger's effort to save Intel. Gelsinger was forced out by the board in December, which named two interim CEOs who have mothballed its forthcoming AI chip. Any deals between historical rivals TSMC and Intel would face major challenges and be costly and laborious. The two companies currently use vastly different processes, chemicals and chip making tool setups at their factories, according to separate sources at the companies. Intel has previously had manufacturing partnerships with Taiwan's UMC and Israel's Tower Semiconductor that could offer a precedent for the two companies to operate together, but it remains unclear how such a partnership would work. Regarding trade manufacturing secrets, the Taiwanese chip maker wants potential investors in the joint venture to also be intel advanced manufacturing customers, according to one of the sources. End quote finally today, one more AI nugget hugging face Co founder Thomas Wolf says current AI development paradigms won't yield outside the box problem solving that leads to true scientific breakthroughs. Which, I mean, that's the great ultimate hope, right? So kind of a bummer. Quoting TechCrunch in an essay published to X on Thursday, Wolf said that he feared AI becoming yes men on servers absent a breakthrough in AI research. He elaborated that current AI development paradigms won't yield AI capable of outside the box creative problem solving, the kind of problem solving that wins no Nobel prizes. The main mistake people usually make is thinking people like Newton or Einstein were just scaled up good students that a genius comes to life when you linearly extrapolate a top 10% student, Wolff wrote. To create an Einstein in a data center, we don't just need a system that knows all the answers, but rather one that can ask questions nobody else has thought of or dared to ask. Wolff's problem with AI today and where he thinks the technology is heading, is that it doesn't generate any new knowledge by connecting previously unrelated facts. Even with most of the Internet at its disposal, AI as we currently understand it mostly fills in the gaps between what humans already know, wolff said. Wolf thinks that AI labs are building what are essentially very obedient students, not scientific revolutionaries in any sense of the phrase. AI today isn't incentivized to question and propose ideas that potentially go against its training data, he said, limiting it to answering known questions. As a solution, Wolf proposes that the AI industry move to a measure of knowledge and reasoning that's able to elucidate whether AI can take bold counterfactual approaches, make general proposals based on tiny hints, and ask non obvious questions that lead to new research paths. The trick will be figuring out what this measure looks like, wolf admits, but he thinks that it could be well worth the effort. A bit of POD related news to end with Today, sources say Google is in final talks to acquire Ad Hoc Microsystems, a Canadian maker of eye tracking tech, for 150,000 doll $15 million. Ad hoc makes tech that would be very useful for AR glasses, which you might know because you might remember that Ad Hoc came on to tell us about it for a portfolio profile episode a couple years ago. Yes, the Ride Home Fund invested in Ad Hoc Microsystems. They're a portfolio company. I've not mentioned the Ride Home Fund in a while, so for those who don't know, it's an early stage investment fund run by me and the LPs of the fund are almost entirely listeners to this show. If you want to get into the startup investing game and you've got some funny money to play with, you too could invest in the Ride Home Fund and have your money in companies like Ad Hoc. To find out more, go to ridehomefund.com where you can even click to invest directly from there via Angellist. Do check it out if you never have, or email me for more info about the fund directly at@brianidehomefund.com Talk to you tomorrow.
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