Hey everybody, welcome back to the Elon Musk podcast.
This is a show where we discuss. The critical crossroads?
That shape? SpaceX, Tesla X, The Boring
Company, and Neuralink, and I'm your host, Will Walden.
One more thing. Before we start, Google Podcasts
is. Being discontinued by.
Google So if you want to continue getting episodes of the
Elon Musk podcast, please check us out.
Over at. YouTube Music Search us out over
there and that's where you'll be able.
To find our. Podcast through Google.
Roducts, thank you so much for understanding.
I had no. Control over this Google ulled
the Google Podcast a off of. Android and.
I want to. Let you know where to continue
finding the show. Over at YouTube Music.
Search for. Elon Musk Podcast.
Thank you so much. Joni I've previously from Apple
and Sam Altman of Open AI are currently designing something
interesting. Now Joni I've one of the
absolute best industrial designers used to work at Apple.
All the products that we use now, iPhones, iPads, everything
had Joni's handprints on it, and his ideas are amazing.
And the way that he designs things absolutely brilliantly.
Sam Altman of Open AI, great business person, very
intellectual person. Open AI is revolutionizing the
way that we use AI in every single facet of society.
And they're building something together.
They're trying to secure a billion dollars in funding for
this venture. Now this is wild, but they aim
to develop an AI integrated personal device.
It's going to have very distinct design and functionality is
going to be similar to smartphones that we have now.
Now the Information broke this story and they said that in 2023
after the initial disclosure from the information that
they're working on something. We don't have many specifics
right now. It's all undisclosed, it's all
behind closed doors and there's curiosity about its design and
capabilities too. The developments have been under
discussion since 2023, I think increasing momentum towards
actualizing of the concept. Right now, the collaboration
between I've and Altman combines significant expertise in design
and AI, suggesting hopefully a new groundbreaking product is on
the horizon. Now we've seen similar designs
to the iPhone. Almost every smartphone now
looks very similar to an iPhone. And that's because Johnny Joni,
I've sorry I keep saying Johnny, but Joni, I've was way ahead of
the curve here. But Joni and Sam have engaged
with several potential investors right now to reach their
substantial funding target, a billion dollars.
They're going to hire the greatest minds in AI and design
and engineering to come together and build this amazing device,
whatever it is. And their discussions have
included Thrive Capital, known for its investments, repeat
investments, mind you in Open AI, and Emerson Collective
established by Lorene Powell Jobs Now These talks indicate a
broad search for financial backing to support the ventures
ambitious goals that Joni Ive is behind it.
Something spectacular is on the horizon.
The potential for something spectacular is on the horizon.
We don't know how this thing is going to turn out.
Also SoftBank, a CEO of SoftBank is another prominent figure in
the tech sector and it's possibly interested in investing
in this new format for interacting with yourself, your
data, the environment. We don't know what this thing is
yet, though this is all speculation.
The involvement of the CEO from SoftBank suggests a possible
link to ARM ARM microprocessors. It's a company that he supports.
It's high profile nature of this endeavor is if they get a chip
company on board, they're going to do something absolutely
amazing. If they can do custom chips,
that's probably why they need the billion dollars too.
They have to go through all the engineering to make prototypes
and the whole gambit of things they have to run through.
And not just alpha software, but beta software and also full
release software. But also they have to do a lot
of testing with the hardware and the software together to make
sure everything functions very well.
And they have to keep it at a price point that people would
actually buy out. Yeah, right now an iPhone is
around a, let's say, 700 to $1000.
And if this device is similar to the iPhone, like what it can
accomplish? Check your e-mail, listen to
music. What are the normal things that
you do every day? Check maps, get an Uber and get
food delivered to you? Whatever it is, if this device
can do that and it's smaller than iPhone, you don't have to
take it out of your pocket. It's clipped to you somewhere.
Or maybe it's a ring. I don't know.
And it I don't know what it is and we have no idea.
Nobody really knows. Then would you buy it for 700
dollars, $800? That's an ambitious goal for a
price, but there's a possibility that it could be around that
price. If it's a small device and it
could do things that are similar to an iPhone but doesn't have
the capabilities of a screen, isn't worth that much money,
though. You have to think about that
too. But they want to raise a billion
dollars, build the chips, build the software.
You need bright people to do all of those things and managing the
company and AI everything. So let's go back to the
information. If you're not familiar with the
information is they break a lot of tech stories and they have
people on the inside. They know everybody in Silicon
Valley. They have some insiders that
come through with some very reputable information.
That's why they're called The Information now.
They say that the device excused traditional designs, potentially
offering a novel user experience.
They're looking into screenless interfaces.
Sam Altman wants to have creative, intuitive, less
distracting technology, and I think Joni, I've was on the
precipice of something. Let's not talk about the Apple
Pencil, though. Can we?
Or the way that the Apple mouse charges?
Let's not talk about those two things.
Those are horrible, horrible designs.
I don't know if Joni, I've had anything to do with that, but if
he did, Joni, you did a horrible thing to humanity for
introducing those two ways of charging things, The way to
charge an Apple Pencil and the way to charge an Apple mouse.
Horrible designs. But this new design hopefully
screen this interface and it's going to be very intuitive.
It's going to be very novel. It's supposed to leverage open
AI's ChatGPT or some version of that or some sort of something
with the large language model. And they're going to be
integrating advanced AI capabilities with this device
now. Between I've designed prowess
and Altman's AI expertise, they could redefine personal
computing devices. Think about how much money Apple
makes just from iPhone sales and software sales.
I've's previous contributions to Apple's iconic products in his
post Apple venture love form show that he has a deep
commitment to innovation in design and functionality, even
though he's been gone from Apple for a long time now.
And the project's ambition is evident in the recruitment of
Tank Tan, a former Apple executive, to lead Hardware
Engineering. Now, this venture's commitment
to high quality design and engineering could draw upon
Tan's experience with Apple's product lineup.
They have to the right people, in the right places, doing the
right things in order to produce an amazing device that people
would actually want to use and wear.
Now, there's an ongoing debate, though, about the role of AI in
enhancing productivity while minimizing distractions.
Previous AI devices have promised efficiency without the
pitfalls of conventional smartphones, but real world
effectiveness and security concerns remain to be addressed
comprehensively. Just hear me out for a moment.
If you ask your device that's connected to Open AI to look up
somebody's phone number or to give your information, any sort
of information, let's just dial it back here.
Any sort of information. Do you want Open AI to have your
information or do you want it to be encrypted?
I would go for encrypted. Nobody needs to know if I'm
having one of those nights and I need a pizza at 3:00 in the
morning. Nobody needs to know what, like
where I go or anything like that.
Same with you. I'm sure I'm most people don't
really worry about them. That's not.
I don't really worry about it, but I don't think a company
should have all of my specific data for things that I for where
I go and what I do though. I have an iPhone and I'm
probably tracked all the time anyway.
I have googled Google on my iPhone, so I'm pretty sure ads
are being forced to me through Google.
Because the things that I say or the things that I search, there
are trade-offs. This little device, it's
supposed to be smaller than an iPhone, will be able to do all
that, I'm not sure. I'm not sure what they'll be
able to do, but I'm pretty sure everything will go up to the
cloud anyway. They'll be able to process
things in the cloud as opposed to on your device.
So maybe that's where they're going to be doing their
processing. Maybe they're going to have
server farms, GPU farms, etcetera that will be handling
all this computation. Now the feasibility and the
impact of such AI power devices are still under scrutiny though.
Nobody's made anything like this before.
Questions about their practicality, user experience
and data security linger, and that's the challenge for Ivan
Altman's project going ahead. There's a lot of problems,
actually a lot of things to solve the funding of a billion
dollars. With high profile investors like
SoftBank, it's potentially significant.
In the tech industry. The involvement of such
influential figures could shape the project's direction and its
technological foundations, particularly with arms potential
involvement as well. And the project's conception
involving brainstorming Session I of San Francisco Studio
indicate a hands on approach to defining the devices, core
features and user experience. If you get together with
somebody, there's a lot that can be done that you cannot do over
Zoom. Real time collaboration in
person is a lot different than real time collaboration on Zoom
or any other. Their meeting app.
I'm glad they met up. I'm glad they can brainstorm
traditionally one-on-one or with their team to pound this out
because it sounds like an amazing thing and the goal is to
develop an intuitive user interface that transcends
conventional computing paradigms.
Most like the iPhone revolutionized mobile Internet
access. If you remember back then phones
didn't really have the Internet. And when they did have the
Internet it was expensive and it was basic text.
There wasn't a lot of websites that were developed.
There weren't any apps really, just apps that came with your
T-Mobile phone or whatever. But no real apps for the
Internet back then, not compared to like now everything has.
Every phone has 5000 apps on it. It's a lot different time.
And what kind of apps would they use on a small device that they
don't really want to interfere with your life?
We'll see. We'll see in the future.
But this project is still in his formative stages of course, with
various ideas being considered the complexity of creating a new
device category. This is everything.
It's a whole new thing. Means that the venture might
take years to materialize into a market ready product and this
could be a long term vision behind this initiative.
Ivy's concerns about the addictive nature of smartphones
and their unintended consequences have been well
documented. That's why he's going forth with
this venture. This project with open AI offers
a chance to address these issues.
But developing a less screen dependent method of interaction
potentially mitigating some of the negative aspects of modern
technology use. Hey, thank you so much for
listening today. I really do appreciate your
support. If you could take a second and
hit the subscribe or the follow button on whatever podcast
platform that you're listening on right now, I greatly
appreciate it. It helps out the show
tremendously and you'll never miss an episode and each.
Episode is about. 10 minutes or less to get you caught up
quickly. And please, if you want to
support the show even more, go to treon.com Stage zero and
please take care of yourselves and each other and I'll see you
tomorrow.