TechFirst with John Koetsier

Generative AI is going to drive a 10X transformation in gaming, says Unity CEO John Riccitiello. It'll create truly believable worlds ... so believable it might even become more real that our "real world."

It will transform NPCs -- non-player characters -- into deep, intelligent, and differentiated characters who might be more fun to hang out with than your real friends. And it will make infinite worlds and infinite experiences more of a reality than a dream.

In this TechFirst we hang out with Unity's CEO and chat about how generative AI will change gaming.

We also discuss how Unity's runtime -- on 4 billion devices -- has an AI inference engine built into it ... one that Unity started making 5 years ago.

Huge chunks of our lives are already managed by AI. The songs we listen to, the routes we drive, the search results we see, the climate in our homes? When AGI takes over, will you even notice? In this TechFirst, we chat with Evan Coopersmith, a data scientist and AI researcher who says that when AI fully takes over ... we probably won't. And, he says, his bird can teach us a lot about what our future relationship with AI will be.

Imaging using an entire podcast as a prompt to GPT-5, or GPT-10. What would a massively capable generative AI do with a podcast?

Create a movie?

Score a soundtrack?

Build an immersive world?

John Gauntt is the host of The Augmented City podcast. He’s also a journalist, analyst, founder, and story teller who has been building an audio sci-fi ghost story about Seattle 100 years from now for the past half-decade

He created a video companion to the podcast with Midjourney.

In this episode of TechFirst, we'd going to learn how, why, and what it means for the future of podcasting and story telling. And we're also going to interview Beini Huang, the artist and designer on the project, as well as Keith Ancker, the audio engineer.

Enjoy!

Facebook isn't what it used to be. It's shedding staff, dismantling efforts to create the metaverse, losing ground to TikTok in short-form video, bleeding ad revenue thanks to Apple's privacy changes, and generally following rather than leading tech industry trends.

But it still has a massive number of users and some of the biggest apps on the planet.

What can Facebook do to regain its mojo? And ... honestly ... can Facebook regain its mojo?

In this TechFirst I chat with Brian Bowman, an entrepreneur and investor. He's focused on generative AI right now, but he's been in the ad space and multiple other spaces. He's a former Yahoo Executive, former CEO of Consumer Acquisition, and multiple other tech companies.

Is technology and AI out of control? Is AI already beyond our ability to manage and monitor? In this TechFirst, we chat with David B. Auerbach. He's a software engineer who has worked for Google and Microsoft and recently wrote a book. The title is a bit on the scary side ... MEGANETS: How Digital Forces Beyond Our Control Commandeer Our Daily Lives and Inner Realities. He says technology is already way out of control ... just like weather. "Rather than treating these technological systems as based on algorithmic recipes that we can just debug, it's better to think of them like the weather. The weather is a classically chaotic system that we cope with, but nobody thinks that we can actually control ..."

Aimi is a generative AI application for music that make songs that are everlasting: collaborations between artists and audiences that start, but never have to end.

In this TechFirst I chat with Edward Balassanian, the CEO of Aimi, a generative AI for music that musicians can use to create, generate, and even code music ... while allowing audiences to add, customize, extend, and personalize the sound. There's free music, monetization for artists, and over 200 artists onboard who are creating something entirely new in music.

The 500-year ceramic geodesic dome home is now an actual physical reality.

I first wrote about Geoship's plan to build long-lasting, inexpensive, earth-friendly, community-centric homes about 3 years ago. Last year, Geoship showed me a prototype. Now there's an actual built, powered, and furnished dome home in Nevada City, California.

In this TechFirst, we chat with Geoship founder Morgan Bierschenk, see the dome first-hand, and get some insight into pricing, availability, technology, and livability.

The first dome home is the 18-foot diameter model. But ultimately, Geoship plans to make domes that are anywhere from 1500 to 3000 square feet. A large individual dome might be 1,000 square feet, but can be combined and connected with smaller domes for bedrooms, kitchens, home gyms, living rooms ... pretty much anything.

Is generative AI the beginning of the end for humans ... or the end of the beginning?

And, did you know generative AI has been around since 1972?

In this TechFirst we chat with Ilke Demir, a research scientist at Intel who is working on ethical generative AI applications, like a speech synthesis project that aims to enable people who have lost their voice to talk again, an open urban driving simulator developed to support development, training, and validation of autonomous driving systems.

And a privacy-focused face generator that allows researchers to mix and match facial regions (nose of person A, mouth of person B, eyes of person C, etc.) to create an entirely new face that does not already exist in a dataset, so that people can request anonymization in public photos.

We also -- of course -- talk about OpenAI and Chat GPT, and how Ilke feels that it is not actually generative AI.

On November 16th, revenue for skippable ads dropped 50%, 60%, even 90% for many YouTube creators. 

They say YouTube variously admits it was a bug, says it was fixed or will be fixed, or claims the payment drops are due to invalid traffic: code for "you're cheating."

However, looking at their YouTube analytics doesn't support that claim.

In this TechFirst, I chat with 5 creators who say they were impacted by the bug ... including several who have been impacted so severely they're not sure if they're going to be able to pay their bills, or keep creating content on YouTube.

So I did a Twitter Space with a bunch of really smart people, and they said I could upload the results to TechFirst. The only thing ... it's literally over 3 hours.

So ... listen however long you'd like!

The people on the Twitter Space include the host, Robert Scoble, as well as:

 ... and ... of course ... yours truly, John Koetsier!

Drone delivery is super-hot, but there aren't that many major players yet. Google's Wing is doing well, but Amazon is still just getting started, and few other significant players have major traction.

Tiny Irish drone delivery company Manna Aero, however, has completed over 100,000 drone deliveries, is expanding to Dublin shortly, and will be expanding to mainland Europe and the United States this year.

In this TechFirst with John Koetsier, we chat with Bobby Healy, CEO of Manna Aero.

Imagine building a digital twin of an entire country: all inputs, outputs, activity, infrastructure, issues, challenges ...

That hasn't happened yet, but a client used Bentley Systems's tools to create a baseline digital twin for Singapore. In this episode of TechFirst with John Koetsier, we chat with Greg Demchak, who leads digital innovation at Bentley.

Increasingly, the company is using digital twin technology, AI, and drones to monitor, protect, and maintain massive infrastructure projects including wind farms and power lines, and Bentley is helping build the ITER nuclear fusion plant in France.

Links:

TechFirst transcripts: https://johnkoetsier.com/category/tech-first/

Forbes columns: https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/

Full videos: https://www.youtube.com/c/johnkoetsier?sub_confirmation=1

Keep in touch: https://twitter.com/johnkoetsier

The wetware in a casket of bone that we each carry on our shoulders is 1 million times more efficient than the AI models run by services like ChatGPT, Stable Diffusion, or DALL-E.

In this TechFirst with John Koetsier we chat for a second time with Gordon Wilson, CEO of Rain AI, which is building a neuromorphic artificial brain simulating the structure of our biological brains, and aiming at 10,000 to 100,000 greater energy efficiency than current AI architectures.

We also discuss "mortal computation" and a radical co-design of the hardware and software for AI systems, which could lead to much more efficient (and more effective) smart tools, machines, and companions.

Links:

TechFirst transcripts: https://johnkoetsier.com/category/tech-first/

Forbes columns: https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/ 

Full videos: https://www.youtube.com/c/johnkoetsier?sub_confirmation=1 

Keep in touch: https://twitter.com/johnkoetsier

What will 2023 bring for mobile apps and games? We chat with Data.ai's Ted Krantz about 21 new billion-dollar mobile apps including Call of Duty Mobile, Bumble, and HBO Max. 

We also chat about entertainment, about third-party app stores competing with Apple, and the decline in ad revenue growth for mobile apps.

One category that's growing fast: travel, hotel, airplane ticket booking, and rental car booking apps.

Links:

TechFirst transcripts: https://johnkoetsier.com/category/tech-first/

Forbes columns: https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/ 

Full videos: https://www.youtube.com/c/johnkoetsier?sub_confirmation=1 

Keep in touch: https://twitter.com/johnkoetsier 

A massive aerospace corporation cancelled an order for 40,000 Oculus Quest VR headsets when they saw the technology in this video.

In this very special TechFirst, I've received permission from TechBeach Retreat to share the first global unveiling of a technology called AirGlass from Mobeus HQ which, the founder Richie Etwaru says, is finally the Z-axis of tech: the depth to the horizontal and vertical of our flat screens.

The most interesting part to me is that AR/VR/MR headsets are bulky and limiting. This potentially works right on every computer's screen in the world: no additional hardware needed.

After Richie's demo of Airless 2, we chat about the consequences and uses of technology you can engage with physically, as well as get into some of the details of how it's made, including that it doesn't really touch the operating system but operates between the camera and the GPU in pretty much any computer.

Links:

Mobeus: https://mobeus.com

TechFirst transcripts: https://johnkoetsier.com/category/tech-first/

Forbes columns: https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/ 

Full videos: https://www.youtube.com/c/johnkoetsier?sub_confirmation=1 

Keep in touch: https://twitter.com/johnkoetsier 

This year we saw consumers push back hard on BMW's decision to include heated seats in vehicles but only make them actually work if people paid a monthly subscription fee.

Why?

And how does the concept of ownership change when everything is smart, everything is remotely configurable, and everything can report its own level of usage?

In this TechFirst with John Koetsier, I chat with Zach Supalla, the CEO and founder of Particle. We talk about music, software, hardware, and buying versus renting ... everything. What does value mean, and when do we like paying monthly fees versus when do we prefer to buy something upfront and own it outright?

And what does that mean for our right to repair the products we think we own? 

And does our new relationship with ownership of objects mean that the US government could force companies like Apple and Google to brick all iPhones and Android phones in Russia, if Russia used nuclear weapons?

TechFirst transcripts: https://johnkoetsier.com/category/tech-first/

Forbes columns: https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/

Full videos: https://www.youtube.com/c/johnkoetsier?sub_confirmation=1

Keep in touch: https://twitter.com/johnkoetsier

We need more homes for people. We need them cheaper so people can afford them. And we need them eco-friendly and carbon-neutral and self-powering so that our planet doesn't die in the process.

Is the answer 3D printing homes?

Perhaps, partly.

In this TechFirst with John Koetsier, we chat with the CTO of Mighty Buildings, Dmitry Starodubtsev. We talk about the fact that the construction industry in the US produces 600 million tons of waste annually, that we need robotics, automation, and 3D printing involved in home building, and we talk about Might Buildings, which says they have a solution that is 80% automated, 50% faster, and produces 99% less construction waste to create Net Zero communities: communities that produce all the power they need.

We also chat about Light Stone, which Mighty Buildings has pioneered, which the company says is lighter than concrete while 4X stronger.

Links:

TechFirst transcripts: https://johnkoetsier.com/category/tech-first/

Forbes columns: https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/ 

Subscribe to the podcast: https://anchor.fm/techfirst 

Keep in touch: https://twitter.com/johnkoetsier

It's not every day that you get to interview a 357-year-old company founded by a king, and the company that ships 1 out of 6 things moved globally.

In this TechFirst I chat about how we're going to fix the $100 trillion global economy: make it smarter, make it faster, and make it much, much more planet-friendly.

This is a session I moderated at Web Summit in Lisbon about a month ago with Ursula Soritsch-Renier, the Chief Digital & Information Officer of Saint-Gobain, and Rotem Hershko, Senior Vice President, Head of Business Platforms for Maersk.

Enjoy!

We've seen it in tickets and gaming consoles. But now it's happening in diapers and food and consumer goods: bots buying, taking up all available supply, and driving up prices for the rest of us.

What can we do about it?

In this TechFirst with John Koetsier, we chat with Niels Sodemann, CEO of Queue-it, about bots, e-commerce, pricing, supply, and what we can do to fix the problem.

Links:

TechFirst transcripts: https://johnkoetsier.com/category/tech-first/

Forbes columns: https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/ 

Subscribe to the podcast: https://anchor.fm/techfirst 

Keep in touch: https://twitter.com/johnkoetsier

In this special episode of TechFirst, I'm sharing the on-stage chat I had with Ghazi Shami, the Founder & CEO of EMPIRE, an innovative hip hop music label, and Wilfrid Obeng, the Co-founder & CTO of Audiomob.

We chat metaverse, gaming, NFTs that don't suck, and what the tie-in is between a hip hop label and an audio ads company.

Both also chat about their metaverse plans ...

Tesla CEO suggested Optimus, the Tesla Bot, would come in around $20,000. He's been wrong about pricing before. 

But is Tesla the only company that can pull off humaniform robots with strong AI that can do multiple tasks? In this TechFirst we chat with Robert Scoble and Irena Cronin from Infinite Retina about what Tesla Bot is, what it can do, and whether it's possible.

Unity CEO John Riccitiello talks about playing his first game (Pong), coding his first game, co-coding his first game with his daughter, and of course all the other stuff:

 - gaming

 - game monetization

 - ironSource acquisition progress

 - Applovin attempt to get Unity to buy them

 - the metaverse and the future of gaming

We’re seeing so much generative art today: text, images, even video created by AI. I can’t get the image out of my mind of “The Creation of Adam” by Michelangelo in which God reaches down to touch Adam and stir him into life.

In this TechFirst, we’re going to chat about generative AI

 - What it can do

- What it means

- How it will change the world

- And how it might change us

Our guest is Alex Cardinal, CEO of Glimpse.ai. They have 2 AI projects … Article Forge, that generates articles on a topic based on a keyword

And WordAI, which will rewrite content uniquely in the same style.

Is Tesla Bot more than vaporware? Will it be useful and effective in general tasks and duties?

Most robots are designed to do one thing or a small subset of things well. Tesla Bot and Xiaomi’s CyberOne robot seem to be attempts to create general purpose smart robots that can follow complex orders. Elon Musk, for instance, suggested that you could tell Tesla Bot go to a store and get you groceries, and that it will “replace people in repetitive, boring, and dangerous tasks.”

MIT professor Daniela Rus, however, has her doubts.

MIT is working on multiple types of reconfigurable robots, including ones made out of reformable smart sand, but making a humanoid general purpose robot is counterproductive because, as Rus says, " the more you generalize, the less you optimize."

In this TechFirst, we chat about the future of robotics and automation.

Links:

TechFirst transcripts: https://johnkoetsier.com/category/tech-first/

Forbes columns: https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/ 

Full videos: https://www.youtube.com/c/johnkoetsier?sub_confirmation=1 

Keep in touch: https://twitter.com/johnkoetsier 

How do you define the future of augmented reality?

Is it a $2,000 headset from Apple or a $1500 Oculus Quest Pro from Facebook? Or is it a device that we all hold in our hands that can cost just a few hundred dollars. A device that there are literally five billion of on this planet? AR platform Blippar is betting on the latter while not ignoring the former, and in this TechFirst we chat with the CEO Faisal Galaria about exactly why.

And, of course, an integration Blippar just built and announced for Unity, the technology that underpins half the world's games and many of its immersive 3D experiences.

Links:

TechFirst transcripts: https://johnkoetsier.com/category/tech-first/

Forbes columns: https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/ 

Full videos: https://www.youtube.com/c/johnkoetsier?sub_confirmation=1 

Keep in touch: https://twitter.com/johnkoetsier 

Who knew, but maintaining state and level of progress on massive construction jobs is actually a really hard problem. Exyn Technologies has adapted their mine mapping level 4 autonomous drones to work on construction sites and feed completion data into construction software packages.

In this TechFirst, we chat with CEO Nader Elm and COO Ben Williams.

Links:

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When will we solve the “last-mile” problem of robotics? We’ve made robots that can go to the bottom of the ocean, that can operate in hard radiation in a melted-down reactor, and can go to Mars, fly or drive around, do basic science ... and so much more that humans can’t ...

But so many of our robots can’t do the simplest things humans take for granted, like pick up objects, handle them, move them, and work on them. Or identify by touch if an object is a flower or a nail.

It’s kind of the last mile of robotic capability

A company that’s building undersea robots for the Navy is working on exactly this problem. 

In this TechFirst we chat with Jorgen Pedersen, who built RE2 Robotics in Pittsburgh, sold his company to Sarcos, and now serves as COO of the combined company.

Links:

Support TechFirst with $SMRT coins: https://rally.io/creator/SMRT/

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Sometimes you need a big drone. Sometimes a small one will do. Some deliveries are urgent. Others are far away. For each, a slightly different drone would be the optimal solution. That's why Google sister company and Alphabet portfolio company Wing has built an 'aircraft library' ... a vault of drone types it can pull out and get in the air relatively quickly.

In this Techfirst , we chat with Wing CEO Adam Woodworth about the company's 'aircraft library,' about drone development, about what drones will do to the delivery ecosystem, and about the future of Wing.

Questions we address:

Podcast links:

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Data is the nuclear waste of the web and machine learning, Ghostery CEO Jean-Paul Schmetz tells me in the last TechFirst podcast. And big tech is redefining privacy to suit their business and cut out their competitors ... not to actually deliver privacy to people.

Today, our identities are as much digital as physical, maybe more. We are where we surf, what we watch, the apps we use, the games we play, the people we engage with on social.

So privacy is a big deal and getting bigger. That's true legislatively, especially in Europe, but also technologically. Big tech has been very eager to share how privacy sensitive it is: Apple has molded its whole brand around privacy, introducing App Tracking Transparency, and Facebook is keen to say you can trust us now … we’re Meta. Google is introducing Privacy Sandbox for web and Privacy Sandbox for Android, and killing the third-party cookie … the bit of data that websites you DON’T visit can put in your browser and track you around the web.

But they all have their own definitions of privacy, which often don’t mean you giving them less data … just their competition. And Ghostery says that Google’s Manifest V3 update to Chrome will break anti-tracking and ad-blocking services.

Links:

Support TechFirst with $SMRT coins: https://rally.io/creator/SMRT/

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Plantiga makes sensor insoles for shoes that help people get better, faster, and healthier. They track how you run, walk, jump, and change direction, and Olympic gold medallist and on of the world’s fastest humans Andre de Grasse is a customer.

But smart soles might just be the first step on the path the Human OS, which takes data from your wrist (smartwatch), finger (smart ring), body (smart clothes), face (smart glasses), and also, likely, smart insoles for data on you feet ...

In this TechFirst we chat with Plantiga CEO Quin Sandler about what his company is building.

Links:

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Programming robots is so 2010. Providing the AI framework within with they can teach themselves is accelerating training and development of new behaviors from 100 days to 3 hours.

In this TechFirst, we meet 2 of the researchers behind making MIT's mini-Cheetah robot learn to run ... and run fast. Professor Pulkit Agrawal and grad student Gabriel Margolis share how fast it can go, how it teaches itself to run with both rewards and "punishments," and what this means for future robots in the home and workplace.

Links:

Support TechFirst with $SMRT coins: https://rally.io/creator/SMRT/

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When you plunk a $100 million wind farm down on 98,000 acres of varying terrain, you want to know a few things. You want to know that you’re optimizing the location of your multi-million-dollar turbines. You want to know that the turbines you source can handle the gustiest gust of wind they will ever encounter without shattering dramatically in a viral video. And you want to test potential uses cases and changes in software, which is cheap and changeable, rather than in hardware, which is expensive and hard to edit.

Which is why Siemens Gamesa, the global renewable energy company, is working with NVIDIA to generate AI-powered digital twins of its turbines.

In this TechFirst, I chat with Dion Harris, Lead Product Manager of Accelerated Computing at NVIDIA and Greg Oxley, Siemens Gamesa.

Links:

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Everyone wants privacy. Most of us also care about an environment in which businesses can grow too. But can both of these be reconciled?

If you are in the mobile app or marketing spaces, you know that over the past year there’s been a great disturbance in the force. Apple increased privacy regulations for apps, and that essentially killed how apps measured their growth, discovered new audiences, or sent you a reminder that those shoes you were going to buy are still in your cart.

Facebook complained this would hurt small business, took out big ads in the WSJ, and then life sort of went on and most of us forgot about it. But not those in the business.

Growth slowed and profitability went down: 40% down.

Now one company says they’ve solved it: figured out a way to drive growth via advertising that’s completely privacy-safe and Apple-compliant, but almost as good as the old days of abundant data.

In this TechFirst, I chat with Singular CEO Gadi Eliashiv.

Links:

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We desperately need more housing that is affordable, sustainable, and mass producible. Geoship thinks they've created exactly that, and have now actually built a full-scale prototype using their advanced materials science and construction methodology.

In this TechFirst, we chat with CEO and cofounder Morgan Bierschenk.

Way too many can’t afford homes right now, especially young people, and the homes we do build are generally horrible for the environment. Plus, the isolated wood boxes we build for people don’t tend to bring us closer together.

Geoship is building sustainable bioceramic domes. They're non-toxic, have a near-zero carbon footprint, are and designed to last 500 years. They’re also intended to be affordable, mass producible, and maybe even to be deployed in communities where people can live together, not apart.

Sounds idealistic? Maybe.

But the company has completed its first full-size prototype, has 500 orders, and is looking to enter full-scale production.

Links:

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Mojo Vision has been working on smart contact lenses since years. Recently the company announced its most advanced prototype ever, which VP Steven Sinclair told me has "all the elements that we need ... in a working system so that we can really push forward what we hope is the first product."

That includes:

- 14,000 pixels per inch MicroLED display

- 5GH ultra-low latency radio to stream AR content

- continuous eye tracking via custom-configured accelerometers, gyroscopes, and magnetometers

- medical-grade in-lens batteries

- eye-controlled user interface

In this episode of TechFirst with John Koetsier, I chat with Sinclair about the technology, uses, augmented reality, timeline to purchasable product, and the fundamental breakthroughs Mojo had to make before achieving this latest prototype.

Links:

Support TechFirst with $SMRT coins: https://rally.io/creator/SMRT/

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What if the very things we want big social platforms to do to stop the spread of extremism, racism, propaganda, and lies is actually causing more problems than it solves?

Many of us want YouTube, Facebook, or Twitter to manage and moderate what people say. Others, who value free speech higher than social harms that its exercise might cost, say that muzzling people is unethical and in some countries illegal. The big social platforms are in the crosshairs either way, and that's one of the reasons Elon Musk is buying Twitter.

But where do people go when they get kicked off the big platforms for spreading covid misinformation or saying unacceptable things? According to some, they go places that just make things worse.

In this episode of TechFirst, we chat with Daryl Davis, a black musician who has convinced 200 KKK members to stop being racist, and Bill Ottman, the CEO of alternative social network Minds.com. 

Our questions:

- why are we so divided?

- aren't we seeing more racism lately? why?

- should any speech be censored?

- should social platforms open source their algorithms?

- what's the solution to the division and anger we're experiencing?

- how do we bridge our reality bubbles?

Links:

Support TechFirst with $SMRT coins: https://rally.io/creator/SMRT/

Buy $SMRT to join a community focused on tech for good: the emerging world of smart matter. Access my private Slack, get your name in my book, suggest speakers for TechFirst ... and support my work.

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Who's winning in the media and entertainment battles? We are currently seeing an epic battle in the mobile space for consumer time, attention, and dollars.

Two of the biggest juggernauts are short video versus long ... think Netflix vs TikTok, Disney+ vs Reels, with many more combatants and some like YouTube and Facebook with stakes in both sides.

What’s happening here … and who’s going to win? And why did Tiktok just have the biggest quarter of any mobile app ever?

In this TechFirst, we chat with Data.ai CEO Ted Krantz.

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Catawba Indian Nation in Rock Hill, South Carolina has established a new Special Economic Zone where the tribe will provide space and regulatory certainty for crypto and fintech companies.

It's called the Catawba Digital Economic Zone, and the Catawba Corporation says it "can be prosperous thanks to the ability of Native-American Tribes under US law to have their own commercial code, regulation-making and administrative capacities." Catawba is a sovereign jurisdiction under U.S. law, allowing it to built a regulatory framework that is friendly to fintech, blockchain, and crypto companies, says Ronnie Beck, CEO of Catawba Corporations.

The closest similarity?

Estonia's eResidency program.

In this episode of TechFirst we chat with the CEO of the CDEZ, Joseph McKinney, and Thomas Trimnal, a VP at Catawba Corporations. Our focus: what will the enable, who will come, and how will this generate value for both companies and the Catawba themselves.

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BMW sells 2.5 million cars and 194,000 motorcycles annually, almost all in a traditional car dealership. But the 100-year-old car brand wants to sell cars online, just like Tesla.

Now BMW is embarking on a major project with Adobe to get "phygital" ... to be able to do business seamlessly across apps, websites, and physical car dealerships, however its clients prefer. That means data, insights, software, and a complete rethinking of how its thousands of car dealerships interact with customers.

And, of course, how customers interact with BMW ... including before they buy, when they buy, and for years of owning their vehicles. In this TechFirst, we chat with BMW SVP Jens Theimer.

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Will super-smart artificial intelligence be the ultimate cheat code for beating the market? Probably not ... but its could ensure you retire with 25% more than you otherwise would.

In this TechFirst we chat with the CEO of Qraft USA, Robert Nestor. Qraft is an AI company focused on investing. The company has a billion USD "assets under AI" in Korea and is expanding to the US. While the AI is active in crafting the strategy and execution, humans still make the final decisions.

The result, so far, is about a 1% improvement on what financial advisors would otherwise get. While that doesn't sound huge, that's significant over your earning and investing lifespan.

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Digital retail giant Amazon has over 200,000 robots helping deliver more than 350 million different products in an unceasing flood of billions of deliveries. Its fulfillment machine with both free and fast shipping has become a key competitive moat against other retailers: free shipping and 1-day or 2-day shipping is why Amazon customers chose Amazon.

So how can other retailers, whether giants like Walmart or smaller brands, compete? One way is by stealing a march on the e-commerce behemoth and automating themselves. 

In this episode of TechFirst, we chat with Locus Robotics CMO Karen Leavitt. Locus Robotics robots-as-a-service will pick more than a billion items in warehouse, fulfilment centers, and logistics hubs ... and the company just added more.

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MIT scientists are building ElectroVoxels, small, smart, self-assembling robots designed for space. 

It's programmable matter, infinitely recyclable large-scale 3D printing, if you will, and it could be the future of robotics and machinery in space. In this TechFirst, I chat with MIT PhD student Martin Nisser

"Rather than building a robot or a structure in a top-down manner, we envision robots or structures as these modules of hundreds or thousands of small components or modules that can rearrange themselves with respect to their neighbors," Nisser says. 

The mini-bots don't have actuators: they use "small, easily manufactured, inexpensive electromagnets into the edges of the cubes that repel and attract, allowing the robots to spin and move around each other and rapidly change shape."

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Is neuromorphic computing the only way we can actually achieve general artificial intelligence? 

Very likely yes, according to Gordon Wilson, CEO of Rain Neuromorphics, who is trying to recreate the human brain in hardware and "give machines all of the capabilities that we recognize in ourselves."

Rain Neuromorphics has built a neuromorphic chip that is analog. In other words it does not simulate neural networks: it is a neural network in analog, not digital. It's a physical collection of neurons and synapses, as opposed to an abstraction of neurons and synapses. That means no ones and zeroes of traditional computing but voltages and currents that represent the mathematical operations you want to perform.

Right now it's 1000X more energy efficient than existing neural networks, Wilson says, because it doesn't have to spend all those computing cycles simulating the brain. The circuit is the neural network, which leads to some extraordinary gains in both speed improvement and power reduction, according to Wilson.

Links:

Rain Neuromorphics: https://rain.ai

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Will NFTs be a trillion-dollar market by 2030? Or will they vanish in a blazing explosion of hate from all the naysayers?

(I might give even odds on each side, actually!)

In this episode of TechFirst I chat with Rarible chief product officer Alex Salnikov. And yes, he’s aware that there’s way too many bored apes, yacht apes, space apes, technicolor apes, and all other kinds of crypto mishmash digital art that are vying for the stupid money that is out there chasing NFTs.

But, he says, half of all digital commerce doesn’t need to have a physical component at all. And that would transform the future of commerce. Using, of course, the foundation built by today’s NFTs.

But we’re early. In fact, we’re just now in the “Cambrian explosion,” Salnikov says, which will birth a massive amount of innovation and completely change