AI NEWS: $500/mo Home Robots, AGI by 2028 & Adobe’s Decline

Welcome to the Next Wave podcast. I'm Matt Wolf and today I'm joined once again by Matthew Berman, one of the sharpest minds covering AI and the creator behind Forward Future Live, a show that's become an absolute must watch for anyone trying to make sense of where artificial intelligence is really headed. Matt's been on the front lines at major tech events like Dreamforce and Boxworks, talking directly with the people building the future. And in this episode, we're going to dig into some of the biggest developments from the past week. Everything From Adobe's new AI tools and what they mean for creative pros, to Nvidia's massive expansion and its surprising political moves to OpenAI's bold new timeline for creating a self improving AI researcher. We also dive into one of the most viral tech stories of the year, the Neo Humanoid Robot. And whether we're actually ready to have one of them in our own homes or not. It's a fun, fast moving conversation packed with insights, hot takes and a few wild predictions about where AI and robotics are headed next. So let's just jump on over and chat with Matthew Berman. Hey, Matt, welcome back to the show. Great to have you again.

Yeah, thanks, Matt. I am very grateful to be here again. I always like talking about AI with you.

There's really four sort of events this week that were kind of going on in the AI sphere, right? You had Adobe Max, which was going on in LA. You had Nvidia, GTC, Washington D.C. and.

Of course Jensen did another two hour keynote.

Yeah, yeah. There was also TechCrunch Disrupt, which we'll talk about briefly. And then also OpenAI did a live session that was sort of like a surprise session this week where they talked about their nonprofit and some of their timelines and all of that kind of stuff. So those are some of the avenues I want to go down. There is also the Neo robot, over.

50 million views on X alone. So something has resonated. I am excited to talk about that with you.

Well, I'll just kind of go through the list real quick. So Adobe Max happened this week. They announced like a conversational AI assistant, right? So like you'll be able to go into Photoshop pretty soon and just tell it, edit this image so the guy's wearing a banana on his head. Or edit this image so that the background is the beach instead of, you know, the desert or whatever. Right. So it's going to like they're adding in this like conversational chat assistant. I think they saw like the success of Nano Banana and a Lot of these, like, AI editing tools and, and then went, let's just build that into our tools and sort of like get ahead of the narrative. They also announced that they're going to be doing some like, custom fine tuning for enterprises and for, for companies. So if you want like a Firefly model trained on your branding, your imagery, like your color scheme, that sort of stuff, they will fine tune a Firefly image model for you.

Let's talk about the elephant in the room. It does seem like there's an existential threat to Adobe's business. Right?

Right.

I mean, we have Nano Banana, we have, you know, a plethora of other image generation models and it's so easy to use. But then we have Photoshop, which, you know, you have to, you have to actually learn the tool. You can't just speak in natural language. So I totally understand rolling out features that allow anybody to actually apply that technique of just prompting to some kind of amazing generation within Photoshop. It makes a ton of sense. It's interesting because they really are serving two separate audiences with that.

I feel like Photoshop should probably stay that suite of tools for like, the professionals that want to use those, those tools. I'm really, really not a fan of Adobe's business model either. Right. Like, they've got the monthly billing and then like, there's actual fees to cancel it. Now it just creates this really crappy narrative around Adobe where everybody just thinks Adobe is this like, evil company that's like, trying to like, extort you for as much money as possible. The other thing I was going to say about Adobe that will probably get me in trouble with Adobe is we did an episode here on the Next Wave where we did, like, our tier list where we went like, you know, S tier all the way down to like, F tier of like, image models. Out of all the models we talked about, Adobe Firefly was the only one that fell into F tier.

Do you think this new crop of generative image models is going to eat the lunch of Adobe, Adobe Photoshop specifically?

It does feel like whenever this stuff comes out, Adobe's trying to stay ahead of it and go, let's just bake it into our software. But I feel like we're going to quickly get to a point where, like, why do I need to pay for Adobe to get that feature if I can just do it, you know, directly on the Seed Dream website or directly on the, you know, Google AI Studio with Nano Banana? I don't know. I do think there's going to still always be that Subset of people that are like, I love really getting into like the granular details and like dialing in this composition that I have in my mind. But I also feel like Adobe is sort of like isolating those people because those are the types of people that tend to be more on the anti AI side. Right. Like the people that really like to use Photoshop for what it's designed for and get granular. Those are the people that are like, I hate AI and if Adobe is going to roll AI into Photoshop, I'm going to use a tool that's not going to use AI.

The delineation between these different types of products, whether it's image generation or Photoshop more for professionals, they're going to start to get blurred and they're going to start to look a lot alike.

Yeah.

And it's going to enable a huge new crop of, of users and tinkerers to really make incredible things. But ultimately, and this is what I've really realized lately, taste and the ability to curate an amazing human experience, whether that is the design or an actual physical. Physical experience. That's gonna matter more than anything and so much more going forward. I, of course, like, the first thing that comes to mind is the Rick Rubin meme. Right. So like that the ability to really know your taste and know who it serves and, and actually have good taste in a world where anybody can create incredible visuals is going to be so important.

I, I invest in a lot of stocks of companies that are making big moves in AI. Adobe is not one of the companies I've put money into. Well, I'm gonna, I'm gonna shift over to TechCrunch Disrupt. That was where I was this, the, the past few days. So my perspective on TechCrunch Disrupt, like what it was, was essentially a whole bunch of like fairly new startups. There was a, a couple big companies represented. It feels like most of them are there because they want to raise capital. So they're just kind of putting out as many feelers as they can and talking to as many people as they can. And then they also do like this startup battle where founders get up on stage and sort of pitch their idea and then it gets narrowed down, narrowed down, narrowed down until they pick their one finalist. Probably most famously seen in Silicon Valley when I was.

I'm so happy you brought that up at. Oh, that, that was like peak techcrunch Disrupt, peak kind of Silicon Valley culture. For those of you watching who haven't seen that show, Silicon Valley highly recommended.

It is a good Watch. And pretty accurate to the event. I would say that Silicon Valley made out TechCrunch Disrupt to be a much bigger event than it actually is in real life. But other than that, pretty accurate.

Yeah, it may have been more culturally relevant back then. It's slightly less now.

Yeah, when I was there, I was fairly underwhelmed.

Yeah. And I don't think we're the only ones thinking it was underwhelming and maybe not worth the time. I don't know. If you want to show Gary Tan's Twitter tweet.

So this was. This was Gary's tweet. Tech Currents Disrupt is a terrible waste of time and I don't understand why any of you would go to it. Well, I'll tell you why I was there. I was sponsored. JetBrains sponsored me to come out and film their. Their pan. Their session that they gave and then also film around their booth and, and make some content around Jet Brains. So I was there specifically for Jet Brains. But had I not been paid to be there, would I go back next year? Probably not.

Yeah, there's a legacy to it. I think one little coder down below as a reply is, is like, that's pretty prescient. TechCrunch after Arrington Michael Arrington, the founder of TechCrunch sold is generally PR newswire. Just the way to get your. Get your news out there and nothing more than that.

Hey, if you take a look at my web presence online, it's safe to say that I'm a bit AI obsessed. I even have a podcast all about AI that you're watching right now. I've gone down multiple rabbit holes with AI and done countless hours of research on the newest AI tools every single week. Well, I've done it again and I just dropped my list of my favorite AI tools. I've done all the research on what's been working for me, my favorite use cases and more. So if you want to steal my favorite tools and use them for yourself now, you can. You can get it at the link in the description below. Now back to the show. The other event I wanted to chat about quickly was we had Nvidia g in Washington D.C. this week as well. It was a tough week because I was invited to three out of these four events, Adobe TechCrunch and Nvidia, and ended up going to TechCrunch and probably from the videos and footage I saw from the other two would have selected to go to one of the other two had I had the option. But during the Nvidia gtc. You've probably seen more of the keynote than I have. I actually have not had an opportunity to watch it yet. But the big things for me that came out of it were the, the new IGX Thor, which is like the brain that they're trying to put into like robots and, and things like that. And then also this is something I don't totally understand. You might know a little bit more about it, but it seemed powerful. Just in his explanation was the open source aerial software which is going to create this like AI native 6G wireless network. It's a little bit over my head, I'll be totally honest. But those were the two things that sort of grabbed my attention from his keynote. But I'm curious like what, what you saw in the keynote.

I think the news that stood out to me was they're taking a huge stake in Nokia. First of all, okay, I didn't know Nokia was still around. That's cool. You know, I definitely had one of those Nokia bricks that lasted years and played snake on and yes, so that was surprising. They invested $1 billion if I remember correctly. They got a chunk of, of, of of equity from them or I should say stock because I believe it's a public company. And it seems like Nvidia is making these investments into so many different companies and it goes back to this like kind of roundabout profit and revenue cycle that we're seeing. So I think another good example is Nvidia invested 100 billion into OpenAI and then OpenAI is going to take that money and essentially spend it on video Nvidia chips. And so I'm like, I'm trying to you know, like the country's economy but like aren't we double counting dollars at this point? And so they've done a number of these types of investments. There have been a lot of memes, a lot of graphs showing the very incestuous nature of these top tech companies, whether it's Frontier Labs or hardware creators like md, AMD and Nvidia. But I just thought, so you bring it back to Nokia. It's interesting to see what they're going to do there. They did say, speaking of 6G that that's something they're working on with Nokia if I remember correctly.

Interesting. Is Nokia still making phones? Is that there's still their model or have they moved on to something else? Are they like making phone chips? Like I'm not actually quite sure what Nokia is doing because I don't think I've seen a Nokia phone on the market anytime recently, they sold their mobile.

Phone business to Microsoft.

So Nokia is owned by Microsoft now.

Their mobile phone business is Microsoft. I don't even think it's like branded Nokia anymore, but I'm not sure.

That's something that's definitely fascinated me about, like Nvidia is Nvidia's strategy of investing in these various companies, but then that investment money turning around and essentially buying Nvidia chips.

And they just passed 5 trillion. Right? They've passed $5 trillion in the value of the stock.

That's absolutely wild to see. And I'm going to be honest, I know there's talk about an AI bubble and, and there probably is an AI bubble, but I feel like Nvidia is one of the companies that's going to make it through.

Yeah, there's been a lot of talk of AI bubble lately. And the way I see it, and obviously, look, I've dedicated my working life to AI. At this point, the potential value of artificial intelligence seems nearly infinite to me. It just seems like there's so much that can be done. So even if we're over investing today in infrastructure, in models, if most companies have bigger inference bills than what they're actually charging customers, I think all this math is going to work out in the end. And of course there's an analogy to be drawn in kind of the early and mid 2010s where, you know, companies like Uber, Airbnb, Lyft, these companies were just burning through VC capital, subsidizing rides, subsidizing housing, and they, they made it right. And there's a thousand examples of those that didn't. But the VC math is typically overinvest. Capture the market and then monetize more based on business fundamentals later on.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, Amazon, didn't Amazon lose money for like 20 years or something like that?

Exactly. And all they had to do is turn it aisle and, and, and all of a sudden they had margins. So yeah, yeah, it's gonna be interesting. I don't, I don't think, like maybe we're in a mini bubble, but in the long run I just don't think we're gonna see this huge drop like a dot com bubble. And there's been a number of interesting tweets about this where if you look at the price earnings, we're nowhere near the dot com era.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. You were showing me that graph, I think last Friday when we were doing a live stream together.

Yeah, it's really, really interesting to me. Did you hear that? Like, Nvidia's now got a stake in intel, which is something that I never saw coming either.

I didn't. No, I didn't see that.

Yeah, yeah, Nvidia made the US Government.

Has a stake in intel, which is kind of nuts.

Yeah, well, that's probably why Nvidia went in, let's be honest. They probably saw the government got invested in intel and Nvidia's like, all right, we're in as well. And, you know, I mentioned that the, that gtc, the second version of GTC this year was in Washington, D.C. well, I think they did that for, like, political reasons. I think he did that to be close to Trump. Obviously, Jensen, from what I understand during his keynote, was very, you know, favorable towards Trump and how Trump is handling things and seem to be fairly okay with the whole China situation.

Yeah, look, I think Zuckerberg is probably the most prominent example of this, of just doing a 180 and, and these, these guys who lead these, the MAG7, they are incredibly bright. They are. You know, ultimately they'll do whatever it takes to make the company successful. And if that means kissing the ring of the current administration or whatever the next administration is, they will do that. And whether they believe it or not doesn't really matter. They're going to do it. And that is how they're currying favor with the administration.

Yeah, yeah, expect, I mean, seeing like, Tim Cook hand that, like, whatever that was, that like, clear disc thing to Trump and, and I think Jensen handed Trump, like, assigned, I don't know, like, one of his signed GPUs or something. I don't remember what he gave him, but he, he gave him something to get in his favor. But, yeah, no, it's, it's really interesting to see how this is all playing out, because I would have thought that Jensen would really be fighting for the business in China, but he seems to be okay just sort of letting that go.

Yeah, well, I, I assume he's still going to be fighting. I think China is making it difficult to sell into China, though, because they, they see the writing on the wall. They know that if they build their AI infrastructure on top of US chips and software, they are going to be at a disadvantage and beholden to the US and of course they don't want that.

Yeah, yeah, totally makes sense. Well, let's talk quickly too, about the OpenAI event that happened this week. So they, they did sort of like an. What would you call the live stream, Just sort of like an update, like a sort of state of OpenAI kind of update thing.

Yeah, it was. It felt like ad hoc. I don't know. I mean, obviously they had been planning it a while, but it just felt like out of nowhere. And then, yeah, there was kind of a few minutes about the, like, an overview of it was kind of very technical. Jakob Pachocki was there with Sam Allman, Yaka being the chief scientist, I believe is his title. And then they did a Q and.

A. Yeah, so here. So Sam went to X and posted this tldr. I'm not going to read the whole thing because even his TLDR could use a tldr. But you know, some of the, some of the things that they said here. Five layers of safety, value alignment, goal alignment, reliability, adversarial robustness, system safety.

Honestly, if you could scroll up for a second, Matt, I think the first line, we have set internal goals. If you want to read that, that is crazy important to me.

All right, let's see. So we have set internal goals of having an automated AI research intern by September of 2026, running on hundreds of thousands of GPUs and a true automated AI researcher by March of 2028. We may totally fail at this goal, but given the extraordinary potential impacts, we think it is in the public interest to be transparent about this. So in the talk of AGI, it sounds like Sam Altman has the belief that AGI is coming before 2028, but an automated AI researcher by March of 2028, like, wouldn't that be kind of. If AGI comes sooner than that, wouldn't the AI researcher also come sooner than that? You know what I mean?

There's so much to unpack from this one paragraph here. So first, he does not mention AGI. And I actually think that's important. To your point there, they have ironed out a new relationship, a new dynamic, a new deal with Microsoft. And a big part of the original deal with Microsoft was they. Microsoft had ownership of OpenAI's IP up until they hit AGI. Now, AGI was such an amorphous term, it was a moving goalpost. Nobody truly knows what AGI means or how to measure it, so kind of ignored that. So there's two other things I want to point out here. One, these are incredibly specific dates for saying that they're going to have something like an AI researcher, an automated AI researcher. September 2026. Okay, that's, you know, not too far away, but it is a very precise date. The one that blew my mind is March 2028. To have a true automated AI researcher, it is, is a specific month within a specific year. It just seems wild. Like what does Sam Altman know to have such a precise prediction of that timeline? Now the, the last thing that I want to point out is once a company has a true automated AI researcher that he didn't say any of this, but I'm going to infer that also means you're going to have self improving artificial intelligence. And once you have self improving artificial intelligence, the only limiter for really just an explosion of intelligence to use the situational awareness paper is how much compute can you throw at it. Right? And so it seems to me if you have these, you know, handful of companies racing towards whatever that goal is, the self improving AI seems to be really the only goal that matters because once one of the companies hits that goal, they are forever in the lead.

Right?

And it just seems very obvious to me that I know Zuckerberg is heading towards that. He calls it artificial super intelligence. Sam Altman is calling it an automated AI researcher, but they're all talking about the same thing. They're talking about this point at which AI can improve itself, right?

And to me that's also the point where you know, AI has the potential to be the, you know, quote unquote runaway AI, right? That's, that's the point where AI, if it's self improving, it might start to figure out like that's where the sort of paperclip maximizer theoretical experiments come into play is okay, well I'm sort of optimizing for this goal, so what do I have to do to achieve the goal? You know, possibly at the expense of everything else. That's where things get scary. The reason I almost like the reason I bring up AGI is I know Sam Altman did an interview last year, maybe he was just being hype. Altman, right. But he brought in an interview last year when somebody said, what are you excited for in 2025? He said, I'm excited that AG about AGI in 2025. Right. Something along those lines. He said, I'm excited about AGI next year. So he almost implied last year that he thought we'd have AGI this year. And now he's saying, you know, the automated AI researcher by March of 2028. Which seems like if you have AGI before March of 2028, like would you consider AGI to be that? Like, are those the same level AGI and self improving AI? Like would you see those as sort of like being the same thing or are those two different milestones?

Based on my understanding, they are two completely different milestones. Not, maybe not completely different, but they are very different. And so when he says AGI, if we're using his, his and OpenAI's kind of previous definition of AGI, it is, I, I, I'm not going to get the words exactly right, but it's essentially when AI can accomplish most economically valuable work better than the average or most humans. I butchered it a little bit, but I think that was the definition and I actually do think we're almost there. Granted, we have two more months left in this year, so we'll see. But I don't, I think he got to a point with the Microsoft relationship where he couldn't really use or have a hard definition of AGI now going towards like self improving artificial intelligence, a true AI researcher that seems very different. That is when AI can discover novel algorithms and new ways to build silicon and, and, and then apply it to itself, it becomes more powerful and thus the next piece of research just happens more quickly or becomes even, you know, a more important discovery. So I, I do think those are two very different things. And AGI in his, in the context of his previous definition does seem like it is right around the corner. And in fact a lot of these models, the core intelligence of the models, I think we're there, I just think we're now needing to build the scaffolding and the implementation around it, which seems to be lagging by about 18 months. So the core intelligence of the model is there for AGI. We just need to go implement it now. So I don't think he was wrong with his predictions. It's just the terms, the definitions that he's using are pretty amorphous.

Yeah, yeah, I totally agree with that. Yeah, I remember you were doing the, you were at Dreamforce this year, doing your forum future live during Dreamforce and one of the terms I kept on hearing you bring up over and over again was capability overhang. Yeah, it sounds to me like that's kind of, that's kind of what you're referring to here, right? It's actually smarter than what most people are using it for right now, right?

Yeah, yeah, exactly. The models are extremely capable. The scaffolding around them, the tools, memory, tool use, access to different information sources, all of that stuff still needs to continue to be built out.

Yeah, yeah. And along the same lines here I just pulled up this article. Both OpenAI and Microsoft posted this article on their website about the next chapter of Microsoft OpenAI partnership which ties into what we're saying. Because they basically said once AGI is declared by OpenAI, the declaration will now be verified by an independent expert panel. So they're going to put together some sort of panel to decide, okay, did OpenAI actually achieve AGI? So I, I mean, it's still subjective, but it's now left up to the subjectivity of this panel. As opposed to like Sam Altman just claiming we got AGI.

I think. So this just came out, right? This is a.

A couple days ago, yeah.

Oh, interesting. So maybe I got that wrong, actually. I thought the whole notion of you get the IP, Microsoft, OpenAI says you get the IP until we declare AGI. But it seems like they still do have that kind of going up to this paragraph. I can read real quick. The agreement preserves key elements that have fueled this successful partnership, meaning OpenAI remains Microsoft's frontier model partner. Okay. Microsoft continues to have exclusive IP rights and Azure API exclusivity until AGI. I did not. I might have made a mistake there. I thought they had removed that part of the agreement, but it seems like they just clarified that.

OpenAI alone doesn't get to declare it, although they do get to declare when it happens, they.

Declare it and then an independent panel verifies it.

Right. And so let's look at the incentives here. OpenAI is incentivized to declare AGI as soon as possible because they do not want to give Microsoft exclusive IP rights. Right. They don't want Azure to be. To have exclusivity. Any exclusivity is bad generally for a company. And so OpenAI is definitely incentivized to claim AGI and they could have done so at any moment, but now they actually have to have a third party validate it. And what that validation is based on, I don't know.

Who knows? Yeah. But it does say here Microsoft's IP rights for both models and products are extended through 2032 and now include models post AGI with appropriate safety guardrails. So basically it sounds like their, their agreement goes through 2032 regardless of AGI.

I'm immediately thinking of the. The. The Megamind meme and Satya Nadella. Just playing 4D chess. This is.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, it seems like Microsoft worked out a pretty nice deal for this, although it does.

I'm not surprised.

Microsoft's IP rights now exclude OpenAI's consumer hardware. So whatever they end up making with Jony, I've. If they ever do get into robotics, that's going to be outside of Microsoft's scope. I Do remember there was a little bit of tension around when Microsoft was approaching Windsurf to acquire Windsurf. Or not. Sorry. When OpenAI approached Windsurf to acquire Windsurf, it seemed like it was Microsoft that got that deal shut down. Right. Like, Microsoft went, oh, you're buying Windsurf? Well, because of our agreement, that means we'll also own a portion of windsurf. And OpenAI didn't like that. But it does sound like there's no exclusions for, like, acquired software from OpenAI. Just consumer hardware.

Yeah. And, and, and again, like, Microsoft just had all the leverage here. They. They invested and got all of these terms before OpenAI was OpenAI.

Right? Yeah, they, they.

I think it was 2017. And by the way, did you see Satya recently did an interview in which he said, bill Gates thought we were just burning a billion dollars on that investment in OpenAI, which is like, you know.

No, I didn't see that.

Oh, my God. Even the most prominent tech minds in our multiple generations gets stuff wrong. Nobody really knows what's going on. And maybe except for Satya. Satya. Satya seems to be just operating on another level.

He does. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Also, Microsoft can now independently pursue AGI alone or in partnership with third parties. So, I mean, OpenAI and Microsoft are competitors now in the race to AGI.

Oh, absolutely. They're going to be competitors on almost every dimension right there. OpenAI's building hardware. OpenAI because of it. It's just like a completely new way to write and build software. They can compete with every piece of Microsoft software all the way down to the operating system level. I truly believe this. Microsoft sees OpenAI as an existential threat, but they're also a partner. They're like, you know, keep your enemies close type. Type thing.

Yeah, no, absolutely. So I want to move on to. Let's see. Let's talk about the robots real quick here. Let's talk about.

Let's talk about robots.

So we've got the. The Neo home robot, which you can actually pre order for a $200 deposit.

This is. I actually saw. You saw. Did you see this one at ces? They actually had this one at CES and they were doing like a. A demo of it. Like vacuuming a living room kind of thing.

No, I think I missed that.

Yeah. So I thought this one is just interesting because it's like a robot wearing clothes to kind of hide the fact that it's a robot. But so this one you probably know a little bit more about. I didn't really catch this announcement when it happened, but do you want to quickly fill me in on what's got you excited about the Neo robot?

Yeah, absolutely. So this is really like the first time a company has officially opened orders for a robot that you can buy and have in your home today, with the exception of unitry.

Yeah, I was going to say I've.

Seen like Chinese company, you see like.

Streamers and stuff that have like the unitary robot. Like I don't know if you saw the Kaiser. Not one where they were like pushing it around and stuff.

It was awesome. Yeah, so, so okay, so yeah, it's, it's definitely possible to buy it but you're going to be buying it from China and everything that comes with that. So this is the first US company that, that you're able to actually buy a humanoid robot that is supposed to do chores around your house. It is built for your house. They show off a bunch of examples. Cleaning, welcoming guests by opening the door, doing laundry, cooking food, potentially getting medication for you. I mean there's, there's a thousand use cases and this, their, their launch of video as I mentioned earlier, went absolutely mega viral. 50 million plus views just on X alone, not including YouTube and Instagram and every everywhere else they launched. Now Joanna Stern, I believe her name is, did actually had an in person review and demo of this robot. Turns out it is 100% Tele operated and what that means is there is somebody wearing a VR, wearing VR goggles with you know maybe some, a handset of some sort operating the robot. So it is not yet true artificial intelligence inside the robot. Now that is not to take anything away from this accomplishment. It is wild to think just a few years ago this was a complete pipe dream and now we actually have working humanoid robots that seem to be quite impressive. Yeah. MKBHD just launched a video yesterday talking about how a lot of tech companies are now overpromising and under delivering. This is kind of another prime example. And then even like within tech, within AI it's even more prominent that companies are overpromising under delivering. Of course he was talking about the rabbit and if you made a human pin, a humane pin. Right. And so once again we the demos so far today say showed that it is 100% teleoperated. In the demo video there were two different scenes in which it was fully autonomous. That's great. But the promise is it is going to be autonomous. The majority of uses is going to be autonomous.

They said they're going to be delivering this by or kind of. Yeah, I Think delivering it by the beginning of next year.

Yeah. So it says right here, US deliveries begin in 2026, starting with early access customers. It doesn't say when in 2026, it just says be in 2026, anytime.

Okay. So they basically have over a year to start delivering this. I put in a pre order, by the way. I'm super excited. I tend to be very optimistic. I like thinking that this stuff is going to work. But of course, like that last 10, 20%, like they, they got the robot that works great, it moves well, but that last 10 to 20% always is the hard part. And I think it's very analogous to self driving. We, you know, Elon and Tesla have been talking about delivering full self driving, actually fully capable self driving for over a decade and we're now just kind of like starting to get to somewhere that it feels like, okay, he's delivering on that promise. But it, you know, a year away at all for the last decade, it seems really cool. I'm into it. The part that is maybe a little worrisome for me is if I have this humanoid robot in my house and it's not able to do things autonomously, there's going to be somebody else operating this robot, seeing into my house, doing things in my house and that.

Interesting.

Okay, I didn't catch me the right way.

I didn't catch that when you said it the first time. So basically I understood that they're tele operating it, but I assume that was for the demos. But like if you get one of these and put it in your house, somebody's going to be teleoperating it while it cleans your house.

Yeah. So it's in the FAQs. But basically what happens if. Is if you give it a task and it is not able to accomplish it autonomously, which most likely is going to be a lot of tasks in the early days they will have. You can schedule a time with their tele operators for them to accomplish the task. Now the hope is by the tele operator accomplishing the task through neo. NEO will learn and not need a teller teller operator for subsequent tasks.

Right.

But again, you are giving permission for this person running this robot that's capable of lifting £150 by the way, to operate in your house, which is just, it's wild. I don't know if I feel more uncomfortable with having an autonomous robot doing that or somebody operating it. I think it's the latter though.

Yeah. I think operating is creepier. Like somebody operating it is creepier to Me that like somebody is looking around in my house, like nowhere I put my wallet, things like that. Yeah. But you know, on the, the flip side of the coin, if you're looking at like one silver lining, you know, everybody keeps on saying AI is going to create new jobs. This is a new job that didn't exist. Teleoperating robots for people.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Matt, what do you think about the look, what do you think about the, the design of the robot?

I, I, I think honestly it's one of the less cool robots that I've seen.

What, what makes sense to me.

It looks like, to me it looks like, like a giant human sized teddy bear or something.

Do you remember like a few years ago Elon Musk went on stage to announce optimus and they had a bunch of people with like Optimus.

Yeah.

Sings single like outfits on dancing. It feels like that. But there is actually a robot under it. Yeah. For me like having the very soft look wrapped in cloth and just it looks a little, I don't know, it's not my design esthetic that I would choose when I see figures robot that is like that is what I want robots to look like. I want to see the metal. And I agree.

That's where I'm at too. This to me looks like it's from like a Tim Burton movie or something, if I'm being honest.

Oh yeah, totally.

But anybody who's wondering, I just looked up the price here. So you can buy one for 20 grand or there's a subscription for 500 bucks a month. So like if you can't afford the 20 grand up front, you could basically like rent one of these robots to live in your house.

So Matt, let's, let's assume this is all going to work out. It's going to deliver on its promise. Whether that happens or not. Let's make that assumption. The 20k price point is very interesting. That is essentially the lowest priced car in the United States is, is a little bit, I think it's 18,000. So it is essentially a very inexpensive car. Plus if you start layering on financing options, it really becomes something that I think a broad portion of the population can afford. 500 bucks a month. Okay, that seems like a lot of money. But imagine how much time you will save not having to clean up, not having to do the dishes, not having to tidy. And I guess all of these use cases are really cleaning. But I just think that the price point was the most compelling aspect of this launch.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean I figure if you hire Like a housekeeper. Right. Like, and they. Let's say they come once a week. You're probably going to pay 500 bucks a month for that housekeeper to come once a week. This is someone. Something that is there every day. Right. So if you were to. If you were to hire a private chef. Right. That's a whole additional cost. If you were to hire a housekeeper, that's an additional cost. Like, if you were to hire out all of the individual things that this one robot theoretically will be able to do for you. This is actually the more economical option, it seems.

Did you pre order?

I haven't yet, but I probably will. I mean, it's 200 bucks, so I'll probably. I tend to pre order pretty much every new tech gadget that comes out. So I had a feeling.

Yeah, Yeah. I put in the pre order. I'm gonna go with early access because that's what I want and I want to show it off on camera. So. Yeah. Okay.

My Neo robot, after I learned the third worlder piloting them is mad Chill. He's just playing video games with them and the house is a mess.

Excellent. Just hanging out. Yeah.

What we got here? Day 2 of cleaning after humans.

Yeah.

I. My robot is going to see things. Let's just say that.

Yeah. We've got. We've got kids. They'll be. Yeah. Our robots are most likely to turn on humans because of what they have to see.

Yeah. But, yeah, this is hilarious. I think this is a whole new category of meme and I'm ready for it.

Yeah, absolutely. Well, Matt, this has been absolutely amazing. I love having you on because you and I can nerd out about AI forever. I feel like every time we have a conversation, it always ends the same way. I feel like we could talk about this stuff forever.

Oh, yeah. We could easily keep going for another two hours next time.

Well, we'll definitely have you back on if you're willing to come back on and do this again, but it's been a blast. And I'm really loving what you're doing with the forward future live. I love the live shows. I love the booth you set up at Dreamforce and you had one at one of the other. What was the other event? Oh, yeah, voxworks. Yeah. I mean, I love those live streams that you're doing and you're rotating through guests and stuff. Really, really, really cool.

Yeah. We have to have you back on spe.

It's a blast. It's a blast. So thanks so much. Any, any, any place you want to shout out Obviously, everybody needs to check out Matthew Berman on YouTube. Check out Forward Future. That's where he does the live show. Forward Future Live as well. Anywhere else people should go after listening to this follow.

So if you can just click on the Ford Future Twitter thing right below Nick Wentz on the right side of the screen, just follow us at Forward Underscore. Future underscore. We're working on getting a better handle, but for now it is that Follow us on follow us at Forward Future.

Awesome. Well, Matt, thanks so much and looking forward to doing it again with you in the future.

All right, thank.

You.