Why I Bought AI Glasses (And Ignored the Robots)

Hey, welcome to the Next Wave podcast. I'm Matt Wolf and I'm here once again with Maria Grieb. And I just got back from ces and what I saw there was not what I expected to see there. So in this episode, I'm going to break down the three trends that I think you're going to want to know about that came out at CES this year. Because there was definitely three clear things that, that were just all over the place at ces. So let's go ahead and dive right into it.

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So you mentioned you saw some pretty interesting things that you were impressed with and because some of us, we're not as fancy as you and couldn't attend ces. So, like, you tell us about this.

Yeah, so I mentioned, like, what I saw there surprised me. And what I meant by that was I didn't feel like there was any major leaps this year. You know, I went to CES for the first time three years ago, so this was my third ces. The first year I went to ces, I was completely blown away. Like, I was walking around going, holy crap, I can't believe they made that. And look at these TVs. They're like this thin and they're clear. And like, how does this technology work? And like, my mind was blown. And then the second year I went, eh, like, it feels like the same kind of stuff as last year. And then this third year that I went in a row, I was even like, more underwhelmed. I was kind of like, it's all the same stuff I saw literally two years ago now. And I didn't feel like ces, there was these major, major leaps, like the first year that I went. So that's kind of like, what was surprising to me was it just felt like for the last three years, it's been all of the almost exact same stuff. Major difference. Of course, they're putting AI in everything now, so you're gonna see like, AI enabled mattresses for, you know, whatever that's useful for. We saw AI birdhouses and AI binoculars, and you name it, they put AI in it. Like AI toilets, literally, they have AI in everything now. So I think that's kind of like one of the sort of evolutions over the years is companies just made the same junk, but put AI in it now.

Odyssey. And this is coming from me, I think AI toilets could save my life. I feel like if we had AI toilets, life would be complete, but that's me. Did you say AI mattresses?

Yes, they have AI mattresses that can sort of detect, you know, when you're snoring, or it can tell you're uncomfortable because you're squirming too much or whatever, and it adjusts the bed or, like, tilts your head up and things like that. It's very, very interesting.

Some partners are gonna love this. Some people suffer from that. I would say totally. Like, a lot of people, Yeah.

I mean, like, I understand the usefulness in a lot of the AI stuff. Then there's also a lot of AI where it's like, that doesn't need AI, right. Like, they have bicycles with AI, so, I mean, you can talk to ChatGPT while you're riding your bike. Like, they're just pretty much bicycles that have, like, a chat in them, so you can chat with your bicycle. And that's one of those things where I'm like, does this actually need AI solely? So I would say at CES this year, there was three major themes that just sort of were very, very apparent. And I think it'd be kind of fun to break down each of these themes. Number one was humanoid robots. Number two was AR or AI enabled glasses. And number three was, like, autonomous vehicle tech. Those were the three things that I feel like no matter what direction you turned, you saw some company trying to put their own spin on one of those three things. So humanoids was probably, like, the most prolific there. Like, they were just everywhere. Like, even booths. That had nothing to do with robotics. I had humanoid robots standing in their booth just to sort of attract attention towards them. Like, the humanoid robots were absolutely everywhere.

Could you hug one?

Could I hug one? Most of them, I don't think would let you hug them, but they would do, like, fist bumps. Like, you could walk up and, like, some of them would fist bump. I think one of the most dystopian humanoid robots that I saw was one that was sitting at a piano, playing the piano. And I was just thinking, like, yeah, that's exactly what humans want. They want robots to be playing their pianos. Like, what?

I don't think that's what we want. I want someone to kind of hold the door for me. Put the kettle on. When I come home, I need an AI butler. This is what I want. Show us this.

Yeah. Like, they didn't really have a lot of humanoid butler types. In fact, the butler type tasks were all being done very, very slow. There was one robot that claimed to be a laundry folding robot. And when you walk up and watch the laundry folding robot, it was folding a rectangle towel, and it took, like, three minutes to fold one towel. It was pretty discouraging.

There's some kinds of things that we want to see in our mundane lives, which include, you know, like, I ironing our clothes. I don't want to iron my clothes. That's the worst thing you could ask of me. Ironing clothes is probably a punishment. You would put me in a corner, and I would stand there for, like, two hours, and I would just be punished. Rather than iron clothes, I want to see AI do that. I would love for that to happen. But, you know, if it's folding right now like this, the future isn't looking so bright for that.

Yeah, I would say ironing would probably take a robot, like, two hours. It's not great yet. But here's what I felt about the humanoid robots overall at ces. The hardware is there. There's no issues making humanoid robots look like humanoid robots. We saw robots that could walk. They showed off robots that could dance. They were showing off robots that could do flips and, like, rolls on the ground. There was one booth where somebody was actually, like, boxing with a robot. They had robots serving coffee. The mechanics, the engineering of these humanoid robots, it's there. They could make them look like humans and move like humans. I feel like the bottleneck is still the software, the mechanics to make them look like humans and move like humans. Not an issue anymore. Yet when you actually see them in practice, they're all moving in slow motion or falling over. We actively saw, like, a ton of boosts where the people were troubleshooting issues that the robots were having as we walked by. We also saw a ton of boosts where, like, the humanoid robots were, like, hanging from, like, a crane thing, because when these humanoids are powered off, they can't stand anymore. Like, they need power to balance. So as soon as they power them off, they either fall over or they have to, like, hang them up to make sure they keep on standing. So, yeah, that was a little interesting to see, like, robots hanging essentially all over the place.

So we would say, like, maybe those robots are still in their toddler age right now.

Yeah. They've got the bodies, but not the brains.

Put it that way, toddlers would be more intelligent. Why is the robot dancing? I don't want to see a dancing robot.

Yeah, you want it to do your.

Ironing, save the world, help out old people in their own houses, these kinds of stuff. A dancing robot is not going to add anything to my life as a person that writes about AI every single day. There are some things in this world that kind of frustrates me. We want to make people approach AI rather than get away from AI. I don't think this is going to happen if we keep on having robots that are dancing or, like, robots that can box. I want to see a robot that literally just kind of helps out in the house and sort of helps the elderly if they can't stand or people with disabilities.

I mean, the goal of a lot of these, like, demonstrations weren't necessarily like, hey, you want a robot that can do flips? It was more like showing off the capabilities of the engineering behind the robot. But still, you're walking around and you're seeing these robots do all of these things that you're like, I don't need the robot to do that for me.

No.

I need the robot to bring me my coffee, fold my laundry, do my dishes. I want my robot to do the stuff I don't want to do. It's cool that this one could do flips, but, like, why? Why do I need that?

The whole idea is that we want to make our lives more productive so that we can handle other things in our lives. A robot that flips and break dances. We saw this vision 2005. It's 2026. I want to see a robot that automates my house.

Yeah, absolutely.

I said what I said.

So, yeah, those are a handful of the, like, robots that I saw there. And again, just to, like, recap, the form factor is there, the capabilities and movement are there. I mean, we can see them do flips and we can see them box and we can see them dance. Like, the movement mechanics are there, but they're just not doing anything useful yet, in my opinion.

Yeah, agreed.

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I Do believe, like from a humanoid robot perspective, we are far, far behind. Like we're not even there yet. But I think AI, when it comes to wearable AI is what kind of excites people more than other things. This is the feelers out there, you know, from the people that hear about this. Wearable AI is what kind of excites them the most. So I heard that you also had the opportunity to see that in ces.

Yeah. So the glasses, that was the sort of second theme that I would say I saw throughout CES was these glasses everywhere. Some of them were just AI enabled. So like the meta ray ban, for lack of a better word, rip offs. Right. Like the same kind of concept as the meta ray bans.

Get started on those again, where they.

Just have like AI built into them so you can talk to your sunglasses. And some of them have cameras that so they can see what's going on around you. Some of them don't. They just have the AI built into them. But then there was also a lot of the like augmented reality glasses where they might have like a heads up display or the ones that I really actually like because I'm a gamer nerd. Also were the xreal glasses. I actually ended up getting a pair of them while I was at ces. But they're glasses that let you hook into like your Steam Deck or your Nintendo Switch or even your phone or laptop. And it makes it look like you have a 500 foot display in front of you, like you're watching on like a giant movie screen. But the xreal glasses, like their big innovation this year was It'll convert any 2D game or video into 3D and it does it on device. So you don't even need to connect to a cloud. It doesn't need Internet, anything like that. You just press a button and it switches from 2D to 3D and it turns whatever video you're watching into 3D. So like the examples they were giving when we were there, they were showing videos of like Planet Earth. Remember the old show Planet Earth? They would show that and they would flip on 3D and that whole Planet Earth show would look like it was on a 500 foot screen in front of you in 3D.

Wow, I would love to see that, for example.

Yeah, that was actually kind of cool. I actually owned a couple of pairs of these xreal glasses. Like I owned their first generation of them like four years ago.

Of course you do.

And I actually still use them sometimes. You know, we've got our living room TV and My wife watches shows I'm not interested in. My kids watch shows I'm not interested in. So sometimes I'll just be lounging on the couch, I'll put on these glasses, and I'm in my own little, like, movie theater watching something completely different.

That actually is so nice. If I can just watch reality TV in 3D, that would be so cool. Yes, please.

Yeah, yeah. That's the type of stuff that I put on my glasses to get away from. But yeah, you know, sorry.

Not sorry.

But yeah, I mean, you mentioned that you have, like a bit of a beef with the glasses. And I'm curious what the beef with the glasses are.

It's just design wise, I don't like Ray Bans. I think that the last time they looked nice was in like 2010, and then they stopped being nice. And I just want it to be style. Like, I want to walk around. This is like a shout to all of the people that know what I'm talking about. I like to wear nice things and I like to get out of the house. If I want to wear my glasses, I want to wear my glasses that look stylish. That kind of like completes the whole look. And, you know, the Ray Bans are not going to do that. Meta should team up with someone else. Why are you teaming up with Ray Bans, of all people? You know, like, well, here's the thing.

So Ray Bans are made by a company called SLR Lexotica. Right? But that same company also makes Oakley's. They make, I think, like Prada sunglasses. They make. Almost every big name sunglass brand you can think of is made by this one company. They're essentially like a sunglasses monopoly. And Meta actually acquired like a big chunk of SLR Lexotica. And so Meta is actually releasing the glasses in an Oakley form factor. Those are already out. They're releasing them in like a Prada form factor. They're actually releasing them in all sorts of different form factors. The Ray Bans were just like the original proof of concept. But the company that Metta is partnered with essentially makes like every sunglasses brand you can probably think of.

If the Prada ones come out this year, thoughts and prayers to my bank account. I feel like I'm going to buy every single one of them. Also, watch me get banned from buying Ray Bans for life. I feel like if they hear about this and, like, they see this video, they're just going to ban me from owning any pair, even the ones that don't have AI. I'm sorry, I Just. I'm not bashing you.

It's okay. I'm a counterbalance. I own like five pairs of Ray Bans, so I'll counterbalance you there.

Thank you.

I'm a millennial. I'm an old dad. I wear dad stuff.

I mean, you said it. I didn't say anything. I'm also a millennial. Like, I'm late millennial.

Yeah, yeah.

So also, you saw some pretty interesting things that include vehicles that are also operated by AI.

Yeah. So there was a ton of autonomous vehicles. Waymo had a booth this year.

Of course they do.

Everybody's kind of heard of Waymo at this point, I imagine, which is like the self driving ride share program. They're actually releasing new vehicles. They have like bigger vans that are going to be coming out. The company Zoox, I don't know if you're familiar with them, but they're actually an Amazon owned company and they make these like little robo buses. And these little robo taxi buses were actually driving up and down the Las Vegas strip throughout ces, giving people rides between hotels and stuff. So they were actually in use during the event. Just all over the place in Vegas. But then on the show floor, we saw all sorts of different style of these vehicles. Like some of them are like these luxury, like they look like the first class cabin on an airline. Some of them were actually really comfortable. I'm like, this is how I want to ride.

I hate driving. If that could like sort of sort out my whole life and save me from driving for the rest of my life, I would. Oai, honestly, I'm the same.

I hate driving. My wife almost drives everywhere.

I went back home in December and when I was in Heathrow, there was this robot that was cleaning or like was. I don't know if it was cleaning or roaming around in the airport. And I sort of was in its way and it said, you know, I have to move out. And it said it in this kind of like futuristic sort of tone. And I was like, oh my God. I have living it like it is happening in front of me. This is the first time I've seen it. Where I come from, we don't have that yet.

So if you haven't seen the Zoox Robo Taxi, this is what the Zoox robo Taxi looks like. These things were like literally everywhere on the Strip. You saw them driving up and down the Strip, taking people around. It's just like a little bus thing. It's kind of awkward if you don't know the people in it with you because the seats are like facing each other, so you're like looking directly at the people on the other side of you.

Having complete strangers with you at the bus could be like a way for you to meet new people, is what every life coach would say to you. I wouldn't say that I don't want.

To meet new people. I'm good with the amount of people I know.

My worst nightmare, actually.

So this is the new Waymo. The original Waymo was actually made by Jaguar, or as they say over in the uk, Jaguar. But this new one looks like it's actually designed by Waymo. It's like a van looking one. Here's another one that we came across called a Tensor. You can see it's got the giant lidar on top. And then here's one of the more like luxury ones that we saw. That's like a giant van. But look at those, like, comfy lounger couch seats. It's like an autonomous limo is what this one looks like to me.

I would ride in that.

And then here's the last one I'll share. This is the one that I said feels like you're sitting in a first class cabin on an airplane.

It looks really nice.

I got to sit in it and try it out. You can recline all the way back. So imagine an Uber comes and picks you up and this is what you get in.

I would never leave that Uber specifically, like, I think I would stay in that Uber.

And one thing you can't tell from this video, well, there's actually two sides to it. So like somebody sitting on the opposite side of the screen. And so this vehicle can go around and pick up multiple people and drive all of them around. And if you know the person that's getting in there with you, you can actually drop the screen and be talking to the person next to you. If you don't know the person next to you, you can just lift the screen and just be completely isolated.

Beautiful is what we wanted to hear.

Perfect for introverts like me.

Yes.

So, yeah, the autonomous vehicle thing was just kind of everywhere at CES as well. If there was one sort of like, honorable mention that I thought was cool was the EVTOLs, the electronic vertical takeoff and landing devices. They're basically like flying cars. They'll go to about 15 or 20ft off the ground. They're not like crazy high in the air. They're just like, you know, above traffic, I guess.

Yeah.

But some of them are kind of freaky looking. So this is one of them that we saw. This is one where I said, it kind of freaks me out because those propellers are just sort of like, right there in the open. Like, it feels like if it was turned on and you walked too close, it would chop you up into a million pieces. So that's kind of freaky. So this is the one that I really liked. These are all, like, little mini jet engines. They're not actually, like, propellers. And it's got, I think, 48 of them. And they said, like, 25% of them can fail and you would still fly. I kind of like the idea of more engines when I'm flying. That way, if some engines break, you just don't fall out of the sky. But this is the one that it flies about 15ft off the ground. It could only fly for about 20 minutes total, and it cost $100,000.

I got to anger a lot of people with this. I know there are a lot of nerds out there that are going to hear me and, like, and they're going to say, this girl doesn't talk with a lot of integrity, even though she writes newsletter about AI. They do look like cupholders. I mean, so if you don't have any use of it, you just put it in your living room and just put cups in it.

I mean, yeah, you could do that. It's a very, very expensive cup holder. This is one of the few evitals, or I don't know how that's pronounced. I just say Evtol. I think that's how you say it. But this was one of the few that, like, I saw there, and I was like, I actually kind of want to fly that one. The ones with the giant propellers that are exposed scare me too much. But this one, I'm like, I could do that. Just don't put your finger in it.

Even helicopters freak me out. If I had, for some reason, had to take a helicopter, I have a fear of that because the chopper is, like, going really fast.

Oh, totally. I've flown in a helicopter once in my life, and it scared the crap out of me. And I'm like, yeah, I don't want. I'm good. I've done it. I don't need to do it again.

These look better than the chopper, you know?

Exactly, exactly. So, yeah, those were pretty much the big themes that I saw during CES that I think, you know, we're going to really, really hear more of throughout the year. We're going to hear a lot more about the humanoid robots. Hopefully they get smarter. They're all kind of felt kind of dumb still. The A high glasses, I mean, they're relatively dumb. You know, in AI we have a saying, right? This is the worst it's ever going to be. So I don't feel too bad saying something isn't great yet because I can just follow that up with, well, wait a year, you know, because it's going to get a lot better.

Yeah.

So the humanoids are not quite where we want them to be yet. We saw a lot of AR AI headsets everywhere. And then the autonomous driving. I think 2026 is going to be the year where we just see more and more and more of that stuff bubble up. I Believe Waymo has 2000 vehicles on the road already and they're coming to London and I believe Tokyo next. So Waymo is going to be worldwide. Zoox is coming to Vegas. They were rolling them out and testing them during ces, but they're not rolled out in Vegas yet. That was just sort of like a CES sort of special thing they were doing. But they are rolling out in Vegas later this year and you've got Elon's robo taxis and the Tesla fleet and all of that kind of stuff that's bubbling up. And I went to a Rivian event late last year where they were showing off the sort of self driving capabilities that they're building. So I think 2026 is going to be the year where we really, really, really see these autonomous vehicles sort of break out and become more and more mainstream.

Yeah, I honestly, as I said, can't wait. I feel like I've been waiting for this specifically ever since I was a child. I've been anticipating something like this since the Donna time. So I can't wait to just see it in front of me. As I said, I saw this robot in Heathrow and I was like, this is the closest thing I've ever gotten to something as futuristic. The robot telling me to move away because it's cleaning.

Yeah. I've been wanting the autonomous vehicles to get better and better ever since I had kids. My daughter is now 13, so three years away from having a driver's license and I'm like, come on, autonomous vehicles, come on, I want you in the next three years. My hope is that they get really big within the next three years and I never have to teach my daughter to drive because her car will just drive her around for.

Is it like a universal dad thing not to teach their daughters? Because let me tell you, once you.

Have kids, it's just the Thought of your kids out driving on the road where you may not necessarily know where they are at any given time is just a scary thought.

I know, I know.

Darren, the producer, knows exactly what I'm talking about.

I don't have a daughter, but I do have a younger sister. Like, I am scared. People haven't driven in Lebanon. They wouldn't know what I'm talking about.

So, yeah, that's kind of the state of ces.

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So, Matt, I mean, we've spoke about this in the newsletter and I did a short video about this. I think it's going to hit people's laptops slash phones soon Enough, which is ChatGPT Health launched a dedicated health experience for a lot of people and a lot of people have anticipated, including myself, because I may or may not trauma dump on ChatGPT. Not only trauma dump, but ask it the dumbest questions humanly. Why is my gray hair getting grayer, for example? And I'm a 30 year old woman, I know that answer. But I need to double check with ChatGPT because, you know, type A and the statistics say that 230 million people, you know, ask ChatGPT for health things every single week. So not only me, you know, so that's okay. That made me feel better. Information kind of usually lives across the apps and like the portals and the PDFs, but like ChatGPT kind of like compressed it into one sort of platform and, and it understands lab results, it prepares you for doctor visits, what to say and what to ask, etc. And it can spot patterns over time. So I'm loving what I'm hearing. And obviously you can share with it what you want and you can unshare with it what you want. You know, it's everything is encrypted. So I'm talking to someone that probably has access to it. But I thought I should talk about it first because I wrote about the newsletter. Let me know what you think.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I do have access to chat GPT Health. I have played with it a little.

Bit, as I said.

Is it only on the pro plan right now?

I think so, yeah.

The high end, expensive plan.

Yeah, yeah. And it's gradually going out on Web and iOS.

Well, it's funny that you mentioned that you sort of trauma dump on there because I always make this joke like, I don't care if you want to look at my browser history. I got nothing to hide in my browser history. Just don't look at my ChatGPT history. Yeah, I don't want anybody to see what I chat with these bots about.

Yeah, yeah.

But yeah, I have played around with ChatGPT Health. It's pretty impressive. It was very, very easy to connect to my health care provider that has all of my data in the background. It pulled in all of, you know, the medications I've taken over the years, all of my doctor's visits. Pretty much any information that's on file for me, it's able to access. And you can also set an expiration date so you can say, I only want it to be able to look at this data for three days and then it will cut it off and then it won't look at that data anymore. Or I only want it to be able to access this for the next three months and it'll cut it off. So I think that's kind of a nice feature as well that you can sort of give it an expiration date where it stops looking at your health data. But it's also going to be able to connect to Apple Health and my Fitness Pal and, you know, any of the sort of like wearable devices that you have that track your health as well. And to me, I just really love this idea of having, you know, an AI tool like ChatGPT having this like holistic view of my health. Right. It knows what my doctors see, but it's also tracking my own sort of fitness routines and things like that. So it's getting the entire picture and can give you advice and, you know, tell you how to approach things with your doctor based on like a ton of information. It's really, really cool.

It is cool. I feel like people kind of confuse us of like, this could replace doctors, this doesn't replace doctors. This kind of like helps you get prepared for your next appointment and your next doctor visit so that you ask the right questions or like, you know, what's up there, you know what's out there for you rather than just going in blind.

Exactly.

And, like, you'd have all your information. It's like your co pilot. You know how, like, sometimes people take their moms? Till this day, I'm 30, I went back home and I took my mom with me to my doctor. I still take my mom with me, and that's okay. Rather than taking your mom. ChatGPT can answer your questions.

Yeah, exactly, exactly. And I mean, I haven't used it for this use case yet, but it's great. Like, if you get like blood work or anything done like that.

Yeah.

Lab results, a lot of times you'll get the blood work back and have no idea what you're looking at. It just is a bunch of random numbers with acronyms next to it and you're like, I have no idea what this, any of this means. And ChatGPT, you can go to it and just say, I just got my blood panels back. Help me understand what all of this means, and it will tell you in plain English what your blood panels mean and maybe, like, what sort of dietary changes you should make based on that blood work and things like that. So I think it's really, really cool. I think the one scary thing is, like, I don't know if I want these big tech companies, like, training on my health data. I could be wrong, but I don't think any of, like, the specific health stuff when you're using the health area is actually training on that data. But again, I could be wrong on that one.

I mean, we don't know about that, but think of it as like a spoiler for your next doctor's visit. We're not talking about, like, small physicians that have trained on this or, like, helped develop it. We're talking about 260 physicians. That's a lot of people with a lot of knowledge. This is the type of things that I think would ease up a lot of anxiety people have over AI. I like it. I like this new initiative of ChatGPT.

Yeah. And it seems like Claude sort of jumped on it with Claude Healthcare. I have not tested that one or tried it yet, but it sounded like a response to ChatGPT releasing their version.

Of course it did.

But speaking of Claude, Claude also launched something this week with their Claude cowork, which is essentially like Claude code, but for, like, everyday users who don't want to use it for code. Right. So what Claude cowork can do is actually connect to folders on your computer. And I think right now it's only Mac as of this recording, but it can connect to folders on your computer and read the files in the folder, manipulate the files, create new files, things like that. I saw demos where people were using it to clean up their desktop and reorganize files on their desktop into cleaner folders and things like that. So it's like a chatbot agent that can just do tasks on your computer on your behalf and not necessarily purely for coding anymore. And interestingly, they actually said they Vibe coded Claude Cowork in a week and a half. They built this whole thing by Vibe coding it in a week and a half.

Sounds like something anthropic would do, in my opinion. Yeah, it sounds like something I would buy because if someone sees my desktop right now, it looks like a bomb went out in it. Yeah, it is everywhere for me.

It's my downloads folder. I download stuff to my computer and just like literally never delete it. So I want to go test Claude Cowork and say, hey, look in my downloads folder and see if there's any files that I absolutely should delete because.

I don't need them anymore 100%. Also, I heard about Google. I really want to kind of pick your brain about this.

Yeah, so this was something that. I hate to say it because I don't know what your comment about it is going to be. It's something that I had early access to for the last month, but it's called Google Personal Intelligence and they just rolled that out today. All of these things we're talking about are only on like the highest tier plans. Right. Like I think ChatGPT Health, they only wrote it out to the 200amonth plan. Claude Cowork is only available right now on the Max plan, which is 200amonth. This personal intelligence from Google, I believe they've only rolled it out to the Ultra and Max plans, which, you know, higher end plans on Google.

I feel like if you had longer hair, you would flip your hair right now.

But yeah, Google, they released this personal intelligence and what it is, is now with inside of the Gemini chat, you can actually directly connect into your Gmail. You can connect into your Google Calendar. I don't know if you can do Google Drive yet, but I believe that's coming. You can actually connect straight from Gemini into like the Google ecosystem of products and it will now use that information when you're chatting with Gemini. One of the examples that they gave on their announcement, Josh Woodward, one of the product leads over at Google, he was at a store to get new tires for his car. And he was in line for the checkout, and they asked him, what kind of tires does your car need? And he was like, oh, I don't remember. So he opened up Gemini on his phone and said, what kind of tires does my car need? And Gemini actually looked through his Google photos to find a picture of his car to figure out what kind of tires he needed on the car. He came back and said, these are the tires you need based on the pictures of your car that I found inside of your Google photos. And then they asked him for his license plate number, and he's like, I don't have that memorized. And so he asked Gemini, what is my license plate number? And Gemini gave back his license plate number because it was able to look at his Google photos and find a picture of his car where the license plate was visible. So, like, that was kind of the examples that they were giving of how this can be useful. And they say they don't train on any of that data. So, like, it's not saving his license plate number into the training data or anything like that. It's just like an extra helpful connector. The problem that I currently have with it is it's not available in workspace plans. And I mostly use a Google workspace plan because, you know, my mattwolf.com domain is built on a Google workspace plan, and that's my main domain. So the thing that I use my Google calendar with my main gmail email and all of my Google photos are in an account that this doesn't work with yet.

For now. For now. I mean, give them time. They just launched it.

But it also makes it really, really hard to test and experiment with. But I don't know if I'm normal in this case or not, but I have multiple Google accounts. I feel like a lot of people probably have multiple Google accounts, like one for business, one for personal, things like that. I have three Google accounts that I use that I sort of switch between for different use cases. And this personal intelligence only connects to one Google account. I think it would be super helpful if I can connect personal intelligence to, like, multiple Google accounts and have it pull information from all of these different accounts to sort of help assist me. Yeah, that's what I would really, really love to see.

I feel like that could be extremely helpful for a lot of people. So I love it. I love to hear about it.

Yeah, a lot of cool products coming out of these companies that I'm excited to use. I think a lot of people will actually find useful. I feel like AI was going through this phase of, like, this stuff is really cool, but it's not that useful to me yet. And we're shifting into the phase where, like, it's actually starting to feel useful. We're starting to see like, oh, dang.

It's what people want to see rather than flipping robots. Yeah, 100%.

Exactly. Exactly. The only problem is right now they're still sort of fairly cost prohibitive for most people. Like, most people aren't going to pay $250 a month to get access to Google's personal intelligence right now. You know, they're not going to pay the $200 a month for Claude Max plan just to be able to use Claude Cowork. Yeah, it just doesn't make sense yet for a lot of people. So we're seeing the usefulness and the use cases pop up, but it's still like, okay, we need to get these costs down. We need to make this, like, accessible to more people still.

Yeah, I think it's just like the start and eventually it's going to be more mundane. It's going to be part of our daily lives, I feel. Yeah, it's going to be, you know, on your phone and stuff.

Yep, exactly. Exactly. And I think AI wins. I think AI succeeds when people forget they're using AI. Right. Like you just get inside of something like Gemini or maybe you're wearing your, like AI glasses or something, whatever, and you walk up to like a counter and they say, hey, what kind of tires do you need? And your Google glasses just, you know, whisper in your ear, oh, you need the Pirelli 32s or whatever.

You know, whispering would be very creepy, but yeah, something along those lines.

Yeah, maybe it shouldn't whisper. Whispering just makes everything creepier, doesn't it? But I feel like once the AI is sort of more proactive and sort of less top of mind that you're actually using AI, that's when AI starts to feel really, really useful in most people's lives, is it's just this sort of helpful assistant in the background that you're not thinking too much about. And I think that is the goal of most of these companies and that's what they're sort of pushing towards. And I think right now we're seeing those steps towards that reality.

I mean, the narrative has to change. A lot of people still don't like AI. A lot of people are cursing AI. I've been seeing it on, like celebrity shows and stuff and like on red carpets and People would be cursing AI publicly. And we just want to see kind of people embrace it to a certain extent so that it becomes part of our daily lives rather than push it away. And these companies need to take that into consideration, in my opinion.

Yeah. And I think it's tough because I feel like a lot of people that are sort of outside of the AI sphere, outside of the tech sphere, they just sort of lump all AI together. But I mean, like, AI has all sorts of subcategories, right? Like, computer vision is a subcategory of AI videos that can, like, recognize what's going on in the video. I don't think any of the celebrities are out there railing against computer vision as, like, a technology or autocorrect or recommendation algorithms. Right. Like, when you use Netflix or YouTube.

Or Hulu, it says AI.

Yes, Spotify, all of this stuff are AI recommendation algorithms under the hood that are sort of looking at what you're listening to, what you're watching and saying based on what you like. Other people that like what you like like this stuff. So we think you would like that.

Exactly. Yeah. I found out about, like, new bands because my playlist is Sleep Token, it's Ghost, it's Evanescence, it's like, a lot. And I found out about new artists out there because of that specifically. So people should be thankful a bit.

Yeah. And then even generative AI has sort of, like, subcategories as well. Right. With generative AI, there's a lot of people that are still really, really anti AI in terms of image generation. I don't think it's the actual tool that they hate. It's the fact that the tool was built on the images created by humans without permission that people hate. Right. Like, it was the. The way the training data was collected without permission that people hate. Same with video generation AI. But a lot of these same actors and celebrities and stuff like that are probably secretly having conversations with ChatGPT behind the scenes that, just like us, they don't want anybody else to look at their conversations with ChatGPT, you know?

Yeah. Celebrities just like us, you know, like, before, we used to kind of, like, see them in supermarkets and flip flops. Now they can also talk to ChatGPT about their gray hair. So it's gonna be. It's the same thing, so.

Exactly. Well, I think we covered a lot in this episode. You know, we broke down the big trends from ces, we broke down the news that kind of happened outside of ces. I think we kind of set the pace for what to expect for 2026. I think this was a. A pretty good breakdown of where things are headed. So hopefully people who tuned in enjoyed this episode and have a better idea of where things are going. And we could be totally wrong with our predictions, but based on what I saw at ces, I feel pretty confident that these are going to be the big themes of the year.

Yay. Less flipping robots, more robots that automate our lives. Yes, please. You can see that.

Absolutely. Absolutely. Well, thank you everybody for tuning in. Really, really appreciate you hanging out with us today. And if you haven't already, make sure you subscribe to channel on YouTube. We're going to try to do our best to keep you looped in on the latest that's going on in the world of AI. We've got tutorials dropping on AI, We've got cool interviews coming up. So if you're not subscribed and you want to stay completely looped in on AI, make sure you're subscribed to the Next wave podcast on YouTube or wherever you listen to podcasts. But YouTube's probably going to be the best place. Thank you so much for tuning in. Really, really appreciate you. Hopefully we'll see you in the next one.

Bye, Sam.