S2 Ep1 - Metaverse | With Robert Scoble and Brennon William

Foreign.

Welcome everyone to this second season of Digital Transformation podcast. It is my pleasure today to welcome all our guests. We have Mr. Robert Scoble, founder at Scobleizer and the CSO at Infinite Retina. Welcome.

Thanks for having me on.

And then we have Brennan Williams, founder and CEO at Infinity Metaverse. Welcome Brennan.

Hey, thanks for having me.

It is also my pleasure today to let you discover that this is second season of the Digital Transformation podcast changes a bit. We're not gonna have any more one, but it going to be more of a talk show. So we will focus on one topic. The topic of this episode is Metaverse. That is really hot, I would say. And I will have with me two co hosts, Cyril Costa, that is advisor for Tesco, Barclays and many other big realities. Thank you for joining, Cyril. You will probably be here. You will probably remember Cyril because he participated already in in the first season of of the podcast as a guest and. And on my left side I have the pleasure to have Francesco Italia, that is a software engineer at last in Dynamics.

Hello everybody. A pleasure to be here.

Okay, so let's warm up a bit with some question. Robert, would you like to briefly introduce yourself and the activities that you your company?

Yeah, I'm Robert Scoble. I had a famous innovation show blog in Silicon Valley for more than a decade. Still is continuing. I was hanging out with series co founders this week at a conference and I've written four books on technology. I used to work at Microsoft as a strategist. I worked at Fast Company and Rack Space. So I got pretty good look at the cloud computing world. And now I'm completely focused on AI, which has a deep implication on Metaverse. We're about to get a new Metaverse.

Yeah, I think we will have a lot of time to to understand which implications you you have in your mind.

Let's just put it on. And Apple is coming. That's three words. We can all go home.

Brennan, would you like to briefly introduce also yourself and the Infinity Metaverse, please?

Yeah, sure. Thanks. I'm Brennan Williams, as I was introduced as the founder and CEO and/CTO at Infinity Metaverse. I guess I've been smacking keys for about 30 years in different parts around the world for lots of different companies, all of your big companies, and quite a few small ones which have been fantastic as well. I've worked in lots of different industries and different fields, everything from Formula One all the way through to building robotics and cognitive AI systems. About a decade ago, before any investors started to realize the Impact and getting involved with that workflow, Microsoft, Xbox, lots of other areas which actually all come together. And in some sort of weird way, even though I'm turning into this old man right now, you know, the Metaverse is an area that I'm probably. I'm probably built to do. So, yeah, Infinity Metaverse is coming along. We've been very, very quiet about what we're doing, and what we like to say is, you know, we're building tools and solutions that will open the Metaverse up to everybody. And we want to make it as easy as, you know, as creating a Facebook profile for people to build 3D immersive worlds. That's. That's where we're at.

So this helps me asking you, what is your definition of Metaverse? Because Metaverse sometimes seems everything and nothing at the same time. So what is your true definition of it?

Oh, sorry.

Let's say with Brandon.

Okay, sorry, sorry. Yeah, yeah. I get asked that question by everybody all the time. And I think the interesting part about this is to say that some of us don't necessarily have a definition. Right. It's really about as a startup and as a business, it's trying to understand what the problems are and solving those problems for people.

So if.

If your users, whether that's consumers or whether that's businesses trying to develop for the metaverse, want to achieve something, whether that's, you know, full persistence, whether that's interoperability and so forth, and these are big challenges that we've got to solve. So it's not about having a definition of Metaverse. I think it'll change over time, as the Internet has, as it's gone through its evolutions. And it's about, you know, businesses and people coming together sol problems and thinking about how to deliver experiences as we move forward. In a technical sense, that's. That's where I stand on the whole. Is there a definition of the Metaverse scenario?

Okay. Okay. Roberto, do you agree with that?

Yeah, it hasn't been well defined because Mark Zuckerberg tried to define it, and his headset hasn't really taken off with consumers, you know, yet. He wanted to build a virtual world in VR and get people all excited about that. The real promise of a new 3D Internet, which is really what we're talking about, is quite deeper than what Zuckerberg has shown us so far. And we haven't yet seen it as somebody put it together, where it gets everyday average people excited, you know, and that's why we're having trouble defining it. You know.

Yeah, probably. Yes, yes. And how do you see the evolution of the mixed reality, augmented reality, virtual reality into the metaverse space? What is it today and what could become in the future? Let's start with Robert.

Yeah. Where we're heading is an AI centric world. And we're starting to get real deep looks into this, right, with GPT from OpenAI, where you can have a conversation with it. Now, that's not 3D yet, but, but they're going to be multimodal by the end of the year. Multimodal means it can ask you to turn on your camera and aim it at something and ingest that and look at what, you know, let's say a menu in a restaurant or something like that, and do that. Oh, man. Let's back up. We're heading into a new AI generated 3D world. When you start reading all the papers coming out of the AI world, you start seeing a lot of innovation around neural radiance fields. These are new 3D fields or new light fields, 3D scenes that are generated by an AI after they ingest 2D photos and stuff like that. So you start thinking about a new kind of metaverse that is going to be generated by AI and you're going to interact with it, like with GPT, where you can have a conversation. So we're going to soon have something like, I have this movie poster behind me from Ready Player one, right where you are going to be able to talk with the environment. Hey, environment, take me to Taj Mahal. Hey, environment, take me to a concert. Hey, environment, take me to a, a sporting arena. Hey, environment, take me to a virtual world that one of these panelists has built. Go to town, right? Or hey, environment, let's mix reality. Let's put, you know, a virtual being here on the floor because, you know, soon we're all going to have glasses on where we can put things, augmented reality, things into the real world and mix reality and, and play with, you know, some of what you're experiencing is real reality and some is generated by an AI, a computer.

Right.

By the way, I asked OpenAI's GPT, how would you define metaverse? And it answers back right. It says the metaverse is a collective virtual shared space created by the convergence of virtually enhanced physical reality and physically persistent virtual reality. It's a digital universe that encompasses multiple interconnected environments, platforms and experiences where users can interact with each other and digital objects in real time using avatars or digital representations of themselves. The metaverse is typically accessed through various devices, such as VR headsets, augmented reality glasses and smartphones. In the Metaverse, users can engage in various activities like socializing, gaming, collaborating, creating and exploring digital content. It integrates aspects of social media, online gaming and virtual economies, blurring the lines between digital and physical worlds. Right. And it keeps going. By the way, OpenAI's chat GPT is for. GPT4 is really good at describing, at defining words like metaverse or any technology. You can ask it, and it comes back with a pretty good thing.

I asked the Same question to ChatGPT3 and it was almost as precise, just much, much shorter than that. But the first part of the definition was exactly that. It's funny that we had the same idea about asking ChatGPT what the method.

Cyril, you were about to say something.

Yes, because Robert and Brennan avoided the question to define the metaverse, or just couldn't, let's say, define exactly what it is. I wanted to ask, in their view, what are the key components and elements of what we would call the Metaverse? I understand that it's not that easy to define.

Do you want to, do you want to kick in, into the conversation?

Yeah, sure, yeah, please, yeah. Thanks for the question, Cyril. I think, you know, from, from a, from a technical perspective, right? So there's a. There's lots of different avenues here where we're trying to view, you know, an idea through different lenses, right? So from a technical perspective, if we're looking at it and saying, what are these key components? How does it all work? Right? There's literally a SC of things that we look at, from what I would consider to be easy to things that are quite difficult, but people have notably previously said they're impossible. I see all this sort of stuff all the time, people saying, oh, we can't build the metaverse yet, we don't have the technology for it. And in fact, quite famously, cto, previous CTO from Intel, made the statement that, you know, we don't have the, the ability and the capacity and the data networks and stuff like that to deliver a Metaverse concept right now. Right. What I can tell you is that all of my career I've worked on what we call future tech, right? Everything that's five, six years away, coming out of research before it even gets anywhere close to a consumer piece for it. And what's funny about this is when we see large companies making statements about solutions that aren't in their agenda or within their best sense of timing, right? So what is a key component area and what is the thing that people struggle with?

Right.

Now, and the biggest challenge of all is the number of concurrent users in a space. Right. And the reason why people like former people from intel and other other companies say we can't do this yet, and it's going to take years, is because most companies are attacking the problems of concurrency users, the amount of number of users in a single space. Viewing through the lens of traditionally how we solve for very large data streaming problems. Right. And so they're looking at, for example, the obsolete client server model, which is the bedrock, the foundation of gaming engines that are fantastic at what they produce. Unreal Engine Unity. Just two to name out of dozens and dozens of engines. But they're built on this obsolete concept of client and server. If I told you right now that we can actually host a hundred thousand people around the world in the same environment simultaneously with a theoretical unlimited level. Yeah. With 90% of the world's population can connect into one environment in under 50 milliseconds. Yeah. That's doable right now. And it's doable because we're not attacking the problem the same way as everybody has traditionally attacked these problems. I've worked on very, very large streaming scenarios, things like streaming the Olympics to billions of people at a time.

Right.

This is a completely different problem. And so, you know, that's the really far end of the scale of what is a problem for, you know, a key component of the Metaverse. It can't be like games. You can't just have 10 people going to this version over here, 10 people going to that version of it there. Everybody needs to be able to flow through these environments. It's meant to be live, it's meant to be fully persistent. Walk in, kick a trash can, open over, walk out, come back another day, the trash can still kicked over. It can't reset. Right. This is these concepts. Persistence is another really big one from our angle. Our approach in my scenario of looking at this was solve the hardest problems first. Yeah. Because the other ones are a walk. They're a cakewalk to solve. Yeah. Things like integration is not necessarily. Interoperability is not necessarily another key problem that people talk about in terms of interoperability cases. Yeah. It's actually about interoperability between the physical and the digital worlds. Yeah. How can we ensure that our censoring solutions are not only fast enough to and capable enough in the back ends, but when we talk about things like security, management of privacy, all of those parts, there's a very big problem set that we have to deal with. But you know, there's a There's a touch without me ranting for an hour about some of the key challenges that needed to be solved. And I can tell you right now that some of us have solved them. We just need to put an interface on things now. Yeah, good. Thank you.

And Robert?

Yeah. There's several problems coming and the elephant in the room is Apple is coming in June. Apple's coming with a new AI mesh that, that's inside all of its products already. This is a new wireless network that nobody knows about. It's called ultra wideband. It connects all of the devices to together. And sitting in front of me is an M1 chip. 21% of that is a neural. Is an AI. Neural Networking is a inferencing engine. An AI inferencing engine. Think of it, a runtime for AIs and it's completely unused. There's more AI inferencing power in this chip than a three thousand and eighty Nvidia card has in it. And Apple hasn't yet turned it on either of these things. And they're going to be turned on in June. And then we're going to see a new headset that's going to let us see a new photorealistic metaverse or digital world and we'll see where we are then. I don't think the Mark Zuckerberg's metaverse is going to be very attractive at Christmas this year compared to the Apple one. But the Apple one is a future one. It's one that most people aren't going to be able to buy this year because they can't make enough headsets for this Christmas. This is really a play for 2025 when we start getting glasses, right? Lightweight glasses that we can talk with, interact with, see the, the glasses are going to have eye sensors, going to have room sensors to see your room, to make a 3D map of your room. And then we're going to be into a new world because then we're going to be able to run our businesses in a new way, entertain ourselves in a new way, educate ourselves in a new way and, and on and on, do fitness services in a new way. Right? This is why Apple's coming, because they see the ability for services to be really profitable in the. In the future because going to be inside the services, right? Instead of watching a fitness app on a 2D screen in front of you or on a phone, now you're going to be, your coach is going to be right next to you, right? Talking with you, watching you work out, right. And having A conversation with you. This is coming and it's coming between now and 2025, right? So all businesses have to rethink themselves from scratch because of what OpenAI has brought. That's one thing. And now we have to think about what is our businesses in a 3D Internet. When we move from 2D screens to 3D screens, what does every one of our businesses have and how does that affect even our manufacturing lines, Right. Or our retail store or any of our pieces of our businesses. So it's a real exciting time because there's a lot of work to be done.

Okay, let's move to some content that we found. I'm going to share my screen and we're going to comment together some funny videos that we found on tick tock, Instagram, YouTube. I really want to hear your opinion. We also have a quite of a strong opinion about what we see, but definitely worth, to, to compare and then. Okay, great. So let's start from, from this one. This is actually really, really funny. Let's switch it and then you're gonna love this. This man lives full time in the Metaverse.

In his daily routine, he would wake up and go to the bathroom, take.

A shower and even commute to work. He claims that he spends 24, 7 in the metaverse because it's a better living environment. After work, he gets into his Metaverse bed and watches movies on his large.

Virtual flat screen tv.

What do you think about this?

Call for more things to the Metaverse?

This is one of the most funny videos that, that I found. But, but yes, before, you know, telling me, telling you what is my opinion, I, I really want to hear what you think about it. Brandon, what do you think about this guy?

Wow. You know, I think, I think we've all seen some videos like this and people with headsets on doing some sort of crazy stuff. Right. It's really interesting though, that in some senses is the guy as crazy as, as what it seems? You know, I've had a lot of questions from business people previously asking me, you know, why, why would, you know, why would my staff want to have some sort of metaphors interface into our business? And when you think about it, it's like saying, well, actually you've got a pretty crappy office. You know, your tables are pretty awful, your chairs are pretty awful, and your staff are actually, you're going to be able to give them the opportunity, work in an environment much better than you could ever afford to build them and, and, you know, a better environment for them to work a Much more efficient environment. So that's a serious take on what we're seeing here. But that whole concept around you can create a better experience in life. I would debate whether it's 100% like this clown. But, you know, that is, that is the. Where we're trying to get to. Right. So people can have better experiences.

Yeah.

Would you say that? So the way I see this is that this has some serious social implications. Okay. So it has a, it's a, it's a serious topic, this guy. Regardless, the fact it could be a fake or not. You know, there is a lot of fake videos on Internet, but actually these guys claims to, to stay 24 hours. Seven on seven on the, on the. In the Metaverse. The feeling that the, that this is just a way to eventually reboot your life for some people. You know, you are not happy about your house, you're not happy about your car, you are not happy about what you own or where you built in in your life. And eventually you try to escape it by going into an alternative, you know, word into another reality. And, and is that the something good or is it something bad? Of course it has a pros and cons I want to see. But, but definitely these guys are, are clearly evading the reality. You know, that, that is what.

I think it's the lens. Yeah, I think it's the lens that you, you're looking at this through. Right. I. I live in Southeast Asia. Yeah. So, you know, over here and in places like Korea, Japan, you know, there is a whole, a very large segment of the population, of the young population that are extremely introverted, no longer have interest in doing certain things. And there's also people that are in some levels of social poverty. Right. They don't have social groups and stuff like that, so their life isn't bright and shiny every day. And this sort of experience could actually improve things for them. It could. You know, we're talking about this guy. We don't get the context behind it. But you know, what if he's actually learning something while he's in there? He's able to go to a university in here that he could never, you know, do previously, or he didn't want to just do online. Looking at a 2D flat screen. He's able to meet people and work with people to, to help him through some challenges. I think there's pros and cons. The context of where people live, how they interface with Metaverse is going to be a big thing. And on the back side of that is what Robert was just saying then, you know, in this side of the world, which is not westernized, the Apple ecosystem is nothing. Yeah. It's not a technology that is pervasive across these, what's it, 70% of the world don't even touch Apple products. And it's not to say that what's coming from them won't be great, but one of those key things is interoperability, and that's been a key problem with Apple for generations now is letting those walls go down and let people work with them. So, you know, I'm getting off topic. I've got to go back onto this. But, you know, you can see that there is going to be, yes, some mental health issues that will develop because people somehow feel they're going to live a better life in here. This is going to be education. This is going to be a lot of things.

Yeah, absolutely.

That's a very good point.

Yeah. It's hard to get excited by this guy because he has a weird, dorky device like my Microsoft hololens on his face. Right. And you know, this is clearly not something that people are going to wear while going to the shopping mall or going to a football game or going to a classroom or whatnot. It's too heavy, it's too big, it's too antisocial, has a lot of problems. It doesn't really do a whole lot for you. But I know that the world is going this way because I've been inside the R and D labs where they're doing the research with human beings on these kinds of devices. VR brings major, major benefits for the human mind to be immersed in a ubiquitous computer compared to a phone screen or a tablet. Here's some examples. I got a tour of the COVID virus in a program called Nanome, which lets you do. It's a VR app that lets you see chemical structures blown way up, and you can walk around them and even walk inside the chemical structures. So the virus was as big as my house. And we could see how it was built right, by nature or by a lab, whatever you want to believe. But we could click on an oxygen molecule and change it or understand it in a new way. And I was seeing this virus with three scientists walking around with me next to me, I could see them. They were there and there. And we could talk just like we would be in the real world. But they were joining me virtually in a 3D environment. Now, if you go to the Paris Eiffel Tower, right? So Paris is one of the most beautiful cities in the world. I've been in a lot of cities. And Eiffel Tower is a tall building where you can go up and see the whole city. But at the base of that, there was a business that rented VR headsets. And it didn't seem very. It didn't seem right. Right. Why would you rent a VR headset to go up in this beautiful tower and see this beautiful city when you can see it with your human eyes? But I did it. And by the way, you had to stand in line to rent one of these things. They were, you know, and so you go up in the tower and you see the city with your human eye. That's really cool. And then you put on the VR headset and it takes you into each of the places you're seeing around the city, right? It takes you into the Louvre, it takes you into Musee d'. Orsay, it takes you over to the RT Triumph right from the tower. And so you can plan out your day better that way. And you can see the city in a new way and you can see what you're going to miss. Because you only have two days in Paris. You can't get to all 10 things that you want to see. So you got to pick, you know, two or three things you're gonna see. And. But at least now you know what you missed, right? And you're immersed in this. You can actually walk around the Louvre in the VR headset and see what it's like. It's. It's a completely new way to work and enjoy.

Makes total sense.

Also, you know, this hololens today is heavy, but the glasses that are coming from Apple meta Snapchat, right? These companies are spending tens of billions of dollars to make them this size. Now imagine this guy has a pair of glasses on like this. Does he look as weird anymore?

No, no, definitely. It's rudimental at this point. It's just the early stages, you know, of the technology. So I totally agree that it's going to evolve in this direction. And I also totally agree that this is opening for new opportunities for everyone, you know, so life experience, educational workspace, problem solved, you know, so definitely it's gonna be an additional opportunity. But serial, literally. This guy is taking the shower with the headset. I mean, what is he doing?

I have, I keep, I have to wear glasses. These are fifteen hundred dollar glasses. My eyes really, really suck. So when people say, oh, you should look at reality, I say, I won't swear. I tell them to go get lost because reality to me sucks. Oh, I can see you people. Oh, hi. Right. And soon you're gonna be 3D environment. We're gonna have a 3D environment and you're gonna join me in something like a classroom or a lab or a digital lab or even a Las Vegas casino. We can go play some blackjack together, right? And be in 3D with each other. That's huge.

Let's move topic that is probably closer to what we anticipated. Education in Metaverse. And then we can talk about work. And I know that there is a lot to say here. Let's look at this short astro businesses in the family.

Actually, I have to write this paper. Will you help me? Let's take a closer look. What part of the solar system are we talking about?

Saturn.

This is pretty much what you were saying.

In the Metaverse.

Have a totally immersive experience. Signs and any other.

Or not just.

To any place, but any time as well.

Ancient Rome. Imagine standing on the streets, hearing the.

Sounds, visiting the markets to get a.

Sense of the rhythm of life over 2000 years ago. Imagine learning how the forum was built by actually seeing the forum get built.

Okay, so Robert, let's resume from you.

Yeah, this is a huge thing advantage of one the new AIs that are just hitting this year, right? GPT. You can ask GPT, please tell me all points of view on a topic. So if we're trying to learn something like history of a specific place, we can ask it to see all points of view. When I toured Jerusalem, I toured it with an archaeologist and she was really interesting because she would stop at a place in Jerusalem where something famous has happened, right? And she would say, here's what the scientists found here. This is what we actually know. You know, we dug out of the ground here and what, what actually happened. And then she told us, here's what the Muslims believe, here's what the Jewish people believe, here's what the Christians believe happened here, right? Because everybody has their own interpretation of the facts of what they found there, right? They have their own story, their own culture, their own perception of that event, right? And AI can help you one see that today in real time just by talking to it. It'll come back with a list of, of ways to look at this. Then you can have it build you a a set of Personas for each of those points of view. Then you can have those Personas argue out how they would look at another point of another thing. So you can iteratively learn just by talking to this new GPT. But GPT today doesn't let us see or experience these things. That's coming soon. That's why I'm excited about AI art, because using tools like Mid Journey or Stable Diffusion or Dall E or a few others coming, we can have those AIs build a 3D environment. Like, hey, build me a classroom. Okay, we're in a classroom now put a chemistry set in front of us because we're going to do some chemistry, right? I've already had this experience in PR in this app called Nano. And I've been inside the VR labs. I've been in Stanford's VR lab, you know, and I've been down at usc. I've been, I've been all over the world talking to people who are building this kind of recent stuff that's coming, and it's going to be quite dramatic. It's so much better to learn this way than to read a book, right. In a, in an hour of walking around a virus, I understood more about how the viruses work and, and all that, then I would understand in a, in a week sitting in a traditional classroom.

Yeah, yeah.

Cyril, do you think that somehow the Kovid helps this evolution? It was meant to happen.

Yes, absolutely. Because all the school teachers got on Zoom for a year and a half, right?

Yeah, they all.

If you told me, I remember when this started happening, I thought it was insane. If you told me three years ago, before COVID happened, right? Oh, all the school teachers are going to give your kids classes on Zoom, I would have said, you're insane. But, you know, it happened real fast. Every, every school in the world started using Zoom to teach their kids because they couldn't come to classroom, right? So now all those kids know how to use video conferencing and all the teachers had to learn, right? So now the teachers know how to use Zoom and do a call like this. This is huge for, for education, for democracy. Now, let's talk about this large language model that I keep going back to this new technology that we got for AI. This is a really interesting technology because, like, stable diffusion ingested 100,000 gigabytes to build their model, ran it through a bunch of Nvidia cards, right? In a data center, built a model. The model is only 2 gigabytes, but it includes all of the art that was ingested into it. So you can talk to that engine without being connected, connected to the Internet. So now think about getting a little LLM in a place that's poor, where people can't afford the Internet connection to, you know, talk to Google. Or Facebook, all of a sudden on their cheap little phone, they can have all of human knowledge. That's insane to me.

It is, it is. Brandon, as, as a CEO and the cto, as you mentioned it, how do you see the worker changing? I, I'm very curious, you know, to, to understand what is your vision about all these it, you know, figures profiles that will, will definitely also be affected by the, the change of technology. We, we mentioned the AI, but definitely also the Metaverse is gonna change everything. So how do you see this professionally positioning themselves into the world of the future.

You know, specifically in terms of roles. I just want to make sure.

That'S. For example, when I think about the Metaverse and I always think about mixed reality, I think it's one of the most valuable things that happens. And what comes to my mind is ui, UX design, software development, and all the world of illustrators that are now already contributing heavily into the NFT and the Web3World. So I would like to understand your opinion, you know, in the, in this direction.

Okay. So I, I think, I, I think that, you know, the world's really, you know, gotta, gotta sit up and pay attention here at the moment. At the point of where we're at, there will be always those people that will complain and say people's jobs have been taking their roles have been ended. And my response is always very similar. Yeah, the blacksmiths all complained when the cars came out. You know, and when roles go away, typically we're seeing roles replaced with other roles, new roles as things move forward. Right. There's also an interesting point here around that sort of position of creativity. Yeah. We want to talk about one step from a technical, from a design perspective and stuff like that. Creativity, not just in terms of design in technical worlds, but also things like, you know, creating furniture, creating art, all of these pieces. I firmly believe that it follows the trajectory that humanity has always had in economics. Yeah. Whenever we could build stuff at scale, things become cheaper and they become perfected through iteration over time. But the things that are done by hand, by absolute creation, always have more value. Right. And so we could look at a piece of furniture is a great example. You can go down to IKEA right now, buy a beautiful functional table. If you come to me and ask me to make that, make a table for you out of some exotic wood, it's going to cost you more than your house. Right. There's a, there's a balance there. When we look at how roles, technical roles within businesses are going to transform with this, you know, I think Microsoft has taken a very smart approach to this by trying to, you know, put everything in this context of a copilot. It's a very good word to use to try and sell the idea that it's AI working with people. Right. I think when you start to combine things like AI and all of those pieces that are there and you combine it with a new type of interface which is much more immersive, more people coming together. Yeah. We start to see a more fluid and functional organization that could result in the end. The easiest and simple example I give you is whenever you work inside of a large organization, the speed at which information traverses that organization. My thesis is that tells you the health of the organization. And I've worked in places where the senior executives that we pulled out and talked about goals and objectives for the business that year. Right. And asked for responses. And it's taken well over six months for the goals and objectives to go all the way down through the company and to come all the way back up. Right. And that's really, really troubling. We're talking about some of the biggest businesses in the world operate like that. Yeah. And they operate like that because people are disconnected. They're disconnected from, you know, from their teams, they're disconnected from their management and disconnected by time. Yeah. So a world where people in a workforce, whether they're designers, developers, managers, security, all of these roles are able to work in environments. That's when efficiency really takes hold. We probably start to see, you know, much more focus on how people are being treated in organizations than what they are today because people stop becoming numbers. That's the other important point to say here. As a CTO on a large organization, the last one I was at, I had 17,000 staff under me and there's no possible way that I'd ever meet all of those people. Right. But that's the problem. People become. They're treated like numbers, they're moved around like chess pieces. Instead of really being able to bring people together and work in ways, that's the benefits that I see will come with integrating things like AI as co pilots, working alongside immersive environments, people being able to work together within organizations, I think a lot less of the roles we think are going to disappear will not disappear. I think they just change, they evolve.

Yeah.

We find value in people much more than we find in systems. When we stop. When we stop taking a bean counter approach to saying, I can get this done this quick, we start thinking about, okay, great, we can get this done this Quick. That gives me more time to concentrate on better quality outcomes for my customers, for the project and so forth. That's the real benefit of something like AI, like in, in these, these areas. That's, that's my opinion.

Okay, let's. Frank, help me commenting this other video, it's one of those that, that we come back to. Funny videos, I would say with each one.

So let's.

I worked out VR for 30 days straight. See, I've always wanted to be shredded and well, I'm kind of nervous about working out in the gym. So I decided to take matters into my own hands and plus all my friends are basically living in VR at this point, so I may as well join them. At first, I was absolutely blown away.

By the metaverse and all that my.

Boy Suck had put together for us to enjoy. I went to the first place I could think of, the gym. But I quickly realized that going to the gym was without a doubt the worst decision of my life. I continued on my quest by trying almost every game known to man to increase my strength and become a God amongst men. But in the end, it was pretty pointless. Go watch the full video on my YouTube channel. I worked out.

Frank, can this work?

Yeah, well, the video clearly makes some fun out of fitness and VR, but I guess that Robert already made the.

Case for it before.

Very, very well. I see a lot of potential because you can just, you can think of something boring as the treadmill. All of a sudden now it's going to become something like running on the beach or even cycling through a scenic landscape. So it completely changes and for some people particularly can change the way they approach business. So I see a lot of a huge potential myself. I can imagine a, I don't know, AI powered coaches and, and they're explaining me how to do the exercises if I'm doing any mistakes. So I see very, very big potential regardless of this video.

The video is funny because of one reason majorly. And it's. At a certain point he says, I started going to the gym, but then I immediately moved to playing games and work on the beach and other stuff. So the, the, the idea that I have in my mind, so this is not improving at least the, the motivational aspect. You know, all the people that go to the gym a couple of times and then they just drop it because they don't have the right motivation. Because of course I see that the, the space will not be any more a problem. You don't have to go anymore to take your car and, or the bus and Then move to the, to another place and then spend a lot of time there. So you can stay at your place and you have everything at your disposal, but you probably will not have the.

Machines at your disposal.

You can do justice. Some of the exercises, you know. So is the gym gonna take a place here? Probably, yes. But in, in, in the far future when, when the tools, you know, that you can connect to, to your VR will be able to, I don't know, to simulate, help you, you know, in training your body in a different way. You know, like in, in, inside the, the, the, the, the metaverse.

I don't know.

That was a serial. What do you think about this?

It joins the discussion about, you know, what we said earlier on the. Bena Brennan mentioned this about mental health. I think what is interesting here is are we going to live in a world where people are going to have some difficulties to differentiate what is their real life? What I mean by real life is, is their real life going to be the metaverse life or the physical life? You know, based on what Robert mentioned earlier, you know, one is going to be very easy to be immersed in the metaverse and to experience through just a pair of glasses how, when we see the, the consequence of a lot of social media and the impact on, you know, teenagers and young adults, should we worry about the impact.

For us?

I mean like everybody's going to be impacted at one point. So that's, that's. Sorry to be the, the bearer of bad news, but this is really what I know what I noted on this, on this, on this step.

And then, yeah, Instagram allows you to.

Understand how, how long have you been today in the application? And some people have show videos online and they have been using Instagram for 10, 12, 14 hours. You know, and that is, to me it looks crazy because I didn't even have that time to spend on social media. So the only way that this can not have an impact, a social impact is that actually what happens inside the metaverse is going to help you training, educating people, work and, you know, conduct the normal activities that you usually, you know, the, in the real life you were, you know, you, you were conducting before. So that is the. But let's not waste too much time on the, on this topic if you agree. I have another one that is also very interesting. This one is ads might not be virtual reality. I see this happening with the mixed and augmented reality for sure. There are other technologies such as screens that with the perspective allow you to simulate 3D. And this is pretty much ads you know, that happening everywhere just in front of a building. Let's resume from Brennan. Brennan, what do you think about this one?

Yeah, you know, I think it's an interesting use of technology. And advertising is a whole different throat of space, time and effort to think about, you know, what is it actually doing an advert in this sense, you know, what is the purpose? I was standing here, I've watched this clip that you've now played, and I'm sitting there and I still haven't recognized the brand yet. Right. It's great in that sense, but surely the world can think up some better things to do with that technology and maybe even make a different classification of advert. Right. I look at different spaces around the world where I'd see this as being visual pollution. Right. I see this as a thing where, okay, if you've got a set of glasses on and you're getting this view by yourself or anybody else is getting that view, great. But don't pollute that space for the rest of the world when there's supposedly a virtual environment where we can see those things.

Yeah, I guess your point, Robert.

And Robert knows this museum because he mentioned it earlier. It's a museum.

Yeah, there we go. I I flashing in my head was a company called mediview, which came out of one of the medical hospitals. It's a surgery system that, that uses the lens, the system that was before the hololens used X ray to see tumors inside your body so the surgeon could figure out where to put their cutting tool. That process actually killed the surgeons. The partner of medevue died from face cancer because he would have to lean into the X ray beam to do the surgery. The X ray beam would have to image you to see where to cut out a lung cancer or something like that. You. And now they have converted that into using a HoloLens where they can see all of the scans that are wrapped on top of the human body in a new way. Using AI, it joins that scan onto the soft tissues of your body and lets the surgeon see where to put the cutting tool. Now, using a new method that doesn't use X ray rates and, and it's far better, by the way. And you know, that's the kind of thing that's changing, you know, in, in business because we're getting new technologies, we're seeing new ways to do it. It's just right now that the technology is dorky and heavy and expensive and you need a lot of custom software. Well, soon AI is going to Cheapen the creation of software. Software, right. Of experiences of this kind of training, of this kind of entertainment, of this kind of, you know, thing. And that's going to change America business deeply.

Right.

We just can't imagine it very well right now because you know, the devices are this big and this. But ugly. And I can only wear this a few minutes before my face starts hurting.

It's too heavy.

Right. The whole world is changing and changing quick Business people better understand this. It's changing very, very deeply because of the large language models that can generate. And we call this generative AI for a reason because it can generate everything.

So the world is changing. And this actually allows me to show something. This is actually something that was happening already 30 years ago in the mind, genius mind, you know, of the creator, ideator of Back to the Future Zemeckis. And you see that it's very famous, you know, it's Back to The Future Part 2. Yesterday when we were looking at it, we were watching it, Cyril pointed out serious. Do you wanna, do you wanna.

Yes.

Jump into the topic.

Yeah.

Is that basically you see Joe's 19.

On just on the right.

You have directed by Max Spielberg. I never noticed this mentioned to Spielberg who directed those shows. But anyway that was something we noticed yesterday when we prepared the show.

Super.

Yeah, super fun. You know, I've been. I saw this is so many times. I think this the pastor too probably at least 50 times in my life and I never noticed this. But. But I think that the, the nice part of this video that we can appreciate is that somehow human being is able to imagine and, and you know, define what will happen in the future. Even when the technology is not mature for, for making it happen. You know, we're talking about 30 years ago. And this is pretty much advertisement on top of a movie theater. And, and the. This is very, very similar to what we are discussing here today. And, and yes, and then now it's happening, now it's here. So okay, so last, last one, last one that I want to show you.

If I can just ask Robert and Brennan is you know, based on this like 30 years gap we've seen between something imagine for a movie and something becoming a reality. What do you think we can imagine today that will become a reality in 30 years? I know it's quite a long and fast time.

At the same time I actually put.

I just put up a video a couple days ago of the three founders of Siri answering that question and they. Adam Chyre went straight to brain computer interfaces like A neural kind of thing where you're going to be jacked in at some point. In fact, I have an early one of these down here somewhere from a company called Next Mind, which puts a bunch of sensors on the back of your head where all your visual processing is being done. And it can sort of see, tell what you're looking at on, on a screen because they're doing that kind of brain interface. Snapchat bought that company and it sort of disappeared. But you can tell these companies are working on this in labs. It's just what's going to be the consumer product or the business product that uses that? I, I can't see that it's a, it's a few years out because it's just too uncomfortable to wear these devices and it's too, too dorky and it's, and they don't work well enough yet. But over the next decade, I think that's going to radically change. So, you know, that's something to watch, you know, toward 2030.

Right.

But in the next 18 months you're going to see extraordinary amount of change for human beings. Right. You don't have to look to that to get completely lost in what's going on in AI and what's going on in imaging in neural radiance fields. There's a reason I, I talked about that first because now we can have a computer that generates a 3D scene and even takes out things like, you.

Know.

It'S, it's crazy what's coming.

Insane.

Insane.

Yeah.

Okay, this other one, so really funny. And I will make the question before even starting it. Does the word need this, that. I mean this is crazy.

I'm grocery shopping in the metaverse. Thanks for visiting Walmart. Looks like you need a good wine pairing. Take a look to your right.

Your age has already been pre verified.

Through your profile, so no need to wait for an ID check. I'm getting a notification from your connected smartphone. It looks like you already have a full gallon of milk at home. Should we put this one back?

Okay, definitely, definitely. Let me say, I know what is your opinion? Probably I can predict it now. But I do understand that it is interesting that with the IoT and the AI, we will be able to connect various devices, analyze the data and make sure that eventually the shopping mall or shopping center, whatever it is, is gonna know if we, you know, we don't have a water at home. Okay. Something like that. That is super valuable. It's super valuable. That gives us a suggestions comparison of prices and other stuff. But do we really need to have this virtual reality experience in which we go and buy stuff? Isn't it better to just open your. Your app or eventually another interface in a futuristic world that allows us to do it so fast? Or eventually will the DI just to tell us where we need to eat according also to the calories, allergens and all the data that they can analyze. Do we really need. This experience, for me, is crazy. I mean, I. I think that anyone wants it.

Here's why this looks dorky to me because. Because this is already starting to happen in a different way. I. I already talked to Chat GPT one day and said I was going to the Lowe's to get a screw. I needed a new screw them, you know, to fix something. And I didn't know where the screws were. So I asked Chat GPT how do I find a screw in a Lowe's because it's a big store. I don't want to waste my time walking around 20 aisles looking for this thing, right? And they told me, look for the hardware sign. It's about halfway down the aisle, right? This is a AI that didn't exist a year ago, and it knows where the screw is in a Lowe's. So we're going to soon have a digital assistant, sort of like this 100% of the time, helping us with everything. It's going to be next to you or a little.in a in your visual field on the glasses, and it's always going to be there talking with you. And you might even have multiple of them. I like a committee that'll help you do something. A virtual committee done by AI. This world is about to radically change, and these kinds of early prototypes look sort of dorky right now. But this is coming, and it's coming in a much better way than this.

Yes.

Okay, Brennan and, and Frank, another question for you too. It's true that definitely Amazon lacks a bit of user experience in the way that for me, it has always been a cold experience, you know, user experience. You go there because you're looking for something. But if I should stay there just to get some inspiration, probably that doesn't happen. And in fact, people go to YouTube to check, you know, the unboxing and the all the other million of videos before buying something. So platforms, e commerce platforms most of the time, do not communicate with you, do not try to involve you into the purchasing process. Can this be the solution? Or is it still something that the world probably doesn't need? How do you see it from a user Experience perspective. Let's start with the.

Brandon? Yeah, I think, you know, there's different ways that the technology sort of transforms over time and one of those is looking at the things that have failed in the past. And so I think what we are going to see is the attempts at use cases which may or may not work and what we perceive to be, you know, a pretty ridiculous experience would be an absolutely mind blowing, game changing experience for say someone that lives on a farm, you know, up in the hills, you know, an hour away from their closest grocery store, right? So you know, there's always these sort of levels of value that a solution like this that could bring, right? What I do think is that it shows, it shows a scenario from an experience point of view where we can stop pretending half the time that we actually know what we want to do. The food and the sort of the menu choice scenario is a challenge that UX has tried to be solved for a very long time. And I think it's one of those things where when we start to join the dots of technology, right, we're not just talking about interacting with a, you know, with some form of avatar here in a, in a virtual shopping center. You know, possibly our doctor now has more information, quicker information about us because they have a AI co pilot helping them to assess my day to day needs because I have some censoring that's, you know, it's, you know, analyzing my toothpaste when I spit it out in the morning, you know, and things like that, right? It could even be, you know, urine testing you as you go into the bathroom. And that's actually informing the avatar in terms of what food choices I should be making to, you know, reduce my cholesterol or reduce my, my chances of heart attack or stroke because all of a sudden this is happening in the background. Think of it like auto tuning a person. Yeah. And this sort of stuff starts to happen on steroids, but in order for it to happen, it's about joining the dots of technology to make it work. And the biggest barrier to making that actually occur is trust. It's integrity and trust. We've seen this go on and on and on in the Internet in its current version, where the world is finally woken up to the fact that the minute you touch the computer, this idea that there's somehow privacy is an absolute load of rubbish, right? All of your stuff, stuff is there as soon as you touch that computer. And it's been abused, it's been abused by every country, every company and every country on the planet. And so that's going to be really hard to get back in order to make these realities, you know, come any quicker. It is going to take a long time and it's going to need to be regulation. There's going to be, need to be, you know, there's, there's going to be studies going out, you know, you know, for, for years and years and years to see the impact on mental health, physical health reduction of this increase of that. You know, we're in a, a really interesting point of time as, as Robert says, the opportunities are there to accelerate and help humanity like never before. But we're also our own worst enemy. We've also absolutely made a mess of the existing in and out of the way that it works. We've made a mess of people's trust and all of those parts that are really important that are the key to making these technologies valuable in the future as we move forward. And that's really one of the biggest key challenges of the metaverse that needs to be solved.

Okay, Frank, very briefly, let's say that you are in the metaverse. You have your VR set on and you're playing some games. At a certain point you're angry. Would you go to the this is shop?

No.

Well, the first time that we saw this video, I was completely, I mean, I found the idea very strange. I don't go shopping normally by myself. I, I would never go virtually. But after the conversation that we had with, with our guests, I would say the augmented reality side of things, it makes so, so much sense because when you go physically to a shop, then you can actually have something a lot more information. I do see. To go back to your original question, I do see a sense for Amazon, more companies like Amazon, for example, to integrate something like this because then you can try on clothing or anything that you buy. You can, you can actually try it virtually and it makes much more sense than a grocery shop too.

Okay, and, and now that you mentioned it, actually this company, Salibaba, Amazon, they moved for a, for a certain moment and probably it's still out there to a new model in which actually the, the, the sales were happening in streaming, live streaming, I don't know if you remember about it. So they both launched this platform. One was better, the other one, Alibaba is actually the most famous app in the Far east and, and Southeast Asia probably, and China. So the, the, the, the whole model changes with the people that explain you how the product is made, which are the benefits. And it remembers me a bit in the past you know, all those television sales on, on the strange channels, you know, from, from those people that were selling carpets to, to whatever, you know, and, and that is quite, quite strange. The idea that that is gonna shift again. Of course the metaverse is gonna be there. There is no doubt how this kind of goods will be sold is still for me, you know, not that clear. It's still not easy to predict. Cyril, do you want to add something on the topic?

This type of applications is going really to depend on one the type of product you're going to sell. I think the retail, you know, Italian and French are not going to buy food, you know, some food online because of their relationship, you know, to food. You know what I mean? We have more cheese than this in France and you know, it's close to be the same in Italy. So you can't really, you know, it's not just about cheese is I buy a specific cheese. The same with wine. Wine, you don't buy wine, you buy a specific wine. But I see that very useful as you for example you mentioned Alibaba, but let's say Amazon for technical products to tutorial how to, you know, how to configure your smart TV and etc. So there can be some applications for some specific publics that can be extremely useful. Also you can have instant translation. So that's also something that can be. Can be very important, you know, depending on where you live and you know, what, what language you speak or not. I just wanted to go back briefly on what the. What Brandon's saying about data trust and importance of integrity. I mean, I totally agree with what you just said. It's fascinating that we, you know, 2023, we still don't know exactly, you know, who collect what in what way, what is told about us and what they do with our data. That's a very important point especially as we are going to need to give more and more to. For this metaverse to work on. Interact. Be able to interact with the outside world. And a word you use a lot also is interrupted or you and Robert. Interoperability. Sorry, interoperability between digital and physical world. So yeah, that was also a very good point. Thank you for bringing that.

I think that about this topic we still have something to look at together. Very briefly, let's move to the articles. But before for who was wondering why I have this profile open on the top is because I I found out that okay, definitely art is one of the major applications, you know, into, into the, the, the digital world in, into the metaverse but look at this. This is amazing. This is Anna Dream Brush, the name on the nickname on. On Instagram. She has a 62, 000 followers. She will have a much more in the. In the.

In the.

In the future, I'm pretty sure of that.

That.

And what is she's doing is literally amazing. Let's play one of them, because I want to let you understand the beauty of what she does. This is definitely an application, you know, of. Of using virtual reality and for creating art. But at the same time, I also see this as a show itself, you know, so somehow I have the feeling that she invented a way, you know, a new way for art that is extremely appealing. People are following her, are joining her, you know, shows online in. In the real world. And. And this has definitely educational implications, you know, as you can see from this class. And. And the first time that I met her, I. I was literally amazed by the way she's even simple, you know, just very simple. Let's look at this. You know, look how she does it. You know, then at the post production, of course, she's working on it to. To make a video for. For Instagram, for, you know, for bringing her art to the rest of the world. But. But it's. It seems so natural for her, you know, the way she's doing it. But. But it has a huge complexity and. Brennan, what. What do you think about this? Is it the first time, first of all, that you see this profile. Did you already know her or similar applications, people that were doing it?

No, no, no. It's the first time I've. I've seen this particular lady. I. I mean, it's. Well, first of all, it's the appreciation of the creativity that she has as an artist, whether there's technology involved or not. You know, I don't know what the rest of you guys are like, you know, from one day to the next, I'm great at drawing stick figures. The next day I could, you know, I could do something amazing. Certainly nothing to the level that this lady can do. I think in this particular case, technology is showcasing that creativity and elevating it. Yeah, we're actually looking at the way that she's composing her art. And that's why, as you said, it's like a show. Right. You're drawn to actually watching it unfold. And what a beautiful way to actually consume art, to really take it in instead of only seeing the finished product. You're almost feeling what she's doing as she's creating. And, you know, for anybody that thinks that technology kills creation. I think they really just need to look at videos like this to really understand that, you know, it's, it's just a different way of creativity and enhancement of it. I think it's beautiful.

Amazing.

Amazing. Robert, do you think that AI will, will arrive to this level of creativity?

Yes, yes. It's very clear. It's heading that way. Absolutely. It's creating things. And here's the fun thing. I've used all the AI art programs, right? And it does pretty good for me, you know, it does pretty good for everybody. You know, you, you ask it to, to give you a purple tree in a pink forest. It will, it'll do. It'll do it. But when you see what the artists are getting out of it, it's another level because they have a vocabulary of how to talk to the engine. They went to art school, they know all the art masters how to talk to the engine of. About Picasso or any of the artists that used to exist, right. And they have a vocabulary of brushstrokes, of camera lenses. Even on photography, if you're asking to give you a photo, they have a, a better vocabulary than I do. So they're getting way better stuff out of it than I do.

Right.

This is why I retweet a lot of AI artists, because they're the bleeding edge of people who, who are using that form of AI, Right. And they're getting amazing things out of it. Soon we're going to have the ability to prompt you and get a video. Yeah, give me a video on this topic and it'll make it for you. Well, you know, that might be cute for a, you know, teach me how to fix my washing machine kind of thing. But people, the advanced users are using this technology to create amazing, amazing things. Yeah. Now, could AI beat a human being? Absolutely. AI beat the best human being at the game of Go. And that is going to happen on every human task.

Task.

Every human task eventually is going to be better done by a computer. But the guy who created the ran the AI team at IBM. Watson told me, well, what we didn't show you on tv, we showed you that the AI beats the human at the game of Jeopardy. What we didn't show you is AI and a human beats AI alone. Right? So we're still gonna be more creative than they are because that's our secret sauce. That's what human beings are. We're biological neural networks. We're very weird. Weird, right. Each of us is slightly different as a slightly different point of view. On everything. Right? And, and we bring that human sauce to bear. This is what I tell school tis. Now you're gonna use it to cheat on your homework. Well, you better do two things. One, you better add your human sauce to it. You better add some personality to what it gives you because it, it does all right at writing, but it's not as good as the best writers. Right? And it doesn't have personality. Two, and you can pull personality out of it. You can write your essay as if Snoop Dogg wrote it or Bill Clinton wrote it, or Donald Trump rehearot it or.

Right.

You can ask the engine to take different points of view or different people's points of view and present that to you. That's pretty creative. But the second thing is we got to talk about the bullshit that these LLMs generate because I was in a restaurant in Austin, Texas a couple weeks ago and I asked it what to eat on the menu. What should I, what should I eat here? I asked it and it gave me six items. Four of those were brilliant, taught me about the, the restaurant, taught me about the food. It was brilliant. Two were never on the menu. They were completely made up. And I'm very confidently made up. And it's very hard to tell which is the item and which is the real item, right when it spits it out. So now you have to validate everything. And by the way, I go even further because anything you're seeing or hearing on a digital device is now in question. Because soon, like today, we can create this kind of zoom call amongst a bunch of AIs. There's not going to be a human involved and it's going to be very, very difficult for you to tell whether it's a human or an AI.

AI.

Soon, like now. I've seen the technology. You can recreate scenes on your computer that are not real and they look real and they're full human beings. So here's one example of this. Google has an AI that can call your phone and talk to you and you can't tell it's not a human being, at least for a few minutes until you have some sort of human conversation with it. It's really good. So if something like that calls you and starts defrauding you, it's going to be convincing to a lot of people. So I, I say blanket, do not trust any phone call anything you see on a digital screen or anything an AI sees until you validate it. Check it out, right? Get another point of view from another system. By the way, here I was talking to an entrepreneur in in Austin about this. He said well I had chat GPT check its own answers. I'm like what? He said yeah, I had it spit out an answer, ingest it back in the engine, have it rate the answer from a different number of different points of view. Right. Like tell me, tell me how accurate that answer is. And it, it actually has a different system internally that rates things things, then generates things. So it's a very complex engine that we're talking about that has capabilities that people are just starting to figure out how to use.

Correct? Yes yes, I totally agree. Frank. Are you an AI or are you here physically in the, in the podcast? That's one way to validate it. Okay, okay okay, let's move to, to the articles. Absolutely. The, the. The evolution of of this technology. As I just to say that the start of our podcast is a, is a scary exciting on a side, but it's scary on the other side and we need to be careful on the way human being is going to use this technology.

Well they can replicate voices of famous people. They could replicate the voice of someone.

You know President it ingested 20 years of my blog. So if you ask it about me, it's freaking knowledgeable. You can ask it tell me a story a story of when Robert Scoble met Mark Zuckerberg and it tells you it's accurate and it's amazing.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Okay, let's briefly go through these headers. We have a CNN business the Gourd. Then we have McKenzie MIT Tech Review. So I just chose some headers and, and trying now to, to discuss them with you you. So let's start from this one. What Metaverse Meta says its single largest investment is now in advancing AI. And the second one instead is the Metaverse will be hours low debt. Is Facebook losing its $100 billion scamble on virtual reality? So I would stop here and, and ask serially how can we even think that a big enterprise like Facebook is gambling on such a such a topic? How for me that gamble is disturbing me. You know because I mean that maybe a stuffed up tries to do something it doesn't happen. I want to understand the can we define.

First of all I know people who are spending this money and they're not spending it on VR. They're spending it on custom silicon for glasses. And here's why. Apple has a huge advantage when it, when we go to glasses world because they have the ability to put the GPUs and the CPU and the radios down here in your Phone, which keeps the glasses very lightweight and keeps all the hot computers off your face and down on the phone. So when Apple comes out with their glasses, they're going to make heavy use of the phone. That's why they built the. Open the. The new radio network that I was talking about. Right. Because they're going to need to transfer a lot of data from the phone to your glasses. Now, Meta does not have that advantage. They don't have a phone. So they have to build a lot of custom silicon to do the computing on the glasses and talk to the cloud where the GPU is going to be to let you, you do this new kind of computing. This is extraordinarily expensive R and D work. And that's where most of that $100 billion is going, is into this custom silicon development, which requires them to really rethink how are you going to display volumetric pixels for users in front of you in a silicon way that's extraordinarily expensive R and D. Okay.

Yes.

I just wanted to say, you know, earlier when we asked Robert and Brennan to, to define the metaverse, there's a word that came in. I'm going to retrieve it in my notes. It's what problems are we going, Are we trying to solve? What customer problem are you trying to solve?

Yeah.

And the metaverse based on this looks like in the Zucambian vision, looks like a solution we were trying to find, a needs to support.

Yeah, and you're absolutely right on. When I do my consumer research, I ask a variety of questions of a bunch of people. I keep hearing over and over, I don't want to go into the metaverse. I don't want to hang out with, with average everyday people that I don't know or I don't have anything in common with me. And I don't want to play these kinds of games that Mark Zuckerberg's showing me. And some people do.

Right.

But most consumers don't. They want to play simple games with their friends and family or people that have at least something in common. Why do we all like to go to a conference? Because we know that the people who go, like I was just at the, at a voice conference. Everybody at the conference cared deeply about voice. I wasn't going to meet people who didn't care about voice. Right. And so that was a fun conference to go to. Same thing here. People don't want to go to a virtual world. And at Microsoft, you know, I've been in virtual worlds for a long time. You know, when I worked at Microsoft 20 years ago. We had one of the first islands in second life. People don't really want to do that at scale. They want to go into a world where they can play like chess or monopoly or ping pong or bowling or, you know, this kind of simple, simple game with their friends and family, right? If I invited you all to put on your glasses and invited you over to my house to play some blackjack or some game, that would be very attractive to a lot of people. And so you're right on the Zuckerberg. And this is the problem of being the first, the first one to try something often makes some mistakes because they haven't figured out what human beings really want with this new technology. And then somebody later can go, oh, that was smart, that was smart. That was stupid. Let's fix that. Let's change that and go after a new consumer. And this is why Google wasn't the first search engine. Apple's iPhone wasn't the first smartphone. It's easier to come in 2nd or 3rd or 17th. In the case of Google, they were like the 17 search engine, right? It's easier to come in late and fix some of the guesses that the early pioneers made. Steve Jobs would tell his employees this, that the pioneers get shot in the back and then we take over their spot, right? And we're about to see a new world that's not so focused on this virtual world stuff. Stuff because there's a lot of utility for business and people in 3D thinking and 3D computing, right? So that's why I say It's a new 3D Internet coming.

What I'm trying to, to, to analyze here is that of course we know that Facebook rebranded into Meta, that they invested so much, much effort that they were bullish, you know, going on lean after Covid during COVID with, with this new idea, they actually finally gave a precise name to, to what was, you know, a collection of different 3D and virtual reality experiences before. Okay, so I come to the point and I would like also to hear a brennan opinion is, isn't it just the natural progression of the business? Because imagine that Facebook owns also Instagram and WhatsApp. So they have been, you know, invading the space of communication and social networking. And what I'm trying to, to, to say, while it's easy to define that table, Microsoft will take, you know, in this space the, the hardware and the software because they, they, that is their own natural progression. If you think about it, isn't. Isn't it just the natural progression of a Facebook to, to take space, the space of the metaverse, you know, and shouldn't they. I see it just from this business perspective, you know, then of course there will be competition on the, on the ground. Someone even defines Roblox Metaverse. And I still don't understand why. But, but isn't, and isn't it just Facebook? You know, meta is what Facebook does already? They are just bringing it to the next level. Brennan, what do you think?

Yeah, I think, you know, I think it's, it's a number of things. I think, I think there was a scenario at that point in time where meta needed to divert a lot of communication, a lot of conversation away from the murkiness of what Facebook as a brand had come to represent. And so meta, you know, as a giant big leap in a change for them was in some ways trying to dig themselves out of the hole. And let's face it, if you're going to spend 10 billion a year on something, whether it, whether it succeeds or it fails, what if the ultimate goal at the beginning of this was them saying, let's just get into to a different direction here because we're, we're, we're kind of screwed with the route that we've been going as a business to monetize consumers, to monetize community. At that point, looking at this mechanism, this is a natural progression, right? That's the other thing, that the metaverse isn't a new concept in that, in that way. The world of games Gamification through 3D and immersive technologies has been around for a very, very long time. And 3D games, you know, the gaming world itself is bigger than the movie industry, right? It's a massive industry. So from a commercial perspective, it's like, okay, so why not just, not just have it for games? Why not make it about commercial spaces? Why not make it about communities and education and all those rest of it? And hey, it's the perfect tool to deliver social experiences, right? It's, it's richer. The data you can extract is richer, the experiences you can provide are richer. So I think, you know, for them it was really about what is going to propel them forward and get them out of having being stuck in these conversations that were happening about the existing Facebook scenario. Don't forget Facebook is the brand of the application. Meta is the name of the company. So Facebook still exists, right? And I think that's the thing. I think they've been trying to invest into this. They're saying, okay, can we grow A market, it's extremely hard. Hardware is always very, very hard. Coming from robotics, I can tell you it's very, very hard. As, as Robert says, the, you know, the R D that you put into this absolutely kills you. I think it's, you know, it's also opportunistic for them to get some pause and to really stop having to invest so much money in a platform that is their cash cow in Facebook and start putting towards a new target, a new area to go in. Right. I love how we see all of these articles and they're slowing down quite a bit. We see all these articles written by people claiming that, you know, Matters abandoned the Metaverse and all this sort of stuff. Right. I laugh about that for two reasons. First of all, I say, if you actually have a look, Matters stock has increased by 75% since it's low, you know, in the last year, you know, so it's actually doing pretty well, even though it just announced that it lost another 4 billion in the last quarter on Metaverse activities. But the, you know, the interesting pathway here is that I saw the same scenario happen in the AI field over a decade ago. And AI has been this circle that has happened, peaks and troughs, AI winters have been happening for decades now. And it's this whole scenario of where eventually someone figures out how they can solve the problem. What was the problem here? I'll tell you what the problem was. The problem wasn't creating this system the way that LLMs work. Vector math versus, you know, vector statistics. This stuff has been going on for quite some time and it comes up with some really amazing scenarios, outputs. Right? And that's why it lies, that's why you get hallucinations, because it's statistics, word and word, predictive statistics. But what it took for someone to make it succeed was to actually have the connection with someone like Satya Nadella and to be able to go and say, give me a billion dollars worth of compute power, because I really want to show what we can do if we scale these models. And that's what it took. It was the billion dollar investment followed by the $10 billion investment, giving them the ability to show a product that could solve real world problems. And that's what communicating with something like AI does right now. Chat, gtp, the number, all of them, that's what they're doing. You are able to get your legal stuff done quickly, you're able to do all that, blah, blah, blah. Metaverse will follow the same path, I guarantee it. It will follow the same path. We're in a, we're in a trough right now, which is, is great. It gets rid of all of the, the follow on the Hype followers and lets the innovation move forward. Right. And I actually think Matt is playing a really, really smart game here. They understand that that AI is going to generate the content. AI is going to be the content production. Previously their business model was people were the product. Now they're sort of understanding that actually the output of AI is the product. The people are the consumers. How do we monetize that transaction? How do we monetize that interaction? And AIs are great, but hell, they just need a really great interface to make them easier, even better. Right. Where do you think that's going to come from?

Yeah, and, and there are business problems. A lot of business people, people are telling me they're unable to use open AI because they don't want to give their private intellectual property that, that their company developed to. You know, if you copy a spreadsheet into chat GPT, it'll, it'll do all sorts of stuff with your spreadsheet. But all of a sudden, a sudden you just gifted OpenAI all the data on the spreadsheet, right? And now OpenAI gets to learn about your business. This is a real problem. So the bleeding edge businesses are building their, their own large language models. Maybe they don't do as much as OpenAI. Maybe they're chained together using a tool like LangChain that you talk to your private LLM inside your company, inside to work on your databases, your spreadsheets, your machines in your factory, stuff like that. All your intellectual property is protected by that. And then it would go out when it can't answer a question, it would go out and get an answer from Open A, from GPT or from Google's version or from other versions, Apple's version, and give you the answer that you require for your spreadsheet or for your database days.

Right, Let me, let me summarize everything with this, this thing, timeline of industrial revolutions. You know, this is very interesting to observe. So the first one was 1760, then 1880, then in 1947 and then 2000. So we are talking about a whole new industrial revolution happening thanks to, of course to AI metaverse and probably the web3 and the, you know, the, the digital assets, everything related to NFTs and the, and the blockchain and the decentralized architectures will also be part of this. But the, the funny thing that Franco was making me observe. Please, Frank, because he was, we were talking about this and then he made me notice.

Yeah.

The first thing that comes to the mind is that the time span between each industrial revolution, it's, it's, it's decreasing with each industrial revolution. So makes you wonder when the next one is going to be and then the one after the next one and if the time is going to keep decreasing. What's going to happen in 50 years? There's going to be an industrial revolution every month or so.

Yeah, yeah, yeah that it's, it's clear that we are finally appreciating the hyperbolic behavior or technology evolution, you know. So what is happening nowadays is that everything is moving so fast and probably in the famous creator economy that they, they name it this way we will be able to product owners will be able to ideate user stories of, of a product and using AI and then develop it using the AI and then eventually ship it to production in one day or two days and collect the data, you know, analyze it and understand if there is a business for that product for that application or not. And it's also very interesting for me to notice that you remember when Facebook came out, you know, Facebook API was a thing so everyone was jumping into Facebook because everyone thought that any kind of application outside of Facebook would have not have any more and you know, sense so you. So, so all developers were developing games and, and applications for whatever inside the Facebook. Imagine when the metaverse will be mature and will be out what will happen? Everyone is gonna jump into it and start integrating you know, system integrators and, and bringing it to inside. It's already happening. If you think about they are buying a lens and the space to make this happen in many, in many metaverse, you know, to, to, to not miss the opportunity but, but definitely worth to observe. So next Industrial Revolution just a date your prediction Robert.

June 5th we see what Apple has and after Apple comes you're going to see a lot of new things shifting because Apple is holding back the entire industry industry. There's companies like Dolby holding back. There's companies like Unity who's building been working on neural radiance fields now for four years and hasn't been able to ship because Apple is holding them and there's many others coming after Apple shifts. You're going to see even meta come with a cheaper headset that's going to be very, very capable and that'll be interesting to try. There's going to be continuing wave after wave of, of change coming because of a, of AI. I mean chat GPT is just the.

Beginning, 5, 10, 15 years. Let's play this game.

I'm talking about the next 12 months, man. Think about the next 12 months is going to be extraordinary for human beings.

Okay, so for you it's one year. One year. Brennan?

Yeah, I think there's a lot of crazy stuff. Yeah, absolutely agree with that. There's a lot of crazy stuff that's going to happen. It's going to speed up. I think people are going to struggle with the speed, especially a lot of people that don't adapt well to change as it is. I think the younger generation is starting to learn to accept change very, very quickly. I think we're going to see more of a maturity scale on technology hit probably so very close to the sort of 20, 28 time frame, 2030 time frame. Although my own personal view of the, the mass adoption window of the metaverse is 24 to 25 in the middle of it. That's what I have at the moment. And why do I say those dates sort of 24, 25? I know I'm scaling over a period there up to 27, 28. It's things like 6G. It's things like, you know, technologies like web GPU things that are being held back, as Robert say, as well as there's a lot of stuff with nerfs and a lot of technical pieces that are being held back through IP protection or the rest of it. This stuff takes a little bit of time, but you will see, I, I think you will see a significant change in the world's workforces. The distribute distribution of equity amongst people and companies and the world's general power STR structure I believe will change before the end of this decade and it'll be interesting to see how it works. Yeah, yeah.

Cyril, last comment from you. On a side that we have a meta, on the other side we have the emergent industrial metaverse. Do you want to tell us a little more about this?

Yes. So quickly, when people talk about the Metaverse, it's mainly what we call the consumer metaverse, so the one that Meta is building. But there is an industrial metaverse which is basically extremely quiet, but is a reality. And I've seen several examples in different conferences. There has been a big partnership between Nvidia and Siemens to use photorealistic, photorealistic images in the digital twins extra. It's fascinating basically that the metaverse indeed already exists, but we don't see it because it's mainly in an area that is not under the major scrutiny. And Brennan, you seem to Agree. What is your view on that one?

Yeah, it's, it is an interesting part. I mean, for, you know, from our point, we like to say that we're actually a commercially focused metaverse. You know, the consumer part is a big play of that, but you know, for us it's a commercial aspect. And we also heavily under the covers, optimizing for an industrial metaverse. The way that I sort of fell into that space is very sort of large consulting role I had a few years back was with a company called wsp. I think by now is the largest design consultancy business in the world for the built world. So these are the, these are the companies that go off and design your smart roadways, your giant buildings, your intelligence networks, you know, infrastructure of the world. And I can tell you, even back then the digital twin mechanisms were already underway. You know, several years ago we had some platforms underway to move data at scale to affect the way how physical buildings were interacted with digitally, not just by their occupants, but also by city officials in different countries, landowners, landlords, all of these things were coming together. And it's, yeah, it's, it's the unsexy part of a metaverse, if you will, but it's, it's absolutely coming together. And you know, we spend so much time talking about Metaverse in the concept context, I guess people easily gravitate towards talking about things like VR glasses, armr, all of those areas. But actually when we talk about the built world, we're talking about the interaction of things like drones and drone technology. We're talking about vision systems, you know, using, you know, tensor circuits within a drone to be able to do, you know, regulation, management inside of a building that is not just replacing a job of somebody, it's speeding up the recognition of the health of a building that a thousand people live in, for example. Right. So there's some real, real world benefits to the industrial metaverse. I don't think it's ever going to get the sexy play that the consumer space does. But certainly it is also a very big driving factor into some of the technologies that will come out and make the consumer metaverse a possibility.

Thank you. And I think that's a very, a great comment. And you know, what we are watching on the screen is it's a Metaverse digital twin of Siemens Start in Berlin, which is a regeneration of a large part of the city. And it covers absolutely everything that you mentioned. So the city officials, the planning application, you know, utilities, education, circulation, mobility, everything by the key is in this metaverse. Indeed, it's like fascinating.

Okay. Okay.

I think we.

Please, did you want to add something?

No, no, go ahead, Michir.

Okay. Okay.

I think we come to the conclusion of this digital transformation tollcast first episode and we actually learned a lot. Thank you for, for being here with us and, and sharing your opinion, your experience, your valuable experience. On the topic. We touched not only Metaverse, but I largely touched also AI and we have been discussing about the future of augmented reality, mixed reality, virtual reality. So it was extremely interesting to, to conclude and to close this episode, I would like to, to thank you and, and ask you my last question. You know, the one that I usually ask to everyone to all the guests. And I did it during the first season, so I, it was a quite of a lucky question. We have been the first podcast in digital transformation space in Philippines, Thailand, Europe, many countries for more than 3, 4 weeks in a row. So. So I'm gonna do it again. Okay, so what is your prediction for the upcoming five years? I, I don't wanna you to tell me, you know, exactly what is gonna happen, but tell me one extremely innovative thing that you truly believe is, is coming and that our audience should expect, you know, and, and they will see it happening in the upcoming five years. Let's start with Robert.

Oh, the next five years, the most.

Exciting one for you.

Well, this large language model is clearly changing everybody's opinion of what the future is looking. I mean, I was just hanging out with the three, three guys who started Siri and Adam Chyre ran the biggest AI group in the world at one point and he said his mind was melted by GPT. Right. So if his mind is melted, my mind certainly is melted. And we're still, we're going to be seeing the reaction of that and, and businesses building on top of it. I mean, I've been going around the world talking to a lot of business people. I talked to an oil man. He's using it to do all sorts of sorts of stuff like cleaning tanks on an oil rig.

Right.

I talked to a guy who's building a video game company. He's using it to create assets around him and stories in 3D. I talked to a guy who runs a scrap yard. He's using it to manage his scrapyard and do marketing and do emails and stuff like that. Right. On and on. The bleeding edge thinkers in business are really using this already. Right. And over the next five years, everybody else in society is going to get on board too. And at the same time, we're about to get new visualization Technology that the AI can show us things. That's what we call multimodal that I talked about. It can show us a video, it can show us audio, it can show us picture. It can be multimodal. Plus it can ask us to talk to the thing. Thing or look at it with a camera. My Tesla's doing this, right? If I'm letting the AI drive and I grab the steering wheel because it's about to kill me in terror, the AI goes, oh, can you please tell us what just happened? Right? And I talk to it, and it ingests that and uses that to fix errors. So it gets better and better and better. Right now, all of these technologies are a little dorky, a little unfinished, but they're going to improve very, very quickly from here.

Why?

Because I read a paper. The AI is now able to teach itself. So we're about to go into a period of America of change that I think is like a new renaissance period. It's gonna. In five years, human beings are going to be different than they are today. Today they're going to be wearing glasses, they're going to be talking to these AIs. They're going to have AIs that assist them all day long. So it's going to be a fun time. A lot of new things to build. A lot of businesses have to be rethought.

Right.

And we're going to be in a new world. And we haven't even talked about autonomous cars and how that's going to change things.

Right.

Because it's.

It's also AI and it's also coming, so. Oh, man, so much change has come. I've never seen a period in my life. I've studied innovation for 40 years. There has been no period in time where this much change is coming so quickly for human beings.

Brennan, your prediction?

My prediction? Wow. I mean, there's a lot of fields, there's a lot of areas to. To think about there. And what I do know is that. And I think it touches on a lot of the things that we've talked about today, right? Not just the core technology parts, not just the commercial parts, the creativity parts, and all the rest of it. I guess if I want to make a prediction, it's about what I would like to see, maybe not what the world will see. Right. And so what I'd like to see is the ability for every single person to be able to create that digital experience that they want to have life. Yeah. I don't want it to be dictated to them. I don't want that experience to be only be able to be crafted by technically gifted people or, you know, great designers. I want everybody be able to go, you know what, where I live is really crappy. Let you know, I want to be transported to somewhere great just so I can feel better about myself. Right. Or I want to connect with my kids better, you know, so let's go and have a great game together somewhere. You know, there's so many of those things. And I'm saying that that's my prediction in the next five years. And the reason why is because that's my sole mission in life, to deliver that within the next five years. Right. That's what I'm going to do.

Amazing. Amazing.

Okay, so I would first of all, thank you all for being here. Robert Brennan, Cyril bank, thank you for helping me trying to analyze the digital transformation in the metaverse space from different angles to our audience. I hope that this episode was a good one for you for starting the second season. Don't forget to follow our guests on LinkedIn and on the other social media platforms. You will find their links on the website of Lasting Dynamics under the Digital Transformation podcast page. And thank you everyone for watching and thank you everyone for being here. See you to the next episode. Bye. Bye.