You may have read the juicy sound bites from Satya Nadella in Google’s antitrust trial this week, as the Microsoft CEO made the case that the search giant unfairly leverages its market power to stifle competition (a charge that Google vehemently disputes). But there was a lot more to digest from his comments.

On this episode of the GeekWire Podcast, we reenact portions of his testimony, explain the positions staked out by Microsoft and Google in the case, and discuss the irony of Microsoft siding with the DOJ two decades after its own antitrust battle.

Here are some additional highlights from his testimony:

Search defaults: “This entire notion that users have choice and they go from one website to one website or one search into one search … it’s [completely] bogus. There’s defaults. The only thing that [matters] in terms of changing search behavior. And at this point, in fact, it’s even more true. … You get up in the morning, you brush your teeth and you search on Google. And so therefore, with that such level of habit forming, the only way to change is by changing defaults.”

Google’s influence over distribution: “The one advantage Google has in defending their defaults … I think of as a game of carrots and sticks. We all try to defend by carrots, which is pay for OEM default distribution. Google has carrots and it has massive sticks. … ‘We’ll remove Google Play if you don’t have us as the primary browser.’ And without Google Play, an Android phone is a brick. And so that is the type of stuff that is impossible to overcome. No OEM is going to do that.”

Windows and Microsoft’s antitrust case: “Google exists because of two things. One is because of our consent decree, where we had to put a lot of limits on what we could distribute and not distribute by default. And, second, because [of] the fact that you could distribute anything you wanted on Windows, and it’s still the case, right, it’s not just Google. … The largest marketplace on Windows happens to be not from Microsoft, it’s Steam. And so it’s an open platform on which anybody can distribute anything.”

The future of AI: “I worry a lot, even in spite of my enthusiasm, that there is a new angle with AI. I worry a lot that, in fact, this vicious cycle that I’m trapped in can even become even more vicious because the defaults get reinforced. The publisher content can get locked in. And so if there are exclusive content deals which are happening right as we speak … all that content today, at least that’s crawlable by everyone and usable by large model training, could become exclusive.”

Google’s response: In court this week, lawyers for Google countered Microsoft’s argument by pointing to Google’s own success in getting users to switch defaults on Windows to Chrome and Google search as defaults. Microsoft’s problem isn’t Google, they argue, it’s the comparatively poor quality of its Bing search results.

Nadella said in response that Microsoft needs more data to be able to produce better results, which would come from more market share, which Microsoft contends Google is unfairly keeping it from achieving.

Apple and Bing: Microsoft’s negotiations with Apple to make Bing the default on iOS were the subject of much back-and-forth during Nadella’s testimony, including this entertaining exchange with John Schmidtlein, a lawyer for Google.

Nadella: So the point I was making to Apple — which, by the way, that is the only reason why they kept engaging, is with the Apple brand, it was not going to be called Bing. We had all kinds of strategic flexibility. It was going to be just like Apple Maps, that was the idea. This was not about trying to put Bing … front and center.

Schmidtlein: Oh, I see, you were going to hide the Bing brand?

Nadella: Yeah, of course. We were going to take whatever Apple felt was their chance as a success with the technology.

Schmidtlein: So you were going to try to hide the Bing brand behind the Apple brand and fool all the Google users into staying with Bing instead of switching back to Google, which is what they did on Windows in droves, right?

Nadella: That is not what I said.

Related links and coverage:

• Testifying in Google trial, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella warns AI could extend search giant’s lead
• The Verge: Satya Nadella tells a court that Bing is worse than Google — and Apple could fix it
• New York Times: Microsoft C.E.O. Testifies That Google’s Power in Search Is Ubiquitous

In the final segment of the show: Generative AI and the “Ghost of Lesser Seattle.” We revisit our attempt to channel the late, great Seattle newspaper columnist Emmett Watson with the help of ChatGPT, and assess the reaction.

• Emmett Watson meets ChatGPT: What if the champion of ‘Lesser Seattle’ could see us now?
• Marketplace: There’s a corner of the internet where YouTubers read strangers’ obituaries. Why?

Listen above, or subscribe to GeekWire in Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen.

With GeekWire co-founders Todd Bishop and John Cook.

The outcome of the Federal Trade Commission’s lawsuit against Amazon could be years away. But there’s a chance we’re already seeing the impact of antitrust scrutiny in the e-commerce giant’s business decisions.

It may be difficult to separate the company’s business motivations from potential attempts to preempt the structural relief pursued by the FTC in the case, which was filed this week in U.S. District Court in Seattle.

But as one example, Amazon’s decision to axe a previously planned 2% surcharge for its rebooted Seller-Fulfilled Prime program came just days before the FTC suit was filed — perhaps not coincidentally running counter to one of the core themes in the subsequent antitrust complaint.

It’s part of a broader trend of Amazon making decisions and launching programs more favorable to sellers, says Jason Boyce, a former seller who has been critical of the company’s policies and practices in the past.

“Undoubtedly, there’s some pressure coming from the FTC case,” he says. Internal factors, including changes in Amazon’s executive leadership, may also be playing a role in the changes. But ultimately, he says, Amazon sellers don’t care about the company’s motivations, as long as it keeps listening and addressing their challenges.

Long term, Boyce says he hopes the case will help spur Amazon to do even more for sellers, rethinking its own far-flung corporate ambitions (i.e, brick-and-mortar stores, OneMedical, Project Kuiper, Prime Video, etc.), and applying its financial resources instead to restructuring the fundamental economics of its flagship e-commerce marketplace.

“Sellers would love to see lower fees,” he says. “I’d love to see it for my clients. … Maybe this pressure will help.”

Amazon’s seller fees, and the impact on consumer prices, are core to the dispute between the FTC and the company.

• The FTC says the company’s tactics “allow it to stop rivals and sellers from lowering prices, degrade quality for shoppers, overcharge sellers, stifle innovation, and prevent rivals from fairly competing against Amazon.”
• Amazon says the “practices the FTC is challenging have helped to spur competition and innovation across the retail industry, and have produced greater selection, lower prices, and faster delivery speeds for Amazon customers and greater opportunity for the many businesses that sell in Amazon’s store.”

That’s one of the angles we explore on this week’s GeekWire Podcast, as we dive deep into the landmark lawsuit. Boyce, the co-author of “The Amazon Jungle,” host of the Day 2 podcast, and CEO of Avenue7Media. Boyce offers a unique perspective on Amazon’s practices and the broader e-commerce landscape, drawing from his 17 years of experience as a seller and his current role working with third-party sellers.

We discuss the implications of the lawsuit for Amazon, consumers, and sellers in the context of the changing dynamics of online retail. We also touch on Amazon’s evolving relationship with sellers, the challenges of omni-channel retail, and the rise of new online marketplace competitors. 

Listen above, or subscribe to GeekWire in Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen.

GeekWire coverage

• FTC and 17 states sue Amazon for maintaining alleged monopoly power that stifles competition
• FTC targets alleged secret Amazon pricing algorithm ‘Project Nessie’ in antitrust complaint
• FTC’s case against Amazon hinges on internal messages and secrets yet to be revealed

Lawsuit: FTC et al vs. Amazon, U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington

New York Times: For Amazon’s Andy Jassy, a Cleanup Job Just Got a Lot Bigger

Reuters: Amazon drops planned merchant fee as FTC lawsuit looms

CNBC: FTC Chair Lina Khan: Amazon lawsuit is about protecting free and fair competition

Kate Johnson is based in Denver in her role as Lumen Technologies CEO and president, but she has been spending a lot of time in the Seattle area recently, and not just because one of the local stadiums bears the company’s name.

Johnson sees the Seattle region as an ideal test bed and proving ground for Lumen’s offerings, including consumer and business broadband, voice, and data services.

Yes, it helps that she has a home here, as a holdover from her prior role as Microsoft’s U.S. president. But beyond that, she cites the region’s importance as a major U.S. tech hub, home to the biggest cloud platforms, with a strong tech community, and tech-savvy customers interested in fiber internet service.

“The market is growing, and we are well-positioned to serve it,” she said. “I’ve been spending time making sure we’re making the appropriate investments, that I’m understanding our opportunities, and that we’re capitalizing on them.”

It’s part of a broader effort by Johnson and her team to reinvent the publicly traded telecom company, which was formed by the combination of Level 3 Communications and CenturyLink in 2017 and rebranded as Lumen in 2020. Johnson was named Lumen CEO a year ago and took over in November 2022.

Educated as an engineer, with experience at companies including Oracle, Red Hat, and Deloitte, Johnson is one of 53 female CEOs of Fortune 500 companies. She is charged with sparking new growth at a company that reported a net loss of $1.5 billion last year, after special charges, on revenue of $17.5 billion, down 11%.

In a recent interview at Seattle’s Lumen Field, she discussed topics including:

The evolution of the telecommunications industry and the need to reinvent the classic telecom business model amid the rapid increase in data and the rise of generative artificial intelligence.

“Companies are looking at, how the heck do I move these huge swaths of data from place to place, in a dynamic fashion in between networks. And here we are in telecom being uniquely positioned to serve in that way. But our business models haven’t really evolved to support it,” Johnson said.

“Right now, it’s our network, and you have to meet us somewhere in the middle in order to consume it. Our view of the future is really about cloudifying telco. And I sense that we’re going to see the same change patterns that happened as AWS, Microsoft, Google, and other companies really built up the cloud business in the world today.”

Her ongoing efforts to change Lumen’s culture, including an unusual series of internal meetings that have been ultimately constructive but initially unsettling for some longtime employees and executives.

“We have a pact at the door: we don’t record the meetings, and I won’t use names, because there’s still places where people fear bringing problems to the table. Less so since I started, but it’s still there. But then when they see me listen, and then we actually fix a problem, it gets kind of exciting. And that’s happened a bunch.”

Lessons from Microsoft’s transformation, and her recent experiences using Microsoft 365 Copilot as part of her work. Lumen is one of the companies piloting Microsoft’s corporate AI tools prior to their broader release.

Johnson and her team are using the technology to record and summarize meetings, send follow-up reminders, create initial drafts of content, and assess how inclusive meetings are, among other functions.

“It does not remove the need for our people to be intimately involved with detail, to understand what the key takeaways are,” she said. “Part of that’s training the models, and the other part is, our people are just learning now how to move up the value chain, what work they do and they don’t do.”

Listen above, or subscribe to GeekWire in Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen.

Audio editing by Curt Milton.

It was a big week for Microsoft, with the unveiling of the company’s latest Windows and AI features and new Surface devices at a special event in New York City.

This was preceded, by only a few days, by the surprise resignation of Panos Panay, the chief product officer in charge of the company’s Windows and Devices division. Shortly after that announcement, Bloomberg News reported that Panay was set to join Amazon as the new leader of its Devices & Services division, a surprise twist that has yet to be confirmed as of publication time.

To help sort it all out, we’re excited to be joined on this episode of the GeekWire Podcast by someone who has covered the company for many years, journalist Mary Jo Foley, editor in chief at DirectionsOnMicrosoft.com.

One of the big stories on her radar: Microsoft 365 Copilot, the all-in-one business AI toolset that’s now set for release on Nov. 1, a little over a month from now.

Is that too early? Yes, Mary Jo says, theorizing that Microsoft is hustling the service to general availability in part to keep up with Google, which this week released new integrations between its Bard chatbot and the search giant’s apps and services.

For Microsoft business customers, one key question is whether the extra $30/user per month will be worth it, on top of the cost of their existing licensing plans.

Listen above, or subscribe to GeekWire in Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen.

Related Stories

• Directions on Microsoft Blog: Microsoft to start selling Microsoft 365 Copilot on November 1
• GeekWire: ‘It’s kind of like the ’90s are back’: Microsoft previews unified AI ‘Copilot’ initiative
• Longtime Microsoft hardware leader Panos Panay is leaving the company after 19 years
• Report: Departing Microsoft exec Panos Panay set to lead Amazon’s Alexa and Echo business
• Should Amazon be ‘pumped’ to land Panos Panay? A closer look at longtime Microsoft devices leader

Chris Pirillo is an entrepreneur, creator, event organizer, and online community leader who has been a guide to the world of tech for everyday users since the early days of the web.

On this episode of the GeekWire Podcast, we catch up with Chris about his latest project, CreatorTech.net, an email newsletter and monthly meetup focused on the intersection of creativity and artificial intelligence. The next CreatorTech meetup is scheduled for 6 p.m. Monday, Sept. 25, at the Microsoft Reactor in Redmond.

We also discuss some of the latest AI and tech tools that Chris has been finding useful, and hear his take on corporate return-to-office mandates — spoiler alert, he’s not a fan!

Listen above, or subscribe to GeekWire in Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen.

• Chris Pirillo on the new iPhone 15, and the edited take discussed on the show.
• The latest CreatorTech email with a list of 25 AI tools to check out.
• Our last GeekWire Podcast/Radio conversation with Chris in June 2013.

Audio edited and produced by Curt Milton.

You might not know it from his recent comments, but there was a time in the late-1990s when Elon Musk was a fan of Bill Gates and Microsoft.

During his tenure at PayPal, Musk once challenged its then-chief technology officer, Max Levchin, to a literal arm-wrestling match in a bid to get the company’s engineers to adopt Windows NT over Unix.

Musk prevailed in the contest, and ultimately won the operating system argument, as well, recounts Walter Isaacson in his new biography of the Tesla and SpaceX CEO and X (Twitter) owner. But the anecdote raises a larger question.

“Levchin had trouble knowing what to make of Musk. Was his arm-wrestling gambit serious?” Isaacson writes. “Were his bouts of maniacal intensity punctuated by goofball humor and game-playing calculated or crazed?”

That’s the fundamental question at the heart of the book, and of Musk’s career and life. It’s a key question for many of us, given Musk’s role as one of the most influential people in the world, and it’s our first topic on this special episode of the GeekWire Podcast, with Isaacson as our guest.

Among other subjects, Isaacson discusses Musk’s role in some of the world’s most vital infrastructure, including SpaceX’s Starlink satellites (yes, we talk about his Ukraine-Crimea correction); compares Musk’s approach to Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Jeff Bezos; addresses Musk’s outlook for artificial intelligence and space travel; and outlines the key issues that could determine Musk’s legacy. 

Listen above, or subscribe to GeekWire in Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen. Continue reading for an edited transcript.

Calculated or crazed?

Todd Bishop: Early in your book about Elon Musk, you paraphrase the technology executive Max Levchin, asking what seems to be the defining question of Elon Musk’s career and life, “Were his bouts of maniacal intensity, punctuated by goofball humor and game playing, calculated or crazed?” What can you say to that after spending two years with Elon Musk, and writing more than 600 pages about him?

Walter Isaacson: I think the answer is that he’s actually crazed. He’s one of the crazy ones, as Steve Jobs would say. Crazy enough to think he can change the world.

He’s got so many personalities, too. He can switch from being a goofball, sophomore humor laughing at fart jokes, and then go dark, and just be pretty maniacal. And I don’t think it’s calculated. In fact, at times I don’t think he can help himself.

His father, Errol, said that about himself, about Errol. Which is, “At times I’d just go dark.” And you cannot help yourself from going into one of these moods, like Jekyll and Hyde. So Elon Musk is calculated about a lot of things, but not about his mood swings.

Structuring the book

TB: One of the things that struck me was the way that you structured this book. It was actually very easy for me to follow as a reader, both in the printed book and in the audio book. Because the chapters are segmented as mini-stories with very straightforward chapter titles that give you a sense for exactly what’s happening. “Starlink, 2015 to 2018,” just as one example. Talk me through the way that you structured this book. Was it a function of the fact that there was so much going on in his life?

Isaacson: Absolutely. It’s such a chaotic, crazed life. He’s juggling six, seven balls at all one time, not to mention 10 children or something at all one time. And so I wanted to keep it chronological. All my books are that way.

From the very beginning, it’s you start, and you watch somebody grow, you watch somebody change. But if you’re doing a chronology with Elon Musk, you have to jump around. Because one day he’ll be dealing with Starship, the next day he’ll be trying to make sure video can upload on Twitter, or ripping out the servers on Twitter.

And I wanted to keep it in a way that you felt it was driven by narrative stories. I’m not trying to preach at you, I’m going to let each reader understand Musk and try to know what to make of Musk. But I do it through, I hope, bite-sized stories. Somebody said it was like a 600-page book for the TikTok generation.

TB: It does strike me that in some ways, it does match the way that we consume content these days.

Isaacson: And the way Elon leads his life, let’s say.

TB: What does it say about the future of society that we are living and consuming in these bite-sized chunks? I mean, you’ve been able to write biographies of some of the deepest thinkers in history. How do you feel about all this?

Isaacson: Well, it’s why I tried to do something that’s a bit unusual, which is a 600-page book. Which means we go real deep. We go real deep into the algorithm for how to make a factory floor work well, or how to make the Raptor engine under Starship work. But I do it in a way that it’s digestible, and it’s fast-paced.

So I’m trying to square two things, the notion of doing a serious, deep book about all the both engineering, and psychological, and personal and business things of Elon Musk, but also making it so that it, I hope, moves along real briskly.

Starlink and Elon Musk’s power

TB: One of the key topics for us here at GeekWire in your book is Starlink. This is the SpaceX subsidiary venture that operates a vast satellite, low earth orbit network of satellites for internet connectivity. One of the reasons it’s an important topic for us is because they are developed here in the Seattle area, where we are. It raises the issue of Elon Musk’s control of things far beyond his own ventures, throughout this book. Ukraine is a great example. How should people feel about this crazed person controlling so much vital infrastructure, from Twitter to Starlink and beyond?

Isaacson: It’s a really good question, and there are multiple layers of it that I deal with in the book. First of all, it’s like why does he have so much power? Should he have so much power? He’s able in the book to determine where you’re going to geofence Starlink, so it’s not available within a hundred kilometers of the Crimean coast.

Or even as you see the text messages in the book with the Ukrainian minister, he’s doing it in the Donbas region of Ukraine on the fly. And even he says to me, “How did I get in this war? I made this so we could watch Netflix and chill. And play video games. And now I’m in the middle of a war.”

So I think even he realizes that maybe he’s got a lot of power. And eventually he talks to Jake Sullivan, our national security advisor, and Mark Millie of the joint chiefs of staff, and they figure out a way to transfer control over some of the Starlink satellites and services to the US military, so Musk isn’t on the fly deciding where in the Donbas is it going to be considered offensive or defensive, and where to geofence it.

But there’s a larger question, which is how come when Russia invaded Ukraine … ViaSat got totally hacked. It doesn’t work. So does every other communication sound. There is no communication satellite working except for Starlink by Elon Musk. And why is it that our government hasn’t been able to do it? You live in Seattle, you’re watching Starlink being done there, but why hasn’t Boeing been able to lift satellites into either high earth or low earth orbit the way that Musk has?

Once again in Seattle you have Amazon and Kuiper, but they’re not launching satellites. So there’s some theme in the book, which is not only does he create products like this, but he learns to manufacture them. Or he manufactures them at scale. He’s made close to 5,000 of these Starlink satellites.

And so the one reason he has a lot of control in this world is, he’s the only entity who can get American astronauts up to the space station from the US. And the only one who can shoot off a rocket, put satellites in orbit, and then have the booster land upright and be reused. No other country has done that.

And I’m not trying to hype him, I’m just trying to say that a lot of the things he’s done has worked. And why is it that NASA, and why some of our big corporations, why are they so sclerotic? Maybe so risk-averse that they haven’t been able to replicate some of these things?

TB: To your point, Amazon has Project Kuiper. This is a competing satellite venture, but they have not yet put satellites into orbit. Bill Gates in the book tells you, makes a very accurate reference to the Teledesic company that he backed. And of course, part of the issue there was the technology wasn’t quite yet ready, but certainly Jeff Bezos and Amazon have the wherewithal to do this, and they have not yet. It seems that this maniacal, all-over-the-place approach is working. It’s getting results in many ways. What is it about his personality that actually produces these results?

Isaacson: Well, he’s driven almost in a maniacal way. I remember walking once in Boca Chica at the southern tip of Texas where the Starship launch pad is, and it was a Friday night at 10:00 PM and there are only a couple people working on the pad because there’s no launches scheduled, and he goes ballistic. He says, “Why aren’t there more people working?” I’m thinking to myself, “It’s 10:00 PM on a Friday night and you don’t have any lunches scheduled.” But he orders up a surge and he just reams out Andy Krebs, who was in charge of the launch pad site, and he said, “I want a hundred, maybe 200 people here by tomorrow or the next day, and in one week I want to take Starship and stack it.” No particular reason, except he felt that there needed to be a fierce sense of urgency. That was a year ago. I mean a year before Starship is even going to launch, but that maniacal fierce urgency is what gets things done.

And I went back to Andy Krebs like, “Whoa, why did he do that?” Andy said, “And some people just quit when these things happen.” A lot of people are gone from base that I remember from two years ago, but a lot of people stay because they buy into the mission. There’s a lot of reasons why he gets things done.

I have in the book something called the Algorithm, which you may have read, in which it’s a five-step process that begins with question every requirement. And everybody else whether they’re bureaucrats or referees or regulators are saying, “No, no, we actually can’t do that. It’s against this regulation. It’s against this rule.”

He breaks rules, and sometimes it means there’s flaming debris left in his wake, or he is in trouble. But we’ve always been a nation of risk-takers, and that’s why we got to the moon 50 years ago. Now we have more regulators than risk-takers. We have more referees than doers, and that’s maybe why we haven’t gotten back to the Moon.

Starlink and Crimea

TB: Your book has been in the news a lot over the past week as excerpts have come out. One of the excerpts that came out was about the attempted Ukrainian attack on Russia in Crimea, and there was a correction that came out on that. Having read that section of the book and then watched the coverage of the correction that was made, it strikes me that perhaps the larger message is getting lost.

Isaacson: Yeah, the larger message is that he said to me, “I’m not going to allow Starlink to be used.” And I made a mistake in thinking he turned it off that night. Later he said, “No, no, no. It had already been so that it wasn’t turned on, but I made the decision that night to reaffirmed that policy, not to turn it on.” And so the larger question is, should he be making those decisions and why is he the one in the position to do so? I was very upfront as soon as I realized, because he had told me that night, he said, “I’m not allowing it to be used.” I made an interpretation, which was that he had shut it off that night, and then he told me, “Oh, no, no, no. It was already shut off, but they were begging me to turn it on, and I said, “Got it.” Made a correction.

TB: The bigger message is he does not want Starlink or his assets, or his donations, from SpaceX to be used [for offensive miltary purposes]. It was intended for the defense of Ukraine, and that to me is part of the answer to whether people should be OK with this maniacal person having so much control. I think a lot of the concern out there is that perhaps he doesn’t have any real values underneath all of this, and this, to me, is an example of the fact that yes, he does have values under that. Am I interpreting that correctly?

Isaacson: Well, he certainly felt it should not be used for offensive purposes, that it was there to be used to help defend Ukraine. He also believed that World War III could start. He’s very apocalyptic, as you know. … So he thought it could lead to a nuclear war. I think maybe that was too apocalyptic and overstating it, but that was what motivated him. It’s a little bit more complex though than he thinks. I mean, because he says, “Okay, I don’t want it to be used for offensive purposes only defensive.” Well, the Ukrainians, as you can see from the encrypted text messages that are printed in the book, they consider Crimea to be part of their territory.

And likewise on the Donbas, you have Vice Minister Fedorov saying to him, “You’ve geofenced off this village. This is my home village. This is where my relatives live. This is not an offensive move for us to take it. This is our territory.” So in some ways, he is driven by both apocalyptic senses of preventing world war and by saying it should only be used for defense, not offense, which he had put in the terms of conditions. But I think it gets more complicated than that, which is why I’m glad he turned control over a lot of it, at least a certain set of the Starlink satellites, to the US military that can now make those decisions.

Parallels to Gates and Jobs

TB: I want to talk a little bit about Bill Gates for a moment here. This was, I think, the laugh out loud line of the book for anyone who has ever worked with Bill Gates at Microsoft, that was Bill Gates’ statement to you. He said of Elon Musk, “Once he’d heard, I’d shorted the stock,” referring to Tesla stock, which is an anecdote you tell in the book, “he was super mean to me, but he’s super mean to so many people, so you can’t take it too personally.” I cannot tell you how many thousands of people have said that about Bill Gates himself over the years. I don’t know whether Bill Gates has gotten older and more evolved or whether Elon Musk is just a new brand of asshole. But I read that quote and I just laughed out loud.

Isaacson: Well, I want the GeekWire listeners and yourself to think about, okay, to what extent are these people, Bill Gates, your friend Jeff Bezos, Musk, they can be rough on people and you’ve got to not take it personally and maybe sometimes, whether it’s Gates in the early Microsoft days, or Musk, they have a vision of humanity, but they’re not exactly humane to the people sitting around them, but they feel it’s part of their sense of mission.

They’ve got to ride things hard. Do you have to be that way? I don’t really justify people being too rough on other people, but I do want people to read the book and say, “Is this part of the whole cloth of the person?” And maybe you can be upset and think bad of him because he’s such a jerk to people, but you also understand that it’s part and parcel of what makes him drive people.

TB: I remember talking to people when Bill Gates retired from Microsoft, and part of the thesis there was that the “Fear of Bill” would put people on a whole other level. If you were going to go into a review with Bill Gates, you prepared. You had to be on your game, and part of it was fear, simple fear. Is that the way things operate with the people around Elon Musk, as well?

Isaacson: You walk the assembly lines with Musk, and there are some people who are very eager to engage with them to say, “Here’s how we’re going to make this better.” And there are a lot of people averting their eyes, trying to get into the shadows, trying not to be in the line of fire, and if there’s a weakness, I mean, there are many weaknesses to Musk, or many criticisms I would have. One of them is he doesn’t get negative feedback well enough. He doesn’t encourage it. He sometimes bites people’s head off when they say no or disagree.

And people around him who are really smart, Mark Juncosa knows how to give him bad news. Gwynne Shotwell knows how to deal with something where he is going to have to get more facts to be turned around. At Tesla, obviously you have Franz von Holzhausen, Lars Moravy, Drew Baglino. They know how to deal with him, but a lot of people don’t know how to deal with him.

TB: Another parallel that struck me to one of your best known biographies, of Steve Jobs, was the way that Musk understands design and engineering and the way they work together. Tell us about that.

Isaacson: Musk cares not only about the design of a product, and not only about the engineering of the product, but the manufacturing of the product. So, he makes his design engineers, like himself, have their desks next to the assembly line, whether it’s the assembly line at Hawthorne for SpaceX or the one in Fremont or Austin for Tesla, and that’s why he doesn’t like offshoring the manufacturing.

We lost that ability in this country to manufacture things for ourselves for a while, Musk has turned that around a bit because he wants the instant feedback that his designers will get when something holds up an assembly line, because they’ve made it too complex, the design.

And to me, that’s one of the little secrets of his success, even now, as he’s building the $25,000 next-generation vehicle. He was going to do it in a factory and will do it in a factory in Mexico, but he said to me, “I’ve changed a bit. We’re going to do the first assembly line in Austin, because I can’t get all of my designers and all of my engineers to move down to Mexico and sit by the assembly line, so we want to design the assembly line while we’re designing the product, and we’re going to do it in Austin.”

TB: When you look at that and you think about all these folks that you’ve written biographies about, where does Elon Musk fit in the pantheon of Walter Isaacson personalities that you’ve studied over the years? Is he closer to one than the other?

Isaacson: Well, he’s certainly a disruptor, and that’s what I tend to write about. People say, “You write about smart people.” I say, “No, no, smart people are a dime a dozen. They often don’t amount to much.” What matters is somebody who, like Steve Jobs says, thinks different. And that means thinking out of the box, disrupting, questioning every rule and regulation, shooting off a rocket when you’re not sure if it’s going to work, and seeing where the debris lands and figuring it out.

So, in the long run, you’ll see, in my mind, at least three or four or five people in this day and generation who, 50 years from now, will be remembered for changing things. Steve Jobs will be remembered for bringing us into the era of friendly, personal computers and then putting it in our pocket and giving us smartphones and an app economy. Changes the world, changes the world of music even.

Jennifer Doudna, one of the great people I wrote about in my last book, “The Code Breaker,” she brings us into the era of life sciences engineering by helping to invent the tool called CRISPR that allows us to edit our DNA. 50 years from now, we’re still going to be reeling from the ramifications of that.

Elon Musk has brought us into the era of electric vehicles, solar roofs, space travel and adventures and exploration again, and also dealing with AI, so I think they will be remembered along with some other people. Bill Gates bringing us into the era of software being king and personal computers, and of course, Jeff Bezos is somebody who, when I was at Time magazine, we made him person of the year in 1999, and everybody said we were crazy. It was ridiculous, the internet bubble was bursting, he was going to be forgotten in a year. And I said, “Nope, just like Sears and Roebuck, they’re going to be remembered a century from now because he’s changing the way we live.”

TB: You wrote what amounted to a mini biography of Bezos in the introduction to a book of Bezos’s memos, effectively. Have you thought about expanding that into your next book or one of your future books?

Isaacson: Well, he’s a great topic, so is Bill Gates. They’re both great topics and there are topics like artificial intelligence that are interesting now. I must say, and my wife has made me promise to keep it this way, I should take a breath, we should take a vacation. I don’t need to launch onto another book.

And I will say that sometimes when I’ve dealt with a very tumultuous character, after Henry Kissinger, I said, “All right, I’m going to do somebody who’s been dead for 200 years,” and did Ben Franklin. After Steve Jobs, I said, “I’m going to do somebody who’s been dead 500 years after him,” and I did Leonardo da Vinci. At the moment my head space is I should go back into the wayback machine, but we’ll see.

Elon Musk’s concerns about AI

TB: You mentioned AI, and I do want to touch on that before we close here. The thread from Larry Page to Elon Musk, to OpenAI, to Sam Altman, to Microsoft that is woven throughout your book and throughout the story of what’s happening right now with ChatGPT and the commercialization of this technology is just extraordinary. Larry Page inadvertently kind of caused all this, if you go back and read what you wrote.

Isaacson: Elon Musk is the richest couch-surfer I’ve ever met, meaning, he doesn’t like to stay in hotels when he doesn’t have to. He doesn’t have a whole bunch of homes, so he used to stay at Larry Page’s house. They were really, really tight.

And then Musk met Demis Hassabis who you know ran DeepMind. And Musk gets worried because Demis frightens him and says, “This could be danger to humanity if it gets unleashed in the wrong way.” So, Musk invests a little bit in DeepMind, gets very serious about it, and then one night, hears that Google, Larry Page, is about to try to buy DeepMind.

There’s a scene in the book in which Musk and somebody else go upstairs from some party and get into a closet where they can have some quiet and try to convince Demis not to sell DeepMind to Google. And it becomes such a problem that I don’t think Larry Page and Elon Musk speak to each other anymore.

And so then, when that happens and DeepMind gets sold to Google, Elon starts working with Sam Altman and says, “Let’s do OpenAI, let’s have a competitor.” Well, you can read in the book the ups and downs about that one, but eventually Musk decide he’s got to do it on his own at Tesla, breaks with Sam Altman, and then he calls me just a few months ago, just as I’m finishing touches on the book and said, “You got another chapter, here it is. You got to come to Austin.” I said, “What’s that?”

And I sat in the backyard with Shivon Zilis, one of his friends, who’s a mother of a couple of his children, and he said, “AI, I’m going to have to start an AI company because I’m worried about it, I’m worried about what Google and Microsoft are going to do.” And he went through it, you can read it in the book, the blueprint he has for dealing with both AI in terms of generative large language models, but also AI in terms of real world AI, artificial general intelligence of Optimus, a robot who will be able to process video data and walk across a factory floor, or FSD 12, which is the full self-driving machine learning system he now has that learns to drive by watching how other humans have done so, so that’s the next chapter.

TB: One of the main reasons that he decided to do this was his disillusionment with OpenAI and Sam Altman’s decision to create a commercial arm and to partner with Microsoft and it’s just striking how this chain of events has led to where he is today. One of the things you point out is that while Google and Microsoft certainly have vast troves of data from their search engines, Elon Musk is no slouch in this regard when you look at all the data that he has from Twitter, or X, as it’s now known, in addition to Tesla and the self-driving cars.

Isaacson: Eight million frames of video from Tesla cars in a week. Twitter, the hive mind of humanity, X, all that, every tweet, every day. I asked him when we were talking about X.AI, his artificial intelligence company, did he buy Twitter with that in mind, knowing that he was going to get this enormous data feed, because right after he bought Twitter and took it over, I was there sitting in the conference room when he’s cutting off the API, cutting off access to the feed because he’s worrying it’s being scraped up by Microsoft and Google in order to train their data, and so, it was a bit of a controversy as he’s sort of blocking that. Well, he did it because he thought it was valuable data for AI training. I said, “Did you think of that when you first made an offer for Twitter?” He said, “No.” Here in Louisiana where I’m from, we call it lagniappe, which means something extra gets thrown in that you weren’t really expecting. But soon as he bought Twitter, he realized, man, that’s a bit of lagniappe.

Elon Musk and his legacy

TB: Walter, where are you after all of this? Clearly this is a fascinating character, an extraordinary person who you’ve just written a biography about. What are your key takeaways and what did you learn along the way about Elon Musk?

Isaacson: Well, I had to deal with multiple Elon Musks. There’s not one Elon Musk. … I hate it when people say, “Did you like him?” Well first of all that’s an anodyne type of adjective for Elon Musk. Secondly, there are multiple times in multiple personalities, and you just have to say, “Boy, I love being around him at this point, but boy, it was pretty scary at this point.” What I learned is how the demons that were instilled in him in childhood, dark demons dancing in his head, some of them he’s been able to channel into drives. Drives that drive people crazy, but drive them to do things they didn’t think they could do.

And some of them are still dark demons, and they cause him to do things that are cruel and unkind to other people or to tweet things that just harmful. And I want to be able to say, “Here are the dark threads, and boy, we don’t like them and we should get rid of them, and here’s the amazing channeling of the drive that does good things.” But in the end, I learned that those were pretty interwoven, and I kind of end the book the way Shakespeare ends Measure to Measure, which is, even the best are molded out of faults. And he is indeed molded out of faults.

TB: Is the determination of his story ultimately going to be whether or not he and or SpaceX make it to Mars?

Isaacson: I think there’ll be three or four things that’ll determine his legacy. One is he already has brought us into the era of electric vehicles when Ford and GM and so many others were crushing the Chevy Bolts or whatever. Secondly, he’s brought us into the era of reusable rockets, so we can send up thousands of satellites, recreate the internet in low earth orbit, and once again, after 10, 12 years, get US astronauts from Cape Canaveral into orbit.

So those are legacies that have happened already. I think the three big ones, maybe four, that could happen is, as you say, getting Starship not only launched into space, but eventually on a mission that takes at least cargo and perhaps humans to Mars. He thinks it’ll be in 10 years. I suspect much longer than that. Elon Musk has a talent for turning the impossible into the merely much later than he thought it would be.

I also think that if he cracks the code on autopilot, on full self-driving, autonomous driving, not just the way Waymo is doing it with maps and circumscribed into certain areas, but to say, “I can learn from humans how to drive and drive anywhere on the planet better than any human.” That’s transformative. That’ll happen, if it does 5, 6, 7, 8 years. He always says it’s a year or two, but triple that and maybe you’ve got it. That means it doesn’t just change how we drive, it even changes the notion of car ownership. You won’t really have to own a car. You just summon the car when you need it, it appears right away, it takes you where you want to go, you get out, and it goes and picks up somebody else.

I think doing that and conquering real world AI so that you have Optimus the robot, which can also autonomously navigate the real world, that could change the nature of work in ways we haven’t yet fathomed. We always think technology is going to put people out of work, cut the number of jobs. It never really is the case. Self-service elevators or ATM machines may have disrupted things, but it hasn’t reduced the total amount of employment. Autonomous robots could be a game changer, and we’re going to have to learn how to deal with that if it happens five to 10 years from now.

“Elon Musk” by Walter Isaacson, published by Simon & Schuster, is available wherever books are sold.

Podcast audio edited and produced by Curt Milton.

Tye Brady, chief technologist for Amazon Robotics, joins us on a new episode of the GeekWire Podcast to talk about the company’s latest warehouse robots, explaining how they represent the emergence of the larger vision that prompted him to join the company more than eight years ago.

Brady makes the case that Amazon is unique in testing and deploying robotics in the field, at a massive scale, and he predicts that the implications will ultimately extend well beyond the company.

“I do believe that what we’re doing in robotics inside of Amazon, mastering these core fundamentals of robotics, actually will help society in general, at large, because these technologies and these techniques, this collaboration mentality, will actually influence other industries and other sectors,” he says.

He continues, “It’s not humans against machines. It’s humans and machines working together to do that task. And we’re pioneering that movement.”

Our conversation at Amazon headquarters in Seattle followed my trip this summer to Austin and San Marcos, Texas, to see several of Amazon’s newest autonomous robots first-hand in the company’s fulfillment centers.

Listen below, or subscribe to GeekWire in any podcast app, and continue reading for excerpts from Brady’s comments, edited for context and clarity.

An inflection point for robotics and automation: Now you can unlock the core capabilities of robotics, something that we’ve been after [as an industry] for 40-50 years, at least. We have the age of the internet, we have the age of computing, we have more sensors available to us, we have machine learning and AI systems. And we can fuse all these together into robotic systems. We’re now at this really amazing moment in time, where it’s all coming together.

Biggest concerns: There are bad actors, for sure. But I’m very optimistic that, for the one bad actor that may be doing something malicious with machine learning, there is a society that will keep that person or that group in check. I do get concerned when people overestimate the capabilities of the technology. But they tend to underestimate what it is capable of in the long run. So my concern really is about the reputation that is being formed early on, right now.

An optimistic outlook for future generations: The mindset that technology will help society is really important. And I want our next generation to embrace that mindset. We need our big-hearted, kindest, most awesome engineers, young women, young men, to get excited about technology, to understand that technology will help us become a better species on planet Earth. I want them to be excited about that. I want them to embrace technology, and not run away from it and say that technology is going to be doom and gloom.

The impact of robots on safety: I want to eliminate the mundane, and the tedious, and the repetitive. I want to make things safer inside our fulfillment centers. I don’t want folks to have to lift heavy boxes and crouch down on their knees or reach over their shoulders. And if we can have robotic systems to do that, that’s a win for everybody.

The impact on jobs and work: I think the evidence is pretty clear. The more robots that we add, the more jobs we’re creating. Over the past 10 years, we’ve created over a million jobs, in total. There are over 700 job categories that go along with that. Jobs do change. When you do robotics right, a collaborative style of robotics, or robotics that extends human capability and augments existing expertise of people, then you become more productive. And when you are more productive, then you actually gain the opportunity to have more customers, because you’re bettering that customer experience. And when you have a better customer experience, that grants you revenue to invest in more new jobs, and also in better robotics, and this flywheel will continue to spin.

Listen above, or subscribe to GeekWire in Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen.

Audio editing by Curt Milton.

Related coverage:

• New robots are making Amazon’s warehouses more efficient — can they also make them safer?
• Video: Amazon’s Robots, explained
• Amazon’s Sparrow is leaving the nest: Trailblazing warehouse robot is ready for a wider rollout
• Video: Up close with Amazon’s Sparrow Robot 

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy made it clear in a recent internal meeting that he wants employees to “disagree and commit” to the company’s policy of working three days in the office, and find somewhere else to work if it doesn’t work for them.

We discuss the news in the first segment of the GeekWire Podcast this week, and ponder why Amazon seems to be getting a bigger backlash than other big companies implementing similar policies.

In the second segment, we consider new changes in the MLB automated ball/strike system for Triple-A games, as an update to Seattle Mariners CEO John Stanton’s comments in a recent interview with our GeekWire colleague Taylor Soper.

And finally, we give a sneak preview of the upcoming GeekWire Summit, scheduled for Oct. 19 at the iconic Seattle movie theater formerly known as the Cinerama. 

Listen above, or subscribe to GeekWire in Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen.

With GeekWire co-founders John Cook and Todd Bishop. Edited and produced by Curt Milton. Theme music by Daniel L.K. Caldwell.

[Editor’s Note: On this week’s GeekWire Podcast, we’re featuring an episode of Shift AI, a podcast hosted by Boaz Ashkenazy, CEO of AI solutions provider Simply Augmented, with guest Matt McIlwain of Seattle-based venture capital firm Madrona Venture Group.]

A thriving tech hub requires access to ideas, people, and experiments that produce collective lessons sooner and with greater fidelity than anywhere else. This is what made the Seattle area the cloud capital of the world. It also positions the region as one of the world’s top centers of excellence for artificial intelligence.

That’s one of the insights from Matt McIlwain, managing director at Madrona Venture Group, on this episode of Shift AI, a show that explores what it takes to thrive and adapt to the changing workplace in the digital age of remote work and AI. We discuss Matt’s background and experience building companies and advising founders, and get his take on the future of AI. 

Listen below, and continue reading for highlights from his comments, edited for context and clarity. Subscribe to Shift AI and hear more episodes at ShiftAIPodcast.com. 

First paying job: I grew up in Miami, Florida, went to a big public high school, and worked as a front-end service personnel-man at Publix, the grocery store. And another name for that is bag boy. But they call it front-end service personnel because we were there to be customer service for our guests. That was my first job, when I was 16 years old.

Family and upbringing: My parents actually met in the military. My mom never went to college; my dad was the first in his family to go to college. And they met in the U.S. Army at Fort Knox. My dad had a business undergraduate degree, and he ended up in the technology world quite a bit, early modem companies and things like that. It was something that was in me, I guess genetically somewhere. I did have a fascination for entrepreneurship and innovation.

Seattle’s rise as a tech hub: I moved here in 2000. If it hadn’t been for a debt financing that Amazon raised as a relatively new public company that year, they may not still be around. 

Microsoft was on top of the world then, but did go through some challenging times. If you look at just the past 10 years of Microsoft, since it’s almost the 10-year anniversary for Satya Nadella as CEO, their market capitalization has grown from $250 billion to $2.5 trillion. 

This economic opportunity and value creation and therefore capital, people, and talent that can be reinforced into creating a flywheel in the Seattle innovation ecosystem is super exciting.

Madrona’s approach: Madrona’s strategy is to be really early stage. It cannot be too early for us. I actually prefer being involved in the company formation stage. 

Then, over the last seven or eight years, we started a whole separate fund that is for more Series B and Series C rounds that will be new investments for Madrona. 

As a venture team, we’re trying to get to know founders and develop what we call “prepared mind thinking,” thematic investing before the rest of the world has figured out that something is going to be one of the next big waves.

The path to AI: If you go way back to the consumer internet in the mid-90s, with Amazon and others, then turning into software as a service, then you got to the later part of the 2000s, and we were thinking a lot and doing a lot of interesting things in virtualization. We did an event in 2007 with the Amazon folks to launch AWS up on Capitol Hill in Seattle. And lo and behold, the last big piece, about a decade ago, we were making our first investments in applied AI, back in 2012 and 2013. That time seemed to be the first big turning point in applied AI.

The state of AI today: What’s different now, with some of these transformer models, large language models, and foundation models, is two-fold.

• One, we can interact with that predictive capability through natural language. We can just write or speak, and ask it to do something for us, versus it being embedded within the recommendation that Netflix gives us, for example. 
• And secondly, those systems are appearing to and actually are generating things. So they’re not just giving the recommendations, predictive systems, but they’re actually generating something new.

Understanding the AI hype cycle: This is a recurring challenge for the venture world —  not just the investors like ourselves, but the founders. My college soccer coach, when we would run a drill poorly, in his Scottish accent would say, “OK, lads, would you do the same thing, only different?” And what he meant by that was, do it better. 

There was grid computing in the 90s. It didn’t work. But cloud computing clearly worked. AWS has a $100 billion business today. And so trying to understand why the same thing, only different, is going to work now — part of that is because it’s actually not the same thing. You learn things, you do things differently. But timing really turns out to matter. 

In the case of AI, I think we’re benefiting from, once again, something that feels like an overnight success, but it’s actually decades in the making.

The coming wave of ‘personalized agents’: Generative AI and applied AI will be the major technological driving force of the next decade. I think the modern data stack is a big contributor. And I think one of the manifestations of all that, and it’s starting to get more conversation, is this notion of personalized agents. 

Right now, we’re thinking about large language models as these monoliths. Soon, we’re going to be hearing more about domain-specific models. I don’t think we’re too long from having these customized personal agents that are not only relevant in our individual lives – I want a buyer’s agent that helps me plan my travel better, or buy a car better, or whatever that might be – but also in our business lives. 

And I think you’re seeing lots of experimentation coming right now, it’s too early to know what’s going to emerge. But I think that it’s not just going to be the model side, but it’s going to be the agent side, and the agents often at the edge, on our phones, on our devices, that will become much more pervasive in the years ahead.

Listen to the full episode of Shift AI with Matt McIlwain here.

How can startups truly differentiate themselves in the new era of AI?

We’ve been discussing that question recently on the GeekWire Podcast, and on this episode, we’ll get a first-hand look from business and technology veteran Pete Christothoulou, who has been immersed in this world for many years.

Christothoulou is the former CEO of Marchex, the call and conversational analytics company, who is now founder and CEO of Xembly, a Seattle-based startup developing AI-powered technology that replicates a chief of staff and executive assistant — automating tasks such as meeting notes, scheduling, and action items.

Xembly was founded out of Madrona Venture Labs nearly three years ago, long before the current mania over large language models. The company has raised $20 million from major venture capital firms and angel investors. It employs about 45 people, with customers including Salesforce, Qualtrics, and Twilio, among others.

“I think the next decade will be the most transformative decade we’ve had. How we buy things will change, how we live will change, how we work will change. I’m really excited about advances in medicine that are taking place. It’s just going to be incredible,” Christothoulou says.

However, he adds, “I also am sensitive to all the slop that’s going to happen. … There are a lot of cool companies, or seemingly cool companies, doing interesting things. But it’s really interesting demoware — they’re not businesses.

“So the things I watch for are, who are the people, and what are the companies, really obsessing about a problem, and really obsessing about customers, and not building something cool because it’s cool,” he adds. “I’d like to see a little more focus on hard-core problem solving.”

We talk about the rapid developments in AI over the past year, and take a close look at Xembly as a case study for insights into how startups can differentiate themselves in this new era of AI.

In the final segment, we consider the big-picture implications of AI in the current deluge of information and the quest for meaningful productivity.

Listen above, or subscribe to GeekWire in Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen.

Related links and resources

• An executive assistant for every worker: Startup’s AI takes meeting notes, follows up on email, and more
• Seattle startup Xembly raises $15M for AI ‘chief of staff’ that automates tedious conversational tasks
• Microsoft’s optimistic view of AI sees technology ending the drudgery of ‘digital debt’
• What Happened to All of Science’s Big Breakthroughs? (New York Times)
• Papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time (Nature)
• A Decline in Scientific Innovation? (Science)

Audio edited and produced by Curt Milton.

How can baseball embrace technology and new traditions while honoring its legacy and listening to its fans? Those were the questions at the heart of the Seattle Mariners CEO’s conversation this week with Taylor Soper, GeekWire managing editor, at the GeekWire Rooftop BBQ and Mariners Day at First Mode in Seattle. 

Stanton brings his experience as a longtime business and tech leader to his role with the Mariners. He also chairs Major League Baseball’s competition committee, the group leading some of the biggest changes in the history of the sport, including the pitch clock that has dramatically shortened game duration this year. 

He spoke with Taylor in the midst of a Mariners’ winning streak that has since been extended to eight games with a 9-2 victory over the Baltimore Orioles on Friday.

An early McCaw Cellular executive and founding partner at Bellevue, Wash.-based venture firm Trilogy Equity Partners, Stanton was CEO of Western Wireless and VoiceStream, the predecessor to T-Mobile USA, and also served as chairman of broadcast communications provider Clearwire. 

Listen for highlights from Stanton’s remarks in the second segment of this episode of the GeekWire Podcast, starting around 10:50, and read an extended writeup with more of his comments on GeekWire.

In the first segment, my colleague John Cook and I revisit my recent podcast conversation with Brinc CEO Blake Resnick based on John’s sighting of the company’s technology during an armed standoff in his neighborhood this week. Here’s the picture that John took of the Brinc Ball at the scene.

In the final segment, we offer our thoughts on Stanton’s remarks, I rants about an annoying tradition carried on by Seattle Mariners fans in the stands during a pivotal moment in a game this week, and we discuss my idea to use technology to help fans keep more engaged with the action on the field.

Listen above, or subscribe to GeekWire in Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen.

This week on the GeekWire Podcast, we look at how Amazon is positioning itself in the emerging era of generative artificial intelligence. We play and assess clips of Amazon CEO Andy Jassy explaining the company’s AI strategy this week.

We also discuss the history of AI usage by startups, and consider advice from investors and startup leaders at Seattle Tech Week for emerging tech companies looking to stand out with their own AI applications and solutions.

And finally, we reconsider our approach to interacting with machines and contemplate the possibility of artificial intelligence reflecting not just the worst but the best of humanity.

Listen below, or subscribe to GeekWire in Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen.

Related links and headlines

• Amazon’s online store sales dip below 40% of net sales for first time, and other earnings notes
• Leaked email shows Amazon formed a new group to work on the ‘most ambitious’ AI models
• How Seattle startups are ‘supercharging’ internal operations with AI
• Why Using a Polite Tone with AI Matters

Brinc CEO and founder Blake Resnick was heads-down in a board meeting Wednesday when he heard a commotion in another part of the drone startup’s Seattle headquarters.

The spontaneous celebration was in response to the first flight of the production version of the Lemur 2, the company’s new drone for police and other public safety agencies. Announced in March, the Lemur 2 is set to ship later this year.

“It happened while we were in the board meeting,” Resnick said later that afternoon, as he was showing us around the company’s two-level space in a nondescript building on the east side of the Fremont neighborhood. “We heard cheers erupt from this general area when it happened, so that was a fun moment.”

It was another milestone for Brinc, and another day in the life of a 23-year-old startup CEO who oversees a team of nearly 100 people, with more than 400 customers.

Brinc has raised more than $80 million from major players in technology and venture capital, including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Index Ventures, Tusk Venture Partners, and former LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner’s Next Play Ventures.

Resnick, who grew up in Las Vegas, built a fusion reactor in his garage at age 14, and interned at McLaren Automotive, Tesla, and DJI, before dropping out of Northwestern University’s mechanical engineering program in 2017 to start Brinc in response to the deadly mass shooting on Oct. 1 of that year at the Route 91 Harvest music festival in his hometown.

On this episode of the GeekWire Podcast, Resnick sits down at the end of a very eventful day to talk about the company’s origins, its decision to move from Las Vegas to Seattle, the development and upcoming release of the Lemur 2, his recent visit to the White House, and the geopolitical forces impacting Brinc’s products.

He also explains the mind-blowing series of events that led Altman to become Brinc’s first investor. Be sure to listen to the end for that story.

Listen above, or subscribe to GeekWire in Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen.

This week on the GeekWire Podcast: Microsoft staked its financial claim in the AI gold rush this week, announcing pricing for its upcoming Microsoft 365 Copilot technology: a whopping $30/user per month on top of its existing license fees.

Wall Street loved it. One analyst called it “eye popping.” Investors sent the company’s shares to a new record on the day the news was announced.

The upcoming product, fueled by Microsoft and OpenAI technologies, is designed to integrate with Microsoft productivity apps and work with internal business data, going beyond the capabilities of web-based generative AI technologies.

But will companies see that much value in what Microsoft has to offer? Microsoft 365 Copilot is still in private preview, for now, but the pricing suggests that the company likes what it’s seeing and hearing from early users.

It’s part of a big week that also saw the company clear a major hurdle in its $69 billion Activision-Blizzard acquisition, winning a key court ruling and giving itself an extra three months of breathing room to complete the blockbuster gaming deal. 

But behind the scenes, Microsoft is grappling with shaky morale amid ongoing cutbacks, and growing questions about the gap between employee and executive compensation.

Meanwhile, a high-profile U.S. government breach by a Chinese hacking group is raising new questions about the security of Microsoft products, and threatening to undermine a growing source of revenue for the company.

It’s shaping up as one of the biggest years in Microsoft history, and this was perhaps the biggest week of the year so far for the company.

Next up: Microsoft will report its quarterly earnings Tuesday. 

Stories discussed on this week’s show: 

• Microsoft sees ‘massive’ economic opportunity in AI; stock nears record on business pricing news
• Microsoft, Amazon, other tech companies make commitment with White House for responsible AI
• Leaked Microsoft messages show employees blasting pay cuts and low morale to executives (Insider)
• Microsoft’s stock has risen almost 1,000% since Satya Nadella became CEO in 2014, netting him a reported $1 billion in compensation (Fortune)
• Google Tests A.I. Tool That Is Able to Write News Articles (New York Times)

Listen above, or subscribe to GeekWire in Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen.

Why can’t Alexa users have sophisticated, nuanced voice interactions with Amazon’s assistant, similar to text-based conversations with OpenAI’s ChatGPT?

That was one of my questions for Rohit Prasad, the senior vice president in charge of Amazon’s Alexa business, during a wide-ranging conversation on the latest episode of the GeekWire Podcast. The rise of generative artificial intelligence is raising expectations for AI in general, and Alexa is no exception.

Of course, as one would expect from any senior Amazon executive, Prasad first made it clear that the company focuses on customers, not competitors.

But in this case, he said, the comparison is fair to neither ChatGPT nor Alexa.

These are two products at different points in their respective timelines and evolutions, serving different purposes, and operating in different contexts, he said. Interacting with a keyboard and screen is very different from a hands-free voice conversation across a room.

“ChatGPT can’t do a lot of the things that Alexa can do today,” he said, adding that Alexa’s capabilities include “giving you trusted answers without hallucinating facts.”

He continued, “Alexa is orchestrating or interacting with thousands of services in real time, instantaneously — your music, your books, your video, your smart appliances … And what it makes seemingly simple is incredibly complex. Because underneath, it has more than 30 machine learning systems working together to give you that outcome in less than a second, often.”

In short, he said, “that’s a very different interaction paradigm.”

Prasad joined the Amazon Alexa team a decade ago, working initially on far-field speech recognition. He went on to become Alexa’s chief scientist, and his role expanded in the past year to lead the Alexa business. That puts him in charge of what he calls Amazon’s “North Star” for Alexa, seeking to create an indispensable personal assistant.

“This is a super exciting time in AI. I’m glad that AI is back,” he said. “The fact that our customers are interacting more than ever with Alexa is a testimony to the fact that our North Star is working. And what’s happening with large language models and other companies is a very good thing for the AI industry as a whole.”

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy hinted at Amazon’s plans for Alexa in April, saying that the company is working on a new large language model that’s “much larger, and much more generalized, and capable,” with the potential to “rapidly accelerate our vision of becoming the world’s best personal assistant.”

Listen above, or subscribe to GeekWire in Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen.

Related coverage

• Amazon’s Alexa and the rapid evolution of AI: A conversation with Alexa chief Rohit Prasad
• Amazon unveils Echo Pop, new Echo Buds; reports >500M Alexa device sales as AI upends market
• Alexa vs. ChatGPT: Amazon building new AI models to make assistant more proactive, conversational
• Amazon previews Alexa capability that synthesizes a person’s voice from less than a minute of audio

Rohit Prasad grew up in the Star Trek era, fascinated by the idea of interacting with computers via voice. So he was excited to join the Amazon Alexa team a decade ago, working initially on far-field speech recognition. He went on to become Alexa’s chief scientist, and his role expanded in the past year to lead the Alexa business.

The broader purview puts him in charge of what he calls Amazon’s “North Star” for Alexa, seeking to create an indispensable personal assistant, just as emerging forms of generative AI transform the industry.

“This is a super exciting time in AI. I’m glad that AI is back,” he says, in part. “The fact that our customers are interacting more than ever with Alexa is a testimony to the fact that our North Star is working. And what’s happening with large language models and other companies is a very good thing for the AI industry as a whole.”

What’s next for Alexa? How does Amazon’s voice assistant stack up against ChatGPT? Is that a fair comparison? How will privacy play into all of this? And what’s Amazon’s commitment to Alexa in this era of corporate cutbacks?

Those are some of our topics on this episode of the GeekWire Podcast.

Listen above, or subscribe to GeekWire in Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen.

Related coverage

• Amazon unveils Echo Pop, new Echo Buds; reports >500M Alexa device sales as AI upends market
• Alexa vs. ChatGPT: Amazon building new AI models to make assistant more proactive, conversational
• Amazon previews Alexa capability that synthesizes a person’s voice from less than a minute of audio

If the use of generative AI in the workplace didn’t seem complicated enough already, just consider what it means for big cities and other governmental agencies.

The implications of common AI problems such as algorithmic bias and attribution of intellectual property are magnified in the public sector, and further complicated by unique challenges such as the retention and production of public records.

Jim Loter, interim chief technology officer for the City of Seattle, grappled with these issues as he and his team produced the city’s first generative AI policy this spring.

Loter recently presented on the topic to the U.S. Conference of Mayors annual meeting in Columbus, Ohio. Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell chairs the group’s Technology and Innovation Committee.

As a starting point, Seattle’s policy requires city employees to receive permission from Seattle’s information technology department before using generative AI as part of their work. The city describes this as its standard operating practice “for all new or non-standard technology.”

Public records are a key part of the consideration.

“One of the most common conversations we have with city staff who come to us and want to start using a particular software tool, is to ask them, what is your strategy for managing the records that you are producing using this tool, and for allowing your public disclosure officer to get access to them when they are requested?” Loter says on a new episode of the GeekWire Podcast.

It’s not a hypothetical consideration, he explained, noting that the city has already had a public records request for any and all uses of city employees interacting with ChatGPT.

What types of uses of AI are city employees considering? Here are a few examples Loter gave on the podcast.

• First drafts of city communications.
• Analysis of documents and reports.
• Language translation for citizens.

As described in Loter’s presentation to the U.S. Conference of Mayors, generative AI raises a number of novel risks and concerns for municipalities. This list is from his presentation.

• Lack of transparency about the source data for models
• Algorithmic transparency is also still an issue
• Accountability for intellectual property violations
• Difficult to assess veracity of output
• Bias in source data and algorithms can inform or skew outputs, reify existing prejudices
• Bad actors could “poison” data sources with misinformation, propaganda, etc.
• New threats to safety and security (mimicking voices, fake videos)
• Consolidation of AI technology ownership and control

“When we look at these generative AI tools, the trust, the community, and the transparency really aren’t there,” Loter said on the podcast. “We don’t have insight into the data layer, we don’t have insight into the foundation layer of these applications. We don’t have access to the product layer and understand how they’re being implemented. Nor is there a community, a trusted community, involved in the production or the vetting of those tools.”

He continued, “It may not introduce a new categorical risk. But it raises the level of risks that may already be there when people are sourcing content from a third party or from an outside source.”

How can cities approach generative AI responsibly? Here’s the summary from Loter’s presentation.

Require responsibility in review of generated content

• Copyright / intellectual property
• Truth / fact-check
• Attribution – tell people AI wrote this content
• Screen for bias

Recommend specific vetted uses

• Data: Identify patterns, don’t make decisions
• Writing: Produce summaries of reports/legislation, don’t write them
• Search: Query/interact with City-controlled data, not general data
• Coding: Help find bugs or suggest optimizations, don’t write software

Perform A/B tests against known-good products

• Perform A/B tests against known-good product

Advocate for transparency and explainability in AI products

• What are the data sources used to build the model?
• How are decisions made?
• How is source content selected, evaluated, and moderated?
• How is illegal activity monitored and controlled for?
• If vendor is licensing AI services, what is that agreement and how is vendor prepared to enforce standards?

On that last point, the city of Seattle is a Microsoft shop, and Loter explains that the need for safeguards is one of the issues the city is discussing with the company as it incorporates OpenAI-powered technologies into Microsoft 365 and other Microsoft products.

We also talk on the podcast about digital equity initiatives and efforts to ensure that local municipalities aren’t pre-empted from exercising authority over internet service providers to try to achieve equitable broadband access.

Listen above, or subscribe to GeekWire in Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen.

For more than four decades, since the 1980s, pointing and clicking has been the primary method of using a personal computer.

Of course, the traditional computer mouse isn’t going away. But what if it could be augmented more frequently by simply thinking and typing, rather than hunting around on your computer for some sort of setting, or other solution to whatever you’re trying to do?

That’s one promise of AI. Rather than remembering the keyboard shortcut to take a screenshot, or the setting to shift the screen into dark mode, for example, you could just tell the computer what you want it to do in natural language.

That, at least, is what Microsoft is promising with the development of Windows Copilot. It’s an adaptation of its Open AI-powered Bing search chatbot, integrated directly into the operating system, showing as a persistent sidebar once activated by users via a new taskbar button.

This week, the company started to give users in the Dev channel of the Windows Insider preview program an early look at Windows Copilot. It’s rolling out slowly, with limited features, but it offers a glimpse of where the company is headed. The company hasn’t yet provided a timeline for a broader rollout to Windows users.

In addition to letting users interact with Windows in a new way, Windows Copilot will integrate with third-party apps via plugins.

So what does all this mean for the future of Windows and computing? On this episode of the GeekWire Podcast, we’re featuring a conversation with Aaron Woodman, the Windows vice president of marketing, recorded shortly after Windows Copilot was unveiled a few weeks ago.

Listen above, or subscribe to GeekWire in Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen.

“Our rule is, we risk capital — we don’t risk people.”

That was a guiding principle for Everett, Wash.-based OceanGate, as described by its CEO, Stockton Rush, in a talk at the GeekWire Summit in October 2022.

Rush’s engineering decisions, and his tolerance for risk, as reflected in his comments at our event, are getting new scrutiny after the apparent implosion of OceanGate’s Titan submersible this week, near the site of the Titanic wreck deep under the North Atlantic Ocean, killing Rush and four others on board. 

On this episode of the GeekWire Podcast, we’re joined by Alan Boyle, GeekWire contributing editor, who has been covering OceanGate for the past seven years. He tells the story of Rush and OceanGate, discusses the Titan tragedy, and considers what’s next for the company and the larger world of ocean exploration. 

We also listen to excerpts from Rush’s GeekWire Summit talk, including these:

Why Rush started OceanGate: “I didn’t understand why we were spending 1,000 times as much money to explore space as we were to explore Earth and the oceans. What I wanted to do with the business was just move the needle, get people excited about the ocean, explore the ocean and discover what was out there.”

The experience of being in a deep-sea submersible: “People don’t appreciate, the average depth of the ocean is 4,000 meters. … And yet, there’s all this life to be discovered. And as we go down to the Titanic, it’s amazing the creatures we see on the 2-and-a-half hour descent, the most bizarre things you can imagine.”

The user experience decision behind the Titan design: “When you get a researcher down there who just gets passionate about the fish or the crabs or the shipwreck that you’re on, that permeates the sub. It’s a must-have. So we said, OK, you’ve got to have a pilot, you’ve got to have a subject matter expert. And then you don’t do the coolest thing you’re ever going to do in your life by yourself. You take your wife, your son, your daughter, your best friend. You’ve got to have four people.”

Technical and materials decisions for the Titan sub: “Carbon fiber is three times better on a strength-to-buoyancy basis than titanium, and underwater, that’s what you care about — not strength to weight, it’s strength to buoyancy, and yet no one had done that.”

The role of certification agencies: “There are certifying or semi-certifying agencies, the Pressure Vessels for Human [Occupancy] committee that handles hyperbaric chambers and submarines, you have the SUBSAFE program in the Navy.

“These programs are over-the-top in their rules and regulations, but they had nothing with carbon fiber. So we had to go out and work on that. And one of the things I learned is, you know, when you’re outside the box, it’s really hard to tell how far outside the box really are. And we were pretty far out there.”

Innovation and ‘breaking things’: “If you’re not breaking things, you’re not innovating. If you’re operating within a known environment, as most submersible manufacturers do, they don’t break things. To me, the more stuff you’ve broken, the more innovative you’ve been.”

OceanGate’s approach to safety: “If we were going to stretch this new material in a new environment, with people inside, we needed to know, well before it failed, that it failed. Our rule is, we risk capital — we don’t risk people.

“So if somebody comes to me and says, ‘Hey, here’s a new idea for the sub,’ if the end result of that failing is that we cancel a mission or we lose a little money, that’s fine. If it’s somebody gets hurt, then we go and find a different approach.”

The role of Titan’s safety system: “With the acoustic monitoring system, we can tell if the hull has had some problem over time. … If it’s making noises at that depth that it didn’t make on the last dive, we can stop the dive. We can go up. We can find out what might have happened.”

Listen to the podcast for a discussion of these comments in the context of what we know now about OceanGate’s design decisions, the loss of the Titan this week, and the passengers who died in the incident.

Related Links and Coverage

• Now what? OceanGate sub tragedy sets off a torrent of questions without answers
• OceanGate submersible and crew declared lost after discovery of debris near Titanic
• Watch the full video: Stockton Rush at the 2022 GeekWire Summit
• Read an archived version of Rush’s OceanGate bio, and a New York Times obituary.

Listen above, or subscribe to GeekWire in Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen.

Amazon famously professes to obsess about customers, not competitors, but if the company really wants to focus its business, concentrating on its battle with Walmart might not be a bad approach.

That was one of my thoughts as I read the new book “Winner Sells All: Amazon, Walmart, and the Battle for our Wallets,” by Jason Del Rey, the longtime business journalist who developed a reputation for scoops and smart reporting about the online retail industry for more than a decade at Recode and Vox Media.

As a litmus test, Amazon’s satellite venture Project Kuiper gets not one mention.

As someone who has read many books about Amazon over the years, going back to the company’s retail roots was refreshing for me as a reader. The construct of the book, and its revelations large and small, make it a worthy complement to Brad Stone’s “The Everything Store” in its delivery of foundational knowledge.

A big part of the reason is that the book is about much more than Amazon. Del Rey tells the inside story of Walmart’s retail history and its tentative entry into e-commerce with the benefit of well-placed sources and interviews with key players including Walmart CEO Doug McMillon, and Marc Lore, the e-commerce entrepreneur whose sale of Quidsi to Amazon and later Jet.com to Walmart make him the most pivotal figure in the entire story.

Beat reporters tend to focus on one company or the other, brick-and-mortar retail or online commerce, but as Del Rey explains on this episode of the GeekWire Podcast, the two companies have repeatedly impacted and influenced each other over the years in ways that have shaped their respective businesses.

“I just felt like that was an under-told story,” he says.

On top of that, they are the two biggest companies by revenue in the United States, and also the two largest private-sector employers. As Del Rey puts it in the prologue, “it’s the defining business clash of this generation—a battle waged for our loyalty and wallets, with hundreds of billions of dollars at stake and millions of jobs on the line.”

But one thing that jumps out throughout the book is how long it took some Walmart leaders to take Amazon seriously, even up to and beyond the point that Amazon acquired Whole Foods Market.

Still, leaders at the two companies have studied each other for many years. As Del Rey reports, early executives at Amazon read Sam Walton’s biography, “Made in America,” and Walmart executives tuned into Amazon’s earnings calls after the company went public, astonished by the sums the company was spending on its fulfillment network.

Amazon, for its part, has been repeatedly surprised that Walmart hasn’t been more aggressive in using its most important asset, its vast network of physical retail stores, to give itself an edge in online commerce. Del Rey documents repeated instances in which the separation of Walmart’s traditional retail and e-commerce operations have pitted different parts of the company against each other due to competing incentives and interests.

It’s the classic innovator’s dilemma, in which a company is reluctant to disrupt its own successful business in the interest of long-term growth and relevance, leaving the door open to competitors.

“In business, incentives actually matter,” Del Rey said, describing one of his takeaways from his reporting for the book.

Lore’s team “had incentives to grow and grow and grow,” he explained. “And while they were separate, the stores team had different incentives … keep that cash machine going. Cash flow was important. Profits were important. And yet, Marc and team were not judged at all, financially, based on profitability. That created a lot of problems.”

Ultimately, the big takeaway is that there is not yet a winner in this battle.

So what happens next? Del Rey devotes a chapter to healthcare initiatives from both companies, and he says this is a key area to watch as the competition between the two plays out in the coming years.

“It’s tough for me to look at the money they’re spending in that space and think they’re going to just give up in a couple years,” he says in our podcast discussion. “That impacts so many more people than just their shopping services do, potentially. So that’s something I’m paying a ton of attention to.”

“Winner Sells All: Amazon, Walmart, and the Battle for our Wallets” is available now, published by Harper Business.

Listen above, or subscribe to GeekWire in Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen.

This week: the origins of data, and the future of the digital species.

Our guest on the GeekWire Podcast is business and tech leader Bob Muglia, a startup investor and advisor who played a pivotal role in Microsoft’s database and server products, and was CEO of data warehouse company Snowflake Computing.

He’s the author, with Steve Hamm, of a new book called  “The Datapreneurs: The Promise of AI and the Creators Building Our Future,” published by Peakpoint Press.

Muglia connects the dots between early data innovation and the emerging era of artificial intelligence; talks about lessons from one of his favorite authors, Isaac Asimov; compares Microsoft and IBM to Microsoft and OpenAI; describes his focus as an AI-oriented investor; tells the story of the data center he built in his house; and explains why he’s an optimist about the convergence of technology and humanity.

Here’s an extended excerpt from his comments.

People will use AI for every possible purpose: the good, the bad, and the evil. We’ve heard a lot about the evil, but there’s also a tremendous amount of good that can be done with AI as a tool.

Then there’s the question about what happens as this AI that we’re building becomes smarter and smarter, and reaches what we might call the point of an artificial general intelligence, where it’s as smart as an average human.

At some point, do we think of these things as entities that are peers of ours that we share this Earth with? Perhaps. I mean, I do think that’s where we’re going. And I think that we are already imbuing ourselves into these things that we’re creating.

Whatever we create, it will be built based on the values of the people that put it together. And every day, more and more learning is happening about society and people that is happening digitally. And ultimately, all of this is information, it’s data that can be leveraged by the AIs of the future to learn about humanity and to learn about us. We are putting ourselves into these systems. …

Certainly the generations of people that are younger, their entire lives are getting recorded now digitally. That’s a foundation of what essentially becomes a digital twin of each of us in these in these systems that potentially can live on beyond us. In a way, it is a form of being able to create a certain level of immortality.

As a humanist, I’ve always believed that what matters is what we do on this planet, and the impact we have with other people in society. Now, for the first time, that is getting recorded en masse. We’ve gone from the verbal way of recording information … to various forms of writing, to the printing press, to ultimately computers and the internet.

Now, data of every type is recording society in a way that essentially has a permanence attached to it. These intelligent entities that we can create in the future will learn from all of this. It’s a little scary, for sure, but it’s pretty exciting, actually.

Listen above, or subscribe to GeekWire in Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen.

With GeekWire co-founder Todd Bishop; edited and produced by Curt Milton.

Some of Microsoft’s biggest missteps over the years have come not from being too late but rather too early, leaving the door open for competitors — especially Apple, it seems — to popularize a product category years later, when the technology and the market are ready.

• Pocket PC … iPhone
• Tablet PC … iPad
• HoloLens … Vision Pro?

That last one sure looks like a possibility after Apple unveiled its new augmented reality headset this week. The device, which looks like a pair of high-tech ski goggles, lets users navigate with gestures in a manner very similar to Microsoft’s mixed reality headset, the first version of which was unveiled in 2015 and shipped in 2016.

The similarities even extend to the language used by Apple CEO Tim Cook on Monday, and then-HoloLens leader Alex Kipman at a Microsoft event in 2015.

Cook: “Vision Pro is a new kind of computer that augments reality by seamlessly blending the real world with the digital world. … You can see hear and interact with digital content just like it’s in your physical space. And you control Vision Pro using the most natural and intuitive tools: your eyes, hands and voice.”

Kipman: “A few years ago we started asking ourselves … could Windows make your digital life more powerful by connecting it with your real life? … Could we place your digital content right into your world, right into your life? The HPU [Holographic Processing Unit] gives us the ability to understand where you’re looking to understand your gestures, to understand your voice.”

Vision Pro ships next year for $3,500, the same price as HoloLens 2.

The future of the Microsoft headset is unclear after the departure of Kipman, the HoloLens leader, and layoffs on the HoloLens team earlier this year amid Microsoft’s broader cutbacks.

But Apple will also be competing with the likes of Facebook parent Meta, which makes the Rift VR headsets; and Magic Leap, which released the second version of its AR headset last year, led by former Microsoft execs Peggy Johnson (CEO) and Julie Larson-Green (CTO).

Apple hopes to popularize what it calls spatial computing by using Vision Pro to supersize the screens around us in the virtual world, with strong connections to iPad and Mac.

It’s also taking a new approach with a feature called EyeSight.

“When a person approaches someone wearing Vision Pro, the device feels transparent — letting the user see them while also displaying the user’s eyes,” the company said in the Vision Pro announcement. “When a user is immersed in an environment or using an app, EyeSight gives visual cues to others about what the user is focused on.”

That may be the Vision Pro’s most important feature, says John Tomizuka, co-founder and CTO of Seattle-based tech company Taqtile, on this week’s episode of the GeekWire Podcast.

Taqtile, which makes augmented reality work instruction software, has been working on HoloLens applications since the beginning, and the company said this week that it plans develop for the Vision Pro, as well.

EyeSight promises to make the device less socially awkward for the people using it, allowing them to interact with those around them.

That’s “the brilliant move that they made,” Tomizuka said, explaining that Apple is focused on “making this accessible and acceptable for people to use in a more widespread way.”

He cited the past precedent of Apple Airpods, which might have looked weird when first introduced, but have since become ubiquitous.

“They have a track record of making these things more socially acceptable, which is super important for our industry,” he said.

Tomizuka said the adoption curve for Vision Pro could resemble that of the Apple Watch, where the initial version doesn’t reach widespread usage, but still gives Apple important feedback that allows the company to iterate and ultimately make the device more popular and useful.

“As it gets smaller, faster, better, I really think they’ll own this market to a certain degree,” he said, “and it will heavily impact our lives.”

Listen above, or subscribe to GeekWire in Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen.

Hundreds of Amazon employees walked out of the office in Seattle this week — gathering between the company’s towers while holding signs, participating in chants, and listening to speakers urge the tech giant to do better.

It was part of a global walkout that organizers said drew participation from more than 2,000 Amazon employees worldwide, seeking bolder action on climate change, and a reversal of Amazon’s return-to-office policies. 

On this episode of the GeekWire Podcast, we hear from Amazon employees in the crowd and speakers at the podium, discuss the company’s perspective, and put the walkout in the context of larger shifts taking place in the tech industry.

Listen above, or subscribe to GeekWire in Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen.

Related stories

• Amazon employees walk out, seeking bolder climate action and end of return-to-office policy
• How big was that Amazon walkout crowd?
• Amazon employee groups expect nearly 2,000 workers to participate in walkout

This week on the GeekWire Podcast, we’re coming to you from our mobile recording studio, aka my car, as my colleague John Cook and I make the most of our time in a clogged parking garage to discuss the comments we had just heard from T-Mobile CEO Mike Sievert at the Technology Alliance annual luncheon.

Topics include artificial intelligence, national security concerns over Chinese hacking, downtown safety, and getting employees back to the office.

From there, we take an impromptu driving tour of Amazon HQ to see things first-hand. Shenanigans ensue.

Stories discussed on this week’s show:

• How T-Mobile plans to use AI to improve one of its most important business metrics
• ‘It’s your responsibility’: T-Mobile CEO exhorts tech industry leaders to return to the office
• Car and foot traffic data show impact of Amazon’s return to office mandate on Seattle commutes
• Microsoft says critical U.S. infrastructure targeted by Chinese hackers
• Amazon responds to walkout plan: ‘We respect our employees’ rights to express their opinions’

Listen above, or subscribe to GeekWire in Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen.

The theme at this week’s GeekWire Awards was Star Wars, but we didn’t need to go to a galaxy far, far away to find the force that promises to reshape the technology industry. The potential of AI was on the minds of many finalists and attendees, and integral to the business models of many of the companies featured on stage.

This episode of the GeekWire Podcast features conversations with finalists and attendees about the economy, artificial intelligence, and more.

Related links and coverage:

• GeekWire Awards 2023 revealed: Community honors top innovation in Pacific Northwest tech
• Seattle Seahawks legend, NASA astronaut, ‘Love is Blind’ star share wisdom at the GeekWire Awards
• Full Coverage: GeekWire Awards 2023

Guests on this episode:

• Ophir Ronen, founder and CEO of CalmWave
• Ivan Liachko, CEO and co-founder of Phase Genomics
• Christie Lagally, CEO and founder of Rebellyous Foods
• Emily Pesce, CEO of Joon
• Claudius Mbemba, co-founder and CTO of Spritz
• Xiao Wang, CEO of Boundless Immigration
• Patrick Husting, founder and developer of Ghostwriter AI.

Listen above, or subscribe to GeekWire in Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen.

We’re back this week on the GeekWire Podcast as humans, not bots, we promise, but we’ve still got a lot of AI to talk about.

This week’s show starts with highlights from my visit to Google I/O, including two generative AI tools that demonstrated the potential of technology to change the way we process and convey information. 

• Project Tailwind is an AI notebook that uses your notes and source materials to create a “personalized and private AI model” that answers questions and summarizes content.
• Help Me Write is an upcoming feature for Gmail in Google Workspace that drafts entire messages for users. It is an evolution of Gmail’s Smart Reply (quick suggested responses) and Smart Compose (suggested auto-complete for sentences).

John and I wrestle with the implications of these AI tools for human creativity, consider the long-term impact on society, balance these concerns against their natural sense of awe and wonder about innovation, and discuss ways that new tech realities are shielding companies from scrutiny.

Stories and topics referenced on this week’s show.

• We had our AI voice clones read an AI-generated GeekWire Podcast script — listen to the result
• Microsoft’s optimistic view of AI sees technology ending the drudgery of ‘digital debt’
• In search of AI’s killer app … and other notes from Google I/O
• Google Workspace Duet AI (Google)
• Google teases Project Tailwind — a prototype AI notebook that learns from your documents (The Verge)
• Dan Deacon’s pre-show Google I/O performance. (YouTube)
• How Gmail’s New AI Feature Will Write Your Emails for You  (CNET)
• As storm clouds clear for travel, Expedia Group looks to become a bigger tech provider to industry
• Trump’s Town Hall, Santos Charged, and STFU with Dan Lyons (Pivot)

Listen above, or subscribe to GeekWire in Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen.

For all the hype over generative artificial intelligence, how far has AI really advanced? Where is the new line between humanity and technology, and what will it mean for how we live and work?

GeekWire is addressing these questions in our Bot or Not series, and this week on the GeekWire Podcast, we share the preliminary results of an experiment that we’ve been conducting. We created AI voice clones for my colleague John Cook and me, and had those clones read a short, AI-generated podcast script.

You can hear a short clip in the first segment of this week’s episode, followed by reactions from our colleague Kurt Schlosser, and from John, who was hearing his own voice clone for the first time. Stay tuned in the coming weeks for a more in-depth look at this process and the larger issues raised by AI voice cloning.

• In the second segment, we get Kurt’s first-hand report from Amazon headquarters as the tech giant’s employees return to the office en masse for the first time in more than three years.
• In the final segment, listen for a preview of the GeekWire Awards, coming up May 18 in Seattle. Check out all of our GeekWire Awards coverage here, and learn more on the GeekWire Awards event site.

Listen above, or subscribe to GeekWire in Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen.

Today’s top STEM teachers embrace learning opportunities wherever they arise, whether it’s baby squirrels that have fallen from their nest, or engineering design failures that literally go up in smoke.

At the GeekWire Awards on May 18, we’re celebrating two STEM Educators of the Year who are among the best in delivering science, technology, engineering and math education. They’re teaching students fundamental scientific principles — but perhaps even more importantly, they’re helping them learn how to solve problems, take risks, and recover from failure.

The GeekWire Awards recognize the top innovators and companies in Pacific Northwest technology. Our STEM educator honorees were selected based on community nominations, along with input from GeekWire Awards judges.

We recently spoke with the two teachers to learn more about their creative, engaging efforts to inspire the next generation of STEM leaders. Bank of America is the sponsor of this award, now in its third year.

The 2023 STEM Educator of the Year honorees are:

Ted Rodriquez, Sno-Isle TECH Skills Center

Ted Rodriquez is an instructor for high school juniors and seniors at the Sno-Isle TECH Skills Center in Everett, Wash. The program serves tech-focused students in 44 high schools spread across multiple districts north of Seattle.

Rodriquez is focused is on electronics, engineering and the interdisciplinary field of mechatronics and his students are highly sought after by local employers. He was previously a department head at Skagit Valley College, leading the Electronics Engineering Technology Department.

Before teaching, Rodriquez served in the armed forces, and he and his wife tend a 7 acre hobby farm in their free time.

Melissa Pearcy, Jefferson Elementary

Melissa Pearcy teaches kindergarten-through-fifth-grade students in her role as a science specialist at Jefferson Elementary, which is part of Spokane Public Schools.

She is a lead teacher in her 30,000 student district in Eastern Washington, and provides STEM professional development for her colleagues. Pearcy also serves on a national team developing cutting-edge science curriculum focused on real-world learning.

When not in the classroom, Pearcy is a graduate student pursuing a PhD in science education.

Listen to our podcast with Pearcy and Rodriquez below, and keep reading for highlights from our conversation, edited for clarity and length.

One of the important initiatives in STEM education is bringing more kids into this space. How do you think about engaging students?

Pearcy: We have a lot of hands-on experiences and real-life opportunities for them to connect to real-world problems.

We’ve been working with the Department of Fish and Wildlife, where we are solving different problems in our community, such as having a moose on our playground, or what happens when some baby squirrels fell out of a tree. The kids came around [asking] what do we do? Do we pick them up? Do we leave them? What they ended up doing is they called a scientist, the scientist said, “Go on Google, find some mom squirrel sounds, put the phone by the baby squirrels, that will attract the mom.”

And so we actually did that during recess. They put the phone right by the baby squirrels, the mom came out of the tree, picked them up, and then brought all four of them up into a different tree into a nest. It’s just real-life problems. Kids are naturally curious, and they’re empathetic so that is really the drive.

Rodriquez: We may start a project, let’s say in alternative energy, and the construction department might want to take advantage of solar panels for some of their school bus sheds that you see on rural roads to keep the students safe from rain and snow. They call upon our electronic engineering students to come in, set them up and so on. That interaction allows a different insight into the world of science. It is a fantastic opportunity.

Our world is moving so fast that content isn’t always the most important piece — you really want to teach students to learn. And you look at something like GPT-4, which is turning things upside down potentially, and it seems like that critical thinking is even more important. How do you approach that?

Pearcy: It’s capturing the natural wonder of kids and letting them ask their own questions, and then being a facilitator for them to do their own research. Yes, you’re 5 years old, or you’re 8 years old, you have questions. Guess what, people that are much older than you have not found the answers. You could be the one. So with that frame of mind, just nurturing their own questions. It’s not a cookbook-type laboratory.

Rodriquez: Empowerment is a large part of engineering. I allow my students to fail. They have an opportunity to develop their designs. They have to make a decision, right or wrong. If they make a wrong decision in the design, they have to figure out what went wrong, how do you fix it, and move forward.

But they do have an opportunity to — I love that phrase “blowing up things” — they do have an opportunity to blow things up. I have a saying that am not happy until I see “maximum smoke,” as it shows that you are trying.

Our audience is very tech focused and in the STEM fields themselves. Do you have an ask for our listeners? Is there something that people working in the tech space could do for your programs, for public schools around the state?

Rodriquez: I would like to have as many of our tech folks visit programs like ours — Melissa’s and ours here at Sno-Isle. That is the best thing that could happen to our students, seeing these folks and meeting them, talking to them. Just the association. Just to see the immense love for the technologies with which these folks are working in their respective companies — and the opportunities that a lot of them have for our future technicians and scientists.

Pearcy: There is a little one of you out there that’s just waiting to be inspired by you. So if you can, go mentor them or pull back the layers of this is how I failed, this is my life story, letting them in on that secret of how you got to where you are.

You’re inspiring that next generation and you might walk away a little bit inspired by some of our younger scientists and engineers and technologies as well.

Listen to the full discussion on the GeekWire Podcast above, or subscribe to GeekWire in Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen.

Biomedicine pioneer Leroy Hood says that artificial intelligence will play a key role in the future of healthcare by accelerating the progress of “scientific wellness,” an approach that he has championed for many years.

Hood, co-founder of the Institute for Systems Biology, delves into this approach in his new book, “The Age of Scientific Wellness,” which he wrote with co-author Nathan Price, an ISB professor and chief scientific officer of Thorne HealthTech.

On this week’s GeekWire Podcast, we talk with Hood about the book, how AI is key to the future of medicine, and what people can do now to live a healthy life.

“AI will be the core foundation for the diagnosis and delivery of actionable possibilities for the information that comes from data-driven health in the future,” he said. “It will be able to take each individual and map out exactly how they should optimize their health and keep track of it.”

The book explores the notion that, at some point during life, every person makes a transition from wellness to nascent disease. It might not be something we see, feel, or can sense. But with the right kind of monitoring of the body’s biological systems, it may be a transition that we can measure and possibly even interfere with.

“Scientific wellness is predicated on the idea that each of us has a trajectory of health that we can follow across our lifetime,” Hood said. “We now have the ability, using a data-rich approach and new methods of AI, to actually assess the health trajectory and to optimize it for each individual.”

In the book, Hood recounts the trailblazing science that opened the door to a more data-centric and personalized approach to wellness.

In the 1980’s, while he was a Caltech professor, Hood’s team developed automated methods for sequencing DNA — technology that helped lead to the Human Genome Project. Hood went on to garner the prestigious Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award and the National Medal of Science.

Hood also coined the term “P4 medicine” — the idea that healthcare should be “predictive, preventive, personalized and participatory.”

In 2015, Hood co-founded Arivale, a startup based on P4 medicine that took stock of the body’s systems at the genetic, molecular, and microbial level. The company offered genome sequencing services, monitored metabolites in the blood, and assessed the composition of the bacteria in the gut, among other offerings.

Arivale folded in 2019. But data from its customers suggested that the approach had a beneficial effect on health. Hood himself found that he had abnormally low vitamin D levels in his blood, which he traced to variants in specific genes. And he remedied the deficiency with extra high doses of a Vitamin D supplement, he told GeekWire.

Hood’s new effort, “Phenome Health,” aims to build a “digital image” of an individual’s health and how it changes in response to lifestyle and environmental changes. The nonprofit’s first goal, “The Human Phenome Initiative,” aims to collect data on one million Americans including on blood molecules, the gut microbiome and digital health measurements.

The endeavor will focus on four key chronic disease areas: diabetes, cancer, cardiovascular disease and neurological conditions like Alzheimer’s disease. “The key thing is to get these early diagnostics years before clinical manifestation, and reverse disease very, very early on,” said Hood.

Physicians don’t have the ability to interfere successfully to slow all nascent conditions. But the more data researchers collect, the more they will be able to understand signs of chronic disease and aging and develop and assess interventions, said Hood.

Some researchers say that Hood’s approach to medicine has not yet matured. But he is used to criticism. In his book he recounts that the field of systems biology was new when he launched the ISB, but it has since been embraced throughout the life sciences with advances in big data, AI, and computational techniques.

Hood is now 84 years old and an athlete who has kept fit his whole life. Measurements show that his “biological age” is 15 years younger, he said. He’s still going strong, and dropped a hint of a future endeavor in our conversation. “I hope to have an Arivale 2.0 within the next five years,” he said.

“I want to see people move into their 90s excited, creative, and functional,” said Hood. “Not retiring, but energetically doing whatever they wish, and having the energy to interact with people, which is really a key thing to successful aging.”

Read on for more highlights from our interview, edited for clarity and brevity.

How can the everyday person put into practice the approach you are advocating?

Hood: In this book, we give the typical person a whole series of recommendations about doing that. But it starts with just the classic things that we do and think about for wellness. So, a proper diet, less red meat, more vegetables and fiber, those kinds of things. I think the idea of exercise is incredibly important — a broad series of exercises, both aerobic and anaerobic, and doing it regularly. Also, getting the proper amount of sleep and really dealing with stress, one of the big dangers for aging of contemporary society.

On the other side, we offer a whole new menu with data driven health that includes actionable possibilities that come from your genome and from measurements of your phenome — blood analytes, the gut microbiome, digital health and such. The integration of these together leads to yet other actionable possibilities, as I showed with my own vitamin D example.

There’s been a rise recently in complementary and alternative medicine, driven partly by the need for patients to be seen as individuals.  But there’s also a lot of what you call quackery. What should the consumer look out for?

The consumer always has to be very careful of who his medical providers are. I will say that in the naturopath area, there are a subset of people that are called functional medicine doctors that are superb. They’re real advocates of this kind of scientific wellness. But I think you do have to be careful because of the quacks. The other thing is that there are a lot of companies out there that promote wellness, and for most of them it’s a general blanket like exercise, diet, stress, sleep, that kind of thing.

In the book you talk about the potential for AI to change medicine. What do you think of ChatGPT-3 and GPT-4, the generative large language models that mimic human speech in response to prompts?

The key thing about ChatGPT is that if you want to use it for medicine, you have to educate the hyperscale AI device with the appropriate medical features. We plan to take a device and use only medical features to do the education, including all of PubMed. It will be exactly tuned to be able to take the complex data from each patient and talk about the actionable possibilities that this patient will require to bring them back toward normal. That’s the vision of how we, at Phenome Health, see using ChatGPT.

Even with proper training, do you think the GPT models will be accurate enough for medicine?

In the beginning, we’re going to have to check them all very carefully with humans. But increasingly, I think they will become accurate enough that we can back off on checking every single thing. There will be areas where we can edit them to make sure we know they’re absolutely accurate.

Some of the actionable possibilities you talk about are not yet realized. But I imagine that the more data you accumulate about health, the more you will understand how to interfere.

That is exactly correct. One of the biggest deficiencies in the Arivale program for scientific wellness was that it only concentrated on the body. And in this next program, we’ll also be concentrating on the brain and on the gut microbiome. And those are three pillars that are utterly critical, whose integration together is what makes the seamless operation of a human being. We think you need to exercise your brain just like you exercise your body and your heart, and there will be a lot of very explicit instructions, actionable possibilities for doing that.

There’s been a lot of talk about health and microbial composition in the gut and elsewhere in the body. What should people be paying attention to?

We showed that if you aged in a healthy way, your gut microbiome lost the core microbiome you had in your 20s and 30s. Every healthy person differentiated a unique microbiome, presumably in response to what their needs were in their 70s and 80s. The interesting idea is that we may be able to engineer your microbiome in the future to optimize the healthy aging process.

Right now though, the one thing you’re interested in is if your microbiome is diverse. If it’s diverse to a first approximation, that means you’re pretty healthy. The microbiome clearly reflects diet in all sorts of interesting ways. But learning what the actionable possibilities are is still a few years in the future.

What are some ways people can improve their brain health?

One of the most exciting types of measurement and intervention possibilities is our ability to carry out a digital analysis of cognitive features. We’re collaborating with Michael Merzenich at University of California, San Francisco, who started a company called Posit that developed digital brain measuring tools. And essentially, they have some 40 measurements they can use to assess 25 different cognitive features like reaction time, depth of field and memory.

Merzenich demonstrated that the brain is plastic, and it’s plastic all the way out into the 80s or 90s — though cognitive abilities rise to a maximum for normal people in the mid 30s and they gradually fade away thereafter. He took 1,000 individuals and showed that the majority of them could be assessed with these devices and that the lost cognitive features could be returned. It means that in your late 80s, as long as you haven’t lost neurons, your brain has a plasticity to return back to its youthful kind of vigor.

Listen above, or subscribe to GeekWire in Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen.

This week on the GeekWire Podcast, we’re joined by a University of Washington professor whose Twitter account was abruptly suspended last week for reasons that seemed inexplicable at the time. The story is a glimpse into the erratic, arbitrary, and divided state of social media, communications, and economics.

We also get a reality check on the new era of artificial intelligence, including the ongoing tendency of OpenAI’s ChatGPT to generate facts out of thin air. We’ve encountered this before, and our latest experience with it was ChatGPT’s fictitious insistence this week that Amazon had boosted the price of Prime by an additional $20 beyond the current rate. (Which is not true, at least not yet!)

And in the final segment, we hear why the late David Bowie was right all along about the “exhilarating and terrifying” future in which the rest of us are now living.

Our guest is Kathy Gill, a technology industry veteran who is an adjunct professor at the University of Washington and Bellevue College, focusing on communications and user experience.

Her current courses include a writing class for UW engineering students. She’s a writer, motorcyclist, and self-described news hound. Follow her @kegill or @kathygill, and read her work at wiredpen.com.

Listen above, or subscribe to GeekWire in Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen.

Related links

• TechDirt: Twitter Suspends User For Sharing Washington Post Story About Pentagon Docs Leaker
• WiredPen: Yes, ChatGPT can answer questions. Can you trust it? Nope
• Conducting research: a guide for undergrads, by Kathy Gill
• Watch the full interview with David Bowie from the BBC in 1999, as resurfaced by Michael Warburton this week.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy’s annual letter to shareholders this week delivered a dual message: while the company might not be done streamlining its operations, it’s also not scaling back its ambitions for future growth.

Jassy outlined the company’s strategy to expand further into generative artificial intelligence, healthcare, satellite broadband and other sectors, even as he hinted that the company might continue to cut costs in other areas.

He also made it clear the company isn’t backing down from its push to get employees back in the office for at least three days a week starting in May, illustrating the shift in the balance of power between big companies and many employees who would prefer to have the flexibility and freedom to work remotely as much as they want.

It was Jassy’s second annual letter as CEO since succeeding Amazon founder Jeff Bezos in the role, and while future historians might not be quoting his lines in a book, it’s clear that he’s settling in and putting his stamp on the company — including a decision to skip the traditional declaration that it’s “Still Day One” at the end of the letter.

My colleague John Cook and I share some of our key takeaways from Jassy’s shareholder letter and talk about the future of the company on this episode of the GeekWire Podcast.

Listen above, or subscribe to GeekWire in Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen.

Audio editing and production by Curt Milton.

Humans have become increasingly vulnerable to technology that grabs our attention, by design, often pulling us away from more meaningful and fulfilling moments in our lives.

Can technology itself be part of the solution?

Our guest this week on the GeekWire Podcast is leading a technology startup based on that premise: Caroline Cadwell, co-founder and CEO of Unpluq, a recent graduate of the Techstars Seattle accelerator program.

The startup, co-founded with Jorn Rigter (chief techology officer) and Tim Smits (chief product officer), offers an app, subscription service, and keychain tag designed to help people become more mindful about their use of smartphones, social media, and other addictive apps.

The idea is to help people “overcome what has been engineered against the very biology of being human,” Cadwell explains.

Unpluq lets users create schedules to insert small but meaningful barriers that need to be overcome to open selected apps on days and at times that users specify. In the premium version, for example, users can set Unpluq to require them to use the NFC keychain tag to access certain apps.

That moment of “intentional friction” is designed to help make the use of addictive apps a conscious choice, and not an automatic behavior.

“You have to think twice. It gives you a moment of pause,” Cadwell says. “And as I see it a moment to have a chance of being successful in making the decision that you really wanted to make for yourself.”

Unpluq currently offers an Android app, and it’s releasing an iPhone version soon. The company offers an Unpluq tag and a premium one-year subscription (normally $3.99/month) for $59.95.

As mentioned on the episode, I’ve been testing out the Unpluq tag and service for the past several weeks, and I’m planning to write more about my experience in an upcoming post on GeekWire.

Listen above, or subscribe to GeekWire in Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen.

Related links and references

• Seattle Public Schools sues TikTok, YouTube, Instagram and others, seeking compensation for youth mental health crisis
• Rational Overrides: Influence Behavior Beyond Nudging — research by Anne van Lieren, Giulia Calabretta, and Jan P.L. Schoormans, which helped to inspire Unpluq’s approach.
• Could You Live Without a Smartphone? — TedX talk by Anastasia Dedyukhina of  Consciously Digital, who is referenced by Caroline Cadwell on the episode.
• Our favorite startup pitches from Techstars Seattle Demo Day

Audio editing by Curt Milton.

This week on the GeekWire Podcast: what AI means for startups. We’re joined by Ali Partovi, a technology investor, entrepreneur, and mentor who is the CEO of Neo, a startup accelerator, mentorship community, and venture firm.

The Neo Accelerator this week announced a new AI track, working in collaboration with OpenAI and Microsoft to help startups build their businesses on newly emerging artificial intelligence capabilities.

Partovi, who grew up in Tehran during the Iran-Iraq war, sold his startup LinkExchange to Microsoft in 1998, was an early investor in companies including Airbnb, Dropbox, Facebook, and Uber, and 10 years ago co-founded Code.org with his twin brother Hadi Partovi, who continues to lead the computer science education nonprofit.

On this week’s episode, Ali Partovi discusses the role that AI will play in the future of startups; Microsoft’s relationship with OpenAI; his experience at Microsoft reporting to a young Satya Nadella as his manager; Neo’s approach to identifying and supporting a diverse group of technical and entrepreneurial leaders; and more.

Listen below, and continue reading for highlights from Partovi’s comments, created with help from Momento, an AI startup that was part of the Neo Accelerator’s 2022 cohort.

The story behind Neo: It starts when I was a startup founder myself at age 24. One of the most important lessons I learned was, it is just incredibly surprising, the difference that a single individual can make.

Throughout my career as an investor, some of my biggest successes have been betting on young people smarter than myself. And some of my biggest regrets have been when I didn’t bet on somebody who was just an absolutely brilliant technologist, and I had doubts about their business plan or lack thereof.

Neo is a firm that I started about five or six years ago around the thesis that you can identify exceptional talent quite young, when they’re still in college, and encourage them and support them towards entrepreneurship.

The AI opportunity for startups: It is the most inspiring moment for new innovation that I’ve seen in more than a decade, maybe in multiple decades. … There’s certain moments that I look back to, saying, this changes the technology world, this changes what’s possible. And I think we’re witnessing a moment like that right now.

Neo’s collaboration with OpenAI and Microsoft: It’s a combination of both technology access, free compute credits and perhaps most importantly, access to people who are experts in the field, who can help people overcome challenges or potentially find new solutions and learn how to make the most of these new tools.

So we’re super excited to have announced this. It’s been less than eight hours since we announced it (as of Tuesday, when we recorded this conversation) and we’ve already had a spike in new applications coming in. I feel pretty confident that this package has hit the spot.

What it was like to have Satya Nadella as a manager: He was an incredible champion for me. I was a headstrong, stubborn, probably insufferable young guy at the time. And Satya did so much to both teach me and to champion my work at Microsoft. So I have looked up to him. That was more than 20 years ago.

And then I could never have predicted that he would become the CEO, and that my new company 20 years later would have a relationship that’s intertwined with Microsoft in this way. And I have to say, it is truly inspiring how Microsoft has gone back to being at the center of the most exciting wellspring of innovation in the tech world.

The potential for AI to disrupt Neo’s approach: AI is disrupting everything. I can’t tell you how exactly it’ll disrupt us or where we’ll end up. But I can tell you, for sure, that we’re going to have to revisit all our practices, just as everyone else has to figure out how the world is different.

The world is changing around us faster right now than really ever in our lives. I think the best we can try to do is remain agile, remain optimistic, remain open-minded, and keep trying to go where the hockey puck is going.

Listen above, or subscribe to GeekWire in Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen.

This week on the GeekWire Podcast …

We discuss the latest on the Silicon Valley Bank collapse, and consider the long-term implications of the bank’s meltdown on startups and the U.S. financial system.

[Special Coverage: Collapse of Silicon Valley Bank.]

Then we consider a point-counterpoint on the issue of the return to office: Downtown Seattle Association President Jon Scholes laments the “affliction” of remote work, and Zillow Group CEO Rich Barton says the ways we work (and the places we work) have changed forever.

And finally, we catch up on the latest in generative artificial intelligence, listening to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s pitch for the company’s new Microsoft 365 Copilot. We consider the potential of AI to change the way we work, the competition between Microsoft and Google, and touch briefly on antitrust issues.

Related reading

• SVB Seattle leader asks customers to return: ‘No safer institution to hold deposits’
• New York Times — Mortgages, Wine and Renovations: Silicon Valley Bank’s Deep Tech Ties
• Seattle leaders make plea for workers to return downtown and help address ‘remote work affliction’
• As tech companies bring workers back to downtown Seattle, Zillow holds firm on ‘Cloud HQ’
• Microsoft’s real AI battle against Google begins with the promise of new superpowers for work
• Microsoft confirms Bing’s AI-powered search chatbot is running on OpenAI’s new GPT-4
• Oren Etzioni — OpenAI’s GPT-4 has some limitations that are fixable — and some that are not

With GeekWire co-founders John Cook and Todd Bishop.

Listen above, or subscribe to GeekWire in Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen.

Startup leaders and tech investors cheered the U.S. government’s promise this weekend to fully protect both insured and uninsured Silicon Valley Bank deposits. But the bank’s demise left many unresolved questions and challenges for the U.S. financial system and the tech industry in the days and months ahead.

So what’s next? That question is the focus of this special episode of the GeekWire Podcast, which we recorded late Monday afternoon with two venture capitalists: Kirby Winfield, founding general partner of Seattle venture capital firm Ascend; and Aviel Ginzburg, general partner at Seattle VC firm Founders’ Co-op.

Speaking with GeekWire co-founder John Cook, they cited looming challenges:

Banking will become more cumbersome for many startups.

Among startup executives and investors, Silicon Valley Bank was known for being easier to work with than many larger financial institutions, given its decades of experience specializing in venture-backed startups. Basic financial activities like wiring money will become more complicated in many situations.

Basic cash management will also become more complex.

Silicon Valley Bank’s downfall illustrated the importance of spreading cash among multiple banks to minimize or avoid balances in excess of the $250,000 limit on FDIC insurance. Many startups have been scrambling to address this issue.

Startups counting on venture debt in 2023 may be out of luck.

As of Monday afternoon, Ginsburg said startups that have tapped into their venture debt aren’t likely to have the funds taken back before the loans come due, while those who haven’t may see this borrowing capacity taken away.

This could translate into additional tech layoffs later this year.

Combined with the decline in venture capital investing in recent months, triggered by rising interest rates, an inability to access venture debt would be a “double whammy” with “reverberations throughout the ecosystem,” Ginsberg said.

[Update: In a memo sent Tuesday morning, Tim Mayopoulos, the CEO of newly established Silicon Valley Bridge Bank, said “we are making new loans and fully honoring existing credit facilities.”]

Much of the outcome is still in flux.

The government’s promise to protect all deposits was a relief, but it wasn’t the end of the story. As illustrated by the uncertainty about venture debt, many key secondary details will depend on which banks or investors end up with SVB’s assets through an auction reportedly under way as part of the FDIC receivership.

Speaking on the podcast, Winfield and Ginsburg also cited some silver linings:

The crisis has been a useful stress test for startup founders.

“This was this exogenous event where you got to see, right away, which founders were on top of their shit, which founders were communicating with their teams, which founders had a plan in place, or the ability to create a plan quickly,” Winfield said.

He added, “I’ll tell you, a lot of founders did. It makes you feel really good as an investor, when it’s been two, three, four years since you wrote that first check, and you can see someone step up.”

The bank failure helped to put other startup challenges in perspective.

This one is clearly coming from the perspective of an investor. But after surviving a bank collapse, startup leaders should be able to look at normal challenges and say, “Well, that’s better than my bank losing all my money,” Ginzburg said.

For example, some startup leaders are wringing their hands over the prospect of future “down rounds,” the phrase for fundings at lower valuations or less favorable terms than in the past.

Winfield agreed. “It totally reframes things,” he said.

This could be the first step toward a venture capital rebound.

Startup investors may “loosen up the purse strings” if interest rates stabilize later this year, providing more predictability in the markets, Winfield said, explaining this optimistic hypothesis.

A key component in SVB’s demise was its sale, at a $1.8 billion loss, of bonds devalued by rising interest rates.

“There’s a school of thought that says the Fed was going to keep bumping rates until something broke,” Winfield said. “Well, something broke. It was Silicon Valley Bank.”

Listen above, or subscribe to GeekWire in Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen.