TechFirst with John Koetsier

Imaging using an entire podcast as a prompt to GPT-5, or GPT-10. What would a massively capable generative AI do with a podcast? Create a movie? Score a soundtrack? Build an immersive world? John Gauntt is the host of The Augmented City podcast. He’s also a journalist, analyst, founder, and story teller who has been building an audio sci-fi ghost story about Seattle 100 years from now for the past half-decade He created a video companion to the podcast with Midjourney. In this episode of TechFirst, we'd going to learn how, why, and what it means for the future of podcasting and story telling. And we're also going to interview Beini Huang, the artist and designer on the project, as well as Keith Ancker, the audio engineer. Enjoy!

Facebook isn't what it used to be. It's shedding staff, dismantling efforts to create the metaverse, losing ground to TikTok in short-form video, bleeding ad revenue thanks to Apple's privacy changes, and generally following rather than leading tech industry trends. But it still has a massive number of users and some of the biggest apps on the planet. What can Facebook do to regain its mojo? And ... honestly ... can Facebook regain its mojo? In this TechFirst I chat with Brian Bowman, an entrepreneur and investor. He's focused on generative AI right now, but he's been in the ad space and multiple other spaces. He's a former Yahoo Executive, former CEO of Consumer Acquisition, and multiple other tech companies.

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

Aimi is a generative AI application for music that make songs that are everlasting: collaborations between artists and audiences that start, but never have to end. In this TechFirst I chat with Edward Balassanian, the CEO of Aimi, a generative AI for music that musicians can use to create, generate, and even code music ... while allowing audiences to add, customize, extend, and personalize the sound. There's free music, monetization for artists, and over 200 artists onboard who are creating something entirely new in music.

The 500-year ceramic geodesic dome home is now an actual physical reality. I first wrote about Geoship's plan to build long-lasting, inexpensive, earth-friendly, community-centric homes about 3 years ago. Last year, Geoship showed me a prototype. Now there's an actual built, powered, and furnished dome home in Nevada City, California. In this TechFirst, we chat with Geoship founder Morgan Bierschenk, see the dome first-hand, and get some insight into pricing, availability, technology, and livability. The first dome home is the 18-foot diameter model. But ultimately, Geoship plans to make domes that are anywhere from 1500 to 3000 square feet. A large individual dome might be 1,000 square feet, but can be combined and connected with smaller domes for bedrooms, kitchens, home gyms, living rooms ... pretty much anything.

Is generative AI the beginning of the end for humans ... or the end of the beginning? And, did you know generative AI has been around since 1972? In this TechFirst we chat with Ilke Demir, a research scientist at Intel who is working on ethical generative AI applications, like a speech synthesis project that aims to enable people who have lost their voice to talk again, an open urban driving simulator developed to support development, training, and validation of autonomous driving systems. And a privacy-focused face generator that allows researchers to mix and match facial regions (nose of person A, mouth of person B, eyes of person C, etc.) to create an entirely new face that does not already exist in a dataset, so that people can request anonymization in public photos. We also -- of course -- talk about OpenAI and Chat GPT, and how Ilke feels that it is not actually generative AI.

On November 16th, revenue for skippable ads dropped 50%, 60%, even 90% for many YouTube creators.  They say YouTube variously admits it was a bug, says it was fixed or will be fixed, or claims the payment drops are due to invalid traffic: code for "you're cheating." However, looking at their YouTube analytics doesn't support that claim. In this TechFirst, I chat with 5 creators who say they were impacted by the bug ... including several who have been impacted so severely they're not sure if they're going to be able to pay their bills, or keep creating content on YouTube.

So I did a Twitter Space with a bunch of really smart people, and they said I could upload the results to TechFirst. The only thing ... it's literally over 3 hours. So ... listen however long you'd like! The people on the Twitter Space include the host, Robert Scoble, as well as: Bryan Talebi, CEO of Ahura AI Tiarne Hawkins, director of AI at WeLocalize Chris Nakayama from Nufa/Mimesis Labs Ajay Juneja, CEO of Speak with Me Adryenn Ashley, founder of Wow is Me Martine Paris, AI columnist Jon Swartz, senior reporter at Dow Jones Ben Parr, co-founder of Octane AI and former tech reporter John Bigs, former TechCrunch journalist  ... and ... of course ... yours truly, John Koetsier!

Drone delivery is super-hot, but there aren't that many major players yet. Google's Wing is doing well, but Amazon is still just getting started, and few other significant players have major traction. Tiny Irish drone delivery company Manna Aero, however, has completed over 100,000 drone deliveries, is expanding to Dublin shortly, and will be expanding to mainland Europe and the United States this year. In this TechFirst with John Koetsier, we chat with Bobby Healy, CEO of Manna Aero.

Imagine building a digital twin of an entire country: all inputs, outputs, activity, infrastructure, issues, challenges ... That hasn't happened yet, but a client used Bentley Systems's tools to create a baseline digital twin for Singapore. In this episode of TechFirst with John Koetsier, we chat with Greg Demchak, who leads digital innovation at Bentley. Increasingly, the company is using digital twin technology, AI, and drones to monitor, protect, and maintain massive infrastructure projects including wind farms and power lines, and Bentley is helping build the ITER nuclear fusion plant in France. Links: TechFirst transcripts: https://johnkoetsier.com/category/tech-first/ Forbes columns: https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/ Full videos: https://www.youtube.com/c/johnkoetsier?sub_confirmation=1 Keep in touch: https://twitter.com/johnkoetsier