Today in Tech

Apple made a big splash with new iPhone models, watches and updated Airpods, but the big question on everyone’s minds was the AI features. What would they be like, when is it coming? Computerworld’s Ken Mingis and Macworld’s Michael Simon discuss the Apple ‘Glowtime’ event with Keith and Chris on our latest episode.

The integration of generative AI with general-purpose and public-facing robots will enable companies to provide friendlier robots that assist humans with physical tasks, in addition to lessening any fears and other dystopian attitudes towards a robotic and AI future. Jerome Monceaux, founder and CEO of Enchanted tools, talks with Keith about the future of physical robots, as well as whether AI avatars will also be more human-looking or character driven.

Despite some feelings of disillusionment around generative AI technologies, there continues to remain large investments in the space. Brandon Mahne, guest co-host, joins Keith and Chris to discuss the $1 billion of investment in Safe Superintelligence (SSI), Anthropic expanding to the enterprise, and OpenAI considering raising subscription pricing for its new large language models. The three also discuss failures of the streaming service advertising platforms, right on the cusp of political ads invading these services, and whether gamers will be able to play top games on AI-based PCs.

With a more than 10x explosion in the number of available large language models (LLMs) for companies looking to deploy a generative AI projects, you might assume that all of the models “are basically the same.” Vikram Chatterji, co-founder and CEO at Galileo, joins the show to discuss the major differences between LLMs and what parameters companies need to explore before choosing one for their project.

Both Apple and Microsoft are in talks with OpenAI to help the generative artificial intelligence company raise additional funds, which could make the company valued at over $100 billion. Will the extra cash mean that the company can improve its large language models to make genAI more useful? Brandon Mahne, guest co-host and CTO at Glasshouse, joins the show to discuss this and other technology news from the week, including whether we think sunlight “on demand” is brilliant or foolhardy.

The massive outage that occurred in July via CrowdStrike and Microsoft has put a lot of IT teams on notice, with leaders thinking about “what’s next?” Krishna Prasad, CIO and Chief Strategy Officer at UST, joins the show to discuss what tech leaders need to do in order to prepare and prevent possible bad recovery processes for future tech outages.

More details have emerged from the National Public Data breach that exposed millions of Social Security numbers to hackers, showing a potential lack of security knowledge by companies that need to protect data. Brandon Mahne, CTO at Glasshouse and owner of Mangrove Collective, joins the show as guest co-host to discuss this story, as well as other tech news. Chick-fil-a as a streaming provider? A future “space gas station”? Our weekly tech news roundup has you covered.

The money flow for generative artificial intelligence projects is starting to slow down, as companies begin to scrutinize the return on investment for these projects, and doubts creep in about accuracy, hallucinations and other potential problems. Hidden costs are also becoming less-than-hidden, leading many companies to wonder whether all of this hype was perhaps overblown. Keith chats with Mike Sinoway, CEO of Lucidworks, about their recent survey that showed a slowing down of AI investments across the industry and around the world.

With another potentially large data breach of 2.7 billion records that included Social Security numbers, as well as a first half of the year revealing major data breaches, is it time to adjust your security strategy? Brandon Mahne joins the show as guest co-host this week to talk about these issues and other technology news stories from the week, including Elon Musk’s new AI image generator that appears to have no guardrails, and why Waymo vehicles in San Francisco are all honking at each other.

A new survey indicates that companies are looking to train internal employees for key AI skills. Gustavo Alba, global managing partner of Technology & Service practice at Heidrick & Struggles, chats with Keith about ways that companies can help employees get better at learning critical generative AI skills.