Tech News Weekly 376 Transcript

Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show.

0:00:00 - Mikah Sargent
Coming up on Tech News Weekly. Emily Forlini of PCMag is here. We kick off the show by talking about Claude AI from Anthropic playing Pokemon on Twitch. Then Emily, who was at Amazon's recent ALEXA Plus event, tells us about what we can expect from the AI-powered virtual assistant, before Sean Hollister of the Verge stops by to tell us about his time with Framework's new desktop PC. It's sort of kind of modular All of that. Coming up on Tech News Weekly.

This is Tech News Weekly with Emily Forlini, and me, Mikah Sargent. Episode 376, recorded on Thursday, February 27, 2025: Amazon's New AI-Powered Assistant. Hello and welcome to Tech News Weekly, the show where every week we talk to and about the people making and breaking that tech news. I am one of your hosts. I am Micah Sargent and I am joined on this vast and ever changing landscape that is the Internet by the wonderful Emily Forlini. Welcome back, Emily.

0:01:22 - Emily Forlini
Hey, Mikah, happy to be here.

0:01:24 - Mikah Sargent
Happy to have you. So we have some stuff to talk about today. As people are aware, we typically kick things off with our stories of the week. Emily did just get back from an interesting event, so she's agreed to stick around for a little while longer and tell us about that. So I'm actually going to be kicking off the show this week with my story of the week, and that is about a new player has entered the race, so to speak, because Anthropic, which makes the Claude AI decided to essentially use, I would say, kind of a newer benchmark to test the capabilities of its AI model, and in doing so, we have been blessed by the introduction of Claude playing Pokemon Red on Twitch.

So I want to start by kind of laying the groundwork here, because it's important to understand. This isn't a case where we have, you know, a bunch of YouTube videos right of people playing Pokemon being uploaded into the system and saying hey, watch, this is how people play this game. Here is the sort the game manual. Here are the in-game instructions for how to play. No, instead, what they've done is they have actually just dropped, essentially clawed into a game and said now learn how to play it and then play it. So there's no kind of prior understanding to how to play this game in ways that we've seen other AIs play games. Okay, this is kind of just like a, not crucible. But what is the fire? A trial by fire. There we go, a trial by fire situation, and I found this incredibly fascinating and enjoyable to watch. I've had it kind of running in the background for a while now just seeing how this whole thing plays out, because what you have is, in every moment, not just the AI trying to, you know, move around, because it's got like a, it's tied into the emulator so that it can hit, you know, up down, left and right and A and that kind of a thing. But what I found it fascinating, almost as a way to think a little bit about how we think and to see all of that play out and to think about all of the things that we might think about in a given moment, because there's one kind of quirk of this game in comparison to maybe some other games is typically, many of your interactions in RPGs are going to involve walking up to something, be it a person or a door or a store or whatever, and hitting a button, the A button, the main button to say I want to talk to this person or I want to interact with this thing.

One thing with Pokemon is that doors and certain other like entrances and exits, only require just kind of moving once more toward it. So you get to the spot and then you move once more and then you can leave the space. And so you see the AI trying to figure out how to leave. And you know, I walked up to the door, I've pressed A, it's not letting me leave Finally learning how to do so.

And then the thing has gotten stuck at different times. In fact, just recently it got stuck somewhere and decided that the this felt very human. Instead of trying to figure out what it needed to do to get out of its being stuck, it just decided that the game was broken. It's like, hey, this isn't me, this is the game, and that is so human to me, which I've found very fascinating. But I don't know. I kind of wanted to talk to you first and foremost about, maybe, how much do you think a benchmark like this matters in the scheme of things, and also just if you had heard about this and what are your thoughts on this. And then also, did you play Pokemon. Have you played Pokemon? I'd love to hear about that too playing like N64 or something.

0:06:06 - Emily Forlini
And there's, you have all the cars lined up and like half of them are computers, and then it's like you and your best friend who are playing, and so those computers. Do you know what I mean?

0:06:11 - Mikah Sargent
Like when you're playing.

0:06:12 - Emily Forlini
Yeah, so that's a little different than this. I think I always felt like those were a little too autonomous for my taste, like they could beat you, and I was like I don't want that. But I feel like maybe this is a little different because you're watching them play solo. I mean, I don't play video games anymore, but when I was younger I used to make my sister watch me, or my sister would make me watch her. I don't know why, I don't know if anyone else did that, but it was a thing we did together. And so this is almost like you would sit and you would just watch the AI play, and maybe it's like entertainment because you're wondering what decisions it's making and how stupid it is.

0:06:51 - Mikah Sargent
I was cheering, let me tell you, and all I had to do was get out of a store and I was like, from the other room, I had to apologize to my significant other. I was like I'm sorry, I just got really excited because the AI made it out of the store.

0:07:03 - Emily Forlini
He's like wow, that's crazy experience. Yeah, it's almost like e-sports, but you're watching the player, you're watching the most basic. Yeah, yeah, I mean I wonder if it'll wear off like the novelty or if this signals like some new chapter in gaming. I'm not sure. What do you think?

0:07:21 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, I want. So here's what I, what I found myself as I was watching. My first initial thought was is this thing? Because the whole idea, right with AI, when we talk about kind of the benefits of AI, we often look to sort of medical and health stuff. Right, we say, if we're humans, can have the knowledge and the scope of what's in front of them, we can feed this person's symptoms right into the AI. And the AI has had the time, because it has the processing power, to also look at a bajillion of the other cases that exist that have been published and then use all of that to doctor, house the situation into figuring out what that person has. And so I found myself and I was looking at the chat too and seeing some other people being like how are we going to see it, galaxy, brain this game and figure out how to, you know, play the game in a way that maybe a person had never thought of. That it's a technique that the person never thought of.

Because one of the things that caught me off guard I'm very much when I play a game and I don't do that very often, but if it's a, if I am playing a game, it tends to be like an RPG, a game where you go around and you collect things and you, you know, build up your levels, that kind of thing, and so, um, so I'm a resource hog, like I'm holding onto the money for as long as I can, I'm going around and finding objects instead of buying them, and one of the first goals that this thing had was to go buy pokeballs. And I'm going is this something I should have thought of? It goes in and it bought 15 pokeballs, which was like almost all of the money that it had, and many of us are sitting there in the chat being like okay, is this a strategy that you know we should be thinking, maybe this is the way to do it? And despite buying all of those, then it goes out and it starts to try to catch Pokemon, but it hasn't quite learned yet how you have to kind of go between attacking pretty hard and not pretty hard, because if the Pokemon faints, you can't catch it anymore, and so it has to kind of like revise its technique on lowering defenses and attacking and then not doing too much. And so it's got all these Poke balls, but it's basically progressing through the game with just one Pokemon and very little money and you're just going is this the way to do it? And we've been. You know.

What I mean that, I think, is what this potentially opens up is seeing it play through games and wondering if it's just kind of bumbling along sort of like a like sometimes a person I think we even actually talked about this we might have skills that we don't realize we have and you just stumble across something and you're like, oh wow, I'm actually good at this, but you don't have the context or anything like that, and maybe that's why you end up being good at it, because there's not all of this preconceived notion.

Is it going to discover something about playing a game that we didn't think of, something about playing a game that we didn't think of? And you know, also, will it come across different, because there are bugs in games and there are exploits in games. Will it find those by accident, on purpose, based on its own training set? Will it make use? That's the thing that's fascinating is like you get to see it through a whole new lens, I think. The game that you didn't get to see it before. Okay, so it's like the game that you didn't get to see it before.

0:10:46 - Emily Forlini
Okay, so it's like a fresh take on gaming, and everyone's just watching to see what this thing's going to do.

0:10:51 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, absolutely I think. So I mean, that was for me. The other part is just, I think there's still it's still very much a okay, this is a goofy thing that can't really do a whole lot Like it's getting. It's. It thinks that while it's in the store it's actually in the town and it can't find how to go left, and so you see people going no, no, no, don't go left again. You've been going like you need to make it to the door. So it's a little bit of um, pin the tail on the donkey sort of situation. I think there are a lot of dynamics to this that I'm just now kind of picking apart here as we're talking about it.

0:11:31 - Emily Forlini
Yeah, yeah, I could see, since it is so fun. Now I'm like okay, twitch is going to try to replicate this. Now it's going to try to get tons of streaming parties and get more people using Twitch, and they're going to be like every other tech company. That's like oh, we can automate this, we can make AI as creators and they'll have their own Twitch streaming channel and it'll be an AI with, like a character that's playing games.

0:11:55 - Mikah Sargent
And I don't know it just clicked with me. Claude plays Halo, Claude plays this.

0:11:59 - Emily Forlini
Yeah, exactly, You're absolutely right there should be a whole revenue model around it, just like You're absolutely right, there should be a whole revenue model around it, just like the influencers which we've talked about I think you've talked with Abrar about that too and other people. It'd be the whole. On your Instagram account. You'll be following fake AI people, so just another example. I know.

0:12:17 - Sean Hollister
I was having fun with it.

0:12:18 - Emily Forlini
It is cool to have fun with that stuff, but then it becomes less fun and independent when it's commercialized, I think.

0:12:25 - Mikah Sargent
Absolutely no, you're right, and I think for now it smacks of sort of the celebration of humanity, which was core doctorate that essentially, a service ends up becoming garbage whenever you switch from serving your users to serving the shareholders, and, yeah, I think that that ends up happening in anything. So that will be interesting to see how this progresses and evolves. As you know, for for Anthropic, it's just about showing what its latest model is capable of doing, versus for Twitch, where, yeah, they might go. Oh, its earlier model of 3.0 was barely able to get past the start of the game and that kind of then put milestones throughout the game. 3.7, which it's now on, is able to get multiple gym badges and make it pretty far in the game, also completing 35,000 actions before it has to stop because it thinks the game is broken or whatever that happens to be.

0:13:52 - Emily Forlini
Well, that's the best measure for AI progress. I've heard ironically, because I mean every time they say, oh, our model's better. You know Grok is better in this, openai's, you know O1 model is better in this. It's like this nonsensical table of percentages and the different domains, math, science and it's like it could be truly made up. Yeah, what does it even mean? Nobody could possibly analyze these spreadsheets that they put in their PR about how good their model just got. It's just, I completely scroll through. But what you just said, I'm like, oh, I can visualize that, I can see that. So said I'm like, oh, I can visualize that I can see that.

0:14:28 - Mikah Sargent
So I don't know, it's a cool experiment for sure, absolutely All right. We have to take a quick break before we come back to a conversation I'm super excited about, because Emily was at the Amazon event and had an opportunity to learn in person about the stuff that the company has announced. So we'll take a look at that, or listen to that, whenever we get back from this break.

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All right back from the break and Emily Forlini is here to tell us a little bit about your trip to where was it? Yeah, start there. Where'd you go?

0:16:20 - Emily Forlini
I was in New York and I live right outside New York, so it started with I got breakfast in the morning, I picked a train, I got on the train and then I went to a little studio. It was kind of south of Penn Station. They had decked out the whole outside so from the street you could see it was an Amazon event, and so basically it was the reveal of the new Alexa. Which. Do you have an Alexa?

0:16:44 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, I do, but I have headphones on, so we're fine.

0:16:47 - Emily Forlini
Well, my Alexa has certainly been just like collecting dust and I just it-

0:16:54 - Mikah Sargent
sorry, let's rewind, cause I thought you meant, for the sake of you, saying the name like the keyword out loud, but now I realize that's not what you're asking. Yes, I have one. Mine is also collecting dust.

0:17:03 - Emily Forlini
Yes, I have one. Mine is also collecting dust. Yes, yeah, no worries, I mean collecting dust or responding when it shouldn't, like you said. It's just it feels like the Alexa experience is so deeply broken. I mean I can't even get mine to play music. It never knows if it's like my account, my husband's account, amazon music, spotify. It just can't do anything I want it to do anymore. And so, basically, amazon knows this and they are revamping their Alexa also to compete with things like chat, gpts, voice mode, gemini Live, and then there's a new Siri on the way from Apple.

So it was just a bunch of journalists and it was a nice event. It was clearly very important to Amazon. The CEO, andy Jassy, was there. He kicked the event. I mean, I don't think he comes just to any old reveal or um, so this is clearly kind of like a new chapter and he talked a lot about their AI stuff, um, and then it went into you know good old voice demos on stage, you know they asking the new Alexa questions and seeing how, how she was going to respond, and it was um, it was better than like it was impressive. It was impressive, it's just. You know, you could say things in a natural voice. It wasn't that, you know. Alexa set a timer.

0:18:15 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, the the like only the keywords and set in exactly the right way, sort of situation.

0:18:20 - Emily Forlini
Yeah, and they even acknowledged that like they called it. Quote Alexa speak. And oh mine's going off.  

0:18:26 - Mikah Sargent
Now it hears you Wow.

0:18:28 - Emily Forlini
It finally, finally does something.

0:18:32 - Mikah Sargent
Let me ask you so, first and foremost, what's your thought on? You said I feel like this is important. The CEO was there. Why does Amazon not stream its events, given that the rest of the tech, like big tech, does? And then the second question would be I'm forgetting it as I'm talking when it comes to the demos, do you feel like they were true live demos, or was there a little bit of um magic going on?

0:19:12 - Emily Forlini
so I don't know. So does amazon not typically stream any events?

0:19:16 - Mikah Sargent
It hasn't in a while. It used to and then I think a couple of, maybe a couple of years ago, suddenly was not doing it anymore and I thought, what is that about?

0:19:27 - Emily Forlini
I don't know. So is the video up, even online?

0:19:32 - Mikah Sargent
I don't quote me on that, but I don't believe it is. I think the most we have is a press page that just talks about the things that the company announced.

0:19:43 - Emily Forlini
Wait, go up to let me see if I'm in that picture. I probably am. I was in like the third row. I can see the person in front of me. Anyway, it was a cool event, but yeah, so I don't know why they don't live stream, and it does feel like they want an element of control there, because you know what if the demos don't go well or what if something happens? They want to control the press cycle. They don't want something to happen and then all the press and the influencers and the Joe Schmoes on social media start just going off on a tangent about how horrible this demo was. I think they just want to shut that down.

0:20:28 - Mikah Sargent
So just more control.

0:20:30 - Emily Forlini
I think it's more control. I do think as an attendee it can feel better if it's not live streamed, because the presenters are less nervous. There's a little bit more authenticity in the room of they're just presenting something, not that they're running through a super, super canned presentation and it was canned. I mean I could see the teleprompters in the back, but there was just a little more relaxed than sometimes like a live stream can make these tech press conferences. So there was that. But to your second question about the demos, I mean they kept saying oh, it's the first time I'm doing this, I'm so nervous, like trying this guy, Panos Pane do you know that guy?

0:21:07 - Mikah Sargent
Yes, he's from Microsoft and he's funny. He's a funny guy.

0:21:14 - Emily Forlini
Yeah, I mean like 30 seconds into his speech. I was like this guy's a funny guy. Yeah, I mean like 30 seconds into his speech. I was like this guy's a wacko so you okay.

0:21:20 - Mikah Sargent
So here's the funny thing I I want to, because you don't have. Um, then the pre-context of uh, Panos Panay, which.

I had no idea who he was yeah, because I've been on Windows Weekly a bunch of time like co-hosted that show. Um, he comes from Microsoft and Paul Thurrott, who is one of the hosts of uh, windows weekly, has like interacted with with Panos and any time there was a Microsoft event he you know Paul would always jokingly be like I wonder if he's gonna start playing the piano randomly. Is he going to show weird videos?

of his kids doing things, uh like playing. He did that, uh kicking, you know, tell me everything, because we all wondered what Panos was up to okay.

0:22:02 - Emily Forlini
So Panos is a figure out in the world which I am now aware of and I mean he just gets on stage and he's got glasses on, he's jewelry, visible jewelry like I think a bracelet, um, maybe some stuff around his head I don't know necklace, I don't know what he was wearing and he just goes. Remember the first time you used Alexa, that moment you asked a question and she responded what a moment. And he's just telling like the legacy of lexa, and I was like what is this guy? So I mean, he got a like slightly more normal throughout, but he almost was trying to convince us he was normal. He was, you know, showing his kids, showing his husky, and I was just like I don't know if I'm buying it, dude why is he always trying to show like his personal photo album?

0:22:50 - Mikah Sargent
that's so funny, that's like a thing that he does apparently

0:22:55 - Emily Forlini
I'm happy to hear this honestly oh yeah, I mean I, this is. I was like, wow, I don't even know what's happening. I mean I guess I was trying to imagine him in like meetings at Amazon, like what is he doing? Like he's just such a character and he just doesn't speak like a typical. I call it like Amazonian because he's just so loopy.  

0:23:13 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, A little tidbit about him. There was one event at Microsoft where he was supposed to be giving the presentation for this new thing that Microsoft had announced and at the last minute they decided to let the CEO of Microsoft introduce it it and so when it came around for his part of the presentation, he had nothing to talk about because the CEO had taken what he was supposed to talk about. So he spent the time like walking around in the audience doing crowd work and taking people, because somebody had, like a Mac in the audience and so he was like taking that away and be like you should be using a Microsoft Surface, that kind of a thing. Oh yeah, and apparently his favorite thing to say is that he's pumped. I don't know if he said that a lot at the event, but you didn't know to listen for it.

0:24:01 - Emily Forlini
So I didn't know. I'm sure he was pumped. He seemed like he could be pumped. There were a couple of things. So yeah, what did he do? What does a tech do? I guess we'll leave our friend Panos aside.

0:24:12 - Mikah Sargent
So yeah, Panos, thank you for being there and for that little tidbit, but yes, let's talk about the deck.

0:24:19 - Emily Forlini
Yeah, so he was asking questions, it was responding and it did seem to respond. Well, like you know, you could say, oh, can you look up concert tickets for me? And then it would. It would display some concert tickets and they'd be like, oh, those are a little steep, can you, you know, find some under 200? And so it knew the word steep, which is kind of slangy in that context, and it was very conversational in a way. That was impressive.

0:24:42 - Mikah Sargent
Did it go? Yeah, good luck.

0:24:45 - Emily Forlini
Yeah, good luck no, because it's so annoyingly positive. That was my one thing with how it speaks. It's like you're right, those are so expensive, like let's look at other it can do is it can kind of like take actions on your behalf so you could tell it. You know, like theoretically, hold your phone up, or or, you know, talk to your living room and say like, oh, text, mom, that I'm on the way now, and it could do that, rather than, like you know, having to like open a text and dictate specifically.

So it could just you don't have to do that minutiae on your phone of like opening the text and like just setting up a voice recording and pressing send, kind of thing. You could just say without even opening your phone, like oh, text, mom, I'm on the way, it could also. What did he do? He had so many examples of doing things for him Like, oh, someone else came on stage and was like, oh, love to cook. And if the, if the oven broke right before my dinner party, you know what would I do? And then he was like, oh, like alexa, like find a repairman to come fix the oven immediately. And then it looked up like all the repair options and, you know, could, could theoretically call the repairman oh, and pick a good one maybe pick a good one, good reviews um that was a stretch for me?

I don't know.

0:26:10 - Mikah Sargent
I need to know, like, what I'm paying for right, yes, yes, I agree, i't a lot of the like buy actions and stuff. I'm not big on, you know, don't order pizza for me. Don't think that I need to get a car summoned. One thing that I saw in the examples that it gave, that the company gave in the videos afterward that I thought okay, now, that is something that's really cool. The person because this happens to me all the time, if I'm Thanksgiving or some other time where I'm making multiple meals at once and the person is working on the next step I think it's like a side and says, okay, now put the potatoes in the oven. And the person goes, oh no, I'm using the oven for meal prep right now. And then it's like, oh, that's no worries, I'll tell you, I'll adapt the recipe with a frying pan instead and it'll turn out just fine. That is like, if that works, if that actually works, that's the kind of stuff that I want. I know, um, smart home was a big aspect of of this, right? Um, I want to talk to you about that and also the, the pricing and your where Amazon Prime might be going, but we do need to take a quick break before we get to that.

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All right, we are back from the break and we are talking about the Amazon ALEXA event. By the way, this new ALEXA is it's got a plus on the end, um, which immediately made me go oh no, I'm gonna be paying for this. Is that the case?

0:29:06 - Emily Forlini
That's what I thought. I mean, there were rumors that they were going to make everyone pay for it. And then, when you add a plus, that's the signal hey, subscription, subscription. But so the pricing is a little odd and not totally adding up to me. Because, okay, they say it's free with Prime, yay, that's great. So that's $139 a year, prime. But then they're saying or it's $20 on its own, technically $19.99 per month, which would be $240 a year.

So if you buy it on its own. It's more expensive than prime, which you could get and also have the free shipping and you could have the movies and you could have everything that comes with prime. So it's kind of like what gives, like what's going on here. So my theory, which I wrote about, is either they're going to use this as an excuse to raise Prime, because actually it hasn't gone up since 2022.

So it's kind of unfortunately really ripe for a raise and what's more expensive than AI like nothing in the world. So they could definitely raise prime. Or I think, more likely, they'll use prime as a kind of like a watered down version of this to like show you kind of what it can do. It'd be like a mini version and they'll really start developing it um more seriously and in earnest on that 1999 platform and that'll be like a standalone product got it, it.

And they kind of dropped in the presentation very quickly. I don't even know if it's in the press release. They said that it's getting its own like desktop, like URL Alexacom.  

0:30:37 - Mikah Sargent
Yes, I did see that.

0:30:39 - Emily Forlini
Yeah. So I think they're just going to which would be a kind of like a chat GPT, kind of vibe or or a cloud. You know you can access that separately as a chatbot in its own kind of like domain. So I think they're going to try to compete more directly with other chatbots in that way and not only contain it to smart home or prime, probably going to have their own standalone product with like better features, more advanced stuff, like developer kits and like API pricing and just the whole thing. So I think that's what they're going to do. But they didn't say any of that. They just gave some like very confusing numbers. So that's where we are.

0:31:16 - Mikah Sargent
So is this new version of Amazon's assistant? Is this its own AI LLM? Is this someone else's or some other companies? Where? Where is this? And also like, where is this happening? Right, because we know that the database and the infrastructure are all a huge part of whether the generative AI is going to work or not.

0:31:45 - Emily Forlini
Yeah, such a good question. So Amazon is doing it differently than others. Whereas ChatGPT makes and advertises their own models really prominently, what Amazon does is it just has what it says is the largest selection of models that are out there. So it has a huge catalog in the back end and when you ask the new Alexa a question or ask it to do something, it will on its own figure out the right model for the job.  

0:32:12 - Mikah Sargent
Oh, that's cool, that's nice.

0:32:16 - Emily Forlini
Yeah, exactly, and even OpenAI wants to go in that direction, like Sam Altman tweeted. You know we hate that you have to pick the model that you want. On our site they call it the model picker. Like we hate that. It's confusing. Like we should really just kind of like choose for you and Claude, the 3.7 model you were talking about just got an upgrade that it now has like dual capabilities and can do two in one, and so the whole industry is going towards like stopping with the the model thing and trying to keep track of all the o's and the fours and the one, two, threes and all that.

so amazon's just like, yeah, we're just gonna have I mean, they'll probably have deep seek and they'll have like all the models just available and then it'll choose, and I think it'll probably be doing a calculus of like how cheap can we perform this action for the user, like what's the cheapest model to get the best outcome? It's probably what they're doing.

0:33:05 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, okay, that, yeah, that. See, and that's the thing I. It makes you wonder, whenever the companies are deciding for you, right, are they doing it on your behalf? Are they doing it Because I think there's a part that makes you go. I want to use the best one possible, but what's the best is different for you versus what the company thinks. I think that this is clever on Amazon's part for, just from the get-go, making it that you're, because if you don't have the choice in the first place, then it's not being taken away from you, whereas I think it's going to be a little bit more difficult for these other companies where you might be skeptical and you'll go. Well, I want to try a different one to see if I get a better answer Right, and then maybe you don't, and you, I guess, learn at that point that, oh, this actually does work.

One thing that I saw that I thought was also really cool work.

One thing that I saw that I thought was also really cool and this was kind of in the launch video was because I kind of had a whole family in a home with the new version of the assistant and at the end of the video, the dad goes to sit down in the chair and kind of relax and has this kind of like moment where he says did anyone let the dog out today? And the assistant says I checked the cameras and the dog has been out today, and I also. I thought that was also really cool. I could see some people being a little put off by that, but I thought it was cool that Amazon is really leveraging its network, its ecosystem, I should say, of devices, because that's typically a thing you see from Apple.

Apple's devices work really well together. Amazon has made quite a few acquisitions of Eero, of Ring, of I think. Blink wasn't originally an Amazon product, if I remember correctly, and then became one. So all of these things kind of working together with the AI, that leveraging I thought was pretty neat. Was there anything like that, that kind of stuck out to you for this event?

0:35:11 - Emily Forlini
Yeah, you know, who also thought that was cool was Panos, who showed us that on his home ring camera and showed his kids, which I hear it's. He asked it like oh, did my daughter walk the dog today? And then it basically looked at the ring and pulled up the video clips for him to see.

0:35:31 - Mikah Sargent
I feel bad for his kids. They don't have any privacy.

0:35:34 - Emily Forlini
I know, I know also they're like super wealthy and just probably live on like some compound. I'm like what is what is happening in this? Like this man's household, but separately. Um, that brings like. An interesting point is that you know I said you could like watch the video clips. They demoed this on the echo show, which has a screen, and it's coming first to the echo show devices. So, like the amazon alexa I have in my house wouldn't work with this because it's just that little ball. What is it? The dot?

0:36:08 - Mikah Sargent
yeah, the little ball or the spot, one of the, I can't remember which one.

0:36:12 - Emily Forlini
Yeah, I think I have one that's like a cylinder, kind of looks like beat the beats. Whatever, I don't have any old school, yeah, yeah, that's.

0:36:19 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, they don't have any screens so it's coming to screens first and then making its way to the others. I know it won't be on like the farthest, the oldest generation of devices. Right, um, they were pretty coy about it.

0:36:32 - Emily Forlini
They didn't really explain like I don't even know all the devices that I will work on and when. So they were only specific about the show. And then they echo show. And then they did say one additional feature they're going to add to the screen, which are these little kind of like expressive little blue symbols at the bottom. So if, like you're looking at me right now, like at the, if this is an echo show, like at the bottom there's a little like ding, like a little thing that pops up when you ask it to do something. It could be a music note if you ask it to play music, or a happy symbol if you ask it. It's just trying to be expressive.

0:37:04 - Mikah Sargent
It's just trying to be like expressive, I don't know how to let you know that it's understanding you.

0:37:08 - Emily Forlini
Maybe, yeah, it's a little like like the blue branding these little icons that will kind of like dance dance up at the bottom of the screen at times what they call the Alexicons right. They made it seem like it was new. I don't really know. No, it is.

0:37:22 - Mikah Sargent
It is, but I guess I don't know if it was at the event or afterward they explained that those are called Alexicons, which is, I think I love a pun, so I thought that was funny, but some people were like oh brother, but I thought that was funny.

But some people were like, oh, brother, but it's interesting that they mentioned that because you wouldn't think that's super important. But Apple, there was recently a patent that kind of got released that had video with it and it was showing a lamp that had kind of expressive behavior to communicate to the person that it was doing a thing and then also understanding a thing to the person, that it was doing a thing and then also understanding a thing. And so if you asked it something, it would look as if it was kind of seeing what you were talking about. It could, like nod, do a little dance. And it turns out that psychologically that kind of a thing is important to us to where we feel more comfortable and less skeptical, and that's the thing for me skeptical, and that's the thing for me.

Yeah, I don't think I that. Why is mine covered in dust and I have it muted so that it doesn't pick up on me saying the wake word, because every time I've used it to do a thing, it doesn't do it right. So I just don't. I don't use Siri, I don't use it. I don't use Google, I don't use any of them.

0:38:35 - Emily Forlini
That's the thing is, we've all been so burned by this technology. It's like probably one of the least successful pieces of tech. Like I hate voice assistants, like in a car and my phone, anywhere. They're awful. And so then Amazon comes in this big event with their CEO in New York. You know, I got a plate of chicken and steak. They got it all. They got it all this big event. But it's like, wait, this technology has been terrible so far. Like you, like, how are you going to convince me? I don't know, it's a huge stretch and it really, it totally is. Like, oh, I'll believe it when I see it and I just have to think. So many people feel that way.  

0:39:08 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, I, I think so. I think so too, anecdotally, and actually that seems to be the case. So maybe you know these, these little visual things.

0:39:21 - Emily Forlini
Yeah, that's not enough, that's not enough.

0:39:23 - Mikah Sargent
Like you're right, you're right yeah, we need.

0:39:26 - Emily Forlini
I just don't want to look at anything. That's the promise, right? I don't want to be like Alexa find a restaurant. You know, I just I don't know. I just maybe you should just read my mind. I don't know, I just maybe you should just read my mind.

0:39:37 - Mikah Sargent
You're just going to plug a little thing into the side of your temple. Well, I believe that we are just about to the time where we need to say goodbye, but I did want to ask do we have any expectations on when people will start to see these features hitting their devices? Did the company talk about that?

0:39:58 - Emily Forlini
I think very soon in the next couple of weeks. Even so, we should hopefully next step as we can test it and see what it does. I mean, I'm at PCMag so we have to have an Echo Show somewhere. We have a whole room of devices, so I'll probably get one out and see how it works.

0:40:16 - Mikah Sargent
Nice. Well, I'm looking forward to hearing your thoughts on that, and maybe I will hit that unmute button Once again. We'll see. We'll see, emily, it is always a pleasure to chat with you, and if people would like to keep up with what you are doing, where should they go to do so?

0:40:35 - Emily Forlini
Yes, you can find my work at PCMag. I'm Emily Forlini. You can follow me on Blue Sky, twitter and TikTok or just email me. I'm easy to find. I'd love to hear from you.

0:40:47 - Mikah Sargent
Beautiful. Thanks so much, and we'll see you again soon.

0:40:49 - Emily Forlini
Thank you, see you next time.

0:40:52 - Mikah Sargent
All righty, thank you. See you next time, all righty. We've got another break before we get to our final chat of the day about. I know the listeners out there loved the last time we talked about framework, so we're going to be talking about framework again in just a moment.

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All right, we are back from the break and I'm very excited about our next guest. It's Sean Hollister of the Verge. Welcome back, Sean. Hi glad to have you have me. Yeah, absolutely Hi glad to have you have me. Yeah, absolutely. So you are here to talk about a kind of popular topic among our listeners, who are, in many ways, you know. They like to tinker, to build, to do all of that kind of thing, and Framework seems to be a darling among that group.

My fellow, nerds yes, hello, fellow nerds. We know that the company has made a name for itself with those modular, repairable laptops. But when we think about the next product, the one that you reviewed, it's a desktop and traditionally, at least on the PC side, desktops are already modular by design. So has the company kind of talked about releasing a desktop and how that does kind of fall in line with what Framework does and kind of where it fits in the lineup?

0:44:08 - Sean Hollister
I mean, this is the real head spinner around this. I mean, in their blog post, right at the beginning, they say basically they say we understand, we don't need to fix this category. Desktops are already modular, they are already repairable. There are many, many standards in a modern desktop that make it that way, from the ATX standard that determines the size of the boards that will fit in it, the spacing pattern of the screws, the way the power connectors plug in to the M.2 bits that you'll use to plug in mostly your solid state drives, but there are also other kinds of cards that go into those. Many of these modular things exist.

But what they said is they wanted to bring this idea of gaming and this idea of local AI processing to a wider audience, and so what they did is they took a chip, a chip that AMD has, that's like no other chip that AMD has created before, called the Strix.

Halo is the internal code name. I think they're calling it the Ryzen AI Max and Ryzen AI Max Plus. They're taking that monster chip which has more graphics, more integrated graphics power than I think any chip ever made has had before, and it has a tremendous amount of unified memory. There's up to 128 gigabytes of memory 128 gigabytes of memory and about 96 of that available to the GPU. So there's all that shared unified memory in there which lets you run some local AI models on there that would be difficult to run on anything outside of a large GPU cluster that you might put in a server farm right now Not that it has the power of that, but the memory and maybe gives a sizable fraction of the performance of a gaming PC to an audience that just wants something small that sits on their desk, something that's easy to upgrade, something that might be relatively, relatively affordable for them, and so that's the overarching idea here.

0:46:10 - Mikah Sargent
Interesting. Now I love that they're trying to serve a specific area there. When it comes to that AMD Strix Halo processor, you talked about some of the features that it has. If someone were to look at the more traditional gaming PC setups, how does that compare in terms of are you going after multiple things if you're going with a traditional PC setup and you only have to go for this one thing? Are we just looking at power consumption? Are we looking at size? How do the two kind of compare there to make the company want to go for something like this versus those more traditional options?

0:46:48 - Sean Hollister
If you're building a traditional gaming PC, the sky is the limit. Up to a certain point you can buy $500 motherboards if you want and crazy amounts of processing power to go in there and giant graphics cards. I recently tested a $2,000 RTX 5090. I stuck that in a PC that's about 12.9 liters and because it's the PC I'm talking to you from right now, I can't pull it out and show you it's about. You know it fits between these hands. You know this direction and this direction you could fit, maybe you know 12, 14 Coke cans inside of this thing. It's not big, but it's not tiny either. That's 12.7 liters, I believe, for that PC.

The PC that we're talking about here, the Framework desktop, is 4.5 liters. It is smaller than a PlayStation 5, which, admittedly, is one of the biggest game consoles ever made. It is smaller than an Xbox Series X. It is something that you can pick up on a carry handle and you can see in my video on YouTube, on the Verge and easily carry around with you lots of places. And so Framework's founder hearkened back to LAN parties. You know you carry your PC and your big CRT water your LAN party.

Now you could carry this small piece. Well, the community can already build very small mini ITX PCs. They don't need to build in 12.7 liters. You could make one that's as small as the one Frameworks building, but it would not be as easy to do so. You wouldn't be able to just buy that easily from someone with a small amount of money. It would consume a lot more wattage Hundreds, many, many hundreds of watts. This one has a 400 watt power supply in it, but it's not even going to be using anywhere near the 400 watts. The chip is rated at 120 watts of sustained power and up to 140 watt boost. So a little bit of overhead for your peripherals, a little bit overhead for your storage there, but that is your CPU, gpu and memory at your 140-ish watts.

0:48:54 - Mikah Sargent
Nice. Now, of course, with framework customization, is the big selling point. You have 3D printable front panel tiles, user-selectable front IO ports, but you kind of have to strike that balance between modularity, between personalization, with also keeping that system compact and also providing that high performance. It sounds to me like most of that comes by way of this chip choice, this Strix Halo processor. Are there any other decisions that you see that the company made that makes this compact, modular system work?

0:49:34 - Sean Hollister
Oh yeah, I mean absolutely the way that they give you a single board with most of your IO and your CPU and your memory on it. You can't pull any of those things off. That has pulled some criticism from the PC gaming side of things. It's the strength and the weakness of this situation. If you want to upgrade this pc, you're going to be upgrading the entire cpu, uh, memory and board and all these rear ports. I mean it's got an hdmi port, two display ports, two us 4, two USB 3, headphone jack and 5 gigabit Ethernet. All of that you're going to have to upgrade at the same time. The question is, if you were building a desktop PC anyhow, wouldn't you also upgrade all at the same time?

Personally, I don't. I like to buy a new graphics card for my gaming computer, which already has a good enough CPU and will have a good enough CPU for some time to come and for the next decade. I imagine I'll be able to upgrade to a new CPU. I do also have to replace the motherboard at those point. At that point the sockets do change. There are new ports, that who come out, that are desirable even now. I wish I had more USB 4 ports in my PC more USB C ports in my PC that I I don't currently have. Most of my USB ports are fairly slow, even though I've got a very powerful GPU in this machine.

0:51:16 - Mikah Sargent
So what is upgradable after the fact outside of all, of all of that has to be changed at once? What's the modular part outside of those 3d printed tiles on the front?

0:51:28 - Sean Hollister
So the weakness and the strength. The strength is when it comes time to replace those components Theoretically and this is important, we should get into this more Theoretically you take out that board with those parts on it and you put in another board from framework that will let you upgrade all of that at once and the price that they're asking for that is not unreasonable. I don't think they're asking for that is not unreasonable. I don't think they're asking for. The base system, an entire complete system with the lower end chip, is 1099, should offer a roughly the performance of a mid-range gaming laptop for roughly the price of a mid-range gaming laptop. Only now it's in this desktop form factor with all these extra ports and things, and should, unlike most gaming laptops. You'll be able to replace this whole board and get all that new performance, assuming they keep making these boards with new chips down the road, and that's that's. That's the question. Will framework continue to have new boards for these products? The said Framework has said many times that its goal here is to make things repairable and modular and that upgradability often comes with that. They don't promise the upgradability Now.

Historically, they have delivered on their 13-inch laptop. They have delivered many generations of that where, if you take an Intel laptop from 2021, I believe it was their first Intel laptop they just announced a new AMD board that'll go in, that that you can bring that 2021 laptop up to 2025 spec just by replacing that board. And if you're going from Intel to AMD, you also have to put a different Wi-Fi chip in there, but we'll skip past that for a second. But you put that board in there and you have a laptop that you can keep upgrading year after year. That's never happened before not in my, not my recollection. Maybe some id it departments with a specific think pad or a specific you know, dell latitude years ago, maybe there's been one or two things like that, never anything like this, generation after generation.

Now will they do that for their other machines too? They don't like to say yes, we will do that. We will absolutely have new motherboards for this thing down the road. And because this is a, this is an unusual chip from AMD. We've never seen an AMD chip like this before. The one of one of the men in charge of it, amd's Frank Azor, told me. You know, they invested a lot on this experimental new category of halo chip Strix, halo Halo. Will there be a success for Strix Halo. I mean, they invested a lot, they probably will right, but it depends on if people buy it. Is this thing going to be popular enough? Not the framework desktop by itself, but the entire Strix Halo, the Halo classic chip.

0:54:29 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, okay, that makes sense. Like that's got to be for framework. They can't say absolutely we will, because they're relying on AMD to continue to make those and AMD is trying to figure out if it's a profitable enough thing to do. So, yeah, that's hard.

0:54:47 - Sean Hollister
They are not the only customer for the Strix Halo chip. Asus has a Z13 tablet that we're currently reviewing that has this chip in it, a tablet that gets notably more powerful when you plug it into the wall. I believe HP has both a mini tower, a tiny PC kind of like the Framework one, but it's designed for other things and a laptop with the Strix Halo chip in it. So you've got a laptop that theoretically has that 128 gigabytes of memory. So if you're an AI enthusiast and you want to be able to do those local AI models on a laptop, it's possible. They've got a couple customers Asus and HP for now, three other design wins we can think of. And if it doesn't work out with Strix Halo, it's still a desktop with a mini ITX motherboard spot in it.

You could put a different mini ITX motherboard in this. Maybe it's just any mini ITX motherboard that you find that all your components fit in here. Maybe Framework will develop another one around a different chip next year or the year after that. They could put an NVIDIA thing in there instead, an NVIDIA CPU, an NVIDIA GPU, if NVIDIA follows through on its long-held plans to make CPUs for this kind of audience. At CES we saw NVIDIA show off its Digits tiny supercomputer, thingamabob. Maybe one of those boards could fit in here. I'm not sure.

0:56:17 - Mikah Sargent
Now, I guess, overall I'm curious, having tested many a device in this category, I mean and kind of. You talked about mid-range gaming and then there are also laptop gaming options and you know very, very, very powerful gaming options. Where does this fall in there? And you know, in that line, and did you find yourself underwhelmed, whelmed, overwhelmed by what, overwhelmed by what you saw, given this sort of system on a chip design, right Of like, all of the pieces and you had a name for it, but all of the pieces there as one thing Did it kind of have you go. Maybe this isn't such a bad idea because of what it means in terms of the RAM being available to all, the different parts being available to all the different parts.

0:57:14 - Sean Hollister
I would have been underwhelmed if it seemed like it had a lot less performance than I would expect at that price from a laptop. It seems like it might have about the same. You want to have more in the desktop realm, like I mean, if you're paying for that amount of money and you're not getting a screen and you're not getting, you know, swappable memory and you're not getting built-in storage, the storage is on top of the price here. You'd have to bring your own storage for these desktops. If it was much less value for money I'd be very underwhelmed. But as it is, it's cute, it's badass, the price doesn't seem outlandish. I would need to review it and really dig into the performance.

What we're seeing from the laptop that we're testing, the tablet, the asus tablet that we're testing with this same chip, is we're seeing roughly the level of an rtx 4060 mobile in performance, which is, you know, mid-range average, and there are new 50 chips coming for laptops right now, so maybe a little bit behind the curve. You're definitely paying for the modularity here. You're paying for the framework ecosystem. You're paying for the two ports that you can interchange on the front of the system using the expansion cards I'm looking forward to getting one of these in and instead of having just USB ports on the front, I might swap out one of the two front ports and stick in the SD card module that Framework now has. So I can pull the SD card right out of my DSLR, stick it in there and then transfer the files off that way, without having to reach around the back of the computer or stick in an adapter like I usually do. So that's you know. You're paying for that kind of stuff.

I, of course, would love to see even more performance. With the extra wattage that you get plugged into the wall all the time, not having to deal with a tablet or laptop battery, it should perform a little bit better. We did get one decent example while we were there, and obviously this is pre-release, but since Strix Halo is out in shipping products, I wouldn't expect the drivers to be too far behind. We did see a Cyberpunk 2077 running at a native 1440p averaging over 70 FPS without any fancy tricks like FSR. We didn't have ray tracing on, but it was running at ultra spec 1440p native very smoothly. The lows were at 60 FPS. So I mean, if your gameplay is not falling below 60 FPS, you've got a pretty good experience there.

0:59:45 - Mikah Sargent
Absolutely.

0:59:45 - Sean Hollister
Is it going to be the best choice to plug into a 4k TV? Probably not, but with a 1440p monitor it could do pretty respectably.

0:59:53 - Mikah Sargent
My last question, then, for you is do you feel this device is a good choice for gamers, for AI developers, for people who do that thing on the side? You know where does this fall in line for you as a device? Who's it for? Who do you feel it's for?

1:00:18 - Sean Hollister
from the tests that you've done thus far, I haven't done any meaningful AI tests, but what I've been hearing in comments around the web and on our site and on our videos, you know, is that people who do AI or do AI on the side, they don't have a lot of options for what to buy to run models locally in terms of hardware, because big companies are buying up big GPUs that are very expensive. If you want that RTX 5090 and you're thinking you might do local stuff on there, the card alone costs as much as the high-end board here and you're getting what? 32 gigs of VRAM there versus like 96 here, so you can keep your model, you know, loaded into the VRAM there. And I've not done this myself. I don't know if it's good for that. They're telling me wow, this is great, I'm definitely getting this. For that reason, gamers, you know it's a bit dicier. It really really depends, if you like, the idea of laptop performance in a desktop to make it tiny but then upgradable down the road. Hopefully, that that's a lot of, that's a lot of ifs, right, that's a lot of ifs, uh, and and the performance you know, right now, certainly you, certainly you could probably do better if you spent a little bit more on a gaming laptop in terms of raw performance and have a screen built into it and all that kind of stuff. That said, if framework does show that the desktop's here for the long haul, that they're going to be putting new boards into it year after year, that it is really easy to do that, uh, that could be pretty compelling.

Um, and it also depends on the overall pc market. We know that prices are going to be going up under tariffs right now for things coming out of china. Most machines that come into the us, most gaming laptops manufactured in china um, they are. They're created by taiwanese companies in many cases, but manufactured in china. Framework has said that, uh, it doesn't think the tariffs are going to hit it as much because it does its manufacturing in taiwan.

Uh, in addition to that, um, the the the hunt for new gpus is always confounding for desktop PC gamers. A new card will come out and NVIDIA will say, oh, it's $750, is the price of this, or it's going to be $550 for this new NVIDIA desktop card, but good luck finding it for that price, maybe good luck finding it at all for months. And if folks are tired, if PC gamers decide they are tired of building PCs to their exact spec, the way that they are used to building them, and hunting for those parts. In this moment where things are getting difficult to find again and pricier again, maybe this is the right moment for a framework desktop. Okay.

1:03:16 - Mikah Sargent
Well, sean Hollister, I want to thank you so much for taking the time to join us today on Tech News Weekly to talk about the new framework desktop. Everyone, everyone listening head over to the Verge and check out Sean's articles about the framework desktop, as well as the video Sean's articles about the Framework desktop as well as the video, and if people want to keep up to date with what you are writing about, is there a?

1:03:42 - Sean Hollister
good place to go, or maybe places to go to do that. Yeah, in addition to my Verge profile, I'd recommend seanhollister.bsky.social.

1:03:49 - Mikah Sargent
Beautiful. Thanks so much for your time, we appreciate it. Thanks for having me Beautiful. Thanks so much for your time, we appreciate it.

Thanks for having me All righty folks. That's going to bring us to the end of today's episode of Tech News Weekly. As you know, the show publishes every Thursday at twit.tv/tnw. That is where you can go to subscribe to the show in audio and video formats. If you'd like to get all of our shows ad-free just the content and also a warm, fuzzy feeling in your heart knowing you're helping to support what we do here on the network, well, join the Club Twit. That's not like a sassy thing. Join the club no, join the club. Join our club, twit.tv/clubtwit. It's just $7 a month, but you can check it out for two weeks free if you're new to the club, and see what that gets you, because, along with those ad-free shows, you also gain access to the Twit+ bonus feed that has extra content you won't find anywhere else, and access to the members-only Discord server, a fun place to go to chat with your fellow Club Twit members and also those of us here at Twit. That sounds good to you, doesn't it? I'm sure it does, so head to twit.tv/clubtwit to check it out.

If you'd like to follow me online, I'm at Micah Sargent on many a social media network, or you can head to chihuahua.coffee that's C-H-I-H-U-A-H-U-A.coffee where I've got links to the places I'm most active online, so I'd love to see you there. And, of course, you can always tune into my other shows. Many of them publish on Thursday, so you can check out Hands on Mac and Hands on Tech. And be sure to those who are listening now and who love to tune in live, to tune in this Sunday I'm saying tune in a lot. Join me this Sunday, because we'll be recording many episodes of Hands-on Tech this Sunday, so I'd love to see you there. Oh, and, of course, iOS Today. Don't forget iOS Today. Thanks so much, and I'll catch you again next week for another episode of Tech News Weekly. Buh-bye.