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TBPN is a live tech talk show hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, streaming weekdays from 11–2 PT on X and YouTube, with full episodes posted to Spotify immediately after airing.
Described by The New York Times as “Silicon Valley’s newest obsession,” TBPN has interviewed Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Mark Cuban, and Satya Nadella. Diet TBPN delivers the best moments from each episode in under 30 minutes.
Microsoft Build is satisfying, for a number of reasons. They're in the foundation model game. They train a bunch of models. MAI Code One Flash, MAI Thinking One, the company's first coding and reasoning models respectively. Several speakers played up as super efficient on a cost per token basis in ROI.
Speaker 1:Race, you gotta be efficient. Microsoft Scout is an agent. They're OpenClaw build now, powered by OpenClaw, open source technology that operates across cloud, desktop, and webcam connecting to Teams, Outlook, OneDrive, and SharePoint, and to the data that powers your day, including chats, emails, calendar, contacts. Good news if you're all in on the Microsoft ecosystem. And then we talked about this a little bit with the Jensen announcements from NVIDIA.
Speaker 1:They're going into the PC market more. The Surface RTX Spark Dev Box is sort of the answer to Apple's Mac mini custom silicon designed for agentic AI. There's also a new Android based OS operating system, designed to run agents instead of apps called Project Solara, and there's a pretty cool demo. So we should play the video. The Verge always does a cut down of these keynotes.
Speaker 1:They take you through Microsoft Build in twenty five minutes, but we're only gonna play a couple minutes of this because And so today, one of
Speaker 2:the things
Speaker 3:that I'm really excited about in order to tap into all this compute power is to expand the scope of Windows ML and Windows AI. We are also announcing two very cool new models that are all gonna run on Windows in Box.
Speaker 1:Okay. Let's jump to
Speaker 3:is a new
Speaker 1:Eight minutes. Because this is where Satya introduces Project Solara, which Ben Thompson said, Project Solara is, to be very clear, vaporware at this point, although the company did show real devices and has signed up Qualcomm and MediaTek as chip partners. It's also extremely compelling. So Ben Thompson likes it. Let's listen to Satya Nadella introduce you.
Speaker 4:Very broad categories. The first is stationary and the second is portable. The first device is designed for your desk, and it's built on MediaTek's silicon.
Speaker 1:Concept cars.
Speaker 4:With Hello for Business just walking up to the device, securely signs you in, giving you direct access to your agents.
Speaker 1:Amazon and Google Home have similar products at this point with screens for more smart home.
Speaker 4:Think, plan, and even act by delegating tasks to your agents with a simple tap or just using your voice. It even supports experiences like handoff between devices acting
Speaker 1:as a Still tricky to imagine when you wouldn't wanna use your phone for this since people carry their phones everywhere. Firing off an agent isn't the most cumbersome thing, but I do love consumer hardware. So I'm excited to see if there's any unique things that you can do only with this product.
Speaker 4:This
Speaker 1:is a very interesting thing. It's not a phone. It looks more like a smart key card or badge. Yeah. It even has a space on it, like it's a badge
Speaker 2:that you can wear.
Speaker 4:I tap to unlock the device, and I have access now to all my agents in a secured manner. And would you look at that? I already have a task. And it says, gather content for your social media post
Speaker 2:Sorry if I missed it. Why would you want this over having an application
Speaker 1:On your phone? I'm not sure.
Speaker 4:That's a
Speaker 1:good question. Does anyone have an answer?
Speaker 2:There's there's a there's a new meme, the two phone meme. Yeah. You know, maybe some people feel left out. They want a second
Speaker 1:you have it. There's like the dumb phone route where you don't want everything in the phone, but you do wanna kick off agents that go do things for you. You want to be more like delegating instead of like consuming. Like, you're not gonna be scrolling TikTok on that thing. But you might be firing off work tasks that you can come to later on your desktop and sort of lock in on.
Speaker 1:I don't know.
Speaker 2:I could prompt it and say, write a 20,000 word message to John Yep. Telling him that I would like to hang out on Saturday afternoon. Yep. Make sure it's easy enough to digest so his agent can summarize it into a few bullet points.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Into ideally, one sentence. Wanna hang out. Let's see. Ben Thompson broke it down a little bit.
Speaker 1:He said, first off, note the framing. The PC is old tech with agents. What about new tech uniquely enabled by agents? And note the classic Microsoft hook. Could that new tech sit on top of a new platform?
Speaker 1:He says, there was one brief moment in the promotional video that preceded his appearance that made the concept click for him. The problem with wearable devices is the interaction model. They are only useful when you are interacting with them, when the human is in the loop. But being in the loop with a wearable is annoying and inefficient. What is being demonstrated here, however, is a brief interaction and then the agent doing work in the background.
Speaker 1:In other words, the usefulness happens in the cloud without the human needing to be involved because an agent is doing work. That's what Ben Thompson finds compelling. On one hand, you can make the case that, of course, Microsoft would be interested in a device model that uses the cloud as a platform, given that Microsoft doesn't control a mobile device like the iPhone. What occurs to Ben Thompson, however, is that even if Microsoft doesn't succeed with Project Solara, this model, where the cloud is the hub and multiple devices are the spoke instead of the phone being at the center, is clearly a better one for agents. Agents work best in the cloud and Right.
Speaker 1:Across apps and devices. Yes, the phone might be one of those devices, but when it comes to agents, it shouldn't be the hub because it's too locked out. And he says, again, this is vaporware and very much in Microsoft's interest. So take Project Solara with an appropriate grain of salt. It's a vision of the future, however, that does make a lot of sense, particularly in an enterprise scenario where all of the context and compute is already in the cloud And Project Solara is focused on enterprise, not consumer, so you can mandate effectively that all of your employees carry these as their badges.
Speaker 1:And then they have a sort of like secure on ramp to enterprise agents in the cloud that all run-in the Microsoft Azure ecosystem and the Microsoft three sixty five ecosystem. He says it's also something completely different from the past in bits. Ben Thompson's thesis that in the age of AI, thin is in because the compute is so constrained to the data center. On device compute is maybe gonna happen, but there's a lot that you can do in the cloud that you can't do locally.
Speaker 5:So Yeah.
Speaker 1:Just have a very thin client and that that that little key card device is basically the thinnest client you can sole purpose is to just interface. It looks a lot like the Rabbit R1, sort of that form factor, which a lot of people were taking a little victory laps on behalf of the founder of the Rabbit R1, saying he was just a little bit too early because the actual decision to offload all the compute to the cloud, do something useful up there, have a very minimal device that maybe you could take out with you that could do some basic stuff. But it's always hard because people like the phone. They like being able to just watch a full movie on their phone if they want and you never know.
Speaker 2:Has anybody been running down making a smart AI enabled cowboy hat? That'd a good hat, you potentially have a lot of room up here for onboard some
Speaker 1:Potentially. You.
Speaker 2:Right?
Speaker 1:Potentially.
Speaker 2:Maybe you could build a Starlink into it.
Speaker 1:I feel like you would not wear the smart cowboy hat. Just frying your brain with the the Mac mini on your head. You're gonna you're gonna be against that. There's no way you're picking that up. Alex Heath, friend of the show summed up the embrace of OpenClaw in a post.
Speaker 1:Scout is what it's called, Microsoft's first proactive AI agent for Copilot, buried the news that Satya Nadella is fully embracing OpenClaw. When Scout is released more widely this summer, it will be powered by OpenClaw and Microsoft will contribute its security guardrails back to the project's open source ecosystem. A lot of people that got excited by OpenClaw sort of saw the the rough edges and we saw this with the Meta AI, the Instagram account theft that was going on. You can imagine that if you have something that's as powerful as OpenClaw, but still constrained within your Microsoft ecosystem, your your your all your cloud accounts, You could do things that are useful, pull together spreadsheets, PowerPoints, databases, all this different stuff, but not run roughshod over everything. And so if you're all in on one walled garden, the walls are actually somewhat safe.
Speaker 1:So Microsoft getting in bed with OpenClaw makes a lot of sense, says Alex Heath. You only welcome a growing open framework onto your turf when you're confident you can control the ground it stands on. In this case, Microsoft is doing what it does best, being a platform company rather than trying to own too much of the stack. Microsoft also gets to ride the agent wave in a way its main hardware rival won't. Even with OpenClaw's initial buzz driving a surge in Mac Mini purchases, it's highly unlikely Apple will create a white glove experience for Microsoft for OpenClaw like Microsoft has with Scout.
Speaker 2:One of the primary beneficiaries OpenClaw, boom, in terms of
Speaker 1:really they really have sold out all over the place. But
Speaker 2:But not gonna embrace it. Not Yeah. It's just not a
Speaker 1:They just don't have the enterprise motion necessarily.
Speaker 2:Well, that that but also the security, privacy
Speaker 1:Yeah. All the But WWC is next week and who knows? Maybe we will see an OpenClaw competitor. Maybe we will see something that's that's, you know, a great leap forward for Apple in the AI and the Apple intelligence feature set. I don't know.
Speaker 1:I I I'm I'm my my predictions are something that are look a lot more just like, okay. Siri works now. It can do the basic shortcut integrations. It can answer questions at a near frontier level. It's running Gemini under the hood, and so it's probably gonna be pretty good at just answering basic questions, doing basic things on your phone.
Speaker 1:I'm not expecting it to go and, like, warm its way into every other app like OpenClaw has. So there's a few other observations that Alex Heath had from Microsoft Build. Nadele is trying to tamp down the data center backlash. You know it's getting bad out there when a Mag seven CEO is debunking water usage fears. The quote was, in fact, the daily water usage over the course of the entire year is roughly equivalent to what a single restaurant would use.
Speaker 1:The Copilot super app is not ready. Alex Heath showed off, what the new autopilot tab with Scout looks like, but it wasn't shown on stage, so that is delayed as it rolls out to become the Copilot super app that will sit alongside all of the Microsoft apps. Microsoft is still not at the frontier according to Alex Heath. He says it didn't make a big deal out of the benchmarks for its new family of models. There were other comps.
Speaker 1:They were comping it to older models from Anthropic and OpenAI. There were some, obviously, some great cost benefit trade offs. It's important to be in the game. Do you have more context on how these models are performing?
Speaker 5:Yeah. I I think the interesting comparison here is is not with Frontier Labs, I think with Meta. Yeah. Right?
Speaker 2:Because they
Speaker 5:had Muse Spark, like, pretty recently. The thinking model, like, MAI Thinking One
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 5:Is actually, like, competitive with the Meta, which is interesting because I feel like I I just have not heard that much about the MAI team. Like, obviously, they have they have Mustafa and that's kind of, like, the big name
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 5:At Microsoft. But, like, Meta, you hear, like, over and over.
Speaker 1:So we went through all
Speaker 5:this this crazy war Yeah. Talent Warfare Yeah.
Speaker 1:Nat Friedman, Daniel Gross, Alex Wong. You know, you have so many people that have, like, you know, have done podcast to have aura and have clout in the industry coming together. Not to mention, like, the actual researchers that they recruited.
Speaker 5:Yeah. So it's interesting that they're actually, like Yeah.
Speaker 2:These are these are the researchers would actually be more important than.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But but in terms of like building building hype around whatever you're working on, like Meta has No. I definitely built the aura of MSL and TBD Labs. There's a whole article about Alex Wang and and in the journal or the Financial Times today. We can get to that later.
Speaker 1:But Alex, he says agents are the new OS. I'm not sure if an AI access badge with a screen will do it. He's skeptical. Are you putting on the badge?
Speaker 2:I'll throw on the badge.
Speaker 1:I would throw on the badge for a little bit. I wonder how often I would actually reach for it versus a phone. Although I love PCs and I love Windows for gaming, I don't I've never been like a run my whole life in Outlook and Microsoft Teams and all of that. So I I I feel like I would get 1% of the benefit of that. You like, you gotta be all in on that ecosystem.
Speaker 2:Gotta be all in. You gotta pushing your pushing your chips in.
Speaker 1:For sure. For sure. We will keep tracking that. What else is going on? Okay.
Speaker 1:Live reading reacting thread from Stochasm. There's a ton to go through on MAI thinking. Was there anything interesting in this thread? Sarcasm says, I also have to wonder how much of this report is informed by what they know about IP, OpenAI's IP. So, of course, they have access to intellectual property from OpenAI for training and they have access to the models.
Speaker 1:But one of the things that would that that kept coming up in this presentation is that Microsoft is sort of touting like a very clean pre training data set, so that you as a company who are using this model can be very confident that it's not going to get you in any trouble down the road. Because if the New York Times doesn't wanna be in there or Harry Potter books don't wanna be in there, it's not in there because Microsoft has done all the hard work to sanitize all the training data. They also made a very big point that they did not distill on another lab, which has been accusations that have been thrown around a bunch. During the Elon Musk OpenAI lawsuit, Elon was on the stand and mentioned that he folks might have done some distillation on either Anthropic or OpenAI models at one point. And so that was sort of like not the cleanest thing and might lead to problems down the road.
Speaker 1:Microsoft saying, hey, we're getting out in front of this. There's no distillation involved at all. And then they also launched a lot of features for companies to be able to fine tune these models. Slightly different than what Amazon does. Amazon does mid training.
Speaker 1:They give you a checkpoint of the pre train, and then you can add data that is relevant to your business and fine tune it from a mid training checkpoint. Microsoft is offering more of a reinforcement learning, RLE, post training step. But all of these lend themselves to there is a model that has a bunch of great capabilities at the baseline and good price per performance, and it runs on Azure, and they've already optimized it for the systems. And then you can take it, tweak it, fine tune it, and then you can deploy it on the same hardware. And you know it's gonna run.
Speaker 1:You know how much it's gonna cost. BERTOKEN, you're good to go, but it's going to answer your particular questions, work for your particular business a little bit better. At least that is the pitch. That is the hope. We will see what adoption is like.
Speaker 1:Microsoft clearly has a strong go to market team, strong enterprise sales team. So we will hear how this is being deployed in the near future. You know, I think the AI agentic commerce could be big because if you get hit with, like, a $500,000,000 bill for your agentic AI, you might not it might be over the wire limit. So you might need to use you might you might need to transfer like tens of thousands of Bitcoin, low fees. This is valuable.
Speaker 1:That's the future of agentic commerce potentially. Who knows?
Speaker 2:For all the for all the people getting hit with half $1,000,000,000 bills.
Speaker 1:It happens.
Speaker 2:Joe Wiesenthal is tracking the popularity of various running shoe brands. He says on r slash running shoot geeks, one out of 18 posts mentioned a major Chinese running shoe brand. Just last quarter, it was one out of 40. Lee is the big one. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Lee Ning, of course, signed a shoe endorsement contract with
Speaker 1:Golden State Warriors star, Steph Curry. Haven't the basketball shoes been made in China for a long time? That was like the whole Nike thing. But I guess it's like Yes. The brand now is is bigger.
Speaker 2:No. That's a big that's it's Chinese companies have acquired, you know, a bunch of brands like Arcterix,
Speaker 1:things
Speaker 2:Yeah. Like the next step is to actually get meaningful
Speaker 1:What is the best China brands. Brand in America. The one that Americans like the most that comes from China. It's gotta be DJI.
Speaker 6:Right?
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:Drone, videographer Yeah.
Speaker 2:Bernie was using
Speaker 1:like
Speaker 2:Bernie was using
Speaker 1:I know it's controversial company because people see it as industrial capacity. But if you're just like, I were I my only I don't think about geopolitics, but I like that my wedding video had a drone in it and it was a DJI drone. You think about that very positively as sort of a GoPro aspirational brand. Is there anything else that pops up as Chinese brands that are loved in America? But anything on the top of your mind?
Speaker 2:Every product on Amazon that has a name that Yeah.
Speaker 1:But does not yeah. I I I was gonna say hoverboards, but they didn't have a brand. And a lot of the cars aren't here. I believe that they would be popular if you could get a hyper car for $20,000, like, make over there.
Speaker 5:Kimu or Sheen?
Speaker 1:Are those like really loved brands in the same way that
Speaker 2:Like a place.
Speaker 1:DJI feels a lot closer to like a Nike brand or an Apple brand than SHEIN or TIMU. TIMU seems more like a Walmart brand. I I I agree with you. It's popular. It's it's certainly brand recognition is there, but in terms of brand admiration, I don't know.
Speaker 1:Can we play this video from Instagram explaining the new Call of Duty map format? They're getting into generative level design. It's not Gen AI. It's not fully transformer based, but they're they're creating a whole bunch of different pieces of the pie and they remix them. Let's play it.
Speaker 7:The other three like slabs?
Speaker 1:Look at this.
Speaker 7:And we're able to randomize that at run time when you're playing.
Speaker 1:Three slabs on the map. They randomize them every time you load in the map.
Speaker 7:We have. That is a 100. We have the content to do upwards of 900. When you play a multiplayer game for a while, like, you have this sense of discovery each time you play a new map, but that kind of quickly fades. Right?
Speaker 7:You've played that map maybe five, ten times. You're like, I get it. I know all the places. That never fades with Kill Block.
Speaker 1:I I I see this as an existential risk. I think this might be the end of TBPN. I think that once this goes live and we're playing this in the UltraDome, we're not gonna remember to go live because we're just gonna be gaming too much. It's entirely possible.
Speaker 2:I don't know. I keep coming back to Rust.
Speaker 1:Yeah? Broke, don't fix it.
Speaker 2:I'm so happy. Okay. Like, Rust for me is like a vacation destination that you have so many good memories.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You don't want it remixed.
Speaker 2:And you're just like, no, I'm good. Okay.
Speaker 1:I like
Speaker 2:going to this beach, this place.
Speaker 6:Okay.
Speaker 2:And I'm happy to keep going back.
Speaker 1:He's a Luddite. He's a Luddite, folks. Anyway, there's one more announcement we gotta share. Andrew and Nascar are teaming up to sell a $14,000 VR racing rig simulator. Palmer Lucky's back in the VR business.
Speaker 1:I mean, he already was with the Eagle Eye headset, but he's back in the consumer entertainment VR industry with this. Of course, he's not making the actual headset. I believe it is a
Speaker 2:Really three days after I just put down deposit on my own SIM.
Speaker 1:Really?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Did you actually? Yeah. No way.
Speaker 2:But but I I don't think that's gonna be that's gonna be very specific, I imagine. Yeah. For I imagine NASCAR simulation. Yeah. Right?
Speaker 2:Because that's that's where they're focused. But very, cool. Matthew Prince over at Cloudflare What's he saying? Says, well, that happened faster than I predicted. Thought it would be end of twenty twenty seven, then early twenty twenty seven.
Speaker 2:But AgenTik traffic growing so fast that bots have now passed human traffic online for the first time in the Internet's history.
Speaker 1:That's crazy.
Speaker 2:Bots are now Yeah. According to Cloudflare, 57 and a half percent.
Speaker 1:Every time you fire something off, it's it's hundreds of pages. You see it in the reading traces and the tool calls. Let's watch this demo from Eric Lyman, friend of the show, sponsor of the show, introducing Stack, the AI operating system that lets accounting firms take on more clients without hiring, learns your firm's process, runs the close, post the journals, fully auditable. We're living through the biggest shift in accounting since the spreadsheet. That's a good way to frame it.
Speaker 1:And they did a very cool video for this, all practically produced. I believe this is all shot with an actual camera. They got these actual pieces. They filmed this. Not CGI, not AI.
Speaker 6:And accuracy are not negotiable. These one off experiments
Speaker 2:Such a common voice.
Speaker 1:I love Eric doing the
Speaker 6:built stack. It's great. One secure place to orchestrate AI coworkers for accounting. From day one
Speaker 1:This has been the vision of RAMP since they launched. And it and it feels like, oh, this is the moment, of course, they have to do an AI thing, but they've been like like pitching this exact thing since, what, 2020, 2019? You can And teach working on it longer, honestly. Go back
Speaker 8:to parabens. Every client.
Speaker 6:And it learns over time, always giving you the final say before anything gets posted. And every action it takes is fully recorded and auditable. The more you build, the lighter the work gets, and the more clients you can take on. Stack.
Speaker 1:Ramp Stack. They're saying it's god mode. It's god mode for It's god mode. Well, go check it out. We should also watch this one last video from Martin Scorsese, Black Forest Labs.
Speaker 1:I have alluded to it earlier. I saw this on Instagram and I really enjoyed it. Thirty seconds of Martin Scorsese, storied filmmaker. Jordy, name your favorite Martin Scorsese movie.
Speaker 8:Doesn't feel modern. A town. Not a village. Not
Speaker 1:a city. Mafia. Mafia. The movie Mafia.
Speaker 2:Yep. So isn't there isn't it Godfather?
Speaker 1:There is a movie.
Speaker 2:Isn't it? The Godfather? Godfather.
Speaker 1:No. That's am. You're thinking The Irishman, maybe? That is like a mafia movie? Gangs of New York?
Speaker 2:No. That one. One.
Speaker 1:Or maybe Casino or Goodfellas. Goodfellas. Goodfellas. Anyway. Storyboard.
Speaker 1:Play this. Sorry. I was not paying attention. Let's try it.
Speaker 2:And we'll go from from what you think.
Speaker 8:You need a place that doesn't feel modern. A town. Not a village. Not a city. Almost medieval.
Speaker 8:Even the the streets are narrower, cobblestoned. The main road through the town is twisting and turning. Put the camera higher, looking down, DeMille would have his production designers do oil paintings. This is that, in a sense, conveys a cinematic a cinematic intelligence.
Speaker 1:Cinematic intelligence is a good tagline for Black Forest Labs. I thought that was I thought it was really, really good. What a way to like, you know, hammer. Obviously, filmmaking's deeply controversial, but you get Martin Scorsese talking about it and he's at least gonna perk up people's ears and they're gonna listen to what he has to say. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And think about it. Is it a tool? Could it be useful in a workflow? Could it speed something up? Is it gonna make the next Martin Scorsese movie?
Speaker 1:Probably not this year. But will he potentially be using it when he's thinking about what to work on next? Sure. So fun fun project and very cool video from Black Forest Labs. Anyway, tomorrow, have a special show, but we will still see you at 11AM Pacific.
Speaker 1:Sharp. And leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for our newsletter, tbpn.com, and we will see you tomorrow.
Speaker 2:We love you. Have a good