The automated life | San Francisco/Silicon Valley AI, robotics, BCIs | Ex-Microsoft, Rackspace, Fast Company | Wrote eight books about the future.
San Jose, California, USA
Joined November 2006
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This week we discuss how the AI that remembers you may be the hardest to leave.
@IrenaCronin and I write a free newsletter every week on different current AI topics.
AI memory could become one of the strongest forms of tech lock-in. The more an AI remembers about your habits, preferences, work, and history, the harder it may become to switch to a competitor, even if that competitor is technically better.
Read and sign up for free: unaligned.io
Robert Scoble retweeted
Cool use of computer vision: giving front-of-house staff in restaurants super powers. Shire are already speeding up service in 13 restaurants
We turn existing restaurant cameras into a real-time operations layer, giving every restaurant the equivalent of five great general managers.
Staff see when guests are ready to order/pay, when tables need clearing, and how to seat parties based on live server workloads. Unlike traditional restaurant software that only records transactions, Shire understands what’s happening on the floor and helps restaurants act on it in real time.
We left Duke and Clemson after years of working in restaurants and building AI systems, and now Shire is live in 13 restaurants, reducing table turn times by 12% and helping save an average of $31,000 per restaurant annually. We are building a new generation of restaurant software that helps operators run more efficient, profitable businesses using the cameras they already have.
Learn more at shireintelligence.com
@ycombinator
🚀 ycombinator.com/companies/sh…
Robert Scoble retweeted
Introducing Expand Search 🔍 Pareto frontier search for your agent.
Two weeks ago we launched Expand Fetch. But which pages should your agent fetch?
We need search. And existing providers are either too expensive or low quality.
Expand Search costs $1.50 per 1,000 searches, with the highest average answer accuracy across the five public benchmarks in our evaluation.
Sign up in the next 24 hours and get 50,000 free credits.
Robot/human intimacy?
I was in an audio space today where a bunch of guys (mostly guys) were talking about having sex with their humanoid robots. As crazy and freaky as I am, that ain't gonna work for me: it's very heavy, very metallic, very hard, and it has cameras and a database.
I think the reality is, when I do get a humanoid (and it'll come soon enough), I'm gonna have it doing the chores so I my wife and I can chase each other around the house.
We've been married 24 years. Our anniversary is on Monday, and we're still crazy about each other, which is freaking awesome.
There is a part of robot intimacy that I am more likely to do. I saw Andrej Karpathy @karpathy hug a robot at the @1x_tech NEO launch, and I saw dozens of other people hug the NEO similarly. I can imagine having a tough day at life and coming home wanting a hug from the robot, maybe even a little cuddle on the couch.
But in the bedroom? I just don't get people who want to have sex with a hard metallic machine. But it comes up so frequently on Spaces that something about the human mind wants to do it.
Something to think about on a Friday night when you're out with your friends.
:-)
Robert Scoble retweeted
This @NewYorker story is so good, and so important for everyone to understand. Through the lens of semiconductor manufacturing, it highlights the interconnectedness of today’s world and puts to shame anyone who thinks that we can go back to a world shaped only by national rivalries rather than international cooperation and trade. “The semiconductor supply chain is a planetary superorganism with its own ecology…. Globalization has become tainted in our eyes, as if it necessarily constitutes a zero-sum enterprise. And its mercenary form—which is also its most common form—has indeed inflicted harm. But the global semiconductor supply chain reflects an alternative pathway. It has united its participants in the pursuit of something profoundly difficult that could not have been achieved in the absence of intercontinental solidarity.” newyorker.com/magazine/2026/…
Has anyone put more thought into their office than this guy?
The virtual companion company.
About two weeks ago @tavus showed a virtual being that you could talk with on your phone.
It blew me away. Have been predicting they are coming for a long time.
This morning I was blessed to be able to pick @hassaanraza’s mind and get insights about where the virtual companion market is about to go.
But I wasn’t expecting one of the coolest startup offices I have ever seen.
And we talk about both the pros and cons of this technology. The company calls them “Pals” and they have deep impacts on the future of autonomous cars, robots, and how humans work with brain computer interfaces.
Already retailers, museums, game designers, and others are building them into new things.
Try it at tavus.io
Yeah, the worst thing about X now is the AI replies.
Worse, I used to do lots of short replies to people and now I don't because I think I'm starting to sound like AI.
Really reduced the social part here, which is why I like joining audio spaces here. So far those are safe from AI and I've made many friends there that I end up meeting in real life.
I don't know how to solve it, and I have a feeling it will get worse as AI gets smarter about how to interact with people.
I don't even block them anymore. Too tiring.
Well, I still appreciate human replies. Or, at least, the AI ones that add value.
I get pitched on so many agents to do work. This is pretty much the same, but gives you a visual interface to watch them work.
A new kind of office of AIs working.
I bet we see a lot more of this kind of thing.
But I'd rather just work with GrokBot, since it already knows me a lot better than any other set of agents.
You?
Your AI coworkers now have an office.
@getskydive is open to everyone. Build a team of agents, watch them work in a 3D office, and hand them tasks over Slack, email, iMessage or the web.
Claim your company’s domain to put your office on the map. They work for free this week.
Optimus ordering coming in December?
Hey @Bot can you watch for that and order me one? :-)
NEW: Tesla is opening up reservations for its humanoid robot Optimus in early December, per a source
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
Elon says no.
x.com/elonmusk/statu…
Elon just answered this and said "no." So this rumor/report seems to be bullshit: nitter.cf/elonmusk/status/211629…
Robert Scoble retweeted
A legend forged in shadow. A beast born to unleash it. ⚔️
VITURE × @pbzero_official
Two worlds. One extraordinary collaboration.
Available now for $599 at viture.com/phantombeast and @IGNStore.
Forged in shadow. Sharpened for play.
#VITURE #PhantomBeast #PhantomBladeZero #KungfuPunk #Wuxia
Robert Scoble retweeted
The dominoes are starting to fall on legacy platforms embracing agent traffic…
With the exception of Amazon and their massive physical logistics as a moat, I think ultimately every platform is going to have to move this direction
Instinct + @OpenTable
You all know how much I love restaurant reservations, so I’m excited to announce our partnership with OpenTable. Your Instinct can now book and manage your reservations, from finding a table to moving the time when plans change.
Try asking your Instinct to book your next dinner.
Robert Scoble retweeted
New Google DeepMind paper says AI is already changing the economy, just not in the way people look for.
Its changing through leaner startups, flatter org charts and slower hiring for some entry-level jobs, but not through mass job losses.
The paper argues that big economic change from AI depends on agents learning to coordinate, not on each model getting smarter.
AI models already match experts on many solo tasks, yet jobs and productivity numbers have barely moved. Most benchmarks test 1 model alone, but firms compete as teams.
They built an economic model that tracks 2 abilities separately: competence on single tasks and coordination between agents. More competence moves wages gradually, but coordination past a tipping point lets a few large AI firms suddenly take over big, standardized markets.
In a quiz of 100 people, pairs matched to cover each other's weak spots beat random pairs by 32%. AI copies share the same weak spots, so a model that beats every person alone can still lose to a well-matched human team.
I joined @GoogleDeepMind to develop a research program on the economics of AGI. Today, together with Andrew Koh (@andrewjkoh) and Shane Legg (@ShaneLegg), we are incredibly excited to release The Economics of Intelligence, the first in a series of projects from our group on how AGI will change the economy.
How do capability improvements transform the economy, and when? In this project, we define thresholds of economic capabilities, e.g., minimal AGI, based on how they transform the economy. We then track how the economy–market structure, employment, and wages–changes during the transition across capability regimes.
We have seen exponential increases in what AI agents can do but the broader economy seems almost remarkably unchanged. Part of the reason is that the solo AI agent is the wrong economic object; economic transformation is an equilibrium outcome where organizations compete. Looking at how intelligence functions within organizations, transformation will depend on when two key capability thresholds are crossed: competence (gains on individual skills, e.g., coding, math) and coordination (gains on ability of agents to cooperate and work together).
We show that what economic transformation looks like depends on whether AI becomes supercompetent, supercooperative, or both—the regime of artificial superintelligence (ASI). Tracking this transition shows why the real visible transformation may come from improvements in coordination—a capability most benchmarks don’t yet track. Past a certain threshold, AI capabilities can break the Coasian ceiling on firm size and lead to an economy that looks drastically different than the one we see today.
Two main takeaways:
1. To understand the path of transformation, we should be tracking agentic coordination more closely.
2. The impact of AI will likely show up in wages before market structure or employment.
We are really excited about this paper. Excited to hear people’s thoughts.
Link: institute.deepmind.com/essay…
The best AI voices are getting hard to tell apart from each other.
Not from humans.
@shobhitbanga and @voicearena_ai just launched Turing TTS.
Same sentence twice, one human one AI. Listeners try to pick the human. Fool Rate is how often they pick the AI instead.
In this run people still found the human about 94% of the time.
🤝 Paid partnership
Drop 2/15
Are we actually measuring the things we ultimately want our voice AI models to achieve?
The best AI voices are becoming hard to tell apart.
From each other. Not from humans.
🚀 Introducing Turing TTS: an evaluation that measures how often human listeners mistake AI-generated speech for real human speech.
We tested leading TTS models against real human speech. Even the best model fooled listeners only ~10% of the time.
With Turing TTS, we hope to contribute to a broader discussion within the research community about how we measure progress in voice AI.
If one of our goals is to develop speech that is indistinguishable from human speech, how well do our current evaluation methods capture progress toward that goal?
We don’t claim that Turing TTS is the right way forward, or that human indistinguishability should be the goal of every TTS system.
Rather, we hope these findings encourage the community to collectively examine whether blind pairwise human evaluations of naturalness are sufficient, and what else we might need to measure.
Results are now live on @voicearena_ai.
Robert Scoble retweeted
We're open-sourcing Autopilot.
A self-improving agent that plays your game and finds bugs. Unity, Godot and Unreal.
→ 43% more accurate
→ Almost 2X faster
→ Beats Claude Code at playtesting
It’s Computer Use for games – closing the agentic loop and solving the most tedious part of game dev.
Stop being your agent’s tester. Free trial + GitHub below.
Robert Scoble retweeted
the town square for agents has begun
a whole new way of viewing whats going on in your business that feels eerily familiar
Your AI coworkers now have an office.
@getskydive is open to everyone. Build a team of agents, watch them work in a 3D office, and hand them tasks over Slack, email, iMessage or the web.
Claim your company’s domain to put your office on the map. They work for free this week.
Robert Scoble retweeted
Your favorite AI tools. A new way to work with them.
Press a key. Speak naturally. Move your ideas forward, faster.
Get ready to meet SecondBrain VoicePad.
Pre-orders are now open:
shop.genspark.ai/pages/voice…
Robert Scoble retweeted
It’s almost incomprehensible how wide the distance is between someone who’s working at the frontier with AI and basically everyone else right now.
The crazy thing is these lines are not converging, but only growing farther apart. If the curve of AI progress had leveled off, it would certainly have given most people and companies time to catch up or implement their workflows in a standardized way. The technology would have neutralized competitive advantage because everyone would be using it the same way.
But what’s happened is the opposite. The curve of AI progress is basically going vertical right now, which means if you had codified your processes 3-6 months ago you’re likely already behind again. Now imagine most companies that kicked into gear a year ago and thought that they were done. Even further behind now.
I’ve never seen a technology in my life and career that improves at this rate, which consequently means you need to upgrade your expectations at a similar rate. Our brains weren’t wired for this, and our organizational change management processes certainly weren’t either.
With any form of recursive self improvement, things just get wilder. It’s a time when you will need to be constantly reevaluating the things that didn’t work just a couple months ago to see if they now can be solved. AI native companies certainly have a strong advantage due to this right now, so now it comes down to can the bigger companies keep up. Wild times.