Microsoft Copilot+ PCs: Has the AI computer revolution finally arrived?

This episode explores the transformative impact of Microsoft Copilot+ PCs on the technology landscape, highlighting its potential to initiate a significant upgrade cycle across global computing devices.

1. Microsoft Copilot+ PCs may drive a major refresh cycle in the tech industry, comparable to significant tech shifts of the past.
2. The "recall" feature of Copilot+ PCs offers a groundbreaking way to enhance digital memory, but raises potential privacy and security issues.
3. Microsoft continues to innovate, with improvements in AI integration and hardware capabilities that could challenge major competitors like Apple.
4. The discussion reflects on Microsoft's historical trend of being ahead of its time, suggesting a continual evolution towards more sophisticated technology integration.
5. Weitz shares his personal experiences and perspectives on AI's role in enhancing daily productivity and decision-making processes.

1: Introduction

Host Todd Bishop introduces the episode's focus on Microsoft Copilot+ PCs and welcomes guest Stefan Weitz. Todd Bishop: "Welcome to Geekwire, where we explore the most compelling tech innovations."

2: Microsoft's New Era

Discussion on the potential of Microsoft Copilot+ PCs to revolutionize the computer industry. Stefan Weitz: "This could be a massive upgrade cycle for devices across the planet."

3: AI and Hardware Synergy

Exploration of how AI enhancements in Copilot+ PCs are poised to transform user experience and productivity. Stefan Weitz: "The capabilities of running AI models locally on the PC is fascinating."

4: Reflecting on Microsoft's Innovations

Weitz reflects on Microsoft's legacy of innovation and its implications for the future of technology. Stefan Weitz: "Microsoft has always been ahead, setting the stage for future technologies."

5: Privacy and Security Concerns

A candid discussion on the potential privacy and security challenges posed by new features like "recall." Stefan Weitz: "We need to balance innovation with ensuring users' data security and privacy."

1. Evaluate the potential of AI in personal and professional settings to enhance efficiency.
2. Stay informed about privacy settings and security features in new technology.
3. Consider the long-term implications of tech upgrades on daily operations.
4. Explore how historical tech trends can inform current technology adoption strategies.
5. Remain critical and informed about new tech developments to best leverage them responsibly.

Microsoft and major PC makers this week announced a plan to incorporate artificial intelligence directly into personal computers, adding on-board neural processing units (NPUs) as part of a new architecture that promises better performance, longer battery life, and local AI processing that unlocks new capabilities and features.

We discuss the new Copilot+ PCs with our guest on this week's GeekWire Podcast, Stefan Weitz, an investor and entrepreneur who worked at Microsoft for 18 years in groups including Microsoft Bing and MSN. He is the founder of the new HumanX conference on AI taking place in March 2025 in Las Vegas.

Weitz is bullish on the potential for Copilot+ PCs to improve the overall computing experience and motivate Windows PC users to upgrade their machines, a long-awaited milestone for Microsoft's flagship operating system.

The new Copilot+ PCs have also raised security and privacy concerns, focused primarily on the "Recall" feature that takes regular screenshots of user activity on the machine, creating an index that can be queried using AI. The company released an FAQ that emphasized the underlying security and privacy controls for users, but also made it clear that the feature will be activated if users accept the defaults during initial bootup of a new machine.

Weitz also shares some of his favorite AI apps and tools, including Cleft Notes and Read AI.

People

Stefan Weitz, Todd Bishop

Companies

Microsoft

Content Warnings:

None

Stefan Weitz
Someone asked me when they announced the new devices, they said, do you think this is the time when they can take out the MacBook? I said, I don't know about that, but I do think there's a massive refresh cycle and there probably hasn't been, frankly, a ton of reasons to upgrade. I mean, the OS always gets better, the devices always get better, but there hasn't been this kind of watershed feature which comes out that everyone says that actually helps my performance or helps helped me be a better teacher or a better learner, whatever it might be. And I think the mtus and the copilot, plus PCs, I mean, without being a fanboy, because trust me, I leverage plenty of criticism on Microsoft. To me, it felt like one of those moments where, yeah, this could be a massive upgrade cycle for devices across the planet.

Todd Bishop
Hi, and welcome to Geekwire. I'm Geekwire co founder Todd Bishop. We're coming to you from Seattle where we get to report each day on what's happening around us in business, technology and innovation. What happens here matters everywhere. And every week on this show we talk about some of the most interesting stories in the news.

I'm pleased to be joined this week by Stefan Weitz. He's a veteran of Microsoft. He worked at the company for 18 years. And he's the founder of the newly launched Human x AI conference taking place next month, March, in Las Vegas. Stefan, it's great to have you on the show.

Stefan Weitz
Todd, always good to be back. In fact, we were just talking before we started recording. You were on the Geekwire podcast back when it was a radio show in 2012 in the studio. So catch us up. I'm being somewhat facetious, but give us a sense what's been going on with you.

Wow. Yeah, that's a long time. Now. I really do feel old. Well, yeah, since 2012, really?

Still was working on the Bing product for a few years after that, which now is cool again. Or maybe it was. Was it ever cool? I don't remember, but now it's cool. I think once I left, it became cooler, apparently, which was exciting, and then went in and ran some PE backed companies to help them transform their tech stacks and become bigger businesses.

And then I started a bunch of businesses in different spaces and the health space and the music space and the mental health space. And so those are all various stages of growth. Then I started a small venture fund because I need something else to do. So me and two partners run a fund that invests in stage agnostic technology across the US mostly. And then, yes, as you mentioned Human X.

That is my newest endeavor. It was put together because finally, finally after 40 some years, I can begin to see that we may actually get knight riders, we may actually get c three po. We may. Because I don't know about you, but I've been a nerd since I was, since I could read or use a calculator. My first calculator was at two years old and I still have it, which is pretty fun.

But I had been disappointed in the last 15 years, 20 years, 25 years with the progress that we've been making towards that true intelligent assistant or that true human augmentation of intelligence. We're finally seeing potential. But as I talked to CEO's across the planet in preparation for launching this new company, it was pretty clear that most companies, once you get past the initial bluster of yes, we have an AI strategy. It's going to be amazing. You're going to love it.

It's incredible. Once you get past that and drill into it, most companies say, we don't actually know what we're doing. One company even told me, just please God, tell me what to do, which I thought was a terrifying statement. This is a very large company and so it's not because they're dumb or slow or it's just because the amount of information coming out is probably more than I think we've ever seen for any other technology in recent history. And so Humanx is designed really to create an environment that allows leaders of organizations and governments to come and actually gain conviction and confidence for their AI journey as they plot their path forward.

So that's what we're doing. As you mentioned, it's in Las Vegas next March. We announced the first 125 speakers here last week and we're really excited about it. Hope you guys show up. I think it'll be an amazing event for be choir to cover.

Todd Bishop
People who want to check that out can find it at Humanx co Humanex conference next March in Las Vegas. So, Stefan, with your background at Microsoft, as you said, you were working on an earlier version of Microsoft Bing, long before the Copilot era, but then combine that with your AI expertise and everything that you're doing in preparation for the conference and with the companies that you're working with. This announcement this week about Microsoft Copilot plus PCs caught your attention. I know, and I want to talk about that in part on this show. But first, before we get there, I got to go to the launch event on Monday on Microsoft's new Redmond campus.

This is the place where the new buildings have cropped up on the site of what used to be, I think, buildings. Roughly one through nine or nine. The original x buildings. The x buildings, exactly, yes. Talking about Star wars, for sure.

Stefan Weitz
Yep. Oh, my gosh. Is that where you worked? Give me a sense for where you worked on the campus in relation to that. Well, I was there for a while, so I worked in a lot of buildings, but yeah, I was in building eight for a while, which is where at the time.

That's where Bill and Steve were. I was in. Yes, I was in that section, but then I was also across Red west, which back then was a really cool, like, Mel ski lodge type campus, and the forties and the 25. So really I was all around, all around the campus, but generally in that area, which was a lot of fun. I mean, it was probably, I would argue, one of the coolest corporate campuses that I've ever seen.

I think it's still cool, but it's more. I mean, hate to say corporate, but it's, you know, it's more corporate. It's bigger. I don't know, it just doesn't feel the same. When we were there, you know, again, this is like the old man yelling at dogs from his porch.

But when we were there, I mean, the soccer fields in the center of campus were used like almost every afternoon. Or we would have Friday night at 06:00 we'd all come together for, you know, a beer and one of the interesting cafeterias we had. And so there was just this felt like a park to a certain extent. And, you know, but it's. It's the company figure and you gotta go up, so there you go.

Those ex buildings were not super friendly to find your office and oh my. Gosh, it works funny. I could go down a whole rabbit hole here. I will post photos for folks. It's definitely a much more modern campus.

Yeah. And let me say, it is far easier based on the way. Wayfinding signs and the different color coding that they have to find offices. I will say on my first visit a few months back, I did lose my car for about an hour in the garage when I was trying to get back. Didn't surprise me at all.

Todd Bishop
At any rate, it was fun. It was an interesting event, in part because it was a little bit of a media reunion. I saw Mary Jo Foley, Paul Thorot. Oh my gosh. Tom Warren from the verb oh, my gosh.

It was funny. Mary Jo and Paul used to be on the Windows weekly podcast together. Mary Jo, longtime journalist. Paul is with longtime journalist as well. And they had a meetup, and I showed up, and I was waiting in line to get a beer, and the person next to me was standing there, and I said, oh, are you here for the Mary Jo Foley meetup?

And he said, no, I'm here for the Paul Thurrott Meetup. There are camps. There are definitely camps. So I'm there in basically a tent, but a very glorified tent with all these other journalists. They have not finished the full campus yet.

So the conference center is not done yet, the new conference center. But, oh, my gosh, tent doesn't even do this thing justice. I mean, it was full carpeting, full seating. I mean, this would have been better than most corporate conference centers, you know, just in and of itself. And Satya Nadella comes out and introduces something that was really a surprise to a lot of people, this Copilot Plus PC initiative.

And this in many ways goes back to what Bill Gates used to talk about with information at your fingertips. The idea is that you have a neural processing unit on the device. They're far more powerful. They're more efficient. They're running arm processors.

In many cases, Microsoft has not only new surface devices that are going to be coming out under this Copilot Plus PCs initiative, but also a variety of third party hardware vendors, like a who's who of hardware partners. So I'm curious, just for your take, what did you think of what Microsoft announced? I was so impressed, and I'm not easily impressed. In fact, when they announced the copilot button, I think on one of the keyboards back in January, I think I shot a note to Yousef saying, really? That's your AI strategy, as a button on a keyboard?

This is Youssef Mehdi, your former colleague in Bing, who's now my boss. Exactly. Product marketing and big picture. Yeah, exactly. And did he tell you to buzz off?

Stefan Weitz
No. He's always very nice. But, wow. Honestly, I was shocked because I had not, of course, written the company off. I still love the company.

Most of my friends were still there. It's an incredible place. But it certainly was to me, it didn't feel like externally that it was necessarily keeping up with some of the other innovations that we're seeing in the AI space. And I was even reading Kevin Scott's memo from 2019, the one that was redacted. I think it was part of some kind of court case, but same thing in 2019.

Kevin was really nervous about the ability for the company to truly get to parody and surpass the competitors in the space. Now, they've done an incredible job since then, but it's been back my mind for a while. Like, gosh, are they going to miss this wave. So when they introduced the copilot plus PC, I was really shocked, to be honest. And you're right, Todd.

It does remind me of Bill's earliest proclamations. I can remember working on actually the first, the first HP trans meta Crusoe chip tablet back in the day, which. Remember that thing? It was, it was like an hour and a half battery life. Oh, well, it was, it was, it was, um.

I think it was. Was it Linus Torvald or was it Mark Andreessen that did transmut I? One of those two did it, and it was designed to be super low power chip for tablets. That was in other things too, but that was one of the key use cases. And I can remember, and I had the same feeling over and over again when I was there.

It's like we were always three years ahead of where the hardware or the silicon would be. Even our media center PC was incredible. And same thing. It was so little too far ahead of where the time your ATSC tuners were going to be inside your box, crazy things like that. And if you look back at the company, you see a lot of things that Microsoft researched or released and then killed or released and then kind of nurtured along.

They have set, in many cases, the framework for how a lot of people think about technology in the future. So it's exciting. So I saw this come out. It was like, oh my gosh, there's finally a time when the things have come together when you have the lower power arm chips, the more efficient arm chips. The NPus, as you mentioned, that in theory, should give these PCs, they should give the Macs and macOS and Macs in general, a real run for the money, which I don't think they could necessarily do prior to this.

I'm so excited. I will be calling my friends at Microsoft for a copilot plus PC to see if they'll give them to me for free. That's not a buy one. So to your point, some of the capabilities in terms of the ability to run the AI model locally on the PC is really fascinating. And there are some potential downsides to some of these features which we can talk about later on that emerged after the Microsoft announcement.

Todd Bishop
But just as a starting example, they're going to be much more powerful and much more efficient. So even just as a basic computer, these are machines that are going to be far superior in terms of battery life and everything else along those lines. But then I got to do a couple demos there on site, and one of them was just a simple addition to Microsoft paint, where you combine a natural language command. And the one I did was something along the lines of show me a bridge in Seattle, in Seattle's Ballard neighborhood. And with that, I just sketched on the screen two lines that showed generally where I wanted the bridge to be on the canvas.

And it was amazing. In fact, one of my regrets leaving the event was I didn't take a picture of it or get a screenshot of it, but it, it was incredible just how vivid it was. It uses stable diffusion as an image generator, but this is something that gives you far more control over the output of AI. So that was one, and then there was another that got a lot more attention. It's called recall, and I want to talk about that, the positives and the negatives, when we come back.

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Todd Bishop
Welcome back. It's Todd Bishop. I'm talking this week with Stefan Weitz. He is an 18 year Microsoft veteran, worked at the company for many years on initiatives including Microsoft Bing, and he's the founder of the newly launched Human X AI conference taking place next March in Las Vegas. Stefan, we were just talking about the Microsoft copilot, PCs and some of the features.

And one of the features that got the most attention, frankly, is called recall. This one is interesting. It basically takes screenshots every few seconds of everything you're doing as long as you allow it to. But by default, it's taking these screenshots and then it essentially creates the AI feature that allows you to then search later to find things that are saved in this index of screenshots. First off, just as a tool in terms of the benefits, what did you think of this?

Stefan Weitz
Well, I mean, I think this again really gets to the vision that that bill had even way back when, as you mentioned earlier, Todd, like information at your fingertips. But this takes it to a whole new level. I mean, this truly is something. Years ago, one of the researchers was working on a product called Life Lens. Internally, I think it was called life lens was designed to be, I think, yeah, it was an object you would actually wear around and it would record your entire life, and then you could search for it.

And we had some pretty interesting demos. This was probably 15 years ago now where you can literally go back and say, you know, hey, what was, what did, what did, you know, whatever at the time Eric Corbett say to me last Thursday, AI, and it couldn't do NLP that well, the natural language processing that well. But it was incredible. And I think all of us have been looking for this ability to never forget. And so when I saw this, it reminded me of a product I've been using for a little while, actually called Rewind now called limitless.

I think it debuted on the Mac, Apple Silicon, about maybe a year ago, maybe nine months ago. Dan Soroker put it out there, but it's basically the same thing. It literally records everything you do across your Mac, period, and then it allows you to rewind and search for things that you've recorded. So it's incredible the challenges I have with some of this, besides the privacy things, which I personally am not overly concerned with. I worked the company for many years.

I can truly tell you if the things for which Microsoft was a cure about which Microsoft was accused. I think all of us wish we were that competent in some cases, like the orchestration would take to pull off some of these conspiracies far outstripped our ability to actually pull it off. So for me, the privacy piece, especially with Microsoft's real commitment to it, along with an apple, is the same kind of commitment. That doesn't bother me. What the challenge with these things is a, it takes a significant amount of disk space.

I'm sure you saw when we were there. I think they allocate 25 gigs or something like that on the drive to be able to do it. And that gets you three months, basically, of memory, if you will. The other thing is, I found at least, is that it's a load on those on the cpu's, whether it's the mp or not, there's a load that's applied to be capturing this real time. And it definitely had both performance and battery impacts on my Mac.

Still worth it, but it was definitely. It was noticeable. Now, if it's a desktop, that won't be a problem. Although that didn't release, they didn't announce any desktop PCs, copilot PCs. But it is fascinating and it truly does get us to the point where you will never forget or you can forget, but you can remember it very quickly by just asking whether it's your PC or a device that you have that's connected to your personal cloud or your personal storage that it gets shunted to every x amount of days.

Yeah, I mean it's as close to science fiction, I think, as we've seen in quite some time. It's pretty exciting. That's really interesting on a number of fronts. First off, in terms of the performance, one of the things that I got to see was opening up the task manager and you had the GPU, the CPU and the NPU. And when they ran the recall feature, you could see the NPU.

Todd Bishop
The dial just went straight up and the CPU and the GPU were running basically as normal. So you can see how Microsoft is trying to solve that very problem that you ran into with this application on the Mac that was not designed for this kind of configuration. So that was interesting in and of itself. I was talking with Aaron Woodman in Microsoft marketing. Oh my God.

Yeah, he's still around too. I know Aaron. Exactly. That's amazing. One of the points that he made was that people may want to think as they buy these new PCs.

And that's the other thing is you're going to need to buy a new PC, a new laptop or notebook to get this capability with the NPU built in. And he's saying you may want to think about getting a larger. That's not a hard drive, I guess, a larger storage, an SSD. Yeah, exactly, exactly. To accommodate this feature if it's something, you know, that you want to use heavily.

So it's a notable development for Microsoft on a number of fronts, one of which could be an interesting new PC refresh cycle. Someone asked me when they announced the new devices, they said, do you think this is the time when they can take out the MacBook? I said, I don't know about that. I have no opinion either way. But I do think to your point, there's a massive refresh cycle and there probably hasn't been, frankly, a ton of reasons to upgrade.

Stefan Weitz
I mean the OS always gets better, the devices always get better. But there hasn't been this kind of watershed feature which comes out that everyone says, well that's actually. That actually helps my performance or helps help me be a better teacher or better learner, whatever it might be. And I think this, I think the mtus and the copilot plus PCs, I mean, without being a fanboy, because trust me, I leverage plenty of criticism on Microsoft. But to me it felt like one of those, those moments where, yeah, this could be a massive upgrade cycle for devices across.

Across the planet. It is weird. They have no desktop plans. I will say that that struck me as odd because there are still a ton of people that use desktops, especially for creative, which seems to be a very helpful thing for. So that might get solved at some point.

That struck me as strange. Yeah, I agree. I think that's probably somewhere on the product roadmap, even if they haven't announced it. Probably from a third party vendor, obviously, because it doesn't make desktops. Although there is the Surface studio, PC studio.

Is that still made though? I don't. That's still sold? I don't know. I'm not sure.

Todd Bishop
Good question. Someone can bing that for us and tell us that'd be great. Yes. Wow. Wow.

Stefan Weitz
There always declosing, maybe always declosed. Still wanted to win. But I think just on that topic, on that feature, they're going to have to figure out a way to kind of shard off history because to me these features are magical. But we all know the second that something breaks or doesn't work as expected, the magic goes away. Remember when Siri first came out 15 plus years ago on the iPhone things three G's where it first came out.

I was talking to the founder a couple days ago just to catch up and it was truly magical. Like it was. You would ask questions. I remember asking on a stage, hey, Siri, can you find me a restaurant next week, Tuesday in Austin for two people? That's romantic.

At 07:00 p.m. something that unstructured, that terrible, and Siri could at that time connected to all the various services and could actually return back a cogent response saying, yep, stuff in the era. Three restaurants that are open at 07:00 p.m. that are romantic, that are in Austin. Which one do you want to book?

I want that one. And we're done. And that truly was magic. Now the challenge is when you hit an edge case or a case where it didn't have a service, the magic is obviously revealed to be magic or a trick, an illusion at that point, and then you begin to not rely on it. And I think the challenge with something like with recall is they're going to have to figure out a way to ensure they can take history further back in three months and put it in a place that is still accessible via the device, because it does you no good if you're sitting there frantically trying to remember something and it's four months ago and it's not there, I guarantee you'll have disappointed users.

And the second you're disappointing users, you have feature churn and then you have people not using it and it doesn't, it goes away. So they're going to have to figure out a way to enable almost a limitless storage model that probably won't be local, but will need to exist somewhere. In my personal opinion, the other issue. That Microsoft is going to face here is, just as you alluded to earlier, not only privacy, but security. Microsoft is coming under a revival of scrutiny in terms of its security practices based on some high profile breaches over the past couple of years, and just recently announced some new initiatives that will ostensibly put security ahead of features in product development.

Todd Bishop
The release or the preview of this recall feature raised some questions about that, just simply because it does raise the possibility if someone is able to infiltrate your machine that they were able to bypass all these security protocols, they would have access to this detailed history that could include passwords if they're not properly protected by the sites that you log into. So lots of questions there. Microsoft put out an FAQ in terms of its response to this and all of the controls that you're going to be able to have. One thing that stood out to me from the FAQ is if you just accept the defaults when you log in and you boot up your new PC for the first time, this is going to be running. I mean, you're not opting in, you're opting out.

And so I think that is one thing where I look at it and go, wait a second, if security truly is the top priority, why wouldn't you make it an opt in thing where if you accept the defaults, you actually aren't using the feature. You could debate all that. You absolutely could. Clearly they want to drive adoption here, which is why it's an opt out. And look, security is obviously really tricky and you're only as good as your last breach or your last remediation from the breach.

Stefan Weitz
That being said, local device security, especially these days with the tpus they still have in these machines and the biometric authentication and disk encryption. I'm sure this, I'm sure the archives totally encrypted as well as something else. I mean, yeah, absolutely. Will there be someone that figures out a way to get into it? No question about it.

Do I think it's going to be some cataclysmic problem? No, I don't, for two reasons. I think there's so many rings around this thing now that make it difficult to get in on impossible because we know it can be done. But the second thing I always love to talk about is this is back in search too. When people would say, you know, I don't want to search for certain things.

I don't want you to know what I'm searching for. I would tell people, I hate to break it to you, but you're not important.

Not as a mean person, but like, if you think for a moment that I at Microsoft end of being, I'm going to mine your search history. You have a very inflated sense of self now, if you're, you know, if you're a politician or celebrity, whatnot. But the average person, even a relatively non average person, we don't care. It's all, there's too much data. And so it's one of those things where now to your point, if they can get passwords and account information, sure, that's a big, big target for attackers.

But generally speaking, I would say people are a little bit sensitive to something, which likely is a real problem. At the same time, one of the more recent breaches involved some pretty key figures in the us government. So. No, for sure. For sure.

Todd Bishop
I'm like you, though. My default personally, when I see something like this is to go, what can this do for me? Not how is this going to undermine my security or privacy? That's probably one of my biggest faults as a tech reporter. I always have to be adjusting for that.

So I saw this. I was initially immediately going on the best buy site, trying to figure out, you know, if it's time to replace my three or four year old thinkpad with something new. One of the interesting things, I can't quite go apples to apples, but based on what I saw, the initial prices are maybe a couple hundred dollars more with the NPU than I would normally pay. Now, that's purely unscientific. I'm just looking at what I get with a thinkpad X one carbon versus the thinkpad that they're offering there.

And again, it's not apples to apples, but it's certainly a premium purchase. It's not a discounted PC. It seemed like it might be incrementally more expensive compared to a comparable laptop without an NPU. So that's also something to take into consideration. It is.

Stefan Weitz
I mean, I think they said they're starting at $1,000 roughly, I want to say, which is, that's probably the lowest spec one, obviously some oem. But, you know, at the end of the day, I think consumers, especially those in the Apple ecosystem, whether it's for the phones or the tablets or the machines, like they're, they're used to paying, frankly, with Apple, an absurd premium for certain things. And so my point is, like you're, if you're buying a MacBook Air, I think they start at $1,000. But if you want a MacBook Air that's usable, you have to spend another 200 to get eight gigs more of RAm. Now, I don't know about you, but eight gigs of Ram hasn't cost dollar 200 since like 1997.

That's not true, but a long time ago, right? So I think there's a certain level of, at this premium product offerings, I think there's some significant willingness to pay for features like this. So I don't think it's a huge problem. Personally, Stefan, if you can stick around for one more segment, I'd love to talk a little bit about your own usage of AI, how you're incorporating different tools into your life, because I know that you are obviously a very early adopter on a lot of these things. So let's talk about that when we come back.

Todd Bishop
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Todd Bishop
Welcome back. It's Todd Bishop. I'm joined by Stefan Weitz. He is the founder of the Humanx conference, an AI conference taking place March 10 through 13th in Las Vegas. You can find out more at Humanx Co dot co.

So, Stefan, I looked at this and actually I was talking with some analysts about it, and the Microsoft copilot PCs look really cool and actually the recall feature looks great. What I want is for them to go even further. I want them to create an index or a model or, I don't know what the right phrase is exactly, just sort of based on everything. I view everything on my computer and allow me not only to go back and view it, but to derive insight from it. You know, when was the last time that Stefan and I talked?

You know, what did we talk about? And based on that, what would be a great icebreaker question for the podcast we're about to do? You know, that kind of thing based on my personal data, not only in the cloud, but on the PC. So, like, that's where my brain goes. So I'm curious just in general, like, how are you using AI?

What kinds of things is it doing for you? Is it living up to the hype? Give me a sense for sort of your AI landscape right now, personally and in your work. Yeah, I am using it multiple times an hour, every hour of the day at this point. There are so many apps.

Stefan Weitz
If I'm just looking at my phone here, the one that I use, one that's called cleft, and cleft allows me to speak naturally. And if I'm just walking on taking a walk and I have an idea, I can start talking to it and then it's capturing everything. And then it summarizes it for me at the end and sends me a beautiful little note saying, here's what you were talking about without having to read the entire transcript. Really helpful. I love that.

It's a great product. Arc search, another phenomenal product that I love to use, arc. It's arc browser and arc search, a truly incredible search engine that takes up the slat between what most LLMs can do today and what you actually want them to do as it relates to more real time information and the real world. So arc search is to me one of the most interesting search engines out there at this point that I also on my home screen, on my phone that I use pretty often. And then the third thing I use every single day, including multiple times today, is a product called Read AI, which is the Seattle company.

They were raised a big round recently. Great, great guys and gals over there, but truly an impressive product where it aggressively joins all your meetings, as do other AI assistants. But it's there and it is doing a phenomenal job listening. And then at the end, here are the action items and here are the things you discussed. And here's where things got heated or things got really funny.

If it's a recurring meeting, before that, next week's recurring meeting, you get a mail saying, hey, this was the meeting last week. Here are the actions you guys discussed. Are they done? So just things like that. Like that to me is so powerful because I don't have to go back and watch the video.

I don't have to remember what we discussed last week before the meeting starts in my inbox saying, here's what you committed to doing in the last meeting. You know, are they finished? Type thing, just it's a small feature, but really impactful on productivity and effectiveness. And then last thing I'll say is I am. I've tried every single model I think I built.

I built my own open source one like a year ago because I was bored on a Sunday, which took me way too long. I'm embarrassed about it, but, but I deployed it. And then I'm like, wow, I look, I can summarize articles and then I realized chat shipped could do it, you know, much better than my mind could do it in by typing in TLDR. Then the article, I'm like, well, that was Sunday, I'm not going to get back. But anyway, what I found is I had tuned my OpenAI instance and this is not anyone can do this, obviously creating custom GPTs, but I probably spent more time than most actually loading what they call knowledge into the system.

So kind of like you were saying, like all the stuff. And so, like for Human X, I have an entire GPT just for Human X, where I load in all of our agendas, our press releases put out there, our speaker profiles. It's, I mean, it's enormous, but it does then allow me to ask when I'm thinking about how do I position a particular session, I can just ask my GPT and it'll take all the things and half of which I wrote, but I forgot that I wrote because it was six months ago and pulls it into a very powerful assistant. And same thing comes with my writing. I loaded a lot of my writing into the system.

I have basically an author GPT, which, where I can say, if I have to write a blog for something, I can say, okay, in my style, write a blog on copilot plus PCs and make a thousand words and it pops out. And, you know, it's, it's, it knows I'm sarcastic, it knows I use ridiculous pop culture references, it knows that I, you know, love all the things my writing generally is comprised of, and it sounds like me, 95% like me. And it's, it's pretty impressive. So, I mean, and I'm sure I'm scratching, but those are the ones that popped in my head, like out of the gate of really, really powerful tools that didn't exist a year ago and now I couldn't live without, honestly, a. Few points on all of those.

Todd Bishop
Those are great examples. A couple new ones in there for me and then some interesting information on ones that I was familiar with on the GPTs from OpenAI. And get this, if you're a premium user, and I tried this very early on, I actually got to go down to San Francisco to the event where they unveiled these last year. So I was like the week in between them announcing it and, you know, getting out to the general public. I got to try it.

And my initial experience was so spotty that I actually was kind of turned off by it. It was an interesting case study, actually, in some of the downsides of early adoption. And just recently, with the release of GPT 40, I've been going back to it and retrying some GPTs. And I got to say, it's far more performant, more responsive things that would have had errors in response before. I'm actually getting real responses now.

And I think just the evolution of their technology has been great. Read AI David Shimon, the entrepreneur here in Seattle who launched that, we talked with him. We've had him on the podcast based on his appearance at the Geekwire summit last year. And to your point, read AI is great at recapping meetings, and they've recently expanded as well to email and slack, and they call them readouts. So they're starting to connect all these things.

And for me, that kind of ambient intelligence and the agents, the idea that AI will act on your behalf within the parameters that you give it is super interesting. And to your .1 of my favorite comments from the stage at Microsoft build this past week, which was the developer conference that Microsoft held the days after it made this big announcement about Copilot PCs, came from Kevin Scott, Microsoft CTO, who you referred to earlier in the context of the memo that he wrote, basically sounding the alarm back in 2019, saying we got to work with OpenAI because we're way behind it. At any rate, he was on stage this past week, and paraphrasing here, he said, you need to look for the things that were formerly impossible and are now merely very difficult. Look for those and do those. And it's kind of eye opening.

It really shows you how much the world has changed. I think that's what I was saying at the top of the hour, like it was those of us who are geeks have been waiting for this moment, you know, and who didn't want Knight Rider, who didn't want c three po. And I just think we have been not let down, not for any, not for lack of trying or not, because the world isn't smart, full of smart people. It's just because the technology didn't exist. Hearkens back my other comments to around Microsoft, who was so ahead of the game on tablets, you know, ahead of the game even on mobile in the early days on devices, on the, on the reader the origami PC.

Stefan Weitz
I mean, the ebook we had interactive activates. You could talk, your kid could talk to a stuffed animal and interact with the, with the stuffed animal. Incredible things. Yes. Oh, yeah.

It was incredible. Incredible. Just incredible stuff. I mean, I missed the old building. I knew the building twelve company store was amazing.

But we are now, like I said, what got me so excited, why I wanted to do human x as well, is that for the first time you begin to see this confluence of factors coming together which is demonstrably improving and will improve corporates, individuals, communities, governments that we just have never had access to before at scale. And I just, that's why I'm so excited for this whole era. I haven't been as excited in 20 years by technology because it is, it's finally getting to the point that we were all promised as kids, no flying cars yet. I'm still waiting for that one. But I've been watching the molar 400 error car for literally 30 some years.

It still hasn't shipped yet, but when it does, I'll be first in line to snag it. That's awesome. Well, thanks for being on. It's been great. And I encourage folks again to check out the Humanx conference again.

Todd Bishop
It's March 10 through 13th, 2025 in Las Vegas. Humanx co Stefan, thanks again. Thanks. I appreciate it. All right, thanks for listening, everybody.

Our show is produced and edited by Kurt Milton. I'm Geekwire co founder Todd Bishop. We'll be back next week with a new episode of the Geekwire podcast.