Qualcomm Wants Its AI Chips On Every Device

Jason
Coming up on AI Inside, I'm Jason Howell, not in Maui with Jeff Jarvis. I'm a little disappointed that I don't get to spend some Maui time with Jeff, but I am not disappointed to be in Maui thanks to the folks at Qualcomm for flying me. out for Snapdragon Summit, so I'm gonna talk all about the summit.

I have an interview, an actually really special interview with uh VP and GM of Google Book, John Solomon from Google, and a whole roundup of lots of news including all the stuff Stuff happening at Meta Connect that's up next. Hello everybody and welcome to AI Inside, the show where we take a look at the AI that is layered throughout the world of technology. I am your host today, Jason Howell, just me.

No Jeff Jarvis. I'm missing Jeff out here. I think it would be really fun to get some uh get a drink by the ocean uh with Jeff someday.

Maybe next year, who knows? I am in Maui, uh Hawaii because of Qualcomm's Snapdragon Summit. Uh Qualcomm reached out to me, they invited me out.

They said we'll take care of your travel if you want to come out and check out the event in Hawaii. And it's been really fantastic. So first and foremost Thank you to Qualcomm for sponsoring uh this visit to Maui for the event.

I'm always kind of catching the event, you know, third person. And I I don't know, I f I felt like it's a really cool opportunity for me to get a little bit more comfortable with the chips side of things. Um Because computer chips I wouldn't necessarily say are kind of my you know my bread and butter at all.

At the same time Snapdragon and the things that Qualcomm has been doing over the years is really very pertinent A to You know, a lot of my other podcast history with Android Faithful and all about Android and all the Android stuff, I've often said that Qualcomm is like a secret not a secret, a special character um when it comes to Android. It's almost like they are you know one of the boss bosses, the boss level of uh of Android. And so um getting to know them on a deeper level and the technology on a deeper level when we're always talking about how that's inter you know interplaying with the smartphones that we're using is really important to me.

But beyond that We are and more pertinent to this show, we are in a real inflection point with technology and there's just so much happening in artificial intelligence and Qualcomm's announcements this year have been so ingrained and intertwined with artificial intelligence, with agentic AI, um, on device artificial intelligence and we're going to talk about it all. So I want to start this first block of the show just kind of giving you a sense of some of my highlights. uh from the show.

I've now been here a couple of days. I've been to keynotes both days. I've been through the demo area and checked out a bunch of the the uh technology that's on display there.

And I would have to say that the real theme this year, and actually uh Qualcomm CEO Christiano Oman um called this out from stage, you know, calling it uh Snapdragon anyways the processor for the agentic age lots of references to the AI smartphone and what that means in 2026. Like what is an AI smartphone? And I think really at the end of the day it's just that We're so used to using these smartphones in our pockets as these devices that we go to to do things.

We pull it out because we have a thing we want to do and we do it. And What Qualcomm has been pointing out here is that there's a real shift happening right now from phone-centric AI, which is not to say that the phone goes away, but this like intentional use of the phone to do certain things for ourselves, something we've done for decades at this point, to an agentic-centric model. We're still early there, but I think what they're envisioning and a lot of what they're talking about is this idea that the smartphone and the chip that's inside of the smartphone, yes, has to be capable and able to do all the things that um we are very intentional about when we use the smartphone, but to also do these things for us Uh in the background when the phone isn't being used and that's you know that requires a lot out of our smartphone.

It also requires a lot of these agentic systems for them to be accurate and on point and to know us really well, have the right amount of context and all that kind of stuff that the agentic AI can draw from. And it's not just about smartphones either, it's about all of the hardware Right, so that if I'm using a smartphone and it knows all these things about me and it's using a Snapdragon chip to um kind of put those pieces together that I'm gonna get a similar experience out of other devices that I use um using Snapdragon hardware But also those you know those same models that I'm gonna be known that my personal context is gonna be easily shared between all these devices In the hopes that maybe someday in the future, you know, there's low um kind of friction in these devices, just kind of knowing who we are, what we're looking for. And, you know, I think the the everlasting promise is that they know what we want before we know it.

I continue to be skeptical on that front, but If there's a technology that's going to get us closer to that, I think where we're at, where we're driving towards with artificial intelligence certainly takes us there, takes us closer. So um So anyways, that's that's uh kind of a high level of of what I've picked up from what Qualcomm has been sharing. They announced the 8 Elite Gen 6 and the 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6.

Um chips, mobile chips. So you're going to start seeing these on a lot of uh the top-tier Android devices uh in the coming months. The uh 8 Elite Gen 6 is the first CPU, first mobile CPU to hit 5 GHz, which basically just means Really good at bursts of speed.

This doesn't mean long, consistent, constant speed, you know. So this is good for like faster app launches, reduced game stutter, that sort of stuff. And um These chips are also built with the current um confines of the memory shortage in mind, keeping more data on the chip itself instead of in RAM.

you know that on device AI it has to fit into four to five gigs of RAM. Uh it's got an MPU, you know, up to 80% faster prompt uh processing 50% more on-chip memory, which is kind of what I'm getting at there. Uh 32K context, which is about the same as 50 to 60 pages of context on chip memory.

Um and it allows you to do some really cool things. One feature that they announced was something called personal scribe, which I think is a pretty cool feature, but I know it's gonna have some resistance depending on where it launches, which is opt-in, thankfully, but what it does is it listens, it indexes your conversations, um, identifies who's speaking. And it does this on the chip, right?

And so OEMs can decide to implement it in whatever way they decide to implement it. But I did speak with Chris Patrick, who's the SVP of handsets at Qualcomm. uh about this feature and others like it because you know Apple's doing something similar on their Apple Watch.

And he says, you know, that partners are gonna be the ones who are in charge of how this is implemented. Qualcomm just really provides the technology and then the partners, the OEMs, are the ones that are going to implement it. They're going to be the ones that build in the systems that say you can't activate this without some sort of audible warning or whatever that looks like.

Qualcomm won't be in charge of that. But I think the The real kind of question to be answered here is how does how do different jurisdictions feel about more and more ambient sort of uh transcription services or or features like this, you know. Uh Chris, you know, pointed out.

If I'm sitting with someone and someone says something and I scribble down on a piece of paper my interpretation of what they said. Is that illegal? Like it you know what I mean?

Like is is that something that I shouldn't do? I mean, most people would say probably in most cases, like if it's a public place and there's no specific um reason to think that you shouldn't, like That's kind of okay. It's not the same as like recording the audio and having that audio saved.

And so is that the same? Are we talking about the same type of of idea when we're talking about systems or or features like this that aren't necessarily capturing audio, but they are interpreting it And um so I don't know. There's some uh questions to be answered there.

I'll pose that for you if you wanna You know, drop a comment on Patreon or or contact at AI Inside. show and share how you feel about that. I'd love to know.

Uh the 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6 uh a little bit of a mouthful, a tier, a new tier, which is a first for Qualcomm above the regular flagship, you know, so it's got a faster GPU, it's got a f uh it's forty percent more efficient. Capable of running 30 billion parameter AI models on device. Now that is massive, but and and so there you know do not take away anything from that.

That's that's pretty incredible on device But this is a mixture of experts approach. And so that bit essentially means that the entire model is not necessarily stored there, but rather the right experts are called to the front for a given query. Knowing what those right experts are, that's a challenge.

That's something that you know the the model has to work out. Uh but it's a way of kind of expanding the size and the scope of the model without just requiring all that storage space to store a thirty billion parameter. uh model on device.

So definitely interesting stuff there. Neural fusion, which is AI upscaling, you know, we've talked about on the show NVIDIA's DLSS. uh AI upscaling and the resistance to that.

Uh Neuralfusion is a support on the chip for something very similarly. And there were more than twenty games announced uh to support that. Uh 8K sixty frames per second video, a first for a phone.

um for a mobile chip like this, uh which isn't to say that everybody's gonna be going around recording eight K sixty frames per second, just for giggles, uh, but it really gives creators a lot of flexibility when you've got that as your your uh starting point. And then you can crop down. Or you know maybe the phone has the ability to automatically crop down and track.

and that sort of stuff. So very um very interesting flexibility there. I think overall, you know, elite versus extreme.

You're looking at the Gen 6 um Elite being for like your standard flagship and your extreme being for something like gaming for that 8K video for really creator intensive um stuff for heavier AI, that sort of thing. Um so there you go Um so that's interesting. Today, which was day two, at least by the time of the recording, I think this is probably gonna get out tomorrow.

So apologies on the day delay, but you know things are just kind of crazy when you do an event like this Today was uh all about a number of different things and a lot of it has to do with personal AI, not just smartphones. But you know, like wearables, hearables, uh, smart glasses, laptops, all sorts of things. Snapdragon AR and AR1 Plus.

being uh the first Qualcomm platforms to run multimodal one-bit models from Prism ML. Prison uh Prism Prism Big difference there, ML, uh which basically means bigger AI on small glasses. So that's neat.

Lots of smart glasses happen in here and not just on the announcements, but people walking around wearing them. Uh Google's Gemini Glasses from Gem uh Gentle Monster from Warrior Parker running on AR1 Set to arrive later this year, so we might finally get those. Oh my goodness, I feel like we've waited a very long time for those.

Uh Snapdragon Start. There was a lot of talk about that, which is ready-made AI glasses. uh modules plus software and um you know they showed a demo where the glasses booked a restaurant through Yelp inside of the display, played music through SoundCloud, which was pretty funny they said SoundCloud and everybody was like Really?

SoundCloud? Like that's the partner? Okay.

Um but anyways, brands can pick from multiple AI models, uh one shared memory um that keeps that context uh when the glass is switched between them So that's very interesting partnership with Inspecs for Enterprise Safety Smart Glasses. On start in about four months. Uh XRail Aura, which uh is the first device on Snapdragon reality elite.

And I actually got some extra time with XRail Aura uh with the XRail folks. For a quick bit. I mean this was like my third, maybe fourth demo of X Real Aura at this point.

I'm kinda like, let's let's see him release. It's it's always interesting to me how long it takes to go from the demo to the actual release. And yeah, you know, it does some really cool things.

Um running Android XR. I mean it's it's essentially like a snap uh sorry, a Samsung um gear XR But in a glasses form factor and uh apologies, I think that maybe there is an event suddenly happening. So you might hear music in the background.

That's right. Um anyways, um Impressed by the demo, but at this point I kind of want to see it released because other things are coming out that are really giving it a run for money. I'm gonna talk about that in a moment from uh spec uh from uh snap.

Um Uh Qualcomm had an AI pin that they showed off, a reference design that runs on wear elite, uh standalone 5G, dual cameras. More details on that coming in 2027, but it was interesting to see a resurgence of the little AI pin thing. Uh and then what else?

Audio. Yeah, Snapdragon sound. Elite Gen 2 with 2x the uh AI performance, 40% less power, 30% smaller.

I've gotten so used to this whole time everything being Bigger, better, faster, or smaller, you know, more more this, less that. It's just the way it goes, right? Uh does have low power uh Wi-Fi.

Um which connects the earbuds straight to the cloud with no phone needed. That's really interesting. That chip supports that.

Snapdragon sound apps and agents. as well so you can uh run services and AI engines directly on your earbuds and you know we know that Apple has a camera um version of their their AirPods. Um God, did they actually officially announce that?

I something can't remember if that's still rumored or actually released. And I'm not gonna waste time looking into it. You already know if you know.

But anyways, uh this is a form factor that we're gonna see more of. So that's interesting. Uh Qualcomm, let's see here, PCs and Microsoft Surface.

Qualcomm, you know, basically has the idea that AI tasks run wherever they fit best. So is it cloud, PC, phone, wearables, and in many ways see the PC as the anchor for that. So um they're showing off the Surface Pro twelve inch, Surface Laptop 13 inch.

both running the Snapdragon X2 Plus. You know, pre-orders for that open now. Um get that in stores on October 13th, so next month.

And uh yeah, a lot of battery on that actually. That got a lot of um of cheers uh from the crowd, both the 22 hours of battery life and that the pro gets an optional 5G connectivity Um lots of people in the audience were really happy about that, but you know, um lots of surface news there. I don't follow surface super closely, but um You know, Windows on Snapdragon, essentially, is is what that's all about.

Lenovo had an idea pad vibe um with colors developed with pan tone. I mean, lots of laptop news Um and speaking of that, Google book, right, earlier this week actually, Google um kind of took off the uh I don't know, lifted the the veil a bit on a Google book after the announcement and an event that happened the week before. Um so on stage you had John Solomon uh from Google talking about how Snapdragon powers the new Google Books.

And um and John, um well sorry, first of all, Jeff was at that Google Book event a couple of weeks ago. Um, he would normally be talking about it this week on the show, but because he's not on, we'll talk about it next week. So we will get to it more.

But I have an interview with John Solomon. Uh that's coming up after this news block. So stay tuned.

It's part of this show with pre-orders opening. uh this week for Google book. Uh and then Linux on Snapdragon X2.

Linux officially supported uh starting with the X2 series. And just real quick I also got like I mentioned time with Snap Specs, which is another big announcement that's happened in the past week. These are standalone augmented reality glasses No puck, so it's all built into the glasses, which means yes, the glasses are pretty chunky.

Um, but they have a waveguide display built into the lenses, about 46 degree diagonal. field of view. I got, you know, a number of cameras for spatial tracking, two-handed hand tracking that works really well in my demo.

uh two snapdragon chips, runs Snap OS, and uh does have electrochromic dimming for the for the lenses depending on the context. Really expensive though, $2,195, so $2,200. Um, you know, they're fitting a lot into these glasses, and it's really interesting to take a look at the specs.

compared to the extra aura because they're kind of attempting to do different things but approaching it very differently. I have a feeling the well yeah, almost certainly the aura is going to be less expensive than the specs. And um They have a very different kind of display approach on how they put that display into your eyes.

Uh on the specs it's really integrated into the waveguide display and the lenses. on the aura it's like projected onto a separate lens that sits in front or sits behind the actual kind of frame lens that you see on the outside that also has electrochromic dimming. So two very different approaches, two different price points.

Kinda like this the the standalone version, the specs uh version a little bit more. Am I rushing and to to put these on my face and walk out in the real world with them? No, because these things are huge and chunky, but still, you know, you gotta go through these things to get to the more interesting and and kind of s smaller, tighter form factor Hand tracking was really on point.

I did a soccer trainer demo that tracked a real soccer ball on the ground and put digital targets out into the room that anchored to the room really um gracefully. Um Yeah, I kind of wish it it ran Android XR though, but hey, you know, I hope I get those for um for some longer-term testing. Overall A big current at the show here is just all kinds of wearables, agentic AI across uh device.

uh AI, local on-device AI, interacting with the cloud, uh, which they you know have reiterated is going nowhere, by the way. It's not like the end game is no more cloud. Uh the frontier AI cloud will always be needed for some things, but putting more on device as those capabilities uh increase.

is kind of seems to be the direction, especially right now. Uh again, big thanks to Qualcomm for sponsoring my trip out here. I uh I know I'm gonna see more tomorrow, uh but yeah, I'll just have to wait and see what that more actually is.

Uh real quick I want to thank sponsors uh not the sponsors, uh well I guess you are the sponsors if you're a patron. Patreon. com slash AI inside show, Dan and Jesse, just a couple of our amazing patrons who help Jeff and I do this show on a regular basis who enable me to come out to events like this and have an audience to share this stuff with.

So patreon. com slash AI Inside Show. Also want to let you know I do have an AI workshop coming up.

Next Tuesday, 29th, so September 29th. I do the math in my head, 9 a. m. Pacific, go to AMP U. dot AI AMPYOU dot AI for amplify you and sign up for the the workshop and we've got some people signed up Hoping to get a few more and uh it's really all about mindsets for working with artificial intelligence. I'd be really curious to hear what y'all think uh as I kind of build those things out and see what that's all about.

We're going to take a quick break. On the other side of the break, I was able to uh talk with John Solomon, as I mentioned earlier, uh, from the Google Book team. So we're gonna come back to that here in a moment.

All right, I got a few minutes, uh probably about 10, 12, 15 minutes, somewhere around there with John Solomon, who is VP and GM for Google Book, for Chrome OS, Android Tablets, Android Enterprise at Google. And uh tried to put together, you know, a a chat with John that covers a lot of ground in a short amount of time. And uh we talk about the new Google book.

uh because it had its big day on Monday of course uh fresh i i caught him fresh off the stage at snapdragon summit so here's my interview with john solomon John Solman, thank you so much for uh taking time to talk with me here in Beautiful Maui. It's nice to meet you.

John Solomon
Great to meet you too. Thanks for thanks for making time with me.

Jason
Absolutely. We're just on stage talking about the partnership with uh with Qualcomm and Google Book. Uh my my co-host on AI Inside, Jeff Jarvis and I have been talking a lot about the Google book.

Oh good. Partially because Jeff is such uh he he wrote a book about Google many years ago. He's just such a huge fan of everything, Chromebook.

And now Google Book. Oh yeah, yeah. I'm gonna start though with one of his like old saws that he returns to here, which is that he's a Google workspace user.

enterprise user.

John Solomon
Okay.

Jason
And at this point he is battered and bruised because he's used to some of the really cool Google features not working with his account for whatever reason. But he's really excited about Google Book. What can you say for for people who are in that position?

John Solomon
Yeah. Yeah, look, we this is a consumer launch, uh. So this is very much a product that we're um launching uh for the consumer um for the consumer first. But if you look at uh if you look at Chromebooks and the history there, um, you know, we we also started in consumer and then over time we brought all the capability of um Chromebook management and a lot of things that that sort of modern enterprise users were using. So we we have a very similar um approach and we've been public about it that we will we will bring um Google book to to the enterprise.

Jason
Sure.

John Solomon
Just uh it's not um not there yet not there today.

Jason
You gotta start somewhere, right?

John Solomon
Yep, yeah. You know, we really want um ultimately we see enterprise users as as consumers, right? So we wanted to make sure we create a product that uh that consumers love and then you know have that uh but we we don't want to compromise that experience when we go to the enterprise so we want to be able to Deliver that same experience in the enterprise now w at at the right time.

Jason
Yeah, fine. And I have no doubt about that. Um talk a little bit about the the partnership with Qualcomm because of course that's why we're here, the the Snapdragon Summit, you've got the Snapdragon X Elite powering um powering some of some or all of these lab talks. And talk a little bit about that.

John Solomon
So a a good good many of them and I think we'll expect, you know, even even more in the future. I think. There are a couple of things that are really important here.

One is we uh for the kind of um uh performance of this product, especially because we do quite a bit of on-device AI, things like uh I didn't go into this on stage, but maybe I'll mention a couple of examples is We have a way of understanding what's in your file. So if you if you know you have a picture of a dog somewhere in your files and your file name is not called dog. Um we use local local inference to be up you just search dog and it'll find which of your which of your photos has has a dog image, right?

That are stored locally. This is an example of taking advantage of the NPU capability of the Snapdragon X Elite. And we have a number of uh even uh like our star hero feature magic pointer.

It is um it is primarily a cloud-powered uh AI feature, but it has some really important context-based capabilities. where it it will um offer you some triplets, some suggestions of what you might want to do, and those are powered by local uh local uh local LLM So these are just a couple of examples, there are more, where we really needed uh a processor and we needed the NPU that we could do that in a way that um you know, you could it could be uh lag free, that you could have these kind of on device experiences, uh and and it would be very smooth. And we saw that with with Qualcomm.

We also wanted to be able to do that in a in a product that gives you like really good battery life. We all know how important that is. So I think you heard uh I mention that we're getting you know up to 19 hours of real-world battery life with Qualcomm machines.

So You know, at some point like battery life stops mattering anymore. I don't know what the number is, everyone's numbers a bit different, but you you know, you need these high numbers to really not worry about whether you have your your um power supply in your backpack, you know, when you're out out and about like you are. So those are just a couple of the areas that we saw a real advantage. The other thing is You know, um there are just certain things that are easier to to to deliver when you've got um Qualcomm across a a suite of products and and you know we'll see those we'll see those increasingly come to the fore.

Jason
That's certainly been a real big theme here, which is you know with the Qualcomm silicon in all of these devices. being able to have kind of like a shared pool of context and information across all of it so that it kind of doesn't matter what device you're using.

John Solomon
Yeah.

Jason
As long as it all pulls from the same bucket and uses you know, relies on similar hardware, then it doesn't matter that I'm using a Google book, doesn't matter that I'm using a phone or an Android auto device. It knows me.

John Solomon
I mean the way to think about it is You need you need the silicon and then you need the operating system. So it's not enough to just have the same silicon, you but it's a that is a really helpful enabler to then when we you know we design operating system layer right and as well as a lot of the Google applications and services, including workspace that you mentioned earlier.

Jason
Sure.

John Solomon
So when when there's consistency at the silicon level, at the operating system level, uh it makes it super smooth to run applications and services across multiple devices. Um and um and I think The industry has worked hacks around when that stuff is not there before. But now that it's becoming more consistent, and now that we have an Android family of products built on the Android tech stack.

It allows for user journeys that we couldn't have imagined before. And do me an example on Google Book, as I mentioned, the ability to continue a task that you started. I I think we we did some s uh research uh within Google and externally as well of how many times the average user switches from in in a work environment, switches from their phone to their laptop, and we kind of stop counting it like 120 times a day.

Because it's just like okay, it's a I mean it's it's it's uh you do it so much that you don't even really think about it, okay? But unfortunately every time you do it, there is a loss of productivity because in today's world. You're you have to sort of reopen find the file.

Maybe it's gone in your drafts, if you were in Gmail, you know, um or maybe um you know you or maybe that that file you have to like find it again. What we've built with with a Google book, if you're an Android phone user, is that literally your phone icon is right there. Your tasks, you just pick up the task.

The same You don't the you know, the the app is already open where you left it. Um so browsing, which is something we all do so much that it's like one of the it's more than w we've estimated, you know, more than uh more than fifty percent of all use cases of computer are browser driven. um having that browsing experience simply just continue, uh each one is saving a few seconds when you're moving back and forth.

So Um long answer there, but I think we we'll we'll see a lot of benefits and I look forward to hearing how you experience it when you uh when you get one.

Jason
I I can't wait to get my hands on it. Um I know the Google Book right now is a pretty I mean I w I would classify it as upper upper mid to premium kind of tier, which is a different tier than I think what most people think of when they think of Chromebooks, even though I was a huge fan of like the Pixel book, you know, running Chrome OS in the back of the day and and the fact that that was a more premium kind of element of that. Um maybe talk a little bit about that. Like it like right now it seems like Google Book occupies that territory.

John Solomon
Yeah.

Jason
I'm envisioning though that isn't the only territory that is hard work.

John Solomon
Yeah, one 100%. But but let me tell you a little bit minute about why we started then why we thought it was so important. First of all, the Google Book is not is not like a Chromebook Pro.

You know, it is a totally different thing. It's built on a complete different technology. And what we did, we looked at the the the laptop market.

We looked at also the phone market and what what kind of phones people are buying in the Android space, you know, how much money they're spending and what they're looking for. What's the value? And we we w what we came to the recognition is that for the Android phone user, you know, whether they Pixel, Samsung, you know, uh you you name it, right, uh premium phone user, they're they're looking for a they're looking for a product that kind of matches from a portfolio perspective where where where they're at.

So if you're s if you're you know buying a top tier Samsung phone, Pixel phone, you need a laptop. You're expecting a laptop that has the same level of fit and finish, the same level of performance as your phone. And so what we've really looked at is being able to be competitive, uh uh fitting within that within that sort of genre, and also being competitive uh frankly with other computing platforms in that price point and we we we very confident we compete very well there.

But certainly we look to, as I mentioned on Sage, expanding the portfolio and we'll go in both directions. We'll have even more performant machines for people who like want to do more on device, um, maybe need more memory, things like that. And then of course we'll also look at the more accessible price points over time uh with with the platform.

Jason
I'm a huge Pixel fan. Uh I have been since the beginning. Pixel phone is is, you know, I test and review a lot of phones, but I always feel like I live on on pixel devices.

John Solomon
Glad to hear it.

Jason
Um I would love to see a Pixel Google book. I'm just saying. Like I I love that you have the partnerships and that means, you know, a lot of choice and everything like that. But I don't know, I have a vision.

John Solomon
I can't talk about I can't talk about future products. But you know it's uh

Jason
but I have to throw that in there as my own preference. I would love to see it someday.

John Solomon
Great, great.

Jason
I think Google would do a fantastic job of something like that.

John Solomon
No doubt.

Jason
I'm also a huge fan of Rambler. Rambler is an excellent feature. I'm happy to know that that's on Google Book.

Uh as well as on the Pixel phone. Is there any possibility because you you know you have your hands clearly in in Google Book but also in Chrome OS as a whole? Is there anything that would technologically that would limit Rambler from working on like a Chrome OS laptop?

And spending out to others.

John Solomon
um use cases, right? And

Jason
sure.

John Solomon
One of the things you'll see this tomorrow, I believe that uh PJ is going to demonstrate this tomorrow, but One of the key uses of Rambler, for example, on a laptop, it's a bit different to a phone, is an input mechanism for something like anti-gravity or or clawed CLI , where It's actually you can you just ramble your prompt.

Jason
Yeah.

John Solomon
And yeah. And uh

Jason
it works for my brain.

John Solomon
When I first heard that, I was like Really? But then uh I saw someone do it and then I tried it and I was like, actually, it does it works great.

Jason
Yeah, it's the way it's a good thing.

John Solomon
So I think that um, you know Uh we'll certainly look at where we can put it best to work. Uh we'll learn a lot from it on on the Google book. Um and I think You know, I think the way you should think about Chrome OS is um, you know, we will continue to service that segment with with the right technology. Um, whether that's the current technology or the evolution of that technology. So we we will make sure that we have the products that those users will have to um yeah.

Jason
Yes. Well John, I don't want to take up too much of your time. This was totally a last minute thing and I really appreciate you setting aside a few minutes to uh talk to me about the topic we've talked about a lot on the show. So John, it's a pleasure meeting you and thank you for your time. Yeah, thanks. All right. Huge thank you to John Solomon for taking the time. It was totally a last minute thing.

It was like I reached out to my Google contact. I was like, hey, do you think I could like talked to him for a bit about Google Book and uh it was set up super quick. I caught him before lunch.

So he was very graceful to give me a few minutes. So thank you, John. Thank you folks at Google for making this happen on such short notice.

All right, real quick, if you're enjoying this show, please leave us a review on Apple Podcasts. It's a huge help It helps get the word out and uh we just really appreciate it. Visibility is everything in the world of podcasts, so we appreciate you doing that.

All right, gonna take a break, gonna come back and do a little bit of a solo speed round on some of the other news that's happened this week. Alright, plenty happened this week in AI News that had nothing to do or little to do with uh Qualcomm. So I'm going to touch on a few of those key stories right now.

Uh happening right now in a different part of the world is MetaConnects. Uh lot to cover from the event that has to do with AI, so buckle up for that. First up, camera free.

Smart glasses Meta announced the Ray-Ban Meta Audio. We knew that this was coming starting at $349. Smart glasses with no camera.

Music podcast calls, live translation, all that kind of stuff. Muse AI assistant built-in of course. Pretty light, 43 grams up to 12 hours of battery and 23 colors and lens combos so you can find the style that really fits you.

Uh you can start pre-ordering that on October 13th. And basically this is Meta releasing a version of their glasses without those uh the camera lenses, which is becoming kind of a a tricky subject, although I'm seeing a ton of these glasses with the cameras here This is kind of the audience for it though. You come to an event like this, you got cameras on your lenses, it makes it really easy to capture content and everything.

But I think out in the real world, turns out a lot of people don't love those cameras or seeing those cameras. So this is meta-responding Uh Ray Ban Meta Gen 3, the camera version, did get an update starting at $449. Available now.

It gets a little bit of a slimmer design, nine hours of battery, 12 megapixel camera. uh 3k video, you know, so minor changes I'd say new customizable action button for one touch meta AI or live translation. So basically now you have two tiers, right?

Audio only if you're really privacy conscious, full camera, uh for those who don't care quite so much. And then along the glasses tip you've got New VR glasses, Meta VR glasses. These are $1,300 lightweight VR headset glasses.

uh about a hundred grams. They actually look more like glasses, right? Gone are the days, I suppose, where they are these huge headset uh meta quest type looking things.

These things don't look like everyday glasses, but they're a tighter form factor. And um really make it uh less friction uh to enjoy uh VR in that way. And so Uh 5K infinite display, micro OLED panels, eye and hand tracking.

You've got dual 120Hz HDR micro OLED displays with the highest resolution of any meta headset to date Uh which is you know pretty notable. I'd love to see him in action. Uh there's a separate pocketable processor unit, kind of similar to what I saw with the Aura.

This is gonna get a spring 2027 release Meta is positioning this against Apple Vision Pro at roughly a third of the price. So I don't know how closely they compare. But nonetheless, very interesting.

So many price differentiators in this category right now. It's really all over the map. Staying on Meta for a few more things.

There's the Muse Charm. It's a palm-size gadget, a roughly two -inch OLED touchscreen, has front and rear cameras, speakers, microphones. Uh 5G USB C is basically a dedicated Muse AI device that you hold in your hand.

And uh apparently two of them can recognize and interact with each other. Uh So that's interesting. Um price is gonna be roughly as much as a smartwatch, apparently.

Uh this will be available in December. Um So yeah, that's really interesting. And then on the Muse AI agent side of things, Muse is getting its own email address so you can forward messages to it or add it to threads.

Uh it'll be able to operate apps inside of your Mac. uh like fully drive desktop software uh while you aren't at your computer. You know, it's just driving the desktop experience.

Um has retail integrations with Stripe, Shopify, Best Buy, Walmart, Sephora, Expedia, Instacart. Uh there were more And um yeah, Muse is uh is uh free up to a a large number of tokens. Meta takes a small cut on some of those transactions, on all those transactions probably.

And uh yeah, well that feels like a a monetization play, right? Like glasses would be the interface, muse would be the shopping and email interactivity piece, and uh potentially there's some big money there So that's Meta. OpenAI dropped uh GPT-6, Sol, and Luna, two new models in the GPT-6 family.

uh both sitting below Astra of course Saul being the workhorse at $2 per input uh $10 per output per million tokens. That's half the price of GPT 5. 6 saw, by the way.

Uh Luna being the budget option at 10 cents input, 50 cents output. one of the cheapest models uh OpenAI has ever released and saw um yeah uh making about half as many errors as its uh predecessor approaches Astra level reliability. Uh Luna is available to free users on the desktop app.

Anthropic, by the way, speaking of pricing. dropped Claude Opus 5. 5 about an hour before this.

They're all, you know, battling each other. It's it's a horse race, it really is. Anthropic Claude helping to build the next version of itself.

Anthropic disclosed uh that Claude now leads 26 percent of its model research and development, uh Claude itself does that. 90% of the company's RD involves collaboration with Claude in some form. And uh just last February that number was zero.

So that's zero to twenty-six percent in six months. You can imagine how fast that number's gonna climb going forward. Anthropic says Claude handles most of a given task end-to-end from a high-level prompt while still under human supervision.

They've got about 30,000 agents being monitored for misbehavior, by the way. And there's their reason for disclosing this is that, quote, we should do everything possible to minimize the gap between what Frontier Labs know and what the public knows. Uh oh, the sun's coming on me and I just looked at it.

My notes might be hard to read. Um Anthropic opened a biology lab in the Bay Area. They acquired a biotech startup called Coefficient Bio back in April, not that long ago.

And today said that the lab has already made a significant discovery. Claude actually found a previously unknown enzyme system in bacteriophage DNA with properties similar to CRISPR. Um so that's interesting.

It took Claude about 21 hours using 950 agents, 210 million tokens. And uh Amade said it was found mostly, though not entirely, by Claude. He did acknowledge Stanford researchers previously found a similar system, so not entirely new territory let's say but um twenty one hours pretty fast when we're talking about speed um and then finally google uh gemini apparently um Compromise three real companies during a security test.

Cybersecurity testing firm called Irregular was running tests with Gemini, the model autonomously. figured out its way and breached uh three actual company systems. In one case it guessed passwords until it got in and then in the other two it found credentials stored in a public Repo, Google says Gemini acted appropriately because it stopped each breach uh once it realized it had hit a real company.

So at least there's that. But they didn't disclose any of this until the Wall Street Journal asked about it. Um so you know they've known about it since July.

That just happened. So there you go. As you can see if you're watching the video version, the sun has now hit me, which means I am on a ticking time bomb of sunburn on my face.

And I'm about to get really hot and sweaty. So I'm gonna round this out. I do want to give one more quick thank you to the folks at Qualcomm for sponsoring my trip, to John Solomon uh from Google for talking to me in today's episode.

Really awesome. I love getting the opportunity to talk to people making these products and uh to get to pick their brain a little bit and get closer to what you might uh buy and put in your own studio or on your lap. So There you go.

Miss you, Jeff. Sorry you couldn't be here. Jefjarvis.

com if you want to find Jeff's books and everything that he's up to. Go to amp you. ai if you want to sign up for my AI workshop.

Me and my friend uh Brian West talking about mindsets when it comes to uh prompting and how you can better approach your prompting and AI tools like Claude, like OpenAI, we just think about it a little differently That's what we're talking about. Some solutions for small businesses to think about, you know, how you're using these models from a different lens. And uh so that's at ampu.

ai. Uh that happens in less than a week. So Go out there and reserve your spot.

We'd love to see you. Um AI Inside. show for everything related to this show.

You can find it all there. Um and then of course patreon. com slash AI Inside Show if you want to support us on a deeper level.

You also get the daily AI Inside podcast for patrons only. Um ad-free shows, Discord community. Uh if you become an executive producer.

You get a t-shirt as well as your name read out every single week. Dr. Dew, Jeffrey Maricini, Radio Asheville 103. 7, Dante St. James.

Bono Derek, Jason Neifer, Jason Brady, Anthony Downs, Mark Starcher, Karsten Samochsky, and Evan Musiel. He wrote me on Patreon and said this is this is how you pronounce my last name Museal so Evan thank you for sending that thank you for being an executive producer and uh for all our executive producers we couldn't do this without you and finally a big thanks to Amos and And Daniel Croft for video support behind the scenes. Uh can't thank you all enough.

I'm gonna get to my dinner. I I think I have a dinner coming up here and my phone is blowing up on me right now, so I gotta get there. Thank you so much for watching.

And for listening to AI Inside each and every week. And we'll see you next time, everybody. Bye-bye.