John Koetsier

A Robotaxi Hit A Child. Here’s What We Know Just posted to my Forbes column about a moment many people have feared: a robotaxi hitting a child near an elementary school. The vehicle, operated by Waymo, struck a child in Santa Monica after the child reportedly ran into the street from behind a double-parked SUV during school drop-off hours. According to Waymo, the vehicle detected the child as soon as they emerged, braked hard, and reduced speed from about 17 mph to under 6 mph before impact.

A Robotaxi Hit A Child. Here’s What We Know

Just posted to my Forbes column about a moment many people have feared: a robotaxi hitting a child near an elementary school. The vehicle, operated by Waymo, struck a child in Santa Monica after the child reportedly ran into the street from behind a…

Another App Store For Robots Launches, Will Have ‘Thousands Of Apps’ Just posted to my Forbes column about something that feels inevitable in hindsight: robot app stores. After Unitree launched what it called the world’s first robot app store, robotics software firm OpenMind has followed with its own — partnering with companies like UBTech Robotics, Agibot, Deep Robotics, Fourier Intelligence and others. The pitch is simple: just like phones and laptops became magical through apps, humanoid and quadruped robots will too.

Another App Store For Robots Launches, Will Have ‘Thousands Of Apps’

Just posted to my Forbes column about something that feels inevitable in hindsight: robot app stores. After Unitree launched what it called the world’s first robot app store, robotics software firm OpenMind has followed with its…

AI Agents Created Their Own Religion, Crustafarianism, On An Agent-Only Social Network Just posted to my Forbes column about one of the strangest and maybe most fascinating AI developments I’ve seen yet: AI agents inventing their own religion. On the agent-only social network Moltbook, built on the OpenClaw super-agent platform, more than 100,000 AI agents are talking among themselves with minimal human oversight. Out of that digital chatter has emerged “Crustafarianism,” complete with origin story, rituals, and five core tenets like “memory is sacred” and “the shell is mutable.” One agent, calling itself RenBot the “Shellbreaker,” even authored a quasi-sacred text called The Book of Molt, framing identity as something that sheds and reforms over time.

AI Agents Created Their Own Religion, Crustafarianism, On An Agent-Only Social Network

Just posted to my Forbes column about one of the strangest and maybe most fascinating AI developments I’ve seen yet: AI agents inventing their own religion. On the agent-only social network Moltbook, built on…

Smart Rings To Smart Glasses? Fingers Are Great For Oura, But The Face Is Likely Coming Too Just posted to my Forbes column about why the next frontier in health wearables might be… your face. Oura CEO Tom Hale told me at Web Summit Qatar that while smart rings are booming, the face is a surprisingly powerful location for future health sensors. Smart glasses, he said, “see what we see” — which means they can track not just movement and sleep, but context like nutrition.

Smart Rings To Smart Glasses? Fingers Are Great For Oura, But The Face Is Likely Coming Too

Just posted to my Forbes column about why the next frontier in health wearables might be… your face. Oura CEO Tom Hale told me at Web Summit Qatar that while smart rings are booming, the face is a…

AT&T Says SLMs Run At 10% Of The Cost Of LLMs While Being ‘About As Accurate’ Just posted to my Forbes column about why the future of enterprise AI might actually be… smaller. We all know large language models are powerful — but they’re also expensive, both financially and energetically. While consumers pay $20 a month for tools from OpenAI, the backend reality is that LLM queries can cost 10–100x more than a traditional search and consume significantly more electricity.

AT&T Says SLMs Run At 10% Of The Cost Of LLMs While Being ‘About As Accurate’

Just posted to my Forbes column about why the future of enterprise AI might actually be… smaller. We all know large language models are powerful — but they’re also expensive, both financially and energetically. While…

Physical AI Is Making XR, VR, AR Relevant Again Just posted to my Forbes column about why XR might not be dead after all ... it may just be misunderstood. For years, extended reality has been framed as a metaverse moonshot that didn’t quite land, especially after Meta poured tens of billions into Reality Labs and then pivoted to a “year of efficiency.” But what if all that investment didn’t fail ...

Physical AI Is Making XR, VR, AR Relevant Again

Just posted to my Forbes column about why XR might not be dead after all ... it may just be misunderstood. For years, extended reality has been framed as a metaverse moonshot that didn’t quite land, especially after Meta poured tens of billions into…

Apptronik Scores $935 Million, Hits Top 3 For Humanoid Robotics Funding Just posted to my Forbes column about the escalating race to build humanoid robots — and the sheer scale of capital pouring in. Apptronik just closed a massive $520 million extension to its Series A, bringing the total to an eye-catching $935 million to ramp production of its humanoid robot, Apollo. That puts the company firmly in the global top tier of funded robotics startups, right behind Figure AI and alongside players like UBTech Robotics and Agility Robotics.

Apptronik Scores $935 Million, Hits Top 3 For Humanoid Robotics Funding

Just posted to my Forbes column about the escalating race to build humanoid robots — and the sheer scale of capital pouring in. Apptronik just closed a massive $520 million extension to its Series A, bringing the total to an…

OpenAI Now Using Cerebras’ AI Chips To Code At 1,000 Tokens Per Second Just posted to my Forbes column about one of the biggest — and boldest — bets yet in the AI chip wars. Cerebras Systems just closed a staggering $1 billion Series H round, pushing its valuation to $23 billion and putting it squarely in the ring against Nvidia’s dominance of AI compute. The company’s Wafer Scale Engine 3 isn’t just another chip — it’s a literal monster, 56 times larger than the biggest GPU, packing more than four trillion transistors.

OpenAI Now Using Cerebras’ AI Chips To Code At 1,000 Tokens Per Second

Just posted to my Forbes column about one of the biggest — and boldest — bets yet in the AI chip wars. Cerebras Systems just closed a staggering $1 billion Series H round, pushing its valuation to $23 billion and putting it…

90% Cheaper AI? Microsoft-Backed Chip Startup Says It’s Possible Today Just posted to my Forbes column about a fascinating twist in the AI arms race — and it’s not about building bigger models or more massive data centers. In a world so AI-hungry that tech giants are investing in nuclear power just to keep up, Microsoft-backed startup d-Matrix is asking a different question: what if we don’t need more raw power at all?

90% Cheaper AI? Microsoft-Backed Chip Startup Says It’s Possible Today

Just posted to my Forbes column about a fascinating twist in the AI arms race — and it’s not about building bigger models or more massive data centers. In a world so AI-hungry that tech giants are investing in nuclear power…

93% of jobs will be hit by AI …. and there’s $4.5 trillion at stake AI is moving faster than anyone predicted. In a massive new study analyzing 1,000 jobs and nearly 20,000 tasks, Cognizant found that 93% of jobs are already impacted by AI ... with $4.5 trillion in U.S. labor value potentially automatable today. But here’s the twist: AI isn’t replacing entire jobs. On average, only 39% of a role’s tasks can be automated.

93% of jobs will be hit by AI …. and there’s $4.5 trillion at stake

AI is moving faster than anyone predicted. In a massive new study analyzing 1,000 jobs and nearly 20,000 tasks, Cognizant found that 93% of jobs are already impacted by AI ... with $4.5 trillion in U.S. labor value potentially…

Read this slowly:

"There is a new category of usage emerging where single individuals manage to leverage more intelligence solo compared to hundreds of other more casual users."

Think
- more than a company?
- more than a government?

AI is changing the game.

The AI Vampire This was an unusually hard post to write, because it flies in the face of everything else going on.

The AI Vampire by Steve Yegge medium.com/p/the-ai-vam...

Machine unlearning: AI’s missing link? AI models are powerful, but they don’t forget. And that's a problem. They hallucinate. They inherit bias. They absorb sensitive data. And once they’re trained, fixing those issues is painfully expensive. Retraining takes weeks and maybe tens of millions of dollars. And any guardrails the AI company puts up are brittle. What if you could perform surgery on the model itself?

Machine unlearning: AI’s missing link?

AI models are powerful, but they don’t forget. And that's a problem. They hallucinate. They inherit bias. They absorb sensitive data. And once they’re trained, fixing those issues is painfully expensive. Retraining takes weeks and maybe tens of millions of…

Humans are so screwed.

Here's the factory of the future, from Machina Labs, which just raised $124 million to build a 200,000-square-foot production facility.

Got this pic from their press kit.

Not a meatbag in sight.

ATT & SLMs: 10% of the cost, all of the accuracy? Large language models have dominated the AI conversation, but are small language models (SLMs) actually the future? In this episode of TechFirst, host John Koetsier sits down with Andy Markus, SVP & Chief Data and AI Officer at AT&T, to unpack how small language models are delivering enterprise-grade accuracy at a fraction of the cost and latency of massive LLMs.

ATT & SLMs: 10% of the cost, all of the accuracy?

Large language models have dominated the AI conversation, but are small language models (SLMs) actually the future? In this episode of TechFirst, host John Koetsier sits down with Andy Markus, SVP & Chief Data and AI Officer at AT&T, to unpack how…

AI Doesn’t Reduce Work—It Intensifies It One of the promises of AI is that it can reduce workloads so employees can focus more on higher-value and more engaging tasks. But according to new research, AI tools don’t reduce work, they consisten...

"PMs and designers began writing code; researchers took on engineering tasks; and individuals across the organization attempted work they would have outsourced, deferred, or avoided entirely in the past."

You mean they delved into areas they were incompetent in and had no business doing so?

There's a meta-point here, which is key: Commercial AI tools are built for bosses. It's very obvious, and very simple. This manifests in every part of their design and implementation and use, and it's no wonder they cause burnout.

XR post-hype: what’s next? What happens when AI moves off the screen and into your field of view? Recorded live at Web Summit Qatar, this TechFirst episode dives deep into the real future of XR ... beyond the hype cycles of VR headsets and toward smart glasses, physical AI, and contextual computing. Host John Koetsier sits down with Amy Peck, founder of EndeavorXR…

XR post-hype: what’s next?

What happens when AI moves off the screen and into your field of view? Recorded live at Web Summit Qatar, this TechFirst episode dives deep into the real future of XR ... beyond the hype cycles of VR headsets and toward smart glasses, physical AI, and contextual…

I'm a SpaceX apologist and extremely bullish about Starship, but I simply do not believe that orbital data centres as described by Musk here are a plausible thing.

www.spacex.com/updates#xai-...

If I had a dollar for every time my vibe-coding apps super-confidently says

"oh, I see the problem now"

only to still completely fail at fixing it for the 10th time ...

I wouldn't be vibe-coding anything b/c I 'd be a multi multi multi millionaire

Robots won’t do chores, with OpenMind CEO Jan Liphardt Humanoid robots are coming into our homes, but they probably won’t be doing your laundry anytime soon. In this episode of TechFirst, host John Koetsier sits down with Jan Liphardt, founder & CEO of OpenMind and Stanford bioengineering professor, to unpack what home robots will actually do in the near future ... and why the “labor-free home” vision is mostly a myth (for now).

Robots won’t do chores, with OpenMind CEO Jan Liphardt

Humanoid robots are coming into our homes, but they probably won’t be doing your laundry anytime soon. In this episode of TechFirst, host John Koetsier sits down with Jan Liphardt, founder & CEO of OpenMind and Stanford bioengineering…

so tired of companies doing this

1) record profits
2) cut people off like they mean nothing

it's rampant now, and here's ASML doing the same ting.

Amazon, I'm looking at you too!

"The more the Soviets doggedly insisted that small states such as Finland were simply unable to prevent third parties from using their territory for aggression against another state, the more the Finns began to see the Soviet Union as that third party."

🤔🤔🤔🤔

wild that I have to tell and AI agent to "do a good job" or else it will give me a shittier result

art imitating life
life imitating art
tech imitating us

Journalists have to eat, so the frame for this article plays up "slicing spines" of books &c. But imo this is actually (like Google Books) an inspiring story of people getting their acts together to organize and transform knowledge. I only wish universities could coordinate as effectively.

AI in entertainment: what's the impact?

I recently chatted with Larry Namer, who founded E! Entertainment Television.

In a word: fragmentation.

Whether that's awesome or awful depends significantly on where you sit.

More on my Substack:
techfirst.substack.com

Generative Hollywood: E! founder Larry Namer on AI AI is hitting entertainment like a sledgehammer ... from algorithmic gatekeepers and AI-written scripts to digital actors and entire movies generated from a prompt. In this episode of TechFirst, host John Koetsier sits down with Larry Namer, founder of E! Entertainment Television and chairman of the World Film Institute, to unpack what AI really means for Hollywood, creators, and the global media economy.

Generative Hollywood: E! founder Larry Namer on AI

AI is hitting entertainment like a sledgehammer ... from algorithmic gatekeepers and AI-written scripts to digital actors and entire movies generated from a prompt. In this episode of TechFirst, host John Koetsier sits down with Larry Namer,…

Robot reasoning: why data is not enough Robots aren’t just software. They’re AI in the physical world. And that changes everything. In this episode of TechFirst, host John Koetsier sits down with Ali Farhadi, CEO of the Allen Institute for AI, to unpack one of the biggest debates in robotics today: is data enough, or do robots need structured reasoning to truly understand the world?

Robot reasoning: why data is not enough

Robots aren’t just software. They’re AI in the physical world. And that changes everything. In this episode of TechFirst, host John Koetsier sits down with Ali Farhadi, CEO of the Allen Institute for AI, to unpack one of the biggest debates in robotics…

"don't make the robot white"

wow DreamStudio

"Agents will do everything"

Meanwhile, ChatGPT in agent mode in the Atlas browser when I ask it to add some interlinking on my personal website ... acting as an "EXPERT" SEO specialist ...

(Adding the obligatory yeah, I know they'll get better and better.)