Limitless Podcast

Ejaaz:
Picture this. It's Super Bowl Sunday, 140 million people are tuned in tensions at an all-time high.

Ejaaz:
And a mysterious Reddit account posts about how OpenAI was supposed to release

Ejaaz:
an advert about their new consumer AI hardware device.

Ejaaz:
Minutes later, someone hacks into this person's server and reveals a 35-second-long

Ejaaz:
polished advert featuring celebrity Alexander Skarsgård wearing futuristic stainless

Ejaaz:
steel over-the-ear pair of earbuds and staring at a mysterious pebble-like metal device.

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The internet absolutely explodes. News publications post about this.

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Tech Twitter absolutely blows up.

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Until a few hours later, when the president of OpenAI, Greg Brockman,

Ejaaz:
shuts it down with two words, fake news.

Ejaaz:
Now, the advert might have been fake, but the device is very real.

Ejaaz:
And on this episode, we're going to explore the $6.5 billion love child between

Ejaaz:
OpenAI and Johnny Ive and revealing

Ejaaz:
why that's going to lead to three potential new devices this year.

Josh:
Yeah, I have a lot of questions about the legitimacy of this,

Josh:
the way in which we came to discovering this ad, which we're going to get into.

Josh:
This is very much an investigative episode, but I figured the best place to

Josh:
start is probably just to show the leaked ad. So let's watch that first before we talk about it.

Josh:
Man, it really, it looks so good.

Josh:
Dime. Almost time. Okay, there's a lot to unpack with this video.

Josh:
But first, maybe let's set the backstory of how we came to discover this.

Josh:
So as the Super Bowl was winding down on Sunday night, a Reddit account named

Josh:
Winnehata, which has since been deleted, posted what appeared to be a rant of

Josh:
a frustrated OpenAI employee.

Josh:
And the story was pretty simple. They'd worked on this incredible Super Bowl

Josh:
commercial for OpenAI's first hardware device, and it was supposed to air during the game.

Josh:
But at the last minute, leadership got cold feet, supposedly because of all

Josh:
the heat they were taking from Anthropics attack ads, and swapped it out for

Josh:
a safer commercial about their codex coding tool that we saw in the Super Bowl.

Josh:
The employee was seemingly, or I guess the employee was seemingly livid.

Josh:
And in their frustration, they leaked a screenshot of what was supposedly the original ad.

Josh:
Now, here's where things get interesting, because when people in the

Josh:
Reddit thread questioned whether this was legit the poster

Josh:
shared a screenshot which contained metadata and an

Josh:
ftp link now an ftp link is kind of how you share

Josh:
files and somebody cracked the password to that link and inside was this polished

Josh:
minute-long commercial featuring alexander skansgard who for people who don't

Josh:
know is an actor that just wrapped up a new hbo show and is famous for being

Josh:
a character in secession so this is a fairly famous actor who's featured in this?

Josh:
I can't help but ask myself the questions, right? It's like.

Josh:
Well, it's a famous actor.

Josh:
It's showing this unbelievably cool looking product.

Josh:
I mean, we're seeing these beautiful wraparound silver earbuds that are almost

Josh:
stainless steel. And then we see this metallic orb.

Josh:
It's kind of like this smooth pebble shaped case, which is what we were all expecting.

Josh:
And then it ended with the code name that everyone was expecting it.

Josh:
So that says dime almost time. And it was an unbelievably amazing ad. It looks so real.

Josh:
Everything about it matched all the rumors that we heard until the OpenAI president,

Josh:
Greg Brockman, followed up and said, fake news.

Josh:
Something is off because it's too real it's too good what what was this.

Ejaaz:
I'm so confused so i think

Ejaaz:
a few reasons why this went viral is this device

Ejaaz:
is real maybe not the device that we're looking at in this advert we'll get

Ejaaz:
into that in a second but we know from several different rumors and leaks that

Ejaaz:
open ai is working on not just one consumer device but a range of devices maybe

Ejaaz:
up to five devices actually one of the devices is going to look like this pebble

Ejaaz:
disc like thing that sits on your desk, similar to what you saw in the ad just now.

Ejaaz:
And so it's very believable up to the point where the president of OpenAI says,

Ejaaz:
no, it's actually fake, it's not real.

Ejaaz:
And so a bunch of people or critics said, yeah, it's not real, it's AI generated.

Ejaaz:
Now there's two claims here. One, that the video is AI generated and not real.

Ejaaz:
And two, that they may not be working on that kind of a specific device.

Ejaaz:
So we tackled one by asking the smartest people that we know,

Ejaaz:
because Greg's words is his word.

Ejaaz:
But Claude AI is, you know, a million different Glegs all at once, right?

Josh:
You uploaded it into Claude and you asked, is this video AI generated?

Ejaaz:
Yeah, so I uploaded the video to Claude and I asked, is this video AI generated?

Ejaaz:
Now, for those of you who don't know, AI models have gotten really good at calling

Ejaaz:
out what has been generated by themselves.

Ejaaz:
And so it said, let me take a look at this video to analyze it and his conclusion.

Ejaaz:
This does not appear to be AI generated. It actually looks like a professionally

Ejaaz:
shot live action teaser ad.

Ejaaz:
And it goes on to give a few proving points.

Ejaaz:
Number one being the time codes burned in the bottom left of this video is very

Ejaaz:
professional and typical of a raw cut.

Ejaaz:
It says it's consistent, realistic detail.

Ejaaz:
There's no optical illusions. You know, Alexander Skarsgård doesn't have six fingers.

Ejaaz:
And to be honest, if this was an AI generated video, this is the best quality

Ejaaz:
AI video I've ever seen. Josh, what do you think?

Josh:
Yeah, I spent a long time pixel peeping and trying to figure out how this could

Josh:
possibly be fake and every single,

Josh:
frame it looks real and it looks really well done

Josh:
it's in fact it's exactly what i would expect open ai

Josh:
to do to release a new product it has the

Josh:
celebrity actor it has the like beethoven

Josh:
soundtrack that's very epic it has the dime branding and it shows the guy kind

Josh:
of like tapping on it as if it's this new foreign ident object it's just like

Josh:
unbelievably well done but then there's more and there's more to the story where

Josh:
it gets even more interesting because this wasn't just some random person posting a deepfake for laughs.

Josh:
There were tech reporters like this guy, Max Weinbach, who revealed that a week

Josh:
before the Super Bowl, he'd received an email offering him over $1,100 to be exact.

Josh:
I think it was like $1,146 to promote a tweet about the.

Josh:
This new product. And the payment was actually real.

Josh:
Funny enough, if we go through the rest of this conversation,

Josh:
the guys actually paid him.

Josh:
He says, you know what's funny? I did send an invoice and they paid me instantly

Josh:
for it. Hit PayPal within five minutes.

Josh:
Assume this was real and was waiting on them to send a post to retweet.

Josh:
And then this guy's signal says, wait, they paid you? And then he replies,

Josh:
yeah, he sent a screenshot showing that he actually received payment for it.

Josh:
So there was this entity who was reaching out to influencers to do promotion

Josh:
for this new hardware product, and they even paid the influencers,

Josh:
but they never actually released the product.

Josh:
So there's so many contradicting theories here as to why this went down the way it was.

Josh:
I mean, generally, if you're creating a scam, it's to harm a brand's reputation

Josh:
and to cause confusion and generally to earn money, not to actually pay out

Josh:
money to influencers and then get nothing for it in return.

Josh:
I mean, this was a payment of what, $1,146 that just went right to this guy on Twitter?

Ejaaz:
My hot take is this is real, Josh. And what scam do you know of where you actually

Ejaaz:
receive money by the end of it? Like more money than you had before you started?

Ejaaz:
The incentives don't make sense here.

Ejaaz:
If you are paying people to promote your hoax, you have to have something to gain from it.

Ejaaz:
And let's say this went over really well, right? And they gained even more attention

Ejaaz:
than they already did. What did the scammer gain?

Ejaaz:
They, in fact, gave better PR to open air by the end of it.

Ejaaz:
The second point for me is Alexander Skarsgård, the celebrity featured in this

Ejaaz:
video, hasn't come out and denied it.

Ejaaz:
And that kind of reeks of OpenAI NDA disclosures, them telling him to just keep

Ejaaz:
quiet because his PR team is probably saying, well, we can't deny it because

Ejaaz:
that would be fake if it is real.

Ejaaz:
So I think it might be real. And then the third thing is the quality of the video.

Ejaaz:
It's too good. And it looks too realistic. like him.

Ejaaz:
Like, listen, there are models out there that are capable of making celebrities

Ejaaz:
look realistic. Like we've got a new Chinese model that came out this week called Seed Dance.

Ejaaz:
And you're watching a Chinese teenager absolutely cook LeBron at the net right now.

Ejaaz:
And it looks very realistic, but there are some things that are a little janky.

Ejaaz:
It's a little quick. It's a little gritty. It's a little blurry.

Ejaaz:
Nothing of the fidelity and quality that we saw in this video.

Ejaaz:
I just I just don't believe it.

Josh:
Yeah. And it's it's amazing, right, that we can look this deeply at a video

Josh:
and still not know for sure whether it's AI or not.

Josh:
It's a testament to how good this is. And the new Chinese Model C dance that

Josh:
just came out yesterday, it makes it even better. That said,

Josh:
It does look like it's real. So maybe we'll go through the thought experiment,

Josh:
assuming that the ad is a real ad. It's a real celebrity.

Josh:
They're real products. There was a real production budget. It was actually filmed.

Josh:
Who is it for? What was it for? What are the intentions of it?

Josh:
That's the part that I'm still hung up on because Greg Brockman and the OpenAI

Josh:
team claimed that it's fake.

Josh:
But then what is it? And how is it so elaborately done?

Josh:
And I'm still kind of torn as to what the intention of this was.

Josh:
And I want it to be real, right?

Josh:
It's like it matches all the rumors of OpenAI's new device.

Josh:
It has the puck, it has the ear pods, but we're not sure.

Ejaaz:
I think the simple answer is it is real. OpenAI is working on a device like

Ejaaz:
this, but at the last minute, they had to hold it back because of a more boring

Ejaaz:
manufacturing obstacle, which is high bandwidth memory.

Ejaaz:
For those of you who have been tracking this in the AI infrastructure race,

Ejaaz:
memory has become the most expensive component to build a GPU or anything hardware related.

Ejaaz:
It's driven the cost of custom computers up by like 5X in the last like two

Ejaaz:
months, which is just an insane stat and rate of growth.

Ejaaz:
So if OpenAI had planned to build and release this Puck disk-like device,

Ejaaz:
which requires memory, obviously, they can't do it at scale because now the

Ejaaz:
cost of producing that device has gone up like twice.

Ejaaz:
So it wouldn't make any feasible means for them to release.

Ejaaz:
So they've kind of held back that advert until prices go down and then they

Ejaaz:
can like feasibly scale this up

Josh:
Yes this might be an interesting time to bring up that deal that they

Josh:
had between open ai and love from which

Josh:
was six and a half billion dollars to build a suite

Josh:
of devices and the alleged roadmap currently as it stands is we're expecting

Josh:
about five devices by the end of 2028 or at least according to a lot of these

Josh:
reports and interesting enough one of our favorite leakers who was reporting

Josh:
all this stuff who we actually went to go reference for this video the account is gone.

Josh:
And that was the source of a lot. There it is. Yeah, the account doesn't exist.

Josh:
My guy Pikachu, he was publishing all of these leaked Weibo chats from China

Josh:
about the supply chain and how the tooling was going for these devices.

Josh:
And it's totally gone. There's a lot of suspect things happening right now.

Josh:
But the idea and the leak was that there will be about five devices by the end of 2028.

Josh:
We have Dime, which is the product that allegedly we just saw.

Josh:
There's Gumdrop, which is the smart pen type thing. then

Josh:
there's perhaps smart glasses there's perhaps

Josh:
a home device a smart speaker there there will be some sort

Josh:
of suite and johnny ivan love from is responsible

Josh:
for designing and developing it and johnny i

Josh:
for those that don't know he's the guy that did all the apple products that

Josh:
you've ever used he has designed them basically so it's

Josh:
a huge deal and we actually just earned a little bit more information

Josh:
about it this morning which is open ai

Josh:
just gave kind of clear timelines for it and ijaz like you mentioned earlier

Josh:
there's a lot of supply chain issues going on right now and what people were

Josh:
hoping to be released the middle of this year and those leaks from our guy pokemon

Josh:
said it would hopefully come sometime this summer well the reality is now it's

Josh:
pushed back to february of 2027.

Josh:
Earliest so that means we have an entire year before

Josh:
this thing releases and that also kind of

Josh:
feeds into the idea that they wouldn't want to tease a device now that

Josh:
the reality is they can't actually make it until early next year so i'm still

Josh:
not totally buying the fake thing totally but yeah there is some truth to the

Josh:
fact that there won't be any device coming from open ai or any of these suites

Josh:
of devices until early next year and that we have confirmed by sam altman this morning.

Ejaaz:
Yeah, I think the intention was for OpenAI to release one or a set of consumer devices this year.

Ejaaz:
Sam's actually gone on record saying that this year was the planned year to

Ejaaz:
do it at the end of the year.

Ejaaz:
But I think they just simply ran into manufacturing issues, which is funny.

Ejaaz:
The supply chain is tough.

Ejaaz:
Dude, we discussed this on an earlier episode where we chatted about what the

Ejaaz:
OpenAI device might look like.

Ejaaz:
And one of the problems that we raised was the fact that OpenAI AI are good

Ejaaz:
at creating consumer software for AI, but they have no experience in the hardware game.

Ejaaz:
And that is a completely different beast that the likes of Apple,

Ejaaz:
Google, and a bunch of other companies can absolutely nail.

Ejaaz:
So we're starting to see the effects of that actually come into play here.

Ejaaz:
And I got to say, I'm not really surprised by this.

Ejaaz:
The other thing I want to say, okay, let's assume that they're building out

Ejaaz:
this device or those devices that you mentioned just now, Josh.

Ejaaz:
A few things need to be true for this device to be successful.

Ejaaz:
Let's just like assume what they are, right?

Ejaaz:
Number one, if it's earbuds, we're betting that like voice AI is going to be

Ejaaz:
Perfect by that point. You get advanced voice mode right now,

Ejaaz:
but it has a little bit of latency and it runs on the older model.

Ejaaz:
So when you release a new model from a Frontier AI lab, that's typically not

Ejaaz:
the model that is in your voice mode.

Ejaaz:
That's why most of the people just end up just typing or chatting to ChatGPT

Ejaaz:
or Claude or whatever that might be.

Ejaaz:
So they need to nail voice mode. The second thing, and this is like the biggest obstacle for me,

Ejaaz:
which probably moves us into the competition section of this

Ejaaz:
episode open ai doesn't have a ecosystem yet they have a chatbot and they'll

Ejaaz:
release these new devices but it needs to connect to one of these an iphone

Ejaaz:
it needs to connect to your android device and that is where the likes of apple

Ejaaz:
google or android can extract a lot of value that open ai needs maybe

Josh:
We don't know that for sure in theory at least the puck is large enough that

Josh:
it could if it has a battery a cpu and a cellular chip it can run on its own

Josh:
in theory and just ping the server. So we're not entirely sure.

Josh:
I think you made an interesting point about the competition and how it's kind

Josh:
of interesting how much pressure is on OpenAI for their first device to land.

Josh:
I mean, when you think about the comp, which is Apple devices,

Josh:
Apple and Steve Jobs, they were uniquely good at setting these expectations

Josh:
and then actually delivering on them.

Josh:
And basically nobody else in consumer hardware has ever pulled it off to that

Josh:
level before, including recent

Josh:
Apple, who promised Apple intelligence and just was not able to deliver.

Josh:
So there's a tremendous amount of pressure on getting it right the first time.

Josh:
And I would expect them to really put a lot of time and effort into making sure

Josh:
it goes about as good as possible.

Josh:
You mentioned what needs to happen on OpenAI side to actually make this device work.

Josh:
Well, the voice model is a huge thing. I think one of the things we can assume

Josh:
with like fairly high levels of conviction is this will be a voice first device.

Josh:
You will be able to speak with it. It will be able to speak back with you.

Josh:
And there were rumors earlier in the year that OpenAI was actually building

Josh:
up this division to launch better sound voice audio models this year.

Josh:
And I think that's a further signal that that's kind of the direction they're going to.

Josh:
Seems like they're certainly under a lot of pressure from competition.

Josh:
I mean, we have the Meta Ray-Bans, we have Apple that's aggressively trying

Josh:
to ship their new version of Siri, which is going to be basically what OpenAI

Josh:
hopes to do, but built into the iPhone, which is already where everyone is.

Josh:
So it seems like they are certainly in a race. And again, I think that the constraint

Josh:
is going to be the supply chain and how difficult it is to get memory.

Josh:
And we're seeing it with companies like Apple who haven't been able to ship

Josh:
the new MacBooks on time or the new M5 series ships on time because there's

Josh:
just so much supply constraint.

Josh:
And that may prove to be pretty difficult for OpenAI.

Ejaaz:
OpenAI is entering a battle where the odds of them winning it are really low.

Ejaaz:
I'm not saying they won't make it, but the chances are slim.

Josh:
They got to hit a home run.

Ejaaz:
They have to hit a home run. And also Apple has mentioned now explicitly that

Ejaaz:
they're going to be releasing AirPod Pros or their next generation. It's leaked.

Ejaaz:
It's going to have cameras and different sensors, very similar to what OpenAI's

Ejaaz:
earbud device is also going to have.

Ejaaz:
So you're going one-to-one, head-to-head with Apple.

Ejaaz:
And Sam has actually explicitly said that OpenAI's future biggest competition

Ejaaz:
is OpenAI versus Apple, not OpenAI versus all the other Frontier AI labs.

Ejaaz:
So he's intentionally going against this giant. You mentioned Google.

Ejaaz:
Google is releasing or supposed to be releasing Google Glass 2.0 this summer.

Ejaaz:
And Meta Ray-Bans, as much as you and I hate them,

Ejaaz:
have sold 2 million units so far. And they're actually scaling to 20 million

Ejaaz:
units by the end of this year.

Ejaaz:
So OpenAI is entering what is soon to be a very crowded field.

Ejaaz:
And it's not just like American startups that are working on this,

Ejaaz:
right? It's also startups, companies.

Ejaaz:
It's also like Chinese companies that have like kind of like been arguably years ahead of all of this.

Ejaaz:
We're looking at a picture of Huawei's free clip buds that kind of look very

Ejaaz:
similar to the concept that OpenAI is supposedly meant to be delivering.

Ejaaz:
So they're entering a crowded market here Josh I don't really see um how uh

Ejaaz:
it's a clear distinction that they're gonna win

Josh:
I was gonna say as we wrap I wanted to showcase this

Josh:
photo of the earbuds because they look surprisingly similar to

Josh:
exactly what we saw in that teaser video which it was

Josh:
just like okay were they actually just using Huawei earbuds was the video real

Josh:
but was it a hoax and I think that's probably where I'll land as we wrap up

Josh:
this episode is the video was real the actor was real the device may not have

Josh:
been i don't know it's so bizarre so yeah tell us i.

Ejaaz:
Mean you tell us please because like josh and i aren't are rarely kind of uh

Ejaaz:
unconvinced or like we're really split on things but like we are we're generally

Josh:
Don't have a good answer i don't know there's too

Josh:
many contradictory facts for it to be totally fake yeah and

Josh:
that's the thing that's bothering me is like if it's not an open ai ad then

Josh:
what is it because it was really well done and the devices are beautiful and

Josh:
it's very Johnny Ive coded in the essence of what the device would look and

Josh:
feel like so it's really I'm just left I'm left asking more questions than I

Josh:
have answers with this one yeah,

Josh:
leaves me very excited for what the future of these devices will look like.

Ejaaz:
If you're listening to this, if your name or pseudonym is Pikachu and you deleted

Ejaaz:
your account a few days ago because you leaked some of this,

Ejaaz:
please let us know in the comments anonymously, of course, whether this was real or not.

Ejaaz:
And for the observers and listeners of this, like, take a look at the video.

Ejaaz:
It's 35 seconds long. It looks incredibly realistic.

Ejaaz:
Am I just an idiot that has watched this video and has thought,

Ejaaz:
well, okay, this is, you know, I've just been one-shotted psychosis in AI,

Ejaaz:
or is it actually real? you tell me.

Ejaaz:
This has been a fun episode. I know it's been more on the speculative side,

Ejaaz:
but I think it's super important to try and nail some of these predictions and

Ejaaz:
take the clues that we are given.

Ejaaz:
My take is this was genuinely a real video and they had to hold back.

Ejaaz:
It's no qualms against them.

Ejaaz:
They're running into manufacturing supply constraints, but I think it's real.

Ejaaz:
And I think later on this year, we're going to see a bunch of devices being

Ejaaz:
announced formally from OpenAI.

Josh:
Well, one way or another, we will get to the bottom of this eventually.

Josh:
I have my head on the swivel.

Josh:
We are digging deeper every day and we'll keep you posted as we go.

Josh:
But I think the prompt at the end of this episode is really just like,

Josh:
is this real? Do you think this is real? And which parts of it are real?

Josh:
And what does the device actually look like? And why would they cancel it?

Josh:
There's a lot of questions. If you have any answers at all, if you want to do

Josh:
any investigative journaling or send it to a friend who happens to be an investigative

Josh:
journalist, that would be very much appreciated in our mission to getting to the bottom of this.

Josh:
But as always, thank you so much for watching this episode. We will have many

Josh:
more this week perhaps even on these crazy new video models that make it impossible

Josh:
to tell whether or not these videos are real um but yeah as always thank you

Josh:
so much for watching and we'll see you guys in the next one see you guys.