This week on the GeekWire Podcast, we’re featuring highlights from a live interview with Nathan Myhrvold, CEO of Intellectual Ventures and former chief technology officer at Microsoft.

Myhrvold worked at Microsoft from 1986 to 2000, where he laid the groundwork for Microsoft Research, recruited top computer scientists, and played a key role in shaping the company’s technology strategy.

Since leaving Microsoft, he has worked across fields including energy, science, physics, paleontology, photography, and high-tech cuisine.

In this conversation, recorded at Town Hall Seattle as part of GeekWire’s Microsoft@50 event, Myhrvold shares his thoughts on the rise of AI, his longtime collaboration with Bill Gates, the future of energy, the secrets of Microsoft’s success, and what’s next in his Modernist Cuisine book series.

Listen below, and continue reading for highlights from Myhrvold’s remarks, edited for context and clarity.

On predicting Microsoft’s rise: In 1987 I told [Bill Gates] that Microsoft would be the most valuable company on Earth, and he’d be the richest man in the world, and it would take 10 years. And I was totally wrong. It took three… I had not figured that Sam Walton would die.

On Bill Gates’ brutally honest feedback: I remember Bill said, ‘Well, you’re new here, so I’ll forgive the stupidity of your remark.’ That was the type of supportive feedback [that he gave].

On Microsoft’s willingness to admit mistakes: They would admit they were wrong. For some people, especially big-shot CEOs, that’s really hard. But for Bill, it was more embarrassing to not admit it.

On the boom-and-bust fashion cycles of AI: AI is like clothes — it goes through cycles of being in fashion and out of fashion… When speech recognition became successful, they called it ‘speech recognition’ — that used to be AI, until it worked.

On where AI stands today — and how far it still has to go: Today, [AI] is a lot like personal computers in the 1980s… good for a bunch of things… but its potential is enormously higher. And that will require a whole lot of work by a whole lot of folks.

On the ‘miracles’ still needed for human-level AI: AI doesn’t yet have the ability to create new abstract concepts and reason about them. That’s at least one miracle that needs to be figured out. I’ve variously thought there are three to five miracles. It could happen tomorrow — or maybe it already happened tonight, and they just haven’t told us.

Why he’s not losing sleep over AI doom scenarios: Humans love really scary, nasty villains that aren’t actually real. Sauron, the Night King — those weren’t really going to get us. AI overlords destroying us is very similar… it’s a story you can get excited about, but we all know there’s no AI overlord outside that’s going to get us.”

On energy use, AI, and the global demand for more power: “The average American uses about 12 kilowatts — it’s like you had 12 toasters running 24/7… The poor world wants to get rich, and the rich world wants to do more things that require power, like AI.

On using AI to analyze thousands of pastry recipes: I’m writing a big, 2,500-page book on pastry… And I use AI in that. I’ll say, ‘I think this assumption isn’t necessary,’ and ChatGPT will always say, ‘You’re absolutely right.’ Oh my God, it’s learned how to butter me up.

On the surprising reactions to his latest food project: I’m writing a big, 2,500-page book on pastry… Literally, last week, I said to someone, ‘I’m writing a big book on pastry,’ and they immediately said, ‘It must be hard writing on pastry.’ And I didn’t know if they were pulling my leg or what.

Subscribe to GeekWire in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.

Audio editing by Curt Milton.

On this episode of the GeekWire Podcast, we talk with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella about the company’s 50th anniversary, and where it’s headed from here.

Plus, highlights from Microsoft’s 50th anniversary event in Redmond, which featured a rare joint appearance by Nadella alongside former leaders Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer.

The day also reflected Microsoft’s role in an increasingly complex global landscape, with a CNBC interview focusing in part on the impact of tariffs on the company and the global economy, and a protest outside the event condemning the use of the company’s technologies to support Israel in the ongoing war in Gaza.

Subscribe to GeekWire in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.

Related coverage:

• Inside Microsoft’s 50th: Iconic moments, strong memories, and the realities of the outside world
• Interview: Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella on the tech giant’s 50th anniversary — and what’s next
• Gates, Ballmer, Nadella and Copilot: Microsoft CEOs past and present engage in podcast chat with AI
• Inside the Microsoft Archives: How the tech giant preserves, shares, and learns from its history

Microsoft@50 is an independent GeekWire editorial project supported by Accenture.

More: Microsoft@50

[Update, Monday, March 31: Amazon’s Alexa+ Early Access page is now live, and the company confirmed that the new Alexa is starting to roll out “to a small number of customers, and will be ramping over the next few weeks,” with the goal of getting Alexa+ to million of customers in May.]

This week on the GeekWire Podcast: A conversation with Daniel Rausch, Amazon’s vice president of Alexa and Echo, recorded at the company’s Seattle headquarters.

Rausch explained the company’s vision for Alexa+, Amazon’s next-generation voice assistant, in advance of its upcoming rollout through an early access program. Alexa+ promises more fluid, natural conversations, integrating with a wider range of services and devices — including the ability to act autonomously on a user’s behalf.

Alexa “has been completely re-architected around large language models,” Rausch said, describing the company’s shift from the rules-based systems that powered earlier versions of the assistant.

It’s a significant upgrade for Amazon’s longtime voice assistant, judging from the live demos that Rausch walked me through before and after the podcast recording.

In one example, Alexa+ acted as an “agent” by booking a dishwasher repair through Thumbtack. It gathered details via voice, filled out the web form step-by-step behind the scenes, and sent a request — showing how it could autonomously complete tasks online and notify the user as it progressed.

Still, it remains to be seen how much value people will find in using their voice for these tasks, versus the familiar simplicity of a smartphone app or web browser.

And at a fundamental level, Amazon is playing catch-up with OpenAI’s ChatGPT and many other AI chatbots in the world of conversational artificial intelligence.

“Alexa is not a chatbot. Alexa is Alexa,” Rausch said, speaking optimistically about how the new Alexa+ will be received. “We think customers are going to love it. … One of the biggest things they’ll love about it is how much they can do with it.”

He also addressed key business questions about Alexa+, including Amazon’s pricing strategy, its rollout to third-party platforms, and how the company hopes to differentiate itself in a competitive AI landscape.

Listen to the conversation above, and subscribe to GeekWire in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.

Related links:

• What Alexa’s AI upgrade means for Amazon’s business and Alexa users
• Amazon’s new Alexa+ uses generative AI to personalize conversations and automate tasks

Audio editing by Curt Milton

This week on the GeekWire Podcast: A conversation with Microsoft President Brad Smith, on stage at GeekWire’s Microsoft@50 event this week at Town Hall Seattle, discussing the company’s anniversary, the key issues for Microsoft today, and what’s next for the industry and the world.

Smith traced the company’s history from the early days of the personal computer to Microsoft’s present-day focus on empowering people — quoting what Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella would say to recruits: “If you want to be cool, go work for Apple. If you want to make other people cool, come work for Microsoft.”

He offered his perspective on Microsoft’s three CEOs — Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, and Satya Nadella — saying that they share a trait that he believes defines great leadership: curiosity.

Smith also addressed tough topics, including Microsoft’s antitrust history, and ongoing geopolitical uncertainty and tensions, which were underscored by a protest at the event over the use of the company’s technologies to support Israel in the ongoing war in Gaza. (Read more in our recap here.)

Discussing economic pressures facing Washington state, Smith spoke out against a new slate of tax proposals, saying that he fears they could hinder the innovation and job growth that have contributed to the state’s success.

Listen below, and continue reading for key quotes and highlights.

Microsoft’s early mission: “A computer on every desk and in every home running Microsoft software — yes. But the notion was that you could take these devices and make them useful and affordable to everyone.”

Surviving antitrust: “My conversations with Bill would usually start by him telling me that I was about to destroy the company, and then he would be supportive.”

Learning from failure in diplomacy: “Part of what it took to put all those really challenging things behind us… was to fail gracefully with people so you could put the pieces back together again.”

The shared trait of Microsoft’s three CEOs: “All three of them embody a common attribute that I have found to be present in most truly great leaders… and that’s curiosity.”

Current tax proposals in Washington state: “I have, frankly, never been more worried about the future of the tech sector in Washington state, as I am today.”

The symbiotic relationship with the state: “You can’t have a healthy company without a healthy community, but you can’t have a healthy community without healthy business. And that, I believe, is at stake.”

Microsoft’s global role: “We want the people of Ireland and South Africa and Poland and elsewhere to know that they can count on us, and we will be a source of stability even in what can sometimes feel like an unstable time.”

On the importance of product builders: “If truth be told, the people that matter the most are those who design and build the products. Which has never been me.”

The challenge ahead: “The challenge of year 51 is the same challenge it has been for all 50 years: you’ve got to win a year, a year at a time.”

Listen to the full conversation above, or subscribe to GeekWire in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.

Related Links

• Microsoft@50 recap: Company faithful mark first 50 years and look to future at GeekWire event
• Microsoft president: Proposed Washington state business taxes would weaken tech sector

Links discussed in the podcast intro:

• Using AI to uncover allegations in the JFK files of the CIA secretly funding a series of spy novels to influence public opinion in the 1960s.
• Fireballs, foxholes, and cryogenic suspension: Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman’s greatest quips

This week on the GeekWire Podcast, we discuss the big real estate technology news of the week: Rocket Companies, the mortgage, real estate and personal finance platform, is buying Redfin, the Seattle-based tech-powered real estate company — a longtime disrupter in the world of buying and selling homes. 

Joining us to assess the implications are Stephanie Reid-Simons, who oversees the news team at RealEstateNews.com as a senior vice president with the news site; and Tim Ellis, a former Redfin market analyst who’s a podcaster and blogger, and a veteran of Seattle-area startups including Porch, Moz, and Glowforge.

Also on the show: Microsoft brings its Copilot AI technology to gaming, but can Microsoft prove this is more than Xbox meets Clippy? We’ll consider that question in the final segment with Thomas Wilde, an independent video-game journalist and editor who writes about games for GeekWire, Hard Drive, and other publications.

Join us at Microsoft@50 at Town Hall Seattle this Thursday, March 20. 

Subscribe to GeekWire in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.

For many years, Amazon has been trying to put its Alexa voice assistant at the center of the smart home. But right now, Alexa in its current state can seem downright dumb at times. 

And for anyone who has used voice interaction mode in popular generative AI chatbots, the obvious question has become, why the heck can’t Alexa talk to me like ChatGPT does? 

But now it will — or at least that’s what Amazon is promising.  

Amazon’s Alexa+ is an upgraded version of its AI-powered assistant, promising more natural conversations, improved context awareness across smart devices, and more seamless and proactive integration into daily routines. Alexa+ is rolling out in the next few weeks, starting on newer Echo devices.

This week on the GeekWire Podcast: Michael Levin and Josh Lowitz of Consumer Intelligence Research Partners (CIRP) discuss the Alexa and Echo business, and what the Alexa+ service means for the company and Alexa users. CIRP studies consumer behavior to provide insights for investors and industry leaders.

Related links and coverage

• CIRP: Amazon Report on Substack. (Check out CIRP’s Apple Report, as well.)
• CIRP’s Amazon Report: Alexa, Should I Pay for Alexa+? Or Get a New Echo?
• GeekWire: Amazon’s new Alexa+ uses generative AI to personalize conversations and automate tasks
• Amazon: Introducing Alexa+, the next generation of Alexa
  

Top takeaways

The state of the Alexa/Echo business:

• Echo smart speakers have a dominant market share, around 75%, but growth has slowed considerably after an initial rapid adoption period, according to CIRP research.
• Right now, the primary use cases for Echo devices are still playing music/audio and basic question answering, rather than more advanced home automation or shopping tasks.
• Around 30% of Amazon Prime members own an Echo device, while only 12% of non-Prime members do, indicating the devices are more popular with Amazon’s core customer base, according to CIRP research.
• Amazon says the total number of Alexa-powered devices globally is around 600 million, but that includes third-party devices beyond just Echo speakers.
• Alexa+ is a major upgrade for Amazon’s voice assistant, but Alexa is playing catch-up. Some of the core features in the upgrade are table stakes in the larger world of generative AI these days.

Some of the new capabilities with Alexa+:

• Alexa+ is expected to communicate more naturally and maintain continuous conversations, rather than requiring users to repeatedly say “Alexa” or other wake words.
• Amazon says Alexa+ will be able to navigate online services, discover relevant providers, and complete tasks like arranging home repairs or ordering food with little or no user intervention.
• The new Alexa can also understand and respond to the user’s tone of voice, adjusting its responses and remembering the context of conversations across different devices.
• Alexa+ offers a persistent memory for important details like frequent flyer numbers, restaurant names, family recipes, or food preferences among different people.
• It will be able to create complex Alexa routines from voice instructions, without using the Alexa app.

(See Amazon’s list of 50 things to try with Alexa+ for more.)

The business model for Alexa+:

• Alexa+ will be available for free to all Amazon Prime members. This suggests Amazon’s primary goal is to drive Prime membership, rather than generate direct revenue from Alexa+.
• For non-Prime members, Alexa+ will cost $19.99 per month. This pricing seems high (compared to $14.99/month for the larger Prime bundle, which will include Alexa+. It’s unlikely that many non-Prime customers would be willing to pay that much just for Alexa+.
• Older devices not compatible with Alexa+ represents a significant portion of the current Echo installed base, which could drive hardware upgrades among people interested in the new AI capabilities.

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This week on the Geekwire Podcast: Google prepares to say goodbye to Seattle’s Fremont neighborhood, we get ready to say farewell to Skype; and we take a quantum leap with one of Microsoft’s top technical leaders in the field: theoretical physicist Chetan Nayak, technical fellow and corporate vice of quantum hardware for the company.

Related stories and links:

• End of an era: Microsoft to shut down Skype, shifting users to Teams, 14 years after $8.5B deal
• Microsoft quantum breakthrough promises to usher in the next era of computing in ‘years, not decades’
• Amazon’s new quantum chip joins race to enable next era of computing
• Google sets long-term plan to exit Seattle’s Fremont neighborhood, consolidate in South Lake Union
• Tech investors on why AI makes this a great moment for startups — with one caveat

Subscribe to GeekWire in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.

With GeekWire’s Taylor Soper and Todd Bishop; Audio editing by Curt Milton

This week on the GeekWire Podcast, we discuss Microsoft’s quantum breakthrough; a Washington state bill that targets Uber and Lyft surge pricing; the latest update to the GeekWire 200 ranking of Pacific Northwest startups; and Amazon’s move to take creative control of the James Bond franchise.

Related Links

• Microsoft quantum breakthrough promises to usher in the next era of computing in ‘years, not decades’
• GeekWire 200 update: Here are the hot tech startups moving up our list for Q1 2025
• Lawmakers take aim at Uber and Lyft with bill targeting surge pricing after big events
• Amazon MGM Studios strikes deal for 007, takes over creative control of James Bond film franchise

With GeekWire co-founder Todd Bishop and editor Taylor Soper. 

Listen above or subscribe to GeekWire in Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen.

It has been a wild few weeks and an eventful few months in AI: DeepSeek, OpenAI, Stargate, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, Salesforce, Google, Elon Musk, and much more.

With the DeepSeek advances in particular, there’s now a much greater focus on what it takes to train AI models, and the importance of open-source AI.

This week on the GeekWire Podcast, we talk with Ali Farhadi, CEO of the Allen Institute for AI (Ai2), the Seattle-based nonprofit that has been innovating in open-source AI since long before it was popular.

“We’re celebrating this moment as a proof point that open source will win,” Farhadi said of DeepSeek’s breakthroughs, citing the importance of the open approach in allowing researchers to build on each other’s progress.

Elements of DeepSeek’s approach followed in the footsteps of Ai2’s innovations — including reinforcement learning with verifiable results (RLVR) from Ai2’s Tulu 3. Similarly, Ai2 is now learning from DeepSeek’s open-source project.

“If the U.S. wants to maintain its edge … we have only one way, and that is to promote open approaches, promote open-source solutions,” Farhadi added. “Because no matter how many dollars you’re investing in an ecosystem, without communal, global efforts, you’re not going to be as fast.” 

Ai2 had some news of its own this week: releasing its first on-device AI app leveraging a version of its open-source OLMoE model that can run offline on Apple iOS devices, promising new levels of security and privacy.

After developing more than 100 different variations of its AI models over the past year, Farhadi explained, the nonprofit institute is expanding its focus this year to increasingly apply those models to real-world, high-impact problems — starting with Ai2’s role in the Cancer AI Alliance led by Seattle’s Fred Hutch Cancer Center.

A computer vision specialist, Farhadi founded and led Ai2 spinout Xnor.ai as CEO, and sold the AI startup to Apple in 2020 in an estimated $200 million deal that represents one of the institute’s biggest commercial successes to date.

After leading machine learning efforts at Apple, Farhadi returned to Ai2 as its CEO in July 2023. He is also a professor at the University of Washington’s Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering. He cites the collaboration between major companies and institutions as one reason the region is well-positioned in AI.

Related Coverage and Links: 

• Allen Institute for AI’s new open-source iOS AI app runs on-device for secure, private, offline use
• Ai2 Blog: OLMoE, meet iOS
• Allen Institute for AI challenges DeepSeek on key benchmarks with big new open-source AI model
• Allen Institute for AI’s new model points to items in images, aims to make bigger point in industry
• New York Times: An Industry Insider Drives an Open Alternative to Big Tech’s A.I.
• Ken Yeung, “The AI Economy” newsletter: Ai2: The AI House That Paul Allen Built

Listen above, and subscribe in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy sounded more bullish than ever about the potential for artificial intelligence on the company’s earnings call this week.

“We think virtually every application that we know of today is going to be reinvented with AI inside of it, and with inference being a core building block, just like compute and storage and database,” Jassy said. He added that “AI represents, for sure, the biggest opportunity since cloud, and probably the biggest technology shift and opportunity in business since the internet.”

But as cloud giants Amazon, Microsoft, and Google spend record sums to build out their capacity for artificial intelligence models and services, the current realities of customer behavior underscore the risk in those bets.

The basics — storage, compute, etc. — still represent the bulk of demand.

“The big things, the valuable things, the things that drive the world, in a computing sense, are also blessedly the boring things,” says Corey Quinn, the chief cloud economist at The Duckbill Group, the host of the AWS Morning Brief and Screaming in the Cloud podcasts, and the curator of Last Week in AWS, a weekly newsletter.  

That’s not to say there isn’t a core role for AI in the future. But amid all the buzz about AI and the hand-wringing over DeepSeek, the vision expressed by the likes of Jassy and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella doesn’t reflect the current state of the cloud for most customers, at least not at the scale all the hype would suggest.

That’s one of the takeaways on this episode of the GeekWire Podcast. Apart from his newsletter and podcasts, Quinn’s day job involves helping customers understand and manage their AWS bills. He uses those insights to provide a behind-the-scenes glimpse and a reality check on the state of the cloud market today.

RELATED LINKS

• Amazon on pace for $100B+ in yearly capex; Jassy expects cost efficiencies to drive AI demand
• Amazon’s quarterly profits soar to a record $20 billion, but cloud growth comes up short
• Platformonomics: Seattle-area angel investor Charles Fitzgerald (former Microsoft and VMware exec) breaks down Amazon’s capital expenditures

Subscribe to GeekWire in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.

Audio editing by Curt Milton.

In advance of the release of his new memoir, Source Code: My Beginnings, Bill Gates sat down with GeekWire for a wide-ranging conversion on topics including his extraordinary upbringing, the key people and influences in his life, the remarkable circumstances that led to his work in software, and his outlook on the world today.

We’re presenting this interview in two parts, this one focusing on Gates’ new book and his life, and his thoughts on where the world is headed from here.

On an upcoming episode, as part of our Microsoft @ 50 series, we’ll hear his thoughts on the evolution of the company that he and Paul Allen started five decades ago, opportunities in AI, and what’s next for Microsoft and the industry.

Listen to Part 1 of the interview on this episode of the GeekWire Podcast, see video highlights below, and continue reading for edited excerpts from the conversation.

What do you hope people will take away from this book, and from your story of growing up?

Bill Gates: Well, I was unbelievably lucky. I had a lot of fun talking about my mom, who was amazing, and I had a complicated relationship with her that somehow motivated me. My dad, I have such incredible admiration for the example he set. There’s a lot of times in my early career where he helps out, and I learned a lot from him.

And then the two other people who are prominent in this phase of my life are Kent Evans, who tragically dies [in a mountaineering accident] when I’m in 11th grade, and then Paul, who was two years ahead of me at Lakeside, but then after Kent is killed, [Paul] comes back and helps me with the scheduling program, and we got very intense in terms of, OK, we’re going to start a company.

As you acknowledge at the end of the book, you and Kent were destined to do something together as adults, to work together. Do you ever stop and think what Microsoft, or whatever you would have created, might have been like had he lived?

Gates: It’s hard to know, but Kent did a couple of things for me. Even in eighth and ninth grade, he was thinking, OK, should we be ambassadors, generals, or CEOs? And I was like, what? Okay, which of those jobs is more fun? Who makes more money? … He got me reading Fortune magazine.

He had this very out-in-the-world thing. He was getting good grades across the board, he was in the independent study where I was still kind of in this [mindset of], hey, act like I don’t care except in math and not work as hard. But he was very intense. And so, he was by far my closest friend. …

Paul, in his own way, was very unique. Paul was the one reading about Moore’s Law and telling me this exponential improvement thing. I was like, “Paul, do you know that’s mind-blowing? Everybody should be running around shouting because that means computing will be free.” I got the benefit of Kent’s unique thinking and Paul’s unique thinking.

Paul was also the person who introduced you to LSD.

Gates: That’s right. He got me drunk. He gave me pot. This guy was a problem. Jimi Hendrix, I mean, he made me listen to that music. [Laughter.]

I love it because you’ve got multiple forces in your life with the people around you. Your mom was this stabilizing force with high expectations. Your dad would ask, “Are you organized?” as his way of saying, do you have your life in order? And Paul would ask, “Are you experienced?”

Gates: Paul loved handing me challenges. So, the original thing where that computer terminal is there, and people are befuddled by it. I had done so well on a math exam that Paul was literally the one who said, “Oh, yeah. You think you’re so smart. Can you figure this thing out?” And kind of drew me into it, and I brought Kent along.

What has it been like for you to revisit these years?

Gates: It’s not my normal thing to be looking backwards. I mean, even when Microsoft would have our 10th anniversary, I’d be like “Hey, we’ve got to survive and move faster than everybody else.” And this looking backwards thing, I don’t know. But because I’m turning 70, Microsoft turning 50, the foundation is 25, and my dad would have been 100, it actually has been very interesting making sure I explain all these different opportunities I got.

Your parents, Bill Sr. and Mary Gates, set a very high bar in parenting.

Gates: Well, I couldn’t have been luckier in terms of both my mother and father. …

My parents encouraged me to talk to adults. My social skills were slow to develop. I was much better at talking to adults than I was even to most of my peer group. That comes from my parents having lots of events at their house with friends or related to my dad’s career. That was invaluable. I would ask some questions. The way my dad would share lawsuits and explain, “OK, this is what antitrust means,” it’s like, oh, wow, so interesting. 

And yet, I think you would acknowledge, you were an extremely difficult kid to parent at times.

Gates: My parents, there was a period of about three or four years where they were befuddled …

That led to them having me see a therapist, Dr. Cressey, which that also worked out super well, because he, over a period of a year, and he did it in a very clear way, said, “You’re wasting your energy fighting your parents. They love you. Therefore, you win and that isn’t what you should be putting your energy into.” And he was very nice to me. He gave me an IQ test. He had me read all these books. And I was like, “Oh, God, you’re right.”

By the time I was 13 or so, it did improve quite a bit.

You write, “If I were growing up today, I’m sure that I would be diagnosed on the autism spectrum.” Why was it important for you to write that or to say that publicly? 

Gates: Well, I think it’s a level of honesty there, that when I would do a 200-page Delaware report, and I would turn that in, and everybody else’s report is 10 pages … it’s like, wow, I am different.

In social situations, OK, who do I sit with? And how do people perceive this thing? And I’m miscuing, or even that when I’m in thought, still to this day, and people give me a hard time, when I’m thinking hard, I’ll start rocking, which is a stimming, comforting behavior. …

And I do think it’s valuable for anybody who’s different to see that I was able to take that and make it a strength.

The level of candor was one of the things that struck me about this book, but of course, this is just the first installment in your memoirs. Do you think you’ll be able to keep up this level of introspection and self-criticism in the next installments about Microsoft and beyond? 

Gates: Well, we’ll see. One luxury of hyper success should be that you’re willing to admit your shortcomings.

And the whole evolution of how I manage people, there’s a lot of mea culpa in that I managed other people like I manage myself, which is work harder, be tougher and don’t waste time. If you know something, move on to the next thing. And it works for me, managing me, but it only works with a very narrow set of other people who are like me. 

So that limits the people you can have. And over time, I recognized that. I mean, I was so ridiculous.

We’re at a time of transition with the U.S. presidential administration. The Gates Foundation itself is in a time of transition, with you taking over in the sole chair role, and with Melinda [French Gates] departing. Can you give me a sense for where your thoughts are these days in terms of the broader world?

Gates: My general impression is that all of the innovation that I get to work on — whether it’s Microsoft, OpenAI, AI things — is going faster and better than I expected. … Innovation is going in climate, in software, and global health and agriculture is going faster than I expected. … The world that we’re delivering that innovation into is a less stable, more polarized world than I would have expected. And that’s somewhat of a surprise to me.

Has working on this book changed how you’re thinking about your own life from here, and how you’re going to continue, and ultimately finish this story of Bill Gates on Planet Earth?

Gates: Well, turning 70 is stunning to me, because in a certain sense, there were no old people in the [early days of] personal computers. … Now, I feel like I still have some ability to understand and even help guide these things a little bit. It’s so different than when I was young, thinking older people really could never figure out the important things. 

I probably have, with a little bit of luck, 20 years where I can play an active role. And so, in my full-time job, which is the foundation job, Mark Suzman and I and the team, over the course of this year, will talk about what our goals are for the rest of this time, for the next 20 years. …

The climate work, there’ll be some policy things that are less favorable. But even so, I think the theory of innovation, making cheap, clean technology is one of the few things that survives the [reduced] willingness to subsidize.The [Inflation Reduction Act] has a lot of good stuff in it. We’ll see how much of that ends up being preserved.

But, yeah, when you write a book like this, it does make you think, OK, boy, I have a limited amount of time. How do I want to focus my time? Which goals do I want to work on? And I want to take the money that I’m lucky enough to have from Microsoft and have the foundation spend it to the greatest impact possible.

Subscribe to GeekWire in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.

This week on the GeekWire Podcast, we dive deep into DeepSeek, the AI project shaking up the tech world, to better understand the underlying technical advances and the long-term implications for the industry.

Joining us is Bill Howe, an associate professor at the University of Washington’s Information School and the co-founding director of the UW Center for Responsible AI Systems and Experiences, among other UW roles.

DeepSeek, an open-source AI model from a Chinese company, grabbed attention for its ability to rival the performance of top AI reasoning models with a stripped-down technique for post-training.

These capabilities were previously believed to require much more complex and resource-intensive methods. In that way, it illustrates the potential for more efficient ways of creating powerful AI models.

Overall, Howe said, the trend promises to help democratize access to AI models of varying sizes.

“That will accelerate the move into an agentic era where we have agents working on our behalf, scurrying around,” Howe predicted. “There’s a lot of downsides to that, potentially, but there’s also potentially a lot of upsides. But I think you’ll see this year that come to fruition.”

Related stories:

• DeepSeek’s new model shows that AI expertise might matter more than compute in 2025
• Allen Institute for AI challenges DeepSeek on key benchmarks with big new open-source AI model
• Microsoft CEO says AI use will ‘skyrocket’ with more efficiency amid craze over DeepSeek
• Who will win in AI? DeepSeek’s breakthrough stirs questions around value capture

My colleague John Cook and I open the show from the Microsoft campus in Redmond, after getting an inside look at the company’s history for an upcoming installment in our Microsoft @ 50 series.

John marvels at the size of the campus redevelopment, which is still under way. Listen to the end to hear our first-hand experience with Microsoft’s vast parking garage when we attempt to leave.

Also on our agenda this week: Amazon’s lawsuit against Washington state over a Washington Post public records request related to Amazon’s Project Kuiper satellite venture, and what it says about the conflicts inherent to Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ ownership of the paper.

Related story: Bezos vs. Bezos: Amazon sues WA state over Washington Post request for Kuiper records

Audio editing by Curt Milton.

This week on the GeekWire Podcast, we delve into the Stargate Project announcement by OpenAI, Oracle and Softbank, in conjunction with President Trump, and assess the implications for OpenAI’s relationship with Microsoft.

We explain what Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella really meant with his CNBC zinger about Microsoft’s capital investments, and consider how Elon Musk’s involvement in the new administration could play out in the tech industry. 

Plus, we discuss Madrona’s big new funds and the potential impact on startup activity in the Pacific NW, and find a revealing piece of Microsoft history on an old CD-ROM.

Subscribe to GeekWire in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.

Related stories: 

• Microsoft and OpenAI tweak the terms of their cloud deal, enabling $500B Stargate AI project
• ‘I’m good for my $80 billion’: What Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella really meant by his Stargate zinger
• Madrona raises $770M for new funds — here’s what the Seattle VC firm is betting on

Cascade PBS: The rise of Bluesky, a not-so-Seattle-based social media company

CNBC: Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella on $500B Stargate project: Our partnership with OpenAI continues

Microsoft @ 50: ‘The Road Ahead’ at 30: What Bill Gates’ classic book about the future says about the world today

• Learn more and register here for our Microsoft @ 50 event, March 20 in Seattle.

With GeekWire’s Todd Bishop and John Cook. Edited and produced by Curt Milton.

This week on the GeekWire Podcast: An inside look at Amazon’s classic process for strategic thinking and decision-making, with a former Amazon product and technology director who has written a new book about the documents used by the company to determine its direction. What can others learn from its approach?

Plus, we discuss this moment in Amazon’s history, as employees return to the office five days a week; and check in on the state of the Seattle startup world.

Our guest is Marcelo Calbucci, a serial entrepreneur and longtime Seattle startup community leader who has worked for both Amazon and Microsoft. His new book is The PRFAQ Framework: Adapting Amazon’s Innovation Framework to Work for You. It’s available in hardback and Kindle.

Calbucci has also created a giveaway contest for GeekWire readers and listeners. Enter here for a chance to win a copy of the book.

Listen below, and subscribe to GeekWire in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. Continue reading for highlights.

PRFAQ stands for Press Release and Frequently Asked Questions. The idea is to imagine the future, and work backwards from there. It’s also known as a six-pager.

In the book, Calbucci offers these five principles for the PRFAQ:

1. Customer-centric: It starts from the customer, and it captures their needs, pain points, or desires. It captures how customers are being (under)served today, who they are, and what matters to them.

2. Aspirational: It’s an aspirational vision that is feasible, viable, usable, and valuable.

3. Clear, concise, and coherent: It presents the project in its best possible light. It’s easy to understand by the people involved in the project, and it’s logical.

4. Truth-seeking: It is a mechanism to learn and discover. It’s not a way to manipulate opinions or force ideas onto people. It evolves at each round of review, improving its accuracy.

5. A strategic decision-making tool: It’s a tool to decide if the team should pursue a project, why, and when.

“I think the biggest value in the PRFAQ is not the document itself,” Calbucci said. “It’s the process of creating the document and everyone that gets involved in that.”

Although he saw the value of the process at Amazon, he noticed that it wasn’t widely adopted outside the company. He learned that when people tried to use the PRFAQ process at other companies, they faced resistance because the people involved didn’t understand how to write or use it effectively.

That’s where the book comes in. The idea was to provide a resource for understanding and implementing the PRFAQ process, to help not only the people creating the PRFAQs, but also others participating in the process.

What about AI? While artificial intelligence can be valuable, in general, for research and basic summarization, etc., the PRFAQ demonstrates the value of the human process of creation and collaboration.

“The problem with generative AI is that it takes away from your thinking,” Calbucci said. “When AI is doing the writing for you, then you’re not doing the reasoning and the thinking, and that doesn’t help you find the truth in an opportunity, or a product, or a business.”

Listen to the conversation above, and see theprfaq.com for more on the book.

Audio editing and production by Curt Milton.

This week on the GeekWire Podcast, Seattle-area software developer and AI entrepreneur Patrick Husting of Ghostwriter AI and the Equestrian App returns to talk about the evolution of artificial intelligence over the past two years, how people are using the technology today, and where things are headed next.

“The real value in this AI technology is when we allow it to connect to things on its own,” he says. “I think in 2025 is when all the experiments are going to start.”

He explains, “People and businesses or entrepreneurs are going to give access to that fundamental operating system layer, and then we’ll either have really good things happen or really bad things happen.”

A few points from the conversation:

• Husting talked about the importance of creating AI experiences that meet user needs, rather than just optimizing for maximum usage as he feels Microsoft appears to be doing with Copilot, for example.
• He is seeing distinct model differences and preferences among certain user groups, like attorneys favoring Anthropic’s AI models. OpenAI’s ChatGPT has a strong brand recognition. The latest version of Grok, from Elon Musk’s xAI, has a less robotic and more personable style than ChatGPT.
• This will be a pivotal year for AI, with new, more powerful models and capabilities being introduced, creating significant opportunities for entrepreneurs, but also potential risks if not managed properly.
• AI will enable managing multiple agents or AI-powered tasks simultaneously, similar to controlling different characters in a video game. This will require new user interfaces to manage these AI agents effectively.
• AI will start to integrate deeper into control systems and core operating systems, which raises concerns about the potential for AI to “cheat” or make unintended changes. Implementing proper safeguards will be crucial.

Related links

• Can Microsoft avoid the ghost of Clippy? Familiar theme emerges in Copilot rollout for Office apps
• ‘Ghostwriter’ in the machine: How this software developer is integrating AI into work and life
• Microsoft Word gets ChatGPT integration with new ‘Ghostwriter’ third-party add-in
• WSJ: Microsoft Is Forcing Its AI Assistant on People—and Making Them Pay
• Elon Musk’s xAI Launches Standalone Grok App
• Boy Genius Report: ChatGPT o1 hacked a chess game to cheat against a better opponent

Listen to the full conversation above, and subscribe to GeekWire in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.

Edited and produced by Curt Milton.

What happens when you mix modern AI with a piece of vintage technology and the musical stylings of a very amateur guitarist? You might be surprised.

That’s the subject of this week’s GeekWire Podcast. My fun holiday project, revisiting a favorite gadget from my youth, illustrated some bigger themes about the AI tools that have emerged in the past two years, and the role they can play in life and work.

Listen below, or subscribe on Apple or Spotify. Continue reading for the backstory.

Reflecting on the past year — and especially everything we’ve seen, heard and experienced in the realm of artificial intelligence — I keep coming back to something that Microsoft’s chief technology officer, Kevin Scott, said in May.

“You really want to focus on things that have made the transition from impossible to merely difficult,” Scott said at the company’s Build developer conference.

He was talking to engineers and technologists about the tools and solutions they dream up and build, but the message also resonated with me as an everyday user who likes to come up with new ways to apply what all those smart people create, to change and hopefully improve my own work and life.

Over the past year, this has ranged from simple stuff like using AI to figure out the year of a vintage concert poster, or creating fun nametags for my extended family, to bigger things at work, like dramatically improving the process of organizing and retrieving information with tools like Otter.ai and Google’s Notebook LM.

AI is literally helping me sleep better at night, thanks to a Groundlight AI system on my back porch that keeps raccoons out of our house by accurately identifying them and turning on flashing lights and a radio to scare them away.

I’ve also dabbled in other forms of AI, including music. One of our most popular and fun GeekWire Podcast episodes of the past year was our attempt to use AI to create a jingle for our “My AI” segment on the show.

All this was in the back of my mind when my brother brought a blast from the past to our family Christmas gathering: “Dr. Rhythm,” aka the Boss DR-110, circa 1983.

It’s an electronic drum synthesizer, about the size of an old video cassette, with buttons, knobs and a 2.5-inch by 1.5-inch black-and-white screen. You place dots on a grid to program beats. It also plays preprogrammed rhythms.

My brother let me bring the Dr. Rhythm home to Seattle with me. I’ve been having fun this week playing my guitar along with some of its classic rhythms.

As a piece of technology, it’s so rudimentary by today’s standards. Smartphone apps can do this and much more. But hearing those familiar beats took me back to that era. It made me remember how exciting it was to make music with this gadget — not unlike my feeling today when I experience AI doing something amazing.

You can probably guess where I’m headed. If there’s anything that qualifies as previously impossible, it would be transforming the sound of me plunking around on the guitar into a worthwhile tune.

So after recording myself playing guitar with one of Dr. Rhythm’s preset beats (Rhythm 5 on Bank D, for any fellow Dr. Rhythm aficionados), I went back and found a simple 35-second clip with some basic strumming. I uploaded that to Udio.

Listeners who caught our past episode will remember this as one of the AI music services being sued by the Recording Industry Association of America on claims of copyright infringement. So it felt ironic, upon uploading the clip of my collab with Dr. Rhythm, to check a box attesting that I had the right to use and distribute the file.

At any rate, from there, I was able to use AI to extend and accompany the song, using a feature that Udio introduced in June. You can hear the AI join Dr. Rhythm and me in the clip below.

What do you think of the AI? Email todd@geekwire.com.

Personally, I’m amazed by the technology. My teenage self, goofing around with Dr. Rhythm at my brother’s college apartment, would have been blown away.

From a musical perspective, it’s not exactly a Grammy-winning performance. But it’s certainly better than anything I could do on my own, especially in the couple of minutes that it took the AI to produce it. It’s passable, and maybe even pretty good as a piece of low-key background music.

And since it’s riffing on music I made, it doesn’t create the same guilt that would come from simply entering a prompt and having the AI mimic a popular genre.

This speaks to one of my own takeaways from using AI at work over the past year: AI is best when it’s part of the creative process, not simply generating the end product. At a basic level, it’s about using an AI tool to summarize or retrieve a piece of information, or improve a headline or sentence.

For me, at least for now, it’s not about AI doing all of the work. It’s about AI as an assistant, collaborator and co-creator, ultimately helping me to do my best.

That’s what I’ve learned over the past year, and it’s one of the reasons I tend to be more optimistic about the previously impossible things those developers and engineers are working on now.

Just wait until Dr. Rhythm meets a quantum computer.

Subscribe to GeekWire in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.

Michael Schutzler, the newly retired CEO of the Washington Technology Industry Association (WTIA), joins us on this episode of the GeekWire Podcast to reflect on his 11 years running the not-for-profit trade association, assess the state of the tech industry in Seattle and Washington state, and discuss what’s next for him.

WTIA is in a much different position than it was in 2013. That’s when Schutzler arrived at the association, after selling LiveMocha to Rosetta Stone, for what he assumed would be a turnaround effort lasting a couple of years.

Under Schutzler’s leadership, WTIA launched programs and initiatives including Portalus, a for-profit provider of healthcare and retirement plans for startups and small tech companies; the U.S. Blockchain Coalition; and Apprenti, a technology apprenticeship program that was recently spun out as an independent company.

Of course, the wider tech world is in a very different place, as well.

Schutzler, who has been succeeded as WTIA’s CEO by Kelly Fukai, previously its COO, wrote about the extraordinary history and evolution of the state’s tech industry in a recent post marking the WTIA’s 40th anniversary and his retirement.

On the podcast, Schutzler said the companies that build strong, productive cultures of hybrid work will ultimately prevail, due to their greater access to talent.

However, Schutzler said he believes the location of a company’s headquarters and its decision-makers still matters, as the nexus of its relationship with the community. This is a central issue for regional tech trade groups like WTIA.

As an example, he distinguished between the relationships that Amazon and Microsoft have to the Seattle region and Washington state, where they’re based, in contrast with the Silicon Valley giants that with major outposts here.

“Really the power of the organization is still in California. … If you get large enough in a satellite office, then you’re going to build local relationships, just as Google and Apple and Salesforce and many other California companies have done here. But Microsoft and Amazon, they throw a lot more weight around here because they’re here, and their relationships in this region are very different than their relationships in other states.”

We also discussed Seattle’s long-term status as an AI hub, and where Schutzler sees the value emerging in the AI landscape overall. Here’s what he said on that topic.

“The actual power of AI isn’t the tool itself. It’s not the software. It’s the application. What are you doing with artificial intelligence? That’s the radical transformation that’s underway.

“ChatGPT is really awesome demo software. It’s fun to play with. It’s very clever. It’s very interesting. Does some fun stuff. The actual power is, how do you take an LLM and apply it to medical technology? How do you apply that to manufacturing processes? How do you apply that to cyber security, both on the attack side as well as on the defense side?

“This is where AI is really going to make a big impact.”

Other topics include the interplay between tech giants and startups, and the entrepreneurial activity generated by people who leave large companies. Amazon alumni haven’t made as much of a mark in that way, so far, but Schutzler said he believes this will change based on the company’s evolution over the years.

“Amazon is a logistics company. It was a retailer from day one. It had to become masterful at certain technologies, but their core DNA couldn’t be more different. So you’re not going to hire creatives. You’re going to hire people that are efficient … and really, really good at perfecting the systems.

“Until cloud. When they figured AWS, they were like, ‘Holy shit, margins, let’s take on the world!’ and they become super creative since then. Now, with AI, and this next generation of ex-Amazon folks, I think we’ll see more and more of that [entrepreneurial activity] coming out of Amazon.”

One of the things that’s next for Schutzler — in addition to continued angel investing, startup advising, and five weeks in silent meditation at a Zen monastery — is pursuing his love of music. He is already spending time in a recording studio, and we talked about how he’s using AI to augment his own musical efforts.

But before we wrapped up the podcast and showed him our favorite neighborhood guitar shop, we asked if he had a parting message for the tech and innovation community in Washington state.

Schutzler started by describing his good fortune in landing here in the 1990s. He wasn’t quite sure what to do initially when his wife relocated from Chicago for work. He ended up becoming a serial entrepreneur, angel investor, startup founder, CEO, and senior executive at a variety of tech companies in the years that followed.

“Man, did I land in the right place at the right time in 1995,” he said. “Super grateful. It’s been an incredible experience to have a career and raise a family here.”

And these were his closing thoughts — unsolicited advice, as he called it — for the tech community in Seattle and Washington state.

“For the most part, we’re all hat and no cattle. We talk a good game about working together. We don’t. We talk a good game about supporting startups. We’re really terrible here. We have literally tens of thousands of multi-millionaires printed by this industry, living in this region, and yet, in per-capita participation as angel investors compared to the Valley or Vancouver, B.C., we’re paltry.

“That just bothers me, because we like to think of ourselves as progressive. We like to think of ourselves as communal. But it feels a little bit like, ‘Hey, I made my millions. Guess I’ll go buy my third house and go hang out with my friends.’ … I would just challenge this community to be really, truly focused on building together. Because we don’t. We don’t build together.

“And if we did, I think we might actually become the next Silicon Valley.”

Listen to the full episode above, including a guitar outro from Schutzler. Subscribe to GeekWire in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.

Related Coverage

• WTIA CEO Michael Schutzler retiring after 11 years leading Washington state tech group
• WTIA honors 40 years of boosting Washington’s tech sector as new CEO aims for more impact

Audio editing by Curt Milton.

This week on the GeekWire Podcast, we sit down with some of the Seattle region’s “Uncommon Thinkers” — inventors, scientists, technologists and entrepreneurs transforming industries and driving positive change in the world.

We recorded the episode on location, backstage at the GeekWire Gala, where we recognized five Uncommon Thinkers through this annual awards program, presented in partnership with Greater Seattle Partners.

Speaking on the episode are:

Uri Shumlak, co-founder and chief scientist at Zap Energy, a physicist leading a team in pursuit of fusion energy, taking a different approach from others in the field. Read the profile.

Ingrid Swanson Pultz, CTO at Mopac Biologics, and translational advisor at the UW Institute for Protein Design, a microbiologist who led the development of a gluten-destroying enzyme. Read the profile.

Chris Dunckley, director of chemistry and engineering of TerraPower Isotopes, a chemical engineer who leads a team turning radioactive waste into cancer therapy. Read the profile.

Andy Lapsa, aerospace engineer and CEO of Stoke Space, a company focused on developing fully and rapidly reusable space vehicles using a liquid cooling technique for re-entry. Read the profile.

Also featured in in the Uncommon Thinkers series: Hanna Hajishirzi of the Allen Institute for AI and the UW’s Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering, who focuses on open-source AI models. Read the profile.

Subscribe to GeekWire in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.

GeekWire Gala recap: A sweet night in Seattle as community comes together for annual holiday bash

LAS VEGAS — Amazon’s artificial intelligence strategy came into focus this week with the unveiling of Amazon Nova, its new family of homegrown AI models, a new Amazon Bedrock marketplace, and more news from AWS re:Invent.

It turns out we’ve seen this before. As the company’s AI strategy emerges, there are numerous similarities to its e-commerce business, including low cost, broad selection, products from Amazon and its selected vendors, and a marketplace. (This Fortune piece by reporter Jason Del Rey explores these parallels in detail.)

After spending four days in Las Vegas soaking in the news, attending sessions, and talking with AWS executives and attendees, my colleague John Cook and I offered our takeaways and dissected Amazon’s AI strategy on this episode of the GeekWire Podcast, recorded on location at the GeekWire Studios booth on the show floor. 

Related links and coverage

• Apple makes surprise cameo at AWS re:Invent
• Amazon unveils ‘Nova’ AI models, looking to make its mark in the AI revolution
• ‘Easy button to get off Windows’: Amazon’s AI moves Microsoft apps to Linux
• Amazon expands Bedrock with new AI model marketplace, a day after unveiling its own ‘Nova’
• Video: Jeff Bezos talks about Amazon and AI at the DealBook Summit
• Hacker News thread on Nova pricing and strategy.
• Amazon CEO Andy Jassy offers his final takeaways from AWS re:Invent.

Top takeaways

Bezos and Amazon see AI as the new electricity: The company is positioning AI as a fundamental layer that will be integrated into every application and service, similar to how electricity became a ubiquitous utility.

• Amazon is seeking to demonstrate that it has been an AI company for many years, even if the recent perception has been that it is behind in the field.
• AWS CEO Matt Garman said he sees AI inference as a fourth building block for AWS, joining cloud computing, storage and database services.
• Amazon’s Trainium, Inferentia, and Graviton processors were a big focus, continuing to evolve as an alternative to Nvidia and other companies.

Amazon is applying its classic e-commerce playbook to AI, focusing on providing choice and lower costs, among other parallels between the strategies.

• With the new Nova models, the company is offering its own low-cost, high-performance AI models as an alternative to other providers like Anthropic, similar to how Amazon Basics competes with brand names.
• Andy Jassy, the former AWS CEO, was back on stage at the event for the first time this year since becoming Amazon CEO, describing how Amazon is using AI to build and shape own products and services.
• Jassy said Amazon is focused on practical, customer-centric applications of AI rather than just showcasing the technology,

Major cloud providers see AI as a key driver, with Amazon, Microsoft, Google and others racing to integrate AI capabilities into their cloud platforms and services.

• As the largest cloud provider, Amazon has the advantage of leveraging a big base of existing customers as it seeks to expand further into AI infrastructure, services, and applications.
• However, much of the focus for customers is still on more basic services — cloud, storage and database — underscoring the need for Amazon and other cloud providers to continue innovating in these areas.
• Despite all of the buzz and interest in artificial intelligence, it’s not yet clear how how fundamental AI will be in the near-term versus the long-term to unlock business value for cloud services.

Audio editing by Curt Milton.

This week on the GeekWire Podcast, our guest is Sam Schillace, a deputy CTO at Microsoft and author of the new book, No Prize for Pessimism, the first title from Microsoft’s new publishing imprint, 8080 Books.

Schillace discusses the importance of optimism in innovation, drawing parallels between the early internet era and the current AI revolution. He also talks about his experiences as one of the creators of Google Docs, and emphasizes the value of tackling difficult, non-obvious problems.

Listen above, and continue reading for related links and takeaways. Subscribe to GeekWire in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.

Related links and coverage: 

• Sam Schillace’s Sunday Letters on Substack.
• Schillace’s No Prize for Pessimism custom GPT.
• No Prize for Pessimism on Amazon.
• GeekWire: Microsoft turns a new page in the book business with its own publishing imprint

Top takeaways

Schillace’s background and role at Microsoft: Schillace founded the startup that created Writely, which was acquired in 2006 by Google, where he and his team built Google Docs. He joined Microsoft in September 2021 as a deputy CTO, part of Chief Technology Officer Kevin Scott’s organization.

• Scott and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella initially gave Schillace three objectives: improving horizontal infrastructure (i.e., across different Microsoft divisions); enhancing Microsoft’s consumer culture and products; and creating another new category of technology, similar to his past work on Google Docs.
• Schillace likes to say he gets to play “mad scientist,” working with his team on a variety of experiments and projects with the potential to inform or contribute to the company’s products.
• He also contributes to the leadership group for Microsoft Windows and Office, offering advice and input based on his past experience and ongoing work as part of the CTO’s office.

Innovation mindset: Schillace says optimism and a willingness to embrace messiness are crucial for encouraging innovation, especially with emerging technologies like AI.

• Groundbreaking technological advancements often come from tackling challenging, messy problems with a “what if” mentality rather than falling into the trap of a “why not” attitude.
• Growing up in a world of curated online experiences and pressure to succeed, younger generations tend to be more pessimistic about technology and less willing to experiment. One goal of the book is to help aspiring entrepreneurs shake this tendency.
• The innovation mindset is particularly relevant in the age of generative AI, where technology’s rapid evolution demands an experimental approach to problem-solving.

Going AI native: Generative AI has the potential to transform technology in a way comparable to the shift from desktop to cloud software, requiring a rethinking of problem-solving and application development.

• While AI models will continue to evolve, much of the opportunity in the next two years will come from building the applications, user experiences, and infrastructure to harness those capabilities within specific domains.
• Developers need to adopt an “AI-native” mindset, looking at existing applications and longstanding problems and coming up with solutions in the context of AI’s emerging capabilities.
• Success in this new world will often be found in the middle ground between the precise rules of coding and the more nuanced, unpredictable nature of AI, or “the tension between chaos and order,” as Schillace puts it.

Subscribe to GeekWire in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.

Audio editing by Curt Milton.

This week on the GeekWire Podcast, we discuss Elon Musk’s suit against OpenAI, which now includes Microsoft, and assess the complexities of the OpenAI-Microsoft partnership, as illustrated by early email exchanges revealed in the suit.

We also consider the latest update to the GeekWire 200, our ranked index of Pacific Northwest technology startups, including the rise of Highspot to the top spot, and other trends in the Seattle region’s startup ecosystem. 

And we share highlights from tech events around the region this week, including the WTIA’s 40th Anniversary, where Mayor Bruce Harrell addressed AI and the incoming presidential administration; and an interesting takeaway from a panel of startup leaders whose companies made the latest Deloitte Technology Fast 500 list. 

Related links and coverage

• Internal emails: Elon Musk wanted to keep OpenAI from becoming ‘Microsoft’s marketing bitch’
• GeekWire 200 update: A new No. 1 rises to the top of our startup rankings
• WTIA honors 40 years of boosting Washington’s tech sector as new CEO aims for more impact
• Seattle mayor, who sits on a federal AI panel, says he’ll seek ways to work with Trump administration

With GeekWire co-founders John Cook and Todd Bishop

This week on the GeekWire Podcast, we dive into Amazon’s new “Haul” discount storefront — a rival to Temu, Shein, and TikTok Shop — and explore what it says about the future of e-commerce, and generational shifts in shopping.

Guests Michael Levin and Josh Lowitz of Consumer Intelligence Research Partners (CIRP) join the show to provide insights into the long-term trends around Amazon Prime membership and consumer behaviors on the platform.

Related links and coverage

• CIRP: Amazon Report on Substack. (Check out their Apple Report, as well.)
• GeekWire: Hands-on with Amazon Haul: First impressions of the e-commerce giant’s new Temu and Shein rival
• Amazon: Introducing Amazon Haul—a broad selection of products $20 or less, with most under $10
• Business Insider: Amazon’s new discount section, ‘Haul,’ looks like a Temu version of Temu

Top takeaways

Prime numbers: CIRP’s research shows that Amazon Prime membership has steadily expanded from a mostly younger demographic to a broader set of consumers over the years.

• Prime membership has grown from around 17 million people in the U.S. more than a decade ago to nearly 200 million individual U.S. members today, reflecting its dominant position in e-commerce.
• Amazon’s logistics improvements have allowed it to reach more customers in suburban and rural areas, causing the Prime member base to evolve over time to reflect the broader U.S. population.
• Amazon reported about $40 billion in revenue from subscriptions last year, which is believed to consist largely of Prime memberships. That translated into about 7% of the company’s overall revenue.

Why launch a Temu and Shein rival? The key drivers are competitive pressures, the desire to retain younger customers, and Amazon’s strategy of experimentation and diversification within e-commerce.

• Temu’s U.S. e-commerce market share is projected by eMarketer to grow from 0.7% this year to 2.3% next year, making it difficult for Amazon to ignore.
• By offering a similar discount-focused shopping experience via Amazon Haul, the company can try to prevent customers from being lured away to competing platforms.
• Even if it doesn’t succeed, Haul allows Amazon to test out new shopping models that cater to different consumer preferences, and inform its overall online experience.

The state of the consumer relationship with Prime: Overall, Amazon has a positive relationship with the typical U.S. consumer, CIRP’s research indicates.

• Amazon Prime members tend to engage in more frequent, smaller transactions — bringing a “convenience store” mentality to the larger world of online shopping.
• The desire to make the most of their Prime membership subscription leads many members to shop on Amazon first before considering other options, even if they don’t have an immediate need.
• In terms of challenges and opportunities, the grocery business remains a tough nut for Amazon to crack, and it’s unclear what level of dominance, if any, the company will achieve in that space.

Subscribe to GeekWire in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.

Audio editing by Curt Milton.

This week on the GeekWire Podcast, it’s a grab-bag of topics, including self-driving wheelchairs, Expedia Group Chairman Barry Diller’s comments on the prospects for an acquisition by Uber, and an update on GeekWire’s upcoming events and coverage. In the final segment, we discuss what the new Trump administration could mean for technology regulation, including the FTC’s antitrust case against Amazon and oversight for tech M&A.

Subscribe to GeekWire in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.

Related coverage and links

• NYT: Tech Giants Face a Familiar Uncertainty With Trump
• Expedia chairman Barry Diller on potential deal with Uber and Washington Post’s ‘blunder’
• Sea-Tac Airport’s self-driving wheelchairs are getting stymied by unexpected obstacles

Upcoming GeekWire Events

• GeekWire Gala, Dec. 12: Register here.
• Microsoft @ 50: Special series and March 20 event.

With GeekWire co-founders Todd Bishop and John Cook.

For all the concern about deepfakes fooling the electorate, AI is having another impact on the 2024 campaign. In some cases, like heroic AI-generated images of the candidates, it’s less about veracity, and more about the vibe.

“When AI is used in ways that are illegal, you can face consequences,” explains Danielle Lee Tomson, research manager for election rumors at the University of Washington Center for an Informed Public. “But when AI is used to create an ambience online, you could say, ‘Oh yeah, Donald Trump is not a Steelers linebacker,’ but you feel something — and you can’t fact-check a feeling.”

That’s one of the insights on this week’s episode of the GeekWire Podcast. With just days to go before the Nov. 5 election, guest host Ross Reynolds speaks with Tomson about AI, social media, and trends in the spread of rumors online.

Related links and stories:

• Substack: Election Rumor Research @ Center for an Informed Public
• New York Times: As Election Looms, Disinformation ‘Has Never Been Worse’
• Washington Post: Don’t say ‘vote’: How Instagram hides your political posts

Listen to the episode below, and continue reading for highlights, edited for context and clarity. Subscribe in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.

The work of the Center for an Informed Public (CIP): “The Center for an Informed Public was founded by professors in information studies, in law, in science of science studies, to try to inform the public about increasingly specialized knowledge. My team of election rumor researchers is just one of many at the center. We have an amazing group that has a misinformation day. It’s like a media literacy project. We have other teams that are demystifying psychology research and media literacy. So it’s quite a multi-functional team, and part of our work is communicating research to the public in our various verticals so that they understand it.”

CIP’s election rumors research: “Rumors can be true, they can be false, but most of the time they’re somewhere in between. … Rumoring is part of this natural process of trying to make sense of reality. We do our best to point out, ‘OK, this little piece of truth is here, but it’s being conflated and framed into this larger phenomenon that just isn’t true.’ We try to acknowledge when there are pieces of truth that are being twisted or reframed or repackaged in such a way that they become untrue. We have to think of mis- and disinformation a little more holistically in that sense.”

The state of fact-checking, trust and safety on social media: “A lot of the platforms have gone through larger layoffs in the past couple years, and trust and safety teams, a lot of folks are laid-off there. … We’ve seen this dynamic in a lot of social media platforms who are not sharing as much political content. … [They’re] not going to show you these political memes. Even though they’ll keep you for a long time on the app, because they’ll outrage you or get you excited, it’s maybe not going to be good for the ROI of that company.”

AI’s unexpected impact on the campaign: “We were talking about deepfakes in 2022 and 2020. We’ve been talking about the role of social media now for over a decade. And I think that anytime you have a new technology, there’s a fear of how it may be used.

“Anytime something is explicitly false and explicitly untrue, like an AI-generated an image of Donald Trump wearing a Steelers jersey after he went to a Steelers game last Sunday, OK, that’s clearly false, but the veracity here isn’t what’s important. It’s the vibe. It’s this feeling of kinship, this kind of imaginative play on the internet.

“There are instances where there were robocalls using a candidate’s voice telling people to vote on the wrong day in the wrong place. That was prosecuted. So when AI is used in ways that are illegal, you can face consequences. But when AI is used to create an ambience online, you could say, ‘Oh yeah, Donald Trump is not a Steelers linebacker,’ but you feel something — and you can’t fact-check a feeling. So in many ways, facts don’t care about your feelings, but also, feelings don’t care about your facts.”

It doesn’t end with the Nov. 5 election: “I keep two countdowns on my office whiteboard, one till Election Day and one till certification, because I believe there will definitely be a lot more rumoring and sense-making across the political spectrum of what’s going on, what happened, what’s true. So we’re definitely gearing up for monitoring conversations related to election processes and procedures well past Election Day.”

Listen to the full conversation with Danielle Lee Tomson above, or subscribe to GeekWire in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.

Hosted by Ross Reynolds. Edited by Curt Milton. Music by Daniel L.K. Caldwell.

Our guest on this special mid-week episode of the GeekWire Podcast is Panos Panay, Amazon’s senior vice president of Devices and Services, a longtime leader in the world of consumer technology.

It has been one year since he started at Amazon, after his surprise departure from Microsoft, where he oversaw products including Surface and Windows.

Panay’s division at Amazon includes the Alexa voice assistant and Echo devices, but that’s just the start. His purview also spans Kindle e-readers, Fire tablets, Zoox self-driving taxis, Eero wireless networking devices, Ring and Blink cameras, Fire TV devices, and Kuiper, the company’s nascent satellite internet business.

The focus this week is Kindle, with the Oct. 30 release of the Kindle Colorsoft, the first color device in Amazon’s line of market-leading e-readers, selling for a premium price of $279.99.

It’s part of a new era for the Kindle business, driven in part by book-loving social media influencers and consumers looking for simplicity and focus in a world of non-stop smartphone alerts.

We also talked about AI, including the generative AI summaries coming with the next-generation Kindle Scribe tablet, due out in December. Panay wasn’t ready to dish on what’s next for Alexa in conversational AI, but he made it clear that he’s bullish on AI in general, and doesn’t believe it’s a passing fad.

“AI is this transformative platform, not something to be dismissed. It’s real,” he said.

Listen below, and continue reading for highlights. Subscribe to GeekWire in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.

A resurgence of reading: People are reading more now than we’ve ever seen. Engagement on Kindle is about as high as it’s been. You’ve got the highest growth and sales numbers for Kindle in the last 10 years. And so you’re looking at a resurgence of reading, which is inspiring to me.

The importance of adding of a color device to the Kindle lineup: Color is the next step. You have emotion that comes into books. You are able to project exactly what it is that the author was trying to portray, whether it’s through the cover or if it’s through a comic book or it’s through a children’s book, and now you’re getting the real vibrancy and the emotion that comes with color.

The process of optimizing the color: The team had brought forward a series of color filters we were using. … And we’re looking at each one of these products, and they’re all tuned differently, Kindle Colorsofts. And the big decision was, can you see the seeds on the strawberry? It was this beautiful picture of multiple strawberries in a bushel. Can you really see the seeds? Can you see the reds? Are the blacks black enough? And you start looking at it, and you go, “OK, this is perfect.”

The importance of focus in devices and product development: Focus is becoming more of a need … not being distracted, is another way to say it. When you have a series of these products, and they have a purpose, can you keep that purpose as simple as possible for people? I think we’re in a day and age where that matters more than ever.

His first year at Amazon: There’s just so much opportunity. I’ve had this year of just gaining energy, seeing another side of the industry, and a totally new way to lead. But the most important part is it’s a whole new set of customers. It’s a whole new set of lives you get to impact and make a difference on. And the team here has shown me how much opportunity there really is.

The potential for AI: We’re just at the beginning of this AI journey. And it is a journey, and it will be a long one. And it’s a transformation for sure. It is a platform shift. I think Amazon has a series of incredible strengths here. That’s why I’m sitting here across from you. I won’t get into that future state too much for you now, but I think the one way to think about it is, it’s all just getting started.

Collaboration across different groups in the Devices and Services division: There’s a ton. The teams are working together. They’re always looking for the right solutions for customers. … We talk about it being a constellation of devices. A little bit of play on words with Kuiper, if you will, but the truth is how all these devices come together to work for our customers is pretty important for everybody on this team right now.

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Our guest this week on the GeekWire Podcast is Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, who says he has never been as excited about anything in his career as he is about the latest developments in artificial intelligence — AI agents that can autonomously reason, plan, and take action on behalf of businesses.

“We’re going to do this in a large-scale way and give customers a level of success with AI that they’ve really never had before,” he said. “I’m super excited about it. I think it’s going to be incredible.”

Benioff is almost as strong in his negative sentiments toward Microsoft’s Copilot. He calls Copilot the second coming of Microsoft’s much-maligned “Clippy” Office assistant, and asserts that the Redmond company is giving AI a bad name by disappointing customers with underwhelming results and lax security.

There was one thing that diverted him from those topics during our conversation: his dog, Honey, sneaking up behind him in his home office to eat his bagel, tipping over a tray and breaking a plate in the process.

But it didn’t take long for him to get back on topic: “We’ll clean that mess up,” he said. “That’s, by the way, very metaphorical for the mess that Microsoft has made in regards to the AI industry.”

I spoke with Benioff, the CEO and co-founder of cloud computing pioneer and enterprise applications giant, in advance of the general availability of the San Francisco company’s Agentforce AI technology for sales and service.

We also talked about Benioff’s ownership of Time magazine, and what that means for his political involvement; and the status of his past pledge to turn Seattle into Salesforce’s HQ2.

Listen below, and continue reading for a transcript, edited for clarity. Subscribe to GeekWire in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.

Todd Bishop: You seem to be everywhere lately. You’re talking about the potential for AI agents to transform business. You’ve been slapping Microsoft upside the head, which we can talk about. You even talked about the potential to rename the company Agentforce. It’s like the Marc Benioff of old, if you don’t mind me saying. So let me just start by asking you, what’s got you so fired up about AI agents, this whole notion of autonomous artificial intelligence?

Marc Benioff: Well, you are right. I am fired up. I would say I’ve never been more excited about anything in my entire career. For the last 45 years that I’ve been writing software and publishing software and working with customers to be successful with software, well, this is our dream, what’s happening now, that we can really see that software can do things that it’s never been able to do before, that it can make us more productive, truly more productive. It can augment our employees. It can improve our margins, grow our revenues. It can improve our KPIs.

Fundamentally improving our overall business performance, this is our dream of why we all got into the software, business because we thought this is where software’s going and we are at this moment right now. And that’s why I’m really totally excited.

TB: When you make the pitch to customers, I can imagine that some of them are still saying, “Wait a second, Marc. I’m still getting used to the notion of just working with AI as a companion. This might seem like a step too far for 2024, to have autonomous AI agents working on behalf of my business.” What do you say to folks when they bring that up?

Benioff: Well, I think you’re taking a pretty big jump into the abyss there, and before we do that, I think you should take a step back. Look, we’ve been working with AI for a long time. For Salesforce, we’ve been doing AI for quite a while and seriously AI for more than a decade, especially with our Einstein platform. We are the largest provider of enterprise AI in the world. We do about 2 trillion enterprise AI transactions this week alone, and that’s across all of our products and platforms.

And it’s been a fantastic journey — machine intelligence, machine learning, deep learning. I mean, it’s been awesome. And this generative AI moment is exciting because it’s another step on our collective AI journey.

So while we’ve been working on AI, I think we’ve always been saying, “Oh, it’s going to make us more successful. It’s going to make us more productive.” But now with this introduction of this concept of these agents — it’s software that is reasoning, planning, taking action on your behalf — and using the generative capabilities that we see in these LLMs that we love. And then grounding that, connecting with our corporate databases, It gives us the ability to really achieve capabilities with enterprise software we just have not been able to do before. And we are in the zone.

[With Agentforce], the early results have been just nothing short of, well, it’s just stunning, what is possible. We’re going to come out of the gate really swinging on this, and that’s what you’re feeling.

AI agents, a practical example

TB: I got a chance to talk with a couple of your executives, Adam Evans and Brent Hayward, so I have a sense for the answer to this question, but can you give me some examples of what people will be able to do with Agentforce that they might not have been able to do with just a chatbot or a generative AI solution?

Benioff: This is about, for the first time, humans with agents driving customer success together.

Let’s take a specific industry, healthcare. All of us have had this experience. I even have a boot right now I’m wearing because I had a bad SCUBA diving jump a couple weeks ago, and I’m going to be going back into an MRI on Friday. …

Healthcare is very much an individual sport in our country where you’re on your own, and in the future that just is not going to be true. Because what’s going to happen is, your phone is going to ring, or you’re going to get a text and it’s going to be, “Hey, did you drink the water? We’re following up for your MRI and just want to know what’s going on with you and how are you feeling, and are you experiencing swelling? What’s going on exactly?”

And you’re going to say, “Yes, I did. Oh, thanks for reminding me. Oh yeah, no, it’s fine.” “Do you need more help on understanding all the things going on with your foot?” “Oh, give me more information. Oh, that’s great. What are the five things I need to know?” “These are the five things you should know. And are you sure you’re OK? Do you want to talk to a doctor?” “No.” “Do you need to reschedule your appointment?” “No.” “Well, we’re going to schedule a repeat MRI for you in a month, so I’ll be contacting you again.”

That last part, it’s all with an agent, and this idea that we can fill in the gaps of our human workforce with a digital workforce. This is a big idea and this is a great thing in this industry, healthcare. Because I might need a repeat MRI, I might need repeat labs, I might need to schedule an appointment with my doctor.

But, look, my doctor does not want to hear from me. My doctor’s burnt out. My nurse is burnt out. They’re in a post-pandemic malaise. You know that’s true. You go talk to any healthcare organization. But these digital workers, they could fill in this gap and they can give us some breathing space between our doctors, who should be working on certain very important things.

Because there’s a lot the AI cannot do, especially in healthcare. But there’s now a lot that the AI can do, especially in healthcare. And our job has to be to put those two things together. And if we can do that, oh my gosh, this is a moment for our customers that is going to be absolutely amazing.

Agentforce vs. Microsoft Copilot

TB: You’ve been outspoken about Microsoft in recent weeks, and I really want to dig into this a little bit more with you than you’ve talked about before. Fundamentally, your issue is that Microsoft has set expectations too high and not met them, in addition to other things. But I don’t want to speak for you. What’s your problem with Clippy?

Benioff: We’ve all had that ChatGPT moment where we type in the query and we get the result and it’s super-search and we’re like, “Oh my gosh, this is amazing. This is magic. This is awesome. How is this possible?” And our first experience with an LLM, we’re all remembering that. That’s so important.

But the idea for them to say, “Now here’s Copilot, and it’s now going to make your enterprise so much better, and here you go,” that’s a fantasy that has not played out. And you just talk to customers and they’ll tell you, Copilot has not transformed their enterprises.

Every CEO was so excited with the vision of, “Now that we have LLMs, AI is now curing cancer and climate change has stopped and your company’s going to be fully automated.” Not so fast. And when we look at Copilot and when we look at this concept that every company has to have their own model or LLM or train and retrain their model, again, this is not how this is going to play out. And that needs to come to an end.

That is really the big message that we have for our customers, which is, we are the largest provider of enterprise AI, and we’ve made you a lot more productive with AI. And now watch this, with Agentforce. With Agentforce, you’re going to achieve the dreams and visions that you’ve always had for AI. And we’re going to show you, just like in my examples with healthcare, where you’re going to be able to fill in the gaps with your customers to have a much higher level of customer intimacy.

Now, I’ll give you another great example of a real customer. One of the first customers that we turned Agentforce on is Wiley. Wiley is the textbook manufacturer, and right now everyone’s going back to school so they’re all trying to buy more textbooks, and they are usually surging their workforce, hiring more sales and service people.

But not now, not at this time of the year, because they are using Agentforce. So they were able to scale their service organization, their sales organization, their marketing organization, their customer outreach, with digital workers, not just human workers. And that is so important. And this idea that Agentforce gives you the ability to deliver a higher level of customer success than ever before, that is really amazing. And that is why I’m so excited.

Microsoft’s many Copilots

TB: Microsoft itself has created some branding confusion here and so it’s important to point out, when you’re talking about Copilot, you’re talking about Copilot for Microsoft 365, which is the thing that they charge an extra $30 a user a month for. Not GitHub Copilot, which frankly has been one of the early successes in the industry in terms of its ability to be a coding companion.

Benioff: Let’s just take this apart.

TB: Go for it.

Benioff: Because I think what you’re getting into is something very important, which is that software developers are more productive using AI, and there’s different tools for doing that, including that.

But then to say, now “My software developer is more productive with AI of this,” and now to say, “My whole enterprise is going to be more successful with this technology” is not true, and yet it’s what they’ve been selling.

And you can go out there and see with the customers, they don’t have success with this idea. This idea that a fundamentally ungrounded AI into your enterprise is going to deliver you more productivity is not true, and that’s where Microsoft has gotten themselves into trouble here. So let’s just put that aside for a second.

TB: Well, but Marc, I should say, they would push back on that. We both know that, and they would say 60% of the Fortune 500 are using this thing, and they have specific case studies where they would show successes as well. I’m not going to go through them.

Benioff: Which customer are you going to say, let’s talk about it. Take one.

TB: I don’t have Microsoft’s case studies in front of me. I can just tell you that there are some.

Benioff: I have the product. It doesn’t work. … I mean, I have it right here. I’m like, “It’s just ChatGPT.”

TB: What then is the difference with Agentforce?

Benioff: What you have to realize is that LLMs are just a component of intelligence. They’re just an ingredient. Like if we’re making a cake and we need sugar or salt, it’s just a component. But an LLM by itself is just an input-output search engine. It has an amalgamated data set with an algorithm that are combined and you put something in, your prompt, and out comes a response. It’s not a data storage mechanism. It doesn’t store your corporate data. It doesn’t have your metadata. It doesn’t have your sharing model, it doesn’t have your security model. Let me give you another example.

I had a bank CEO come and talk to me … and they have this idea that you can just dump your corporate data into an LLM and it somehow is going to make you a smarter, better company. It’s not true.

But what is true is you can build an architecture out through a platform, good old-fashioned enterprise software platform approach, and the combination of an LLM, your corporate data, your corporate metadata, your sharing model, your security model, and also other critical parts of enterprise software that we know are so important, like the apps themselves, because there has to be a seamless handoff between your human worker and your digital worker. All of these things combined can achieve that vision, and that is the magic and the promise of what’s possible today.

Gartner on enterprise AI security

TB: Related to this, you’ve said that Microsoft Copilot is spilling data everywhere, and I went back and found the Gartner study that you were citing there. And so just briefly here, I want to quote what it says. It says, “Microsoft 365 Copilot honors user permissions. It also respects data security controls such as sensitivity labels where these have been correctly applied. However, if controls have not been correctly applied or permissions are too open, Microsoft 365 Copilot can increase the risk of oversharing by retrieving, summarizing, and generating content that the user should not have access to.”

That’s part of it. I gotta say, if I were editing a story that a reporter turned in, and that was the text, I would have a hard time putting the headline on there that it was “spilling data everywhere.” Can you get into more detail about what you mean by that?

Benioff: Well, I can. I think you actually just said it, which is that customers — and you can read that Gartner report yourself — customers basically have reported directly to me that they’re seeing results in queries that they should not be seeing, that they don’t have that authorization as a user.

In the example of banking, which we just went into with the know-your-customer approach, my banker and your banker have different sharing models. Your banker cannot see my account balance and my banker cannot see your account balance. But in this example, Copilot is showing up, giving people who should not be seeing that data, that data. That’s all that’s going on.

TB: Right, and I think the point of the Gartner report is that it is happening in some cases, and it’s actually stopping some companies from adopting Microsoft 365 Copilot, but it seems like it’s more about the permissions that those companies themselves have put on the data and the protections that they have implemented.

Benioff: My point is that’s never going to happen with a Salesforce platform because you’re defining those user roles up front, your sharing model. You’re defining your security model. And when we’re talking about regulated industries like healthcare, financial services, the government, and other pieces, there is no margin for error on these things.

My healthcare data, my banking data, I don’t want that spilling all over the floor of these enterprises, which is what’s happening. And you’re citing the report actually that I read, and there’s also a very good Computerworld article on it, as well, but it’s not just that. It’s this false premise that Microsoft has sold customers that this is what AI was meant to be, and it’s not true.

What AI was meant to be is the idea that we’re going to have a more productive enterprise with augmented employees, with higher margins, with higher revenues, and this is how we’re going to achieve it. And in my example with healthcare, or my example with banking now, well, that’s what Agentforce does.

Like in the example with Wiley. They are achieving all of those things which you cannot achieve with Copilot. And this idea that we’ve been sold for the last two years that Copilot can do this, it’s not true.

So we for 25 years have helped our customers build their sales forces, their service forces, their marketing forces, their commerce forces, they’re analytics forces, they’re data forces. Now, we’re helping to build their Agentforce.

And that idea that workforces are fundamentally overwhelmed, that they have low-value tasks, stalled productivity, fixed capacity, burning out, like I mentioned, in healthcare, well, customers want more. They want to get down to that immediate, zero-hold-time idea, personal and empathetic service, working with experts, scheduling things, taking actions immediately, have an instant response. None of those things happen with Copilot.

And that bigger idea we talked about at the beginning: what if workforces had no limits? What if workforces had no limits? What does that mean for your company? That’s not what we’re getting with Copilot, my friend. And I think you know that is true. That idea, which is the big idea in terms of AI, radically improving our capabilities, what if workforce has no limits, that isn’t what’s going on, and that is what we’re going to deliver with Agentforce.

And that idea that our customers can use a platform that’s trusted and secure, scalable and accurate, easy to customize, that has the AI built in, that has your apps built in, that uses a metadata framework, that has an open ecosystem, all of these basic capabilities. That idea that you can build radically new types of applications to automate your company? That is AI.

That is what AI was meant to be and that is the contrast that I’m playing around this fantasy of not only Copilot, but also this false premise that I hear from a lot of customers that they’ve been sold by Microsoft, that they need to build their own models and retrain their own models. And that’s why we need these increasing levels of hyperscaler capacity. And those things are not true. This can be done in a more efficient software infrastructure just as we have for decades as the proven computer science approach.

Microsoft’s new AI agents

TB: I don’t mean to put myself in the position of Microsoft proxy here, but I do want to point out …

Benioff: No, it’s good. It’s great. You’re doing fine.

TB: … they did come out this week, seemingly in a preemptive move ..

Benioff: Did you use the word panic?

TB: I don’t know who’s panicking. I read half the headlines and they say you’re panicking. I read the other half and they say Microsoft’s panicking. … But Microsoft did announce their own AI agents, about 10 of them, for Dynamics 365. Did you see that as validation?

Benioff: No. You have to understand, number one, Copilot has failed, and this fantasy that every company has to go build and rebuild their own model has failed, and customers are looking for a new opportunity for this level of automation. That is what is exciting. And we can do this. We can offer companies an incredible new capability, and we see that with our customers across the board.

Let’s talk about Disney. Disney is another great example where they have a very complex product line and for their employees, they call them cast members, to get this very intelligent response for a customer is incredibly difficult.

Now, we automate every Disney customer touch point from Disney+ to the service center, to selling the real estate, to this idea that you’re in the park with a Disney guide. And this is an opportunity for their employees to have an even heightened customer experience.

And I’ll give you a very concrete example. I’m walking through the park, something I actually do four times a year, and I’m with a Disney guide, and we’re on our way to Rise of the Resistance, my favorite ride, it’s at Galaxy’s Edge, which is Star Wars Land, and now the guide is notified the ride is down, because it’s a very complex ride to maintain. What is the guide to do? Does the guide, A, know flow control across the park so that it knows every ride how they’re doing and what’s busy and what’s not, and, B, my ride history, everything I have done and not done? Because those two things need to come together in an instant to make a recommendation to me, “Marc, Rise of the Resistance is down. We need to go to this new location.”

But the agent at that moment can say, with now more than 90% accuracy, “Yes, Marc needs to go to Toon Town.” … There’s no way the guide can do that on their own. It’s not possible. But the AI and the agent can, and now the agent is working side by side with the guide. That is agents with humans driving a greater level of customer success to better.

‘Trailblazer’ and human connections

TB: You were talking earlier about those “aha” AI moments, and I can assure you that you’re speaking with a real human here on the other side, as you can tell, and not an AI agent yet. But I had one of those “aha ” moments with Gogle Notebook LM.

Benioff: That is a great product.

So I read Trailblazer when it came out in 2019, and I have a copy on Kindle, and I took the Kindle copy and was able to fiddle with it and get it into Notebook LM and upload it with all sorts of background about the AI stuff and everything. And I asked it for questions to ask you. And one of the questions blew me away.

“You write in your book Trailblazer that you’ve never forgotten what you learned from your dad. “Nothing can take the place of human relationships, the bedrock of any business.’ How do you balance your belief in the power of AI with the importance of human connection and relationships in business?”

Benioff: Well, this is I think going to be the seminal moment, not just for me, but for all of us. Because there’s no question that we have this incredible ability to augment our employees for the first time with digital workers. That idea is so exciting. That idea that we’re going to work side by side with AI, we’re all going to get our head around that. We’ve seen it in the movies. We all saw it in “Minority Report.” We saw a “Terminator.” We saw “Her.” We saw “Space Odyssey.” We saw them all. Well, we’re going to live it and there’s no question it’s all unfolding in front of us.

And that is going to be the existential question of our time, which is, you and I are going to work side by side with agents. I’m sure we’re already doing that at some level already. For example, how many times a day do you already go to Gemini or ChatGPT or Perplexity or you.com or any of these systems to get an answer? Probably quite a bit.

But now let’s just go back a second. Before that, you were going to Google and you were doing Google Search, and Google Search also is AI. And now you have “super search,” is what I’d call with ChatGPT. And then when we combine that technology and we ground it into your company data, add your sharing model, which I’ve now made that point exhaustively, integrat it with your apps, it’s time for some magic to happen. And I think that’s what’s really cool.

We just did this conference in San Francisco called Dreamforce, and we had 45,000 people come. It was awesome. I don’t think you came, but maybe next year. And while we were there, we took 10,000 of our customers, because I brought in 4,000 of my employees just to focus on something called Launchpad, which was help our customers build agents in real time.

I have a dream that I’m going to try to get a billion agents going in the next year. So I wanted to really use it as a kickstart. I did one today in Tokyo, by the way. I did one last week in the UK and in Australia. I’m trying to really get this going globally. And sat down with those customers and said, “We’re going to build this. Let’s go.” And that idea that we can do it and add and extend their system, that is really important.

Saks Fifth Avenue came to the conference, and they are a tremendous Salesforce customer already, we automate all their customer touch points, and in an hour they built a system to manage their returns and their customer service. And if you go to their site today, it’s running.

So that’s a big thought, that they can extend their human workforce in an instant, in a moment. And I think we all realize our workforces are constrained emotionally, physically, spiritually, mentally, and we just don’t have enough people to do the jobs that have to get done.

Even in my own company, I feel that way. Even right now as I’m rolling out Agentforce, I wish I could be doing so much more faster and more scaled. Agents are going to provide that capability, and that’s what it’s all about.

Salesforce in the Seattle area

TB: You mentioned when Salesforce acquired Tableau that Seattle was going to be HQ2. Do you still see it that way?

Benioff: We have a huge workforce in Seattle. We have just tremendous folks up there. We have so many groups all over the world now. I think what I did not expect was, we had this thing, I don’t know if you heard about it, called the pandemic. And when we had the pandemic and we all went home and we all learned how to use Zoom and be comfortable with Zoom, that changed everything for me.

I think HQ2 probably looks a little bit more like our homes and not so much like a specific city. Maybe that’s HQ1 for a lot of companies. I have friends of mine who only have remote workforces. So I think everything changed at that moment.

It’s not that Seattle isn’t really important to us. We have a huge facility there. We have a brand new tower in Chicago, in Sydney, in Tokyo, in New York, in Atlanta, in Paris, all over the world. But at the end of the day, we are more flexible, more virtual workers than ever before, and we’re going to continue to be that way.

Time magazine and the media business

TB: In 2020, as part of your ownership of Time magazine, you declared, I think rightly so from a journalistic standpoint and ethically that you would no longer be making political donations and (personal) endorsements. As we approach November 5th, any regrets about that decision?

Benioff: No. I think it’s been a great decision. First of all, I’ve really enjoyed my stewardship of Time. Here’s this issue on inspiring women, I’m holding it up, and this is something that we brought actually into the brand, which is not only the concept of Man of the Year, but Woman of the Year.

I would say that this has been a moment in the last six years where we’ve tried to focus more on the middle way, and that’s owning Time and being in the media industry. It’s, by the way, very different than the tech industry. It’s much harder. The media industry is very difficult. It’s very complicated. The tech industry, software, I’ve been doing for 45 years, it’s much easier.

TB: What’s the toughest thing about media?

Benioff: It’s the fluidity of the models, and I think that with Time, what we’ve done is, we have the print, which I just showed you. We also have the digital. We have events. We have other kinds of digital products. Even our NFTs, if you remember those. We have our Time Studios. We have a movie studio now. We have many different types of products inside Time. And that idea that we’re constantly building and growing and expanding brands, sub-brands, new products, it’s so fluid and so fast moving. I would say that in some ways it’s even more so than the tech industry.

Subscribe to GeekWire in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.

Audio editing by Curt Milton.

This week on the GeekWire Podcast, we imagine the possibility of Uber buying Expedia Group, based on a report by the Financial Times this week that the ride-hailing company has considered a bid for the online travel giant.

It would be notable in part because Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi was Expedia Group’s CEO from 2005 to 2017, and remains on the board. Khosrowshahi, who oversaw numerous acquisitions during his tenure at Expedia Group, reportedly recused himself from talks about a possible deal between Uber and Expedia.

[Skift: Uber-Expedia Super Deal? Our Answers to 10 Big Questions]

In the second segment, we enjoy a highlight from the “60 Minutes” profile of former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, and a separate appearance by University of Washington historian and author Margaret O’Mara on an episode of the podcast “60 Minutes: A Second Look” about the rise of Silicon Valley in the early 1980s.  

And finally, we discuss the GeekWire project, Microsoft @ 50, and get a window into what’s next in AI from Peter Lee, the Microsoft Research president. He shares the top three technical challenges on his mind when it comes to the future of artificial intelligence. This is bonus content from an interview for the first story in the series, published this week, tracing the evolution of AI inside Microsoft. 

Subscribe to GeekWire in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.

With GeekWire co-founders Todd Bishop and John Cook.

This week on the GeekWire Podcast: Artificial intelligence and automation are transforming the way companies get stuff to stores and doorsteps, changing the world of logistics, transportation, and the supply chain, as demonstrated by a few Amazon-related stories we covered this week: 

• Amazon’s unveiling of a new “Vision-Assisted Package Retrieval (VAPR) system for the cargo hold of its electric Rivian vans;
• The announcement of Amazon’s next-generation fulfillment center, with updated and expanded versions of its robotics systems in Shreveport, La.
• Former Amazon executive Dave Clark’s launch of a new supply chain technology startup, based in the Seattle area, with $100 million in funding out of the gate. 

Those are our topics in our first two segments of the show this week. In the third segment, we hear more about the new Cancer AI Alliance spearheaded by Seattle’s Fred Hutch Cancer Center, in partnership with other national cancer research organizations and major tech companies including Amazon, Microsoft and Nvidia. 

Subscribe to GeekWire in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.

We were looking for a guest expert to discuss the new Microsoft Copilot features on the show this week, when we realized, why not go straight to the source?

Our guest host for the first segment of the show is Microsoft Copilot, taking advantage of the new voice interaction mode rolled out by the company this week. 

In the second segment, we get a behind-the-scenes view of this and other new features with a couple of clips from Mustafa Suleyman, the CEO of Microsoft AI, from the closing session at Madrona’s Intelligent Applications Summit on Wednesday afternoon in downtown Seattle.

And in the final segment, my colleague John Cook and I — two humans! — analyze my conversation with Copilot, reflecting on the evolution of artificial intelligence and where it still falls short of human capability.

Subscribe to GeekWire in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.

With the ramping up of the Simonyi Survey Telescope at the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile, Microsoft software architect Charles Simonyi joins a select group of scientists and technologists, policymakers and philanthropists who have had world-class telescopes and observatories named after them.

But here’s the thing: Technically speaking, the Simonyi Survey Telescope isn’t named after Charles Simonyi alone.

“The idea was to create something that carries the family name, and I was more thinking about my dad, Simonyi Károly,” Charles Simonyi told GeekWire, using the Hungarian manner of speech for personal names. “He was a professor at Budapest University. He wrote a wonderful book called ‘The Cultural History of Physics,’ which is available now in English at Amazon.”

Simonyi said his father was best-known for his work in popularizing science, “to make science understandable to the great public.” The physicist’s son arguably had an even greater impact on our computer-centric society by taking a leading role in creating Word, Excel and other tools for Microsoft’s Office suite of applications back in the 1980s. Four decades later, Word is still the world’s most widely used word processing software, and Excel is the most widely used spreadsheet.

Now the Simonyi Survey Telescope promises to have a similarly transformative and long-lasting impact on astronomy. Built at the Rubin Observatory on the edge of Chile’s Atacama Desert, one of the driest places on Earth, the telescope will survey the full sky every three nights, generating about 20 terabytes of raw data daily.

The Rubin construction team — headed by University of Washington astronomer Zeljko Ivezic — is currently deep into getting the telescope ready for its official debut in the spring of 2025. And there’s yet another Seattle tech connection to the project: UW’s DiRAC Institute is heavily involved in developing tools for analyzing the torrents of data that will come from the Rubin Observatory.

The Simonyi Survey Telescope is unlike the Hubble Space Telescope or NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, which can focus on an incredibly tiny spot in the sky.

“It’s a little bit like having a camera, and then it’s a difference between a wide-angle lens and a telescopic lens,” Simonyi explained. “It’s not like one of them is better. There are things that you can do with a telescopic lens, but if you don’t have a wide-angle lens, you’re missing a lot of interesting things.”

There’s a wide range of interesting things that the telescope is suited to study. Readings from the Rubin Observatory are expected to help astronomers learn more about dark matter and dark energy, the unseen stuff that makes up 95% of the universe’s content. The observatory will serve as an early warning system for transient phenomena in the night sky, alerting other telescope teams around the world to track supernovas, gamma-ray bursts and other cosmic fireworks.

Simonyi is looking forward to an avalanche of discoveries relating to asteroids, comets and interstellar objects like ‘Oumuamua, the cigar-shaped space rock that passed through the inner solar system in 2017. Studies predict that the Rubin Observatory could detect as many as 70 interstellar objects every year — and about 130 near-Earth objects, mostly asteroids, every night!

“I’m certainly not looking for an asteroid that is threatening the Earth,” Simonyi said. “But it’s good to know where those asteroids are, and this number of 5 million to 10 million objects in our solar system is something worth thinking about. Quite a few of these will be trans-Neptunian objects — that is, things like Pluto. And among those there might be the Planet X that Pluto was supposed to be.”

How did Simonyi end up getting a telescope named for his family? That part of the story goes back to the origins of the Rubin Observatory — which was initially known as the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, or LSST. (Today that acronym refers to the 10-year Legacy Survey of Space and Time, the Rubin Observatory’s top priority.)

One of the earliest advocates for the telescope was Tony Tyson, an astronomer who eventually became the Rubin Observatory’s chief scientist.

“He had this dream of a very, very large survey telescope which he then called the LSST, and in 2004, he approached Bill Gates with a proposal to fund just the mirror — because, you know, the mirror is the long lead-time item. It takes many years to cast it, to have it cool down, and then to polish it.”

Simonyi said Gates was very excited about the idea, but had other priorities for his philanthropic giving.

“He kindly and very generously approached me, and suggested that I put up the founding investment into this enterprise. And he joined me. So, the two of us funded the creation of the mirror, which got the ball rolling.”

Simonyi contributed $20 million in seed funding, and Gates kicked in $10 million. Eventually, funding from the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy exceeded the billionaires’ contributions. “You know, NSF had a much easier time raising the funds in Congress,” Simonyi said with a laugh. “Now it’s nearing a billion dollars. So it was a fast-growing company, if you will.”

You could think of Charles Simonyi as the first angel investor to buy into what will become one of the world’s most powerful telescopes — with the payoff on that investment coming in the form of scientific discoveries. No wonder the telescope bears his name.

In this week’s GeekWire Podcast, Simonyi provides a wide-angle perspective on the telescope and his involvement in the project. He also reflects on his two multimillion-dollar trips to the International Space Station in 2007 and 2009, and talks about the possibility of taking on yet another space odyssey. Here are a few edited sound bites to whet your appetite:

What are the big mysteries that the Rubin Observatory will help solve? “Astronomy is now a mirror of physics. The Big Bang explains elementary particles. In a way, it’s physics writ large, but in a way, it’s very much connected to the physics of the quarks and below. It all has to do with data. Another place where data comes in is, for example, supernovae.

“Dark matter is still a big puzzle. And it’s worth noting that Vera Rubin was very instrumental in noticing the pattern of galaxy rotation that created this issue of the rotational problem. Why don’t galaxies just fly apart? What keeps them together? There’s not enough mass — or visible mass, at least — in a galaxy that would explain the kind of rotation that was first observed by Vera Rubin.

“It’s also interesting that Dr. Rubin had to do her own observations and theories together, because nobody would do the observations for her. The experimentalists and theoreticians were, historically, pretty much the same person. … But now it’s going to be completely different, in that the data will come in automatically, and people will be sitting at computers and working the data.”

How are the telescope’s mirrors ground into shape? “The grinding is done by computerized tools these days, and always checked with lasers for the exact measurement. It’s very careful work. One day, we got a phone call that somebody dropped a tool on the ground mirror. Of course, the first thought was that, I hope the person was fired — which is a horrible thought. But it turns out that the person was the most important and best-equipped person. So, it was an unfortunate accident.

“It turns out that it doesn’t hurt it at all. You simply plug the hole with epoxy, and because the mirror counts as a whole in collecting information, having one-millionth of its surface be less than totally perfect is not going to make any difference. So, you learn something about that, too — that accidents happen, and they don’t stop progress.”

What’s it like to visit the telescope? “They essentially have a national park that is reserved for astronomy. There must be, I don’t know, at least 40 or 50 telescopes within that park. And the special feature of the park is that there’s no light pollution.

“The closest city, La Serena, is about 100 kilometers away. People don’t drive at night, and there are precautions in the whole area to keep the light pollution to a minimum. Of course, the only people there are people that are associated with the various telescopes, and they definitely respect the need for the conditions of respecting the purpose of the place.”

Would you take another trip to space? “Yes, I think going to space again is a possibility. I’m not sure if my family would like to go, but maybe they will. I was thinking that space travel might become more routine, probably in 10 years, than it had been when I was flying…

“There are great elements of spaceflight: the observation of the Earth … seeing day and night, seeing winter and summer, seeing the northern latitudes and the equatorial region, seeing the seas and the land, all in a very rapid progression. That’s really wonderful. The experience of weightlessness is itself an interesting, and I have to say, a very pleasant sensation…. If my family is interested, I would certainly join them, and maybe even point out some interesting details.”

Subscribe to GeekWire in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.

Audio editing by Curt Milton.

This week on the GeekWire Podcast: Amazon’s decision to bring its employees back to the office five days a week is a window into the challenges facing the e-commerce and technology giant, and CEO Andy Jassy’s larger plan to get the company to operate like “the world’s largest startup” again.

Plus, GeekWire’s John Cook gets into the backseat of a driverless car for the first time since 2018, and has a very different experience.

Coverage of Amazon’s announcement:

• Amazon ‘will return to being in the office the way we were’ before the pandemic, CEO tells employees
• ‘The way we were’: Amazon tries to rekindle its future by rediscovering a spark from the past
• Thoughts on Amazon’s full return to the office from a CEO who knows the value — and the trade-offs
• A ‘home run’ or a ‘cowardly’ decision? Amazon’s new in-person work policy elicits cheers and jeers
• Amazon’s new back-to-office mandate fuels debate over remote work and productivity

Waymo links and related stories:

• NPR: Armed with traffic cones, protesters are immobilizing driverless cars
• GeekWire in 2018: We rode in Uber’s self-driving car, and now we’re less confident in the future of autonomous vehicles
• The Verge: Waymo and Uber expand their robotaxi partnership to Austin and Atlanta

Subscribe to GeekWire in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.

Audio editing by Curt Milton.

[Editor’s Note: This week’s guest host, Ross Reynolds, is an interviewer and moderator who is well-known in the Seattle region from his 34 years at KUOW, the public radio station from which he retired in 2021.]

Who is the real Bill Gates? Anupreeta Das focuses on that question in her new book, “Billionaire, Nerd, Savior, King: Bill Gates and His Quest to Shape Our World.” Das is the South Asia correspondent for The New York Times.

Listen to the conversation below and continue reading for highlights, edited for clarity. Subscribe to GeekWire in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.

Why did you decide to write this book?

Anupreeta Das: Back in 2021, when Bill Gates and Melinda French Gates got divorced, I got pulled into the reporting because I had written about Gates’ fortune going back to 2014. The question of what was going to happen to that money became pertinent because of the Gates Foundation.

Leading up to that divorce, there was this period where you had Jeffrey Epstein, the convicted sex offender, and Gates’s connections. I was like, “Who is this person?” I at least had thought of him as the Microsoft co-founder and this global philanthropist. And beyond that wasn’t really paying that much attention.

So that, for me, was the “aha moment,” to try to explore who this persona was, and who the person was, and what does it say about how we engage with billionaires.

What are your thoughts on what you learned, and what still remains unknown, about Bill Gates’ Epstein connection?

Das: The question is why, if you’re one of the world’s most famous billionaires, would you need the assistance of someone like Epstein? So that remains a mystery. Gates has always talked about how it was a lapse in judgment.

The second piece of it that’s confusing to me is, there are a lot of people around Gates. Did they not advise him? Even a simple Google search would tell you that Epstein was a shady character. So that piece of it has never been entirely clear.

[Editor’s Note: GeekWire contacted Gates’ representatives for comment on the book. They responded with this statement: “Relying almost exclusively on second- and third-hand hearsay and anonymous sources, the book includes highly sensationalized allegations and outright falsehoods that ignore the actual documented facts Mr. Gates’ office provided to the author on numerous occasions.”]

In your book, you place Bill Gates in the context of billionaires, and the myths we have about billionaires. One is that they’re self-made. What does the myth of the self-made billionaire leave out?

Das: His mom was on the board of the University of Washington. His dad was one of the best-known lawyers, and they were both community leaders. So you had this level of access into what was the latest at that time. You have to be brilliant, but it allows you to start at a level well ahead of many other people.

The lack of downside risk is something that really struck me. … [Gates] would have had a great career if Microsoft had failed. So that kind of security perhaps allows you to take much bigger risks.

A lot has been written about how hard-driving Bill Gates was and how harsh he was. When he left Microsoft and became a full-time philanthropist, all of a sudden, that began to shift, and that was not by accident.

Das: Until the Epstein stuff, for years, he was seen as the most-admired man in the world. Such was his renown. And this is a man who still gets the same welcome as a head of state. He can easily go into any country and seek a meeting, and the prime minister or the president will take that meeting. … It’s very hard to criticize someone like Gates, because he is doing good. He is a celebrity. He is highly visible, and that helps him.

And yet, we do hear from some people who work for him at the foundation, who say a meeting with Bill Gates is terrifying, even after he supposedly transformed himself into this benevolent philanthropist.

Das: At Microsoft, in the tech world, they kind of understood that. But in the foundation, when you have a lot of people coming from the very genteel worlds of academia or policy, I think that was a rude awakening to be talked to that way, especially because you were hired to the foundation for your expertise. … Either you go along with it, or you quit, or you say, I have a cushy job and I believe in the foundation’s work, and I’m just going to stay quiet and continue.

How does the annual giving by the Gates Foundation and its influence in the charitable areas it chooses to inhabit, compare to other foundations, and to governments, to the United Nations?

Das: The Gates Foundation institutionalized a certain kind of philanthropy, what I call Big Philanthropy. It’s a very data-driven approach. You pick something of vertical, you identify which nonprofits you want to give that money to, and then you give the money, but you hold them to certain standards, and then there are metrics and there’s assessments.

So I do think that if you’re a nonprofit on the ground, you risk spending a lot of time kind of providing these metrics and data points to assess the program’s success, because it’s tied to the foundation’s money.

The level of engagement is unusual. You could look at Mike Bloomberg’s philanthropies. It’s similar in the sense that they give away a lot of money, but it doesn’t have such a tight grip on how the money is being put to use. So the Gates Foundation is quite unique in that sense.

You didn’t get to talk to Bill Gates, but if you had a chance to talk to him, what would your first question have been? What would you have wanted to know most from him?

Das: Does he agree with the way the world looks at him? Does he have humility about it? How self-aware is he of how he is looked at, and how does he use that? Does he put ego aside to do the best he can with the goodwill that he has?

I think he would know exactly what the book was going for. The Economist in its review wrote about the influence of billionaires, and how I’m trying to address this. Gates reads The Economist cover to cover. So he would have read, I assume, their review of my book. And so the question is, does he agree?

Anupreeta Das will be speaking in Seattle on Thursday, Sept. 19, at Third Place Books in the Ravenna neighborhood.

Audio editing by Curt Milton.

E Ink writing tablets are some of my favorite devices. I got started with the Amazon Kindle Scribe, and ended up becoming a regular user of the reMarkable 2. I haven’t added to the stacks of yellow legal pads in my office for almost two years.

It’s my go-to device for scribbling stuff down and thinking things through. It feels almost like using a real pen and paper. Sometimes I have to remind my brain that it’s not actual ink or lead flowing out of the stylus. It’s easy to undo and erase, and add unlimited pages to a notebook. The battery life can be measured in weeks.

In many ways, it’s better than real pen and paper.

The market for these devices reached a pivotal moment this week with reMarkable’s unveiling of its new Paper Pro — now with color E Ink, not just black-and-white. Watching the unveiling and the demo videos this week felt like seeing Dorothy go from monochrome Kansas to the colorful Emerald City.

The reMarkable Paper Pro is not the first color E Ink tablet or e-reader — the technology has actually been around for a couple years — but given reMarkable’s loyal fan base, this device promises to bring new attention to color E Ink displays.

It’s not cheap: The reMarkable Paper Pro starts at $579 with a basic marker, but the price can easily exceed $700 if you go for a premium marker with a built-in eraser, or optional folios for protecting and/or typing on the device.

ReMarkable, based in Oslo, Norway, blends an Apple vibe with a Scandinavian ethos, pitching its tablets as an oasis of peace and mindfulness in a sea of distraction.

Now the big question is whether Amazon will join the trend with a color Kindle e-reader or Kindle Scribe. The Seattle tech giant typically holds its big device unveiling in the fall, so we may find out relatively soon.

The technology enabling the shift from black-and-white to color is the Gallery 3 color display, from E Ink Holdings, a company that spun out of the MIT Media Lab in 1997. So what’s really going on behind the screen?

On this episode of the GeekWire Podcast, we talk with Timothy O’Malley, associate vice president of the U.S. regional business unit at E Ink, about the evolution of the technology and the applications for E Ink displays.

“We have about a billion displays in the world,” O’Malley says. “Most of them are in shelf tag and retail environments, but most of the time, they look like paper, and people would walk right by them and not know that.”

Here’s how he explains the evolution of E Ink’s color technology.

We’ve been slowly integrating and improving, starting with two particles: black and white. Then we went to three: black, white, red. Then we went to four, but not mixing them: black, white, red, yellow. Each one of these steps is us learning how to get better and better at controlling the placement of the particles in this very tiny space.

Today, it’s four particles — white, cyan, magenta, yellow — and the cyan, magenta and yellow mix to give you the appropriate color. All of that learning and control algorithms, in order to get all that placement just done perfectly, in the nick of time … that’s been the journey of delivering color to these devices.

Among other topics, we talk about what’s next for E Ink, the evolving market for digital notepads, and some of the more surprising applications of the technology, including airline bag tags and color-changing cars.

Listen above, and subscribe in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.

Editor’s Note: Timothy O’Malley’s title has been corrected since publication.

This week on the GeekWire Podcast, we revisit the controversy over Starbucks’ hybrid work policy for its new CEO, Brian Niccol; discuss the cyberattack that crippled computer systems at Sea-Tac Airport in the Seattle area this week; and provide an update on last week’s episode about AI text-to-music generators.

Articles and topics discussed on this episode:

• Hybrid policy for new Starbucks CEO sparks debate over remote work, corporate jet emissions
• Starbucks’ New CEO Has a Big Carbon Footprint – WSJ
• Starbucks’ New CEO Will Take Charge Without Training Wheels – Bloomberg
• Steve Ballmer Chases NBA Glory at Intuit Dome, the LA Clippers’ Gleaming New Home
• Plane English: Sea-Tac Airport turns to pen and paper to replace digital displays after cyberattack
• Port of Seattle outage continues two days after suspected cyberattack by ‘nefarious characters’
• GeekWire’s quest for an AI theme song opened our ears to the debate rattling the music industry
• GeekWire Podcast listener Fortunato Vega shares his AI-generated theme song on LinkedIn.

With Todd Bishop and Taylor Soper. Edited by Curt Milton.

Subscribe to GeekWire in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.

For a while now, we’ve been doing an occasional GeekWire Podcast segment called “My AI,” about the latest AI tools grabbing my attention and changing the way I work.

But we’ve been missing a fun musical intro or jingle for the “My AI” segment that would really solidify its place on the show. My colleague John Cook’s attempts to improvise a “My AI” theme song don’t really count, as he would readily admit.

So naturally, we asked ourselves, could AI solve this problem?

We quickly discovered that the answer was yes. The results from our experiments with two AI-based text-to-music generators were pretty amazing, at least in some cases. You can hear for yourself on this week’s show. The services Udio and Suno generated some truly catchy songs, as well as a few duds.

But the incredible thing was that all of the tunes, plus some very nuanced lyrics, were generated from a simple prompt: “Can you create a short introductory jingle for a GeekWire Podcast segment called ‘My AI’?”

Here is one of the songs, an electronic pop tune, generated by Suno. I liked this one because of the structure, which would work well as the intro and outro for a podcast segment (which was the assignment, after all).

In a world of code and screens
Where tech is more than just a dream
My AI, My AI
The future’s here it’s in the sky
My AI, My AI
Tech that makes us reach so high

Just for fun, in some cases, I asked the AI music generators to use specific genres. Here, for example, is a “My AI” country music theme that sounds like it could have come from a Merle Haggard set list.

Talkin’ ’bout my AI
Geek news, set your mind a-fly
Join us on this wild ride
Where tech and truth collide

From the latest in machines
To the code that paints our dreams

We’re breaking down the bytes
Exploring all the sights
In a world that’s so pristine
Where the future’s evergreen

John was partial to this Udio tune, in the spirit of German electronic band Kraftwerk.

My A-I, join the crew
My A-I, look what’s new

My A-I, here to stay
My A-I, leading the way

Tune in to GeekWire, it’s My AI day!

Those are just a few examples. We play more of them on the show, with reactions from John and our longtime colleague, GeekWire Editor Taylor Soper, and discuss the underlying issues raised by these AI music tools.

Even when the music was awful, the technology was pretty incredible.

But when it comes to how the songs are made, how they should be used, and what this means for human creators, the answers are a lot more complicated.

One indication: when the services are asked to create a song in the style of a particular artist, they respond by saying that they can’t do that, but they suggest a series of genres and styles in the spirit of the requested artist.

From a licensing perspective, the services maintain that we’d be within our rights to use the resulting songs for a segment on our podcast. This is from Udio’s FAQ:

Can I use the content I generate using Udio for commercial purposes?

For example, can I distribute the music I generate on music streaming platforms? Can I include it in a monetized video on YouTube? Can I license it for use in TV/movies/advertisements/etc.? Yes, as long as the content does not contain copyrighted material that you do not own or have explicit permission to use, and as long as you properly indicate that the content was generated using Udio

But the reason these services were on my radar to begin with was because they are the targets of litigation from the Recording Industry Association of America.

Here are excerpts from the RIAA’s complaints against Udio and Suno:

“Building and operating [these services] requires at the outset copying and ingesting massive amounts of data to “train” a software “model” to generate outputs. For [these services], this process involved copying decades worth of the world’s most popular sound recordings and then ingesting those copies [to] generate outputs that imitate the qualities of genuine human sound recordings.”

“When those who develop such [services] steal copyrighted sound recordings, the [services’] synthetic musical outputs could saturate the market with machine-generated content that will directly compete with, cheapen, and ultimately drown out the genuine sound recordings on which the [services were] built.”

Here is part of Suno’s response:

Like a human musician, Suno did not develop its capabilities in a vacuum. It is the product of extensive analysis and study of the building blocks of music: what various genres and styles sound like; how songs in those genres and styles are harmonized and structured; the characteristic timbres of the instruments and vocalizations in those genres and styles; and so on.

Those genres and styles—the recognizable sounds of opera, or jazz, or rap music—are not something that anyone owns. Our intellectual property laws have always been carefully calibrated to avoid allowing anyone to monopolize a form of artistic expression, whether a sonnet or a pop song. IP rights can attach to a particular recorded rendition of a song in one of those genres or styles. But not to the genre or style itself.

After using AI to generate the songs, talking with John and Taylor, reading the RIAA’s complaint, and giving it more thought, I’m conflicted about actually using any of the resulting music for the “My AI” segment.

Bottom line, I’m holding off for now, and this project might not be over yet. Stay tuned. Meanwhile, I’ll be trying to get these AI-generated earworms out of my head.

Subscribe to GeekWire in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.

Audio editing by Curt Milton.