AI in focus: Apple Intelligence, Nvidia Keynote, Microsoft Recall

Special thanks to organisations who support innovation and tech leadership in New Zealand by partnering with NZ Tech Podcast: One NZ HP Spark NZ 2degrees Gorilla Technology

Episode Transcript (computer-generated)

Paul Spain:
Hey, folks, greetings and welcome along to the New Zealand tech podcast. I’m your host, Paul Spain. And today we have William Montague Brown joining us. Great to have you on the show, William.

William Montague-Brown:
Thanks, Paul. Very, very excited to be here and have a conversation with you.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, really, really good to have you on for the first time. Now your business is Willbot Wilbot AI. Maybe just tell us a little bit around what you do.

William Montague-Brown:
Yeah. So at Willbot AI, we help small to medium sized businesses implement AI solutions at affordable pricing. So we’ve worked with a few clients and now we’ve actually just started onboarding more. So we do stuff like internal chatbots, external chatbots, as well as some email responders and drafters. So helping businesses centralize and leverage AI, that’s what we do.

Paul Spain:
That’s good. That’s really cool. Well, that’s perfect for our discussion today because there’s been a lot going on in the AI world. First up, before we dive into the topics, and we’re going to be talking about Microsoft and some real dramas that they’ve actually had in the last couple of weeks with their new technology called Recall. And what’s happening there? Amazon. A step forward for Amazon, delving into Apple’s Worldwide developers conference. Massive load of AI news in there. And then also a little bit into Nvidia’s keynote.

Paul Spain:
But of course, a big thank you to our show. Partners to one NZ, two degrees, Spark, HP and guerrilla technology. So Microsoft Recall sounded like an exciting idea when their chief executive is touting this incredible AI capability on your computer that will remember everything that you’ve done and when you’re thinking, oh, what was that really cool shirt, jacket, whatever that you saw a couple of weeks ago, you could just go in and ask the AI and it’ll pull up exactly what you had on your screen at the time and query it about things that have happened in the past. Sounded good until we delved into, how does it actually do that? Oh, it takes an automated screenshot on your computer every 5 seconds, and then it stores a whole lot of data unencrypted on your laptop and that this could happen whether you’re doing personal stuff, work stuff, looking at things you shouldn’t be looking at, whatever is going to be capturing all this stuff and just storing it unencrypted. So some really big concerns came out around that one. What are your thoughts? It sounds like a sort of tempting sort of offering, right, to be able to, you know, give you that ability to kind of look back and look up things without having to maybe remember what website it was you’re on or whatnot.

William Montague-Brown:
Absolutely. I mean, I think with AI especially, there’s so many concerns around privacy. It’s like when chat GPT first came out, everyone thought wow, this is fantastic. And then people found out what data training was and it turned out that this great free tool is actually using all your sensitive information, you know, and I think since then there’s been a massive concern as there should be around privacy with AI models and whatnot. And so, you know, Recall, great idea on paper, but look a little bit deeper and yeah, I think they’ve been exposed.

Paul Spain:
Yeah. So Microsoft sort of learning some lessons here, having to eat humble pie. So they’ve sort of stepped back a little bit from what they were gonna do. You’re now going to have to actually turn the capability on if you wanted. It’s not just going to be automatically running when you start your windows machine by default. So yeah, that will be something you effectively have to opt into. And they’re working away on some of the other elements of it. But yeah, this could be a huge drama for a lot of organizations.

Paul Spain:
And I think it’s also a reminder we often hear about organizations and having a BYOD policy bring your own device. You can access our company stuff on your personal device and you know, there can be variances in terms of how well that stuff’s locked down. And you know, one of the issues has always been, well, you know, if there’s a malware on your machine then you might be limited to accessing company data from a browser or certain systems and so on. If you don’t have full control over that private device. Yeah, you want to be really sure about whether or as you know you have to have a high level of confidence around how you going to address those sort of risks. And there are obviously mechanisms to do that. And there’s things like when somebody’s running a cloud based virtual machine or accessing it from a personal device where you can lock that down so a normal screenshot won’t actually capture the data that’s on the screen. So there are some mechanisms, but I guess what’s happened with Microsoft Recall has been a bit of a reminder around some of those, some of those things.

William Montague-Brown:
Absolutely, absolutely.

Paul Spain:
Amazon drones now we’ve sort of been following drones now for a long time, probably right back to the earliest editions of the New Zealand tech podcast. I’m sort of thinking back to 2011 when we started and we were getting sent drones to try out. I think one of the first was a parrot drone. DJI, obviously very much dominated in sort of a lot of the consumer and business space, but I think that the area that has caught a lot of people’s interest is this idea that you order something and you’re not having to have a person bring it to you and you’re not going to have to go to the store, but a drone’s going to get it to you. And look, the work that Amazon Primer have been doing is one of those that I guess we’ve been watching, and they’ve just recently now received in the US federal. Yeah, federal Aviation Administration approval to operate beyond the visual line of sight, which is often what the regulations say. Yep. You can fly your drone wherever you like, as long as you can still see it with your naked eye and you’re watching it the whole time.

Paul Spain:
So that’s probably much more relevant for individual private use cases. But when it comes to commercial deliveries, that’s probably not going to cut it. So this is really where they’re heading. Their new mk 30 drone, capable of flying in light rain and a broader mix of sort of temperature ranges. And they’re going to be doing deliveries across not only the US, but UK and Italy, and 30 minutes type delivery. So jump online. Maybe you’re ordering a new drone, and if you’re near to an Amazon location, then a drone might pick it up and drop it in your backyard.

William Montague-Brown:
Sounds like the future, that’s for sure. I mean, the thing I think about with that sort of stuff is I remember I heard, I think it was Elon Musk talking about it one time and he said, you know, the reason we have traffic as a problem is because driving is all 2d, right? Getting around places, it’s all 2d. You add that 3d element in and all of a sudden, like, it’s so much more scalable. So, yeah, I mean, this technology’s obviously been in development for quite a long time. I mean, drone delivery and whatnot is something that’s been discussed for a long time. So it’s definitely something I think we can see in the future. And it’s going to be interesting to see how it all plays out.

Paul Spain:
Some of these things seem to take a lot longer than you might imagine. Simon Bridges, who works around the corner here when he was MP and government minister, I think they did the domino’s pizza delivery by drone to him and some other folks. And, yeah, that demo’s going back quite a few. Quite a few years now. And, you know, here we are, we’re still watching these things progress slowly. But what I do notice is that the trials and the different things haven’t stopped. They’re continuing to go forward. It’s obviously not the simplest, easiest thing to achieve.

Paul Spain:
Otherwise we’d have drones flying around all over the place by now, wouldn’t we?

William Montague-Brown:
Absolutely, yeah.

Paul Spain:
Now moving on to Apple’s Worldwide Developers conference. I guess that’s really the big event of the day as we record this, lots and lots of announcements from Apple. But AI really weaved quite deeply into a lot of the announcements. Not everything. There’s all sorts of new things coming to iOS and Mac and so on. My Mac is going to feel a little bit more like a windows machine shortly as you’ll be able to drag a window to the side of your screen and it’ll give you, you know, align your varying windows that you’ve got open, which is one thing windows has done nicely for us for. I’ve lost count of the number of years. Quite a long time.

Paul Spain:
And so if you’ve got a big screen at all or you’re trying to squeeze a few windows onto a smaller screen. Yeah, nice capability we’ve got. IOS is going to be able to not just do iMessage, but it’s got RCS support. I think it stands for rich communication service, if I remember correctly, which is what Android devices have been using for a number of years, so that you can move around multimedia and so on through your messages. So that sort of next step up from text messaging without having to sort of pay the premium for sort of sending somebody, you know, a little graphic or a photo or a video or what have you at those sort of premium. They fixed type rates, sort of throw whatever they cost and just brings the iPhone and Android messaging into a better place. So that’s coming. So, yeah, lots and lots there.

Paul Spain:
But the AI aspects here, I guess, are what are probably catching a lot of people’s attention out of the things that you saw, what sort of standing out for you. Are there any particular things that you found really interesting?

William Montague-Brown:
Well, first of all, I mean, it’s been long speculated when Apple was going to start really investing in AI. Right. They’re kind of late to the party compared to some of the other guys.

Paul Spain:
Well, yes and no, because they have been building in the, the NPU, the neural processing units right into the, into their processes. So the, the foundations have, have been there. But, yeah, today was kind of the day where they’ve unveiled how unveiled kind of, you know, how that gets sort of put to put to better use. Right.

William Montague-Brown:
Yeah, the language models being available, you know, for use more like chat, GBT and Gemini and stuff like that. This is the first big announcement of that, really, isn’t it? So, yeah, I mean, it really. My first initial thoughts when I saw it was, this is copilot. I’ll be honest, I thought it was very similar to copilot in a lot of ways with the sort of apple twist on it, you know, the more vibrant marketing, edgy sort of way. But, yeah, I mean, it was very interesting. I think they’ve done it. So they’ve got their own model, which is. What’s it called? Art.

William Montague-Brown:
Apple intelligent or something. I can’t remember that. I was watching it earlier.

Paul Spain:
So, yeah, instead of calling things AI, they’re calling it Apple intelligence.

William Montague-Brown:
Apple intelligence.

Paul Spain:
Shorten that down. That’s AOI. So they’ve kind of rejigged AI from artificial intelligence to Apple intelligence.

William Montague-Brown:
Yep, sounds about right. So, yeah, I mean, it’s quite interesting how that all works where, you know, it’s working on your own hardware, on.

Paul Spain:
Your device, so there’s a chunk there that’s happening locally, isn’t it?

William Montague-Brown:
Absolutely. For the smaller, less in depth tasks. And then when you do need to use the more complex tasks, it’s hooked up to chat GBT, so it can use that larger language model to do some more complex tasks. And if you’ve got a chatgbt account, you can also get all the features of that. So, yeah, I mean, it’s really interesting. It’s like I said, I thought, wow, this is copilot for Apple, but free, I believe, for all Apple users for the basic features.

Paul Spain:
Yeah. Which I guess if you look now with. When you look at OpenAI with chat GPT 4.0, that’s something you can now use for free without signing up for an account. So in a way, they’re kind of aligning, but we haven’t seen anything around. Well, what are the limits if you’ve got a. Have you got a free account? What’s the difference between your free account, your premium account, you can plug your premium account and, you know, if you’ve, if you’ve got it and get some, some benefits. But, yeah, there’s, there’s probably a bit of detail lacking here. Shall we say that we’ll, we’ll all be, you know, waiting to see how it plays out.

William Montague-Brown:
Absolutely agree. Absolutely agree. It’s going to be very interesting to see how that all comes along, especially with the APIs that they announced for app store developers and stuff like that, how it’s going to be getting integrated into existing apps, I think, as well is going to be really interesting.

Paul Spain:
And then they’re talking about scenarios under which your AI requests can’t happen locally, that they’re going to happen in a private cloud environment. And so they’re doubling down on what we’ve been hearing over the last few years around privacy and effectively saying, look, as Apple, we’re not going to have access to your data, to your prompts and what you’re feeding in that information isn’t going to be stored. So that is rather a, I guess you could say a predictable sort of approach from Apple, but they are really, yeah, they’re really pushing that. I think, you know, chatting to a few people today, I certainly heard some, some sort of skepticism around, you know, the reality of that. And so, you know, I guess wherever you share your data, there’s a, there’s a risk, right, of things, things going wrong. And, yeah, that’s the challenge here, isn’t it? Apple can sort of say they’re going to keep your data private, but what if something goes wrong? How secure are you keeping your device and all of these sorts of things? There’s a bit more picture to it than just, oh, yep, Apple says it’s gonna be safe, so it’s gonna be safe. You do still need to, need to give some thought to what you put where. But I think it probably gives an increased level of confidence, I think, to a lot of people because on the flip side, Apple have now closely linked privacy with their brand.

Paul Spain:
So there is that expectation that they are going to keep your data, your prompts, what you feed into the AI. They’re going to keep that stuff pretty private. That’s the commitment. So I guess we’ll have to wait and see how it actually plays out.

William Montague-Brown:
Yeah, I mean, it’s like we were discussing earlier, right, AI and privacy, they’re two things that get talked about very closely. Right. And Apple is clearly noted on that and they’ve promoted it. And like you said, it is part of their brand. They’ve always very much tried to be a secure, you know, encrypted platform.

Paul Spain:
Yeah. And so, yeah, I guess other things to me is that their approach, which is that chat, GPT is going to be effectively an option for a large language model to sort of lean in on, but they’re going to add more over time. So that’s just, you know, that’s just one. So, you know, the default will be using their models, which will be, you know, on device or in their cloud. But, yeah, being able to tap into chat, GPT or OpenAI’s models, then being able to tap into other ones as those get added over, over time. Having that sort of natively or just kind of built in at a level within your mobile device I think makes a fair bit of sense. And it’s obviously it’s not just them doing this stuff. We’ve got Google and Microsoft.

Paul Spain:
Everybody’s kind of having their time to focus on AI right now. But I think what Apple does is really important because they’re already so dominant when it comes to particularly the mobile space. We do consider them more from a privacy perspective to be a different player than Google put it that way. So I’m really interested to see, you know, ultimately how well it all fits together, particularly with what they’re showing, where you’re going to, you know, you’re going to be able to ask some of these queries that are kind of across your device, that are looking at the information that’s in your email, that’s in your calendar, that’s in the different messages that you’ve got and your own kind of on device knowledge. And to me that’s one of the things that we probably have been waiting for. You can pay for, I guess say the co pilot for Microsoft 365 type capability which if you look at actually the annual cost of that in New Zealand in the direction of dollar 600, you’re more than covering a base iPhone over a 24 month period paying for that. So for some of these types of capabilities, if Apple are, are able to really embed them really well, then it become, you know, potentially becomes a very, very, you know, compelling option. And this is where I’m kind of curious to see what happens over time with the sort of competition and whether people want to throw maybe as much money at, you know, what the likes of Microsoft are, you know, are putting on the table when you’ve kind of got a range of ways of, of doing similar sorts of things.

Paul Spain:
And I’ll use copilot for Microsoft 365 and fire different requests at it based on things that are within my outlook world. But on an iPhone, this is something that’s maybe going to encourage you to take your company emails, your personal emails and put them into Apple Mail and so on. I’m not quite sure how the integration’s going to play in with other apps when it comes to. I didn’t see anything to sort of say that Microsoft were on board with say, the 365 world within say, your iPhone or your Mac. But of course you can sign into your email your calendars and so on on your Apple device. And yeah, I see that as actually potentially being some quite strong competition for the Microsoft offerings. And this is where individuals and organizations are going to be looking quite closely around. Well, who do we trust, you know, who do we invest our money with? There are just so many different options coming through, but ultimately it’s the bigger players that can wrap their arms around an ecosystem and deliver a real breadth of capabilities that I think a lot of us are looking for that simplicity and Apple have, have traditionally been pretty good when it comes to simplicity.

Paul Spain:
Right.

William Montague-Brown:
It’s funny, as you were saying that I was thinking with AI and tasks and automations and stuff, maybe techie people like you and me, Paul, we might see a task and think, oh, AI can do this. Let me go put it in chat GPT or let me go put it in Gemini or let me go generate an image. I think a lot of people don’t even realize or aren’t actively thinking about just how much AI can be automating. And for it to just constantly be there suggesting and recommending and summarizing and doing all these things, I think it’s going to significantly increase just how much the public as a whole are using AI and realizing what it can do and starting to implement it more in everyday life. So I think it’s going to be very interesting to see. I mean, everything always looks great on the keynotes, right? When there was the, the Google one, what was it? Last week or two weeks ago, there was obviously all the search functions that they were promoting and then that got released to the public and then there was all the media coming out about the information that that was giving. But, you know, Apple’s pretty good with it.

Paul Spain:
Blew your cheese to your pizza.

William Montague-Brown:
That’s right. Yeah, that’s right. So, I mean, I think it’s gonna be interesting to see how people respond to this, especially with the massive amount of increased usage. But Apple’s pretty good and I think they’re ones that definitely understand they use them more than anyone and they make it simple. That’s always what they’ve been about, isn’t it?

Paul Spain:
Yeah, but they carry the same sort of risks as others. Like we were joking about with Google and these examples of telling you to eat rocks is a healthy thing and the like. No one is probably immune from that side of generative AI right now. And obviously the likes of Apple, look, they’re drawing in on capabilities from others that they haven’t built everything that they’re going to leverage and even if they had, they would have the same sorts of challenges as others. So, yeah, I think we do have an interesting journey ahead, but a lot of it will come down to how easy it is to access, whether it kind of fits naturally into what we do. I guess, as you’re alluding to, there’s that thing where today some people really pushing into AI, I’m not sure it’s always necessarily related to somebody’s technical ability, but once you click onto it, then you will often push further and further and, oh, what else can this AI do for me? So there’s that element of that really clicking for people. And I think where I often sort of see the traction is where an individual is really seeing how AI maybe fits into their particular, you know, workflows, the work that they do. So, yeah, if those things kind of work well from the get go, then, you know, probably a lot more traction.

Paul Spain:
If they don’t work so well, then that can be a problem. And I think it’s important for people to really, you know, have, have a really good sort of attention to detail individually. And, you know, I keep coming across sort of, you know, situations where someone’s used some AI and then they’ve lacked the attention to detail. They’ve copied and pasted something from chat, DPT, etcetera, into an email, haven’t actually checked what was there and there’s some generic stuff or some wrong stuff or what have you that shouldn’t come through. But yeah, look, really encouraging from Apple, some of the fun stuff that they’re going to have, you know, these emojis that are being created by Gen AI. So, you know, emojis on the fly rather than sort of, you know, standardized ones. You know, it’s a bit of fun. And look, there is that element, right, where some of these things are just a bit of fun.

Paul Spain:
They add a bit of brightness to a day or two, some communications, and then those things that’ll really make a difference for me, Siri is one of those areas. I’m really interested in how it evolves from here because we’ve looked at Siri and our other kind of smart assistants and actually they haven’t been very smart. It’s like, hey, Siri, do this and it comes back with just something.

William Montague-Brown:
This is what I searched for.

Paul Spain:
Waste your time. Yeah, this is what I found from a Google search. No, we’re in 2024. You know, they’re catching up with 2024 by building this stuff into Surrey. And that I think is going to be helpful for us. Hopefully there’s not too many sort of missteps along the way. So, yeah, I think a pretty interesting time. They’re talking about this term of private cloud compute where they’re going to move things that can’t be carried out on device and apparently that’s using their Apple silicon.

Paul Spain:
So I guess there’s going to be some real pressure on those that are designing the Apple chips now to really bump up their AI capabilities or the performance of their neural processing units when AI workloads are being carried out both on mobile devices and Macs and in the cloud utilizing these chips.

William Montague-Brown:
Yeah, that was another thing I was wondering when I saw that, you know, what’s the performance strain going to be on the devices and the hardware with all this new technology coming in? I mean, obviously the models, you know, the Apple model that runs on your device is going to be significantly smaller than like a chat GPT or a Gemini or a GPT or a Gemini. But it’s still. It’s going to be. It’s going to be interesting to see, you know, in the real world application. Excited to test it out?

Paul Spain:
Yeah, look, well, they’re starting to make some stuff available pretty swiftly, beta or preview and the like, so, yeah, definitely encourage people to have a look, experiment. Would love to hear sort of feedback on what does and doesn’t work. One thing around the Apple intelligence, as they call it, the availability of this new AI. They’re saying that some of these new features will only be available on I 15 Pro and Pro Max, and that’s because they run the newest chips along with the recent iPads and Macs that have got the M series chips in them. M one, M two, M three, and most recently the M four and the iPad. So, yeah, this isn’t necessarily something that’s going to be available everywhere. Apple Vision Pro, they made some announcement there. Now, this has been limited to the us market so far and doesn’t appear to have sort of gained a massive amount of traction to date, but they’re opening that up to other markets.

Paul Spain:
I think three markets initially, and then I think July, Australia comes into the fold. Interestingly, New Zealand left off the list, so we’re not getting it at the same time as Australia. So still no, no announcement yet for the New Zealand market, so that’s interesting. But I think, yeah, there’s probably still a lot of development and software iteration to happen in that world and, yeah, we haven’t sort of landed, I guess, on a whole lot of kind of killer apps that people are really, you know, committed to. Apple vision Pro in order to get these new apps. Cause, yeah, we’re just not sort of seeing that level of excitement, even if the technology is pretty cool. And, you know, there’s a bunch of software out there, it just hasn’t kind of lit up the world the same way that AI seems to be.

William Montague-Brown:
Absolutely. I mean, yeah, it’s. What are they priced at? 3000 or $4,000?

Paul Spain:
I think when I worked it out was maybe, you know, by the time you put on GST, convert it to New Zealand. Last time I looked it was, you know, north of NZd6000. So, yeah, there’s definitely a fair premium that you pay for it, you know, compared to sort of meta quest, et cetera. Yeah, yeah.

William Montague-Brown:
Found it interesting. Like, it wasn’t that long ago now when everyone was talking about metaverse, metaverse, metaverse, that’s going to be the next big thing. And now it’s like you said, it’s kind of been outshone by AI. But, you know, I can’t talk too much about this because I’m. By no means, I haven’t really looked into it a whole bunch, but something I think about a lot is what’s going to happen when, you know, they start getting put together. You know, generative AI with VR, I think, is going to be a whole new experience. And, you know, that could be down the track, something that gets seriously looked at and seriously get some people excited about these augmented reality and virtual reality systems.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Look, it’s always fascinating kind of watching how these new technologies evolve over time. And yeah, often there can be interesting bits and pieces, but you don’t get something that really ends up getting the traction. And yeah, we so often see that. And yeah, at the moment, the sort of the virtual reality and augmented sort of reality world, we’ve seen varying iterations of the technologies over quite a few years. But yeah, it just, it hasn’t quite, hasn’t quite landed. And look, you know, I think, you know, some people would, would say, well, you know, look at curved tvs, 3d tvs, you know, those were all touted as exciting things. And yep, it was interesting technology.

Paul Spain:
But yeah, the benefit over what we’re doing now wasn’t there. And I guess this is one of those realities with having to put something on your head that covers your face. That’s quite a big step change to how we operate today, sitting in front of a normal computer screen or a smartphone or a tablet. And yeah, if you’re going to make that your world, then you want a really good step up and I’m not sure everyone’s convinced of that just yet.

William Montague-Brown:
I agree.

Paul Spain:
Yeah.

William Montague-Brown:
Yeah.

Paul Spain:
Now talking around Nvidia, of course, their chief executive, big keynote for them at Computex last week and pretty interesting, you know, robots running around on stage. Well, actually most of them were on the, on the screen, on the, on the back wall, but they did have some, there was some couple of Disney. Disney bots. So. Yeah, lots and lots of things announced. I think what we’re getting here is, yeah, probably more information that backs up the meteoric rise that we’ve seen with, with Nvidia. They’re now up there around the kind of apple type share price, you know, getting up towards being most valuable, you know, company in the world. They’ve just.

Paul Spain:
Share price has gone absolutely nuts. So around that, I think they’ve got right up there around that sort of $3 trillion second biggest market cap. Market cap, right. So, yeah, which is kind of. Yeah, so as I look right now at the moment we’re recording it is saying 3.00 trillion USD market capitalization and, yeah, that’s pretty insane. If we look back just to 2020, that was $5.90 us dollars a share. They’re now at 121.79. So, you know, really have, have gone.

Paul Spain:
Yeah. At a meteoric rise. What will be interesting is with, yeah, with all these announcements, how big can and will they get, you know, can other competitors, you know, kind of come in and, you know, take away some of that market share? Now it’s clear how, how valuable they are. But of course, when you get that valuable, you also tend to have access to near unlimited funds and ability to invest in R and D at a level that very, very few others can compete with. So when you look at who are the other big tech companies, the apples, the Microsofts, AWS, Google, the likes of Tesla are sort of in there, although a lot, lot smaller from a market cap perspective. Yeah, we’ve got some pretty interesting companies competing, but most of those firms are in somewhat different spaces than Nvidia. And in fact, they’re largely, they’re buying technology. Right.

Paul Spain:
So they’re customers. And I guess that was one of the things from, from the keynote. As you see, all the other big players are largely, you know, doing, doing some sort of partnership with Nvidia. And, yeah, it just shows, well, they’re, they’re incredibly well positioned. And look, are we gonna, are we soon going to be seeing a 5 trillion, a $10 trillion business? It wasn’t that long ago. It was insane that there was a $1 trillion business. Now we got multiples at these 3 trillion market cap era, but at the rate that it’s been going, well, if it did another ten x today, you’d be a $30 trillion business. Now, I don’t know where this stuff ends, and I’m certainly not encouraging anyone to go out and buy on those, those sort of, you know, those sort of bases.

Paul Spain:
They, you know, the top is, you know, is completely unknown for me. But, yeah, look at, looking at their averring announcements, they’re really laying, laying the foundations for, you know, just ongoing growth in terms of their sales as a business. The robotic stuff, really interesting. Just the performance that they can give. In the keynote, they were talking around just the massive performance increases that organizations can get by investing in compute power with Nvidia, and I guess that comes down to AI especially, but other workloads, graphics and so on as well. And look, this is the direction that everybody’s going at the moment, right? We want to automate things. We want AI to do the hard work for us. So, yeah, it’s pretty hard not to see them continuing to grow in terms of their sales.

Paul Spain:
I’ve no idea on what the stock’s actually going to do. What does it say here? 3264% increase in the past five years. But they’re not the only sort of company that’s gone through that sort of rise. It’s just they’re obviously coming off a, a stronger base and it’s happened in a very short space of time. I’m not sure about too many others that have risen that quite, that quickly. Although Tesla probably, yeah, not quite that much, but some, there was a window there where they had some very, very fast growth. And I think they grew something like the market cap grew 20 times in a very short window of months, but they’ve fallen back from that.

William Montague-Brown:
I was going to say. The question then was, was it due to company value or was it just people getting excited? I remember that was during lockdown, I think. I have no idea, but I remember a lot of people bored at home sitting on their computers, oh, let’s have a play with the stock market. You know what I mean? And I think that could be a lot of what contributed to that major increase. Whereas with Nvidia, obviously, there’s still a lot of, you know, hype around it, but they’re making some serious advancements and they’re getting some serious usage every day. You know, with more and more people using AI, the usage isn’t going to go down, you know, it’s only going to keep going up and it’s only going to keep getting more implemented, in my opinion. So, yeah, I think Nvidia is on the up and up now.

Paul Spain:
Just there. We’ve touched on stocks, which probably means we have to at least mention GameStop. And so, yeah, become a sort of. They call it a meme stock. I mean, just complete, complete nutter madness from some perspectives. So, yeah, what was it? Mid may, their stock on just shot up from $16 to 48 odd us dollars. So just sort of tripled in value overnight with the pipe. And I don’t even know how you describe these situations.

Paul Spain:
And then it kind of dropped down. Not quite. I mean, it had been, you know, if we look at mid April, it was a $10 stock and so on, ten to $12 stock there for a lot of April. So then up to 50, then it drops back down to sort of sub 20, and then in the last couple of days, it’s shot up to high forties again. And then today it’s, you know, it’s dropped in, dropped in half over the last sort of 24 hours or so. I mean, it’s quite hard to get your head around. You know, I think from a lot of people’s perspectives is in terms of, well, you know, should you play these games and be investing? I’m not sure that we can. We can probably solve those challenges on New Zealand tech podcast today.

Paul Spain:
But it’s a whole new phenomenon when it comes to the investment world and the different mindsets and approaches that are being taken by people, often of sort of very different generations with very different goals than we’ve traditionally expected, that people are kind of working towards when they. When they buy and sell some of these stocks.

William Montague-Brown:
Yes, completely, completely.

Paul Spain:
Is this something you’ve got involved in?

William Montague-Brown:
This is not something I’ve got involved in, unfortunately. I’d be a lot happier right now if I had.

Paul Spain:
Well, if you landed on the right side of it, of course there’s two sides, right. If you buy in at dollar 50 thinking it’s going to go to dollar 500 and then it crashes, then, yeah, you might not be so happy.

William Montague-Brown:
Yeah, I mean, I think from what I’ve seen. Cause I have heard about this having another jump. I mean, obviously, last time they short squeezed the stock by buying all the call options. I think it was. I think it got to the point where so many people were getting involved just because it was something to be a part of. And it was almost a game, you know what I mean? They weren’t actually considering the money behind it, because people were becoming millionaires out of that, and they could have cashed out and changed their life. There was a lot of people that put some big investments into this. Not everyone, obviously, a small few, but they were like, no, we’re gonna hold it, we’re gonna hold it, we’re gonna hold it.

William Montague-Brown:
And it’s almost just that gamified thing where it’s more the satisfaction of winning, in my opinion, than actually making some money out of it. And I think that’s what got so many people hooked on it at the start.

Paul Spain:
It is fascinating. Yep. So in 2021, when it. When it did it, you know, when it really went nuts, it was got up to over $80. And that came off kind of lows of, you know, like a dollar. So it’s kind of been, you know, even with the recent rises, it’s. Yeah, it has kind of never returned to those high highs. And, yeah, we’re sort of talking around those.

Paul Spain:
Yeah. The large increases even now, based on where it was five years ago, still up 16, 60%. So. Interesting times. Yeah. Investor, buyer, gambler, beware. All right, well, great to have you on the show, Will. If people are interested in finding out a little bit more about what you do, can they track you down on LinkedIn? What’s the best way to connect?

William Montague-Brown:
Yeah, I mean, to find out some more about services, you can go onto my website, which is just Willbot AI. Put that straight into your browser. If you want to contact me, you can. So just my name on LinkedIn. William Montague-Brown. Yeah, that’s the best way to contact me. We’ve got a lot of stuff coming out, AI wise posts, talking more about what we’ve been doing, some previous work that we’ve done with other clients. So, yeah, if you’re a small business owner out there or medium sized business owner out there and you want to implement some AI systems to help increase your efficiency, feel free to flick me a message and we can have a chat.

Paul Spain:
And your podcast is launching soon?

William Montague-Brown:
Yeah.

Paul Spain:
So that’s recorded right here in the podcast.

William Montague-Brown:
Recorded right here. My podcast is coming soon where I’m interviewing all sorts of industry leaders in business and also people doing some stuff in New Zealand around the AI space. You know, we’re planning to do one a week. It’s called AI Willpower Business. A little play on words. Willpower. It’s my name. Nice, nice.

William Montague-Brown:
So, yeah, you know, about 45 minutes to an hour each episode. We’re also going to be uploading heaps of clips on social media if you don’t want to watch the full thing.

Paul Spain:
Nice. Nice. Oh, that’s really good. Well, great to have you on the show. Thanks, everyone, for listening in. And, of course, a big thank you to Gorilla Technology, HP, Spark, 2degrees and One NZ. And, of course, we’ll be back again next week to delve into a whole lot more new tech and delve into some of what that might mean for you. All right, thanks, everyone.

Paul Spain:
See ya.