Top Five Tech

Welcome to Top 5 Tech, a weekly show about what to watch, listen to, download, read,

and something deep every week.

It is HomeView week, Apple's first smart home hub with a screen.

I've been reviewing it for over a week and have over 45 minutes showing everything possible

with HomeView, what you can and can't do, and how my family fooled it.

So I'm going to link my own video, but also include a bunch of other videos like the new

Apple TV 4K review and a bunch of other creators' Apple HomeView review.

Jennifer Pattison Tui at The Verge, she's actually been a guest on Primary Technology

and is going to be on Mac Power Users this Sunday, but she has an excellent review.

Also Shane Watley, Joanna Stern, and Eric Wielander, all with incredible reviews.

So if you just want to binge all the HomeView content, I'll put it down in the show notes.

What to listen to and read this week is both going to relate to one of the biggest tech

news stories of recent history.

NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang, who is a co-founder of the company, and it was the second most

profitable and valued company just after Apple, over $4 trillion market cap, he was caught

having two affairs this past year.

One was with a supposed Singaporean spy

who worked for one of NVIDIA's customers

and the second affair was with someone in NVIDIA,

actually the VP that reports to him directly.

Bad situation, but it forced him to have to resign his position as CEO of NVIDIA.

There's a lot of ramifications to that,

especially because the company is not set up for succession.

NVIDIA had very much a flat org chart,

meaning lots of people reported to Jensen Wang directly

and there were not a lot of VPs that could take over easily.

What I want to listen to is an episode of the Verge cast with Liz Lopato

who explains in-depth the ramifications, what this means,

why the company was not set up or prepared for this at all.

So I recommend that.

And on what to read, I'm going to link my co-host's article,

"NVIDIA's Jensen Wang, the most important CEO in tech, just resigned."

This was published right after the news broke just this morning

as I record that he's leaving the company.

So again, if you want to understand the ramifications,

what this means for AI,

NVIDIA has a huge role in the AI industry.

They make the chips that many of these AI models run on.

Jensen's article is the one to read.

Now, something a little more fun on what to download,

there's a new podcast player app out there.

This is Tripod by Ben McCarthy.

I've been testing it for over a week.

It is a great podcast app.

There's a subscription for some premium features

like choosing what chapters play within an episode,

but it is beautifully designed,

actually works on the Home View, also CarPlay,

has an Apple Watch app.

And again, just a really nicely designed podcast player.

I still love supporting third-party podcast apps.

Most people listen to podcasts either on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube,

with third-party podcast players.

They're just way better at managing and listening to lots of podcasts,

if you're like me and have a lot of shows that you love.

So recommend, try, you can use it and never pay the subscription.

But if you like some of those features, check it out.

And on Something Deep, my friend Nate sent me this podcast episode,

The Best Possible AI Catastrophe.

This was my first time listening to the show, Pablo Toria finds out.

But in the show, they talk a lot about what are some recent events,

like a hacker hacking into the freezers of supermarkets in the UK, I believe,

or the EU and turning them off just using an open source.

And I just wanted to frame this again.

Yes, there are many dangers when it comes to AI,

especially the idea of open source models,

meaning you can download an AI model

onto a computer that you run at your house,

and then it's not beholden to safeguards

that the AI companies put in place.

Open source models run locally,

so there is no check and balance from some other company.

So there are dangers there for sure.

But calling back to the news about Jensen Wang

having to resign from NVIDIA,

that actually might be good news for slowing.

down the A.I. race.

There's a lot of other news like Anthropic is filing for an IPO and is going for a valuation

of over $1.4 trillion, which is wild, will be one of the largest IPOs ever.

But this news about Jensen Wang and going for an IPO, Anthropic and the CEO, Dario Amadei,

have written a letter to slow down the frontier pace and just take a step back.

So maybe some of the current events this week will actually slow the progress these companies

can put together, reasonable safeguards, maybe even laws in place for how these companies

need to report what their models are doing, the checks and balances they put in place

on themselves, and maybe some companies that can put those checks and balances outside

of those companies to really keep an eye on it.

It was an interesting episode.

It felt a little closer to A.I.

Doomerism, which I'm not there.

I know there are dangers and we need to have safeguards, but I don't think it's going to

kill us all just yet.

So links everything down in the show notes and you can get this as a newsletter.

You can scan this QR code right here or click the link below.

in the video description. Get all the links with a little more commentary delivered to your inbox

every Friday. If you haven't yet, I would appreciate a five-star rating and review in

Apple Podcasts. Drop a review there and I'll give you a shout out here on the show. And

thank you so much for listening and watching. I'll catch you next time.