‘Uncanny Valley’: Nvidia’s ‘Super Bowl of AI,’ Tesla Disappoints, and Meta’s VR Metaverse ‘Shutdown’

This week on Uncanny Valley, hosts Brian Barrett and Zoë Schiffer discuss the highlights from Nvidia’s annual developer conference, and why Tesla recently got in trouble with some of its most loyal fans online. Plus, Meta’s initial decision to shut down Horizon Worlds VR on the Quest headset signals the end of the metaverse dream. (Meta has since reversed course, saying it will keep the platform on limited support for the “foreseeable future.”) Articles mentioned in this episode: - Nvidia Is Planning to Launch an Open-Source AI Agent Platform - The Tesla Influencers Leaving the ‘Cult’ - Meta Is Shutting Down Horizon Worlds on Meta Quest You can follow Brian Barrett on Bluesky at @brbarrett and Zoë Schiffer on Bluesky at @zoeschiffer. Write to us at [email protected]. How to Listen You can always listen to this week's podcast through the audio player on this page, but if you want to subscribe for free to get every episode, here's how: If you're on an iPhone or iPad, open the app called Podcasts, or just tap this link. You can also download an app like Overcast or Pocket Casts and search for “uncanny valley.” We’re on Spotify too. Transcript Note: This is an automated transcript, which may contain errors. Zoë Schiffer: Brian, hello. Very exciting to have another way to talk to you when I'm not pinging you on Slack every five seconds. Brian Barrett: It's great, because Slack doesn't have the voice part. Zoë Schiffer: It doesn't. Brian Barrett: I will say: very sad that Leah won't be a part of that journey today. Zoë Schiffer: I know. It is really sad, but when the Leah's away, the mice will play, and we will be talking about topics that Leah hates, so just wait. Brian Barrett: And to be clear, she'll be back next week. She's just sick. Zoë Schiffer: Yeah. Brian Barrett: It's allergy season. Zoë Schiffer: Welcome to WIRED's Uncanny Valley. I'm Zoë Schiffer, WIRED's director of business and industry. Brian Barrett: I'm Brian Barrett, executive editor. Zoë Schiffer: This week on the show, we're diving into Nvidia's annual developer conference, why some Tesla influencers are fleeing the brand, and why Meta has finally shut down Horizon Worlds on Meta Quest. So to start us off, this week, Nvidia had its annual developer conference in San Jose. This is the big event in the AI industry. Some people even call it the Super Bowl of AI. Developers go, CEOs, researchers, WIRED reporters—and we're all waiting to hear what CEO Jensen Huang is going to tell us about the future of the company. Brian Barrett: One thing that's interesting about the Nvidia conference too, is I feel like so much of it is business facing. It's not a lot of stuff that you, as an AI consumer or someone who plays around with Claude, wouldn't necessarily connect with. One thing, with a grain of salt, because this is someone who stands to make this money, but Jensen did say the revenue opportunity for artificial intelligence chips just at Nvidia might reach at least a trillion dollars through 2027. Zoë Schiffer: Pocket change. Brian Barrett: Pocket change, I mean, really, for Nvidia at this point. One thing that was really interesting: He introduced a new product. I always like when there's an actual product tied to this rather than the promise of a product. A while ago, Nvidia struck a licensing deal with a company called Groq, not to be confused with the occasionally— Zoë Schiffer: It's Groq with a “q.” Brian Barrett: —Groq with a “q,” not Grok with an unconsensual undressing problem. So they're going to pair Nvidia's chips, which are good at processing AI, with Groq's chips, which have components that can put a charge into how Nvidia's chips operate. So basically that $20 billion licensing agreement is bearing fruit. It's going to make inference quicker, less expensive. It's going to make things more efficient basically for Nvidia customers. Zoë Schiffer: Right. Yeah. I was talking to a bunch of people in the industry about this this week, and one thing they pointed out, which might be totally obvious to AI researchers, but was pretty not obvious to me, is that we actually haven't had specific chips for AI yet. They've been using general Nvidia chips for training and inference this entire time. And this is basically the first year where we are going to see specialized chips for artificial intelligence. Brian Barrett: Well, and I'm old enough to remember—I know we joke about my age, but it's not that long ago—Nvidia got to where it is because it made GPUs for gaming PCs. The GPUs happened to be good at the things AI needed. So they kind of backed into this. So yeah, it is a big moment. But Zoë, we've said inference a couple of times so far. Go ahead and define it for folks so that we know everyone's on the same page about what we are talking about. Zoë Schiffer: Yeah. OK. So if you're an AI researcher, you're like, yawn, this is boring. But it's not obvious to people outside the industry, so it's worth saying really clearly. There is the pre-training process where you let a model loose on the corpus of the internet, and it gobbles up all the data, and it learns from it. And then there's a process of you, as an AI consumer, asking a question to ChatGPT or Claude. The process of you pinging that question and getting an answer in return is what we think of when we talk about inference. And actually now, most of the investments that AI companies and big tech companies are making are being spent on inference, not pre-training. Brian Barrett: Because they've already eaten up the entire internet. Zoë Schiffer: And inference is just really expensive. Serving all of those customers in real time is a really expensive process. Brian Barrett: Just for an example of how Jensen Huang talked about inference, there was a slightly bizarre AI animated music video that was displayed at the end of his speech. Let's listen to that. Archival audio: Once upon an AI time / training was paradigm / short talking models how / but inference runs the whole world now / Vera showed us who's the boss / at 35 times less the cost / Blackwell makes the token sing / Nvidia, the inference king. Zoë Schiffer: I sincerely hope that they used AI to make that and did not pay a marketing firm many millions of dollars. Brian Barrett: Yeah. The quality is about what I would expect from AI. And just for folks, the references to Blackwell and Vera are references to various Nvidia products. Zoë Schiffer: We also should say that Jensen announced NemoClaw, which was this enterprise platform for AI agents, basically like a secure enterprise version of OpenClaw. Brian Barrett: It's fun to watch companies scramble. So you've got NemoClaw now from Nvidia. You've got the creator of OpenClaw, which then—what is the latest name for it? Zoë Schiffer: Yeah, because it was Clawdbot, Moltbot, OpenClaw. Brian Barrett: OpenClaw, great. So he's now working at OpenAI, and Meta has acquired Moltbook, right? Zoë Schiffer: Right. Brian Barrett: —the social network for AI agents. So everyone's scrambling to cover this and be on top of this, but it feels almost like, so that they can say that they are. Zoë Schiffer: Yeah. I was going to say, I feel like you can almost hear the backroom conversations that are happening where Mark Zuckerberg needs to explain to his investors why they're actually going to be ahead of the curve on this, and like, "Wait, wait, wait, no, we're not being left behind." Because as soon as you see a trend pop up or one company doing something, they all try and replicate it as quickly as possible. Brian Barrett: Yeah, which is why I'm working on my own AI agent social network. It's a small one. It's really centered on cooking. Anyway, it's a whole thing. It's going to be a whole thing. I also wanted to mention, I am a little bit obsessed with people's obsession with space-based data centers, and similar to what we're just saying about having to meet the moment and tell your investors where you're at. Nvidia also announced the Space-1 Vera Rubin Module to the GPU and computer that is built for space, or will be built for space because there's no actual timeline for development, but they've got their best people on it Zoë. Zoë Schiffer: I love this. This is one of my favorite conversations to have with really smart researchers right now because people who understand physics immediately start sweating and swearing and talking about how the fuck are you going to cool a data center in space? They just get so upset about it. And I think people who actually know about this thing, it's completely farfetched. We're just so far away from being able to figure out how you would power and cool and operate these things. But again, it's a marketing ploy. And why is it a marketing ploy? Because a bunch of these companies are trying to go public. So I think we're going to see a lot of these, not Nvidia, but we're talking OpenAI, we're talking— Brian Barrett: SpaceX. Zoë Schiffer: —SpaceX. We're talking Anthropic at some point. And so I think we're going to see a lot of these kind of farfetched, big announcements pre-IPO. Brian Barrett: And meantime, there is some actual real world happening right now competition going on. A lot of this is focused on future state stuff, but we do have—Nvidia chips are facing competition. Google making its own chips. Cerebras is a startup that is making chips that specialize in AI. We've seen Meta having its own adventures. Yeah. Zoë Schiffer: I was going to say, a bunch of these companies, like OpenAI and Meta, are actually working with third parties to design custom chips. So I think Nvidia is having to defend its place as the leader of this entire industry in a way it really hasn't had to for many, many months, if not years. Jensen Huang knows that and is making moves to, again, defend its position. Like do I see Nvidia falling way behind or having to really worry about its business in the near future? No, I do not. Do you think? Brian Barrett: No, I don't think so. I think it's more what shape we're in that we've got all of our chips in this particular— Zoë Schiffer: All of our GPUs in this particular data center. Brian Barrett: Yeah. Oh, wow. Zoë Schiffer: I know. Brian Barrett: OK. Speaking of failures, let's turn our attention to Tesla. And I say that—don't be mad, Tesla. Zoë Schiffer: Wow. Brian Barrett: No. OK. There are Tesla fans— Zoë Schiffer: Oh my gosh, in the pocket of BYD. Brian Barrett: I am big BYD over here. No, not Tesla generally, but Tesla did get in some trouble recently. I'm specifically talking about, they had offered a limited time deal to transfer its "lifetime full self-driving service to new vehicles." We'll just say it's not really full self-driving. That terminology is controversial in and of itself. People were excited about the fact that they could just pay once and have it forever because it is pretty expensive. But then Tesla rolled that back. They changed the language of the agreement, saying that you need to have their new vehicle delivered by March 31st in order to swap their full self-driving from their last vehicle to the next one. That's a tall order for people. So people have been upset. I think people who are traditionally Tesla ride-or-dies, and they have a very vocal community who will probably come at me for saying connecting Tesla with the word failure, but they're starting to turn on Tesla themselves. There's a growing community of former Tesla fanatics and influencers who have started distancing themselves from the brand, which I think is interesting. And it's distinct from the sort of broader consumer pullback from Tesla that we've seen in the UK and Europe in particular, but also in the US, people not fans of Elon Musk politics. These are Elon Musk fans who are saying, "We're kind of over this." Zoë Schiffer: I think this is fascinating because we all know that Tesla's stock price has often outpaced its business fundamentals. And part of the reason for that is that Elon Musk has specifically cultivated a rabid fan base that buy Tesla's stock kind of no matter what. It's one of the most widely held retail stocks on platforms like Robinhood. And so if you're in it for Elon Musk, maybe the business goes through its ups and downs, but you're going to stick with the company no matter what, which it gives him a lot of personal power. If we're seeing, again, and this might not be a widespread phenomena among the fan base right now, but even some big name people here and there who are really, really pro Tesla turn, I think that that's actually a really big problem for him. Brian Barrett: How big a problem is it, Zoë? Because I agree with your point, but increasingly, Elon Musk is saying, "We're not even really a car company anymore." We are a humanoid robot company and a robotaxi company. Sorry. I always forget the robotaxi part, even though that's the part that's actually the closer to being real. So is there a world in which none of this actually matters because you know what: We've got optimist robots, and we've got a fleet of self-driving Teslas and that's really what the future is? That's what the stock price is based on. Zoë Schiffer: Yeah, it might not. And again, I think Musk is first and foremost an excellent marketer and an excellent storyteller. And so if the story he's telling now is that we're not a car company, we're a robot company and people buy that, then sure. But I think the point that we're making is that a lot of these people aren't necessarily Tesla car fans in a vacuum. They're Elon Musk fans, and he happens to make this vehicle. And so then they choose the vehicle as the thing that they're going to be obsessed with and pump and talk about on X all the time. Maybe that transfers, but I think if his popularity among the fan base is waning, if he is doing things to kind of ostracize his own community, then I think that's an issue. And I think that this started to happen with some people when he started getting into politics. I talked to a couple of people for that Cybertruck story last year who said, "I love this car, but it's a bummer to go out in public and be a lightning rod. I didn't get it because I necessarily want to tell everyone I support the Trump administration. And he didn't really give us a choice because he started getting involved with Trump and DOGE. And all of a sudden when I drove this car around, people were yelling and screaming at me and kind of trying to drive me off the road." Brian Barrett: And if you haven't read Zoë's Cybertruck photo essay from last year, please do. She interviewed a bunch of Cybertruck owners who said some fascinating things, including one guy whose quote—I'm going to get it slightly wrong—but it is printed in my brain indelibly, "Women don't like the car." Zoë Schiffer: “Women don't like the vehicle.” Brian Barrett: Women don't like the vehicle. Women don't like the vehicle. So in terms of Tesla owners who are turning around, Zoë, there—I think you have feelings about this, or