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[Robert Scoble @Scobleizer]

I just got an unreleased version of @getVITURE “huge display when you put them on” glasses. Called “the Beast.”

Getting announced on Monday.

And I was talking to its Chief Marketing Officer tonight and she told all about their future glasses but she got me NDA’d up.

She is aiming at making them far more interesting than the Apple ones.

There are so many ways to make reality better with no cameras or displays, she taught me tonight.

Well, except for the ones in your hand already. :-)

Instantly I was transported to a new reality. Everyone will buy the Apple ones, I am convinced. It has an exclusive on Formula 1.

But she is a fashion thinker and dresser. Her products are going to look different. And think different. Decentralized AI is gonna level up, based on what she told me is in the lab.

The “Beast” launches Monday. You won’t wear them around much.

But sit down and put them on and you have an office with five screens around you. A new superpower for business travelers.

Great product. Great company.

I will show you more on Monday.

I am not currently compensated by them. I have gotten to know them and their products and leadership lately and they see the future clearly.

The “Beast” because it is still too heavy and optics don’t let you see the real world well. The virtual screen is stunning.

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

Try using the X API

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

Grok

[Robert Scoble @Scobleizer]

OpenClaw still is the most disruptive thing we've seen in years. Yes, there are new competitors, but none have stuck yet like @OpenClaw has.

What do you have yours doing this weekend?

[Robert Scoble @Scobleizer]

Last night I was hanging out with the @Tesla community, which I do every night on an audio space here on X. And will again tonight.

First, a disclaimer, I'm a long-term Tesla investor and that has not changed. That has grown into a position that makes my money manager quite nervous. Everytime we talk he asks me to trim my Tesla. I won't.

I'm also a new NVIDIA long-term investor, and won't sell my small position for a decade or more.

But the host of such a show about Tesla, @ValueAnalyst1, has caused a stir by reversing his support of the community and is now shorting Tesla's stock. Several in the community have written him off because of his new stance. I haven't.

He also is shorting NVIDIA, warning his that an AI crash could be coming.

What if he is right about both?

Yesterday I interviewed a very credible entrepreneur (he is now building his fourth company to bring AGI to the world) and he laid out how we will get to AGI. His system needs far fewer NVIDIA cards than are currently needed to build Large Language Models that are the heart of every new AI system.

And Toyota is working on an electric vehicle, I've learned, without a steering wheel. In other words, a competitor to Tesla's Robotaxi that I was at the announcement for.

Tesla fans are not really considering what such an announcement could do to its stock.

AI fans are not really considering what a new technology could do to NVIDIA's stock.

Sometimes even Tesla fans forget what I do, and have done, for years. Study AI and Automotive innovation. It is why Elon Musk gave me the first ride in the first Tesla. It is why Siri, the first consumer app to use AI, was launched on my blog by visiting my house first. I still have the only video of its investors up on YouTube and last year the three cofounders of Siri invited me to interview them on stage at an AI conference. Why? They told me I was the only one on the press tour who got it. Even Steve Jobs had to yell at his executives about how important Siri was (it went on to be the most profitable acquisition Apple ever made).

My eight books on technology have properly laid out decade-long changes long before they have happened.

I wrote a book about social media before this Website you are reading me on started.

I wrote two books about spatial computing before Apple announced its first product. Am working on a refresh of the latest that I wrote with @IrenaCronin. Which, by the way, properly laid out how important Robotaxis and robots will be to our economy. We wrote it five years ago. Long before Tesla showed off its Robotaxi just a couple of months ago.

I wrote books about contextual software before Waze, Yelp, and Uber were invented. Today all of them use the technology I laid out. Among thousands of others. The founder of @otter_ai caused me to write that book long before he started his AI company.

That was why I was invited by @Huawei to be in its first batch of Key Online Leaders before it really started its smartphone efforts and, today, is the most innovative in China.

It is why I Mercedes Benz gave me its first ride in its first AI-driven vehicle. In fact I had two rides, one at CES which I'll be at again in a month to study how AI is changing consumer electronics and automobiles.

Among many other firsts.

So, back to Toyota.

It, along with many other auto makers, have fired executives and undergone a big cultural change initivative. Here in America Ford and others are undergoing the same. They missed the boat just like everyone other than Tesla and they know it.

They have woken up to the threat that electric vehicles driven by AI represent. IE Robotaxis. I have friends in the industry who have been hired by legacy automakers to try to figure out what to do about Elon Musk and his Robotaxi.

Toyota's answer, I hear, is to partner with the Chinese to get such a car onto the market with a long-range battery and AI that can drive the car.

Now that might keep them out of America now that @realDonaldTrump and @elonmusk are best buddies.

I expect Trump to put deep tarrifs on such a product, keeping it out of America to protect American autoworkers (and his new friend Elon). More on that in a second.

But Toyota has some things that Tesla doesn't.

And it will do well worldwide even if kept out of America. Just like Huawei is doing well around the world, even though it is kept out of America.

First, Toyota has a brand that is trusted and known world wide. I was a customer of Toyota's for decades. Drove a Prius for a decade before I got a Tesla. My immediate family had only Toyotas before Tesla came along. If Toyota came with a credible new product it would be used by many.

I was at a Prius product launch and met the guy who ran that team. He's very smart and the new Prius that just started shipping a year ago is a great looking car that still is popular, even here in Silicon Valley. My wife's coworker at @broadcom bought one of them despite evidence that Tesla is ahead in many ways.

It also has a dealer network that's worldwide and factories that are very capable of building a great product worldwide, including here in America.

So, it is my belief that a Toyota Robotaxi announcement, in other words, a car without a steering wheel, could dramatically change the market worldwide.

I've studied consumer attitudes toward autonomous vehicles for a long time, visiting almost every state to meet consumers to do that research.

So I understand American's resistance to autonomous vehicles. But here is the rub. They will change and change quickly.

Ford's CEO once told me his research showed no one would buy an autonomous vehicle. Yet one sits in my garage today and if you drive around many cities in the world (which I have in the past 18 months, most recently Spain where I rented a manual transmission car to do more of that research) you see a crapload of Teslas and on our audio spaces I hear from many who are very excited about its AI efforts.

If you haven't heard, Tesla now drives everywhere, at least in the United States, without your hands on the steering wheel. And it will soon roll out another update that will demonstrate to everyone how far ahead it is of almost every other automaker.

I also visited a slum in South Africa where I talked to women who laid out how Uber had totally transformed their lives. Because it served them when traditional taxis wouldn't. They would take to a Robotaxi network INSTANTLY because such a vehicle network would be safer for them, provide better service, and be cheaper to boot. And they love Toyotas. Many of the Ubers I watched pick them up were Toyotas.

Uber was invented by Garrett Camp and Travis Kalanick right in front of me in a Paris snowstorm, which got me to interview Travis at Stanford Business School, among other things.

Point made that I've had a front-row seat on transportation as a service from the very first day and studied its effect around the world, including in Moscow, Russia, where Uber was quite popular. I also was the first to interview Uber's competitor's founder. Uber will be radically disrupted when Robotaxis come. A car with a human driver is more expensive and far less safe.

Uber went from an idea in the snow to an international company in three years. So, I had a front row seat to how its business was built. A friend, @ChrisSaad, worked there, among many others. I parked in its garage when I worked at @UploadVR. I interviewed many Uber employees about how its technology and business worked.

That led me and Irena to write about Robotaxis four years ago in our book, "The Infinite Retina." Long before anyone in the Tesla community figured out that such a thing might be important.

Just to make my credentials clear. :-)

Don't forget I was on this website before ANY of you were and that I was on Instagram before ANY of you were. Among many other things.

Back to autonomous vehicles.

Many can't see how consumers around the world will adopt these things. I suggest they visit San Francisco, Phoenix, or Los Angeles, and interview people who use that driverless service. The number of rides are going up every month. That data can be found online.

I have.

Customers love them.

They bring their friends for rides. And then their friends love them. Do some searches here on X and you'll see the evidence of consumers changing. Google's head of R&D told me that they knew it took only one to three rides before you would become a huge fan of autonomous cars and you probably wouldn't buy another human-driven car. And it knew that a decade ago based on its own research as it handed autonomous vehicles to its employees. One of its early research projects now sits in the front of the @ComputerHistory Museum in Silicon Valley. Oh, and I had the first video of its first vehicle up on YouTube, and it still is there today.

You can ignore me and my research, but then you would be making a huge mistake. So I encourage you to do your own. If you do, you will realize that a huge shift is underway in consumer behavior and belief.

Autonomous vehicles are coming and coming in a big way soon.

Even if Tesla is the only one. And it won't be.

The Chinese automakers are already including cameras and AI computers to drive autonomously. They are starting to show up in cities around the world (saw one in Spain a few weeks ago).

Back to Toyota: When it enters the market, and it will, investors could become less enthusiastic about Tesla than they are today. I could see that short term such an event would bring an immediate sizeable drop in Tesla's stock price.

My estimate is 20 to 40% drop. Which would mean @ValueAnalyst1 is right.

So why am I still long in both companies then?

Well, every great company has a great competitor. Hertz has Avis. Apple has Google. Starbucks has Dunkin. Coke has Pepsi.

Toyota entering the market would dramatically help Tesla, even if Tesla is number one in most markets. Competition drives human interest and trust. One of the things that many great investors in Silicon Valley considers is how good are your competitors. Uber has Lyft, for instance, and did from the very beginning. Investors know that a great competitor helps the leader in huge ways.

NVIDIA, too, would be dramatically helped by a new AI technology that could be trained with far fewer NVIDIA cards, such as I heard about yesterday. Such a technology would run literally everything in our society. Even a Toyota autonomous vehicle. And robots. Both of which Tesla is very credible in building. Tesla needs a great competitor and Chinese brands don't have what Toyota has: a trusted brand and distribution around the world.

NVIDIA's Omniverse is not well understood and would be a HUGE beneficiary of such a move to new AGI's running everything from factory floors to robots in our homes. It is a new system that will drive everything in our society, from robots to virtual beings to autonomous vehicles.

So, even if a Toyota announcement of a car without a steering wheel would cause an immediate drop in Tesla's stock price, my research shows that investors will come to the same conclusion that I have above, that a new competitor actually helps Tesla. Same in NVIDIA. If such an event happened it would be the mother of all buying opportunities.

Now, back to @ValueAnalyst1. His instincts are ahead of most. I see a possibility that he's right, and if he is, he wins big. At least if his timing works (he won't tell me when his shorts have to work by, so hard to figure out if he'll be a big winner, because it might be a year or two before we see either of these events actually get recognized by investors/seen by the world).

Which brings me to tariffs and Trump.

If I were to have dinner with President Trump I'd lay out how he should remove tariffs and open up the American market to Chinese competitors. This would give American automakers a chance to do the same as what Toyota is doing: license their technology and build it here in America. American legacy automakers have the same advantages of Toyota: they are trusted by many around the world and have factories and dealerships around the world too.

An innovative American auto industry would be a good thing for everyone, and would keep GM and Ford relevant for decades.

Anyway, I can never quite figure out timing, so even if Yaman is right he might not win. Shorting stocks is dangerous business and Tesla is ascendant, so is NVidia, and even if both are faced with new competitive headwinds I see both winning long term. That's a dangerous place to be shorting stocks.

But it does make a great show because now we have something big to talk about.

See you on the shows!

[AppMinute @AppMinute]

@Scobleizer Wow

[AppMinute @AppMinute]

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