This week on the GeekWire Podcast: Anthropic takes its most powerful models offline after a U.S. order, with Amazon CEO Andy Jassy reportedly contributing to the concerns that helped trigger it. We talk about what it was like to use one of those models, Claude Fable, while it was available, and dig into the Amazon-Anthropic dynamic.

Then we explain how agentic AI is upending Amazon’s “working backwards” tradition, as represented by one division inside the company that is using agents to create prototypes in some cases before going through the company’s traditional PRFAQ process.

Then, an AI-powered school is arriving soon in the Seattle area. Alpha School uses AI-driven software rather than chatbots to teach core academics, frees the rest of the day for hands-on projects, and is drawing both interest from Microsoft executives and skepticism from critics.

And finally, this week’s trivia question focuses on the sensor-packed World Cup ball.

With GeekWire co-founders John Cook and Todd Bishop; edited by Curt Milton.

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John Cook and Charles Fitzgerald spent several days in Cleveland this week, and they came back with a cautionary tale for Seattle: don’t assume the good times will last. But they also found inspiration: a city that’s coming back by getting its business, civic, and public leaders to row in the same direction.

The GeekWire co-founder and the Seattle angel investor called into the GeekWire Podcast from an unlikely setting: an abandoned Westinghouse light bulb factory on Cleveland’s near east side, part of an industrial district called The Midline that’s being redeveloped for a new generation of jobs.

The Cleveland trip closes a loop that opened in February, when Fitzgerald, a GeekWire contributing columnist, wrote a provocative piece warning that Seattle risked becoming the next Cleveland.

Cleveland Mayor Justin Bibb joined the podcast to push back and make the case for his city, then invited the two to come see its comeback for themselves. This week, John and Charles took him up on it.

Over several days, they met with Bibb, Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, and a roster of developers, entrepreneurs, and civic and business leaders. What stood out, they say, was a city hustling and aligned around jobs and growth in a way Seattle no longer is. Their takeaway is blunt: Cleveland could eat Seattle’s lunch if Seattle keeps taking its prosperity for granted.

For the full rundown of advice from those Cleveland leaders, see John’s previous story.

Then we turn to the week’s news back home. The Seattle City Council voted unanimously for a one-year moratorium on new large data centers. Fitzgerald argues it’s political theater, since the big AI data centers were never coming to high-cost Seattle anyway, and says the real concern is the signal it sends about whether the city is open for business.

And with the SpaceX IPO landing on Friday, Fitzgerald explains why he’s sitting it out.

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Microsoft’s Build conference was a firehose: in-house AI models, agent-first devices, new coding tools, and a Copilot “super app” that got teased but not yet shown.

This week on the GeekWire Podcast, we’re joined by Mary Jo Foley to understand what’s ready and what’s not quite yet fully baked, from Project Solara and the Scout agentic assistant to Microsoft’s push for AI self-sufficiency and the mounting pressure on GitHub.

Related Stories

• Inside Microsoft’s Project Solara: A platform for devices that run agents instead of apps
• Microsoft unveils seven homegrown AI models in new bid for ‘long term self-sufficiency’
• Mary Jo Foley: No Copilot ‘Super App’ at Microsoft Build, but plenty of agentic fodder
• Microsoft’s OpenClaw team takes on the personal assistant challenge

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This week on the GeekWire Podcast: Mark Zuckerberg’s 387-foot superyacht arrives in Seattle, cruising through the Ballard Locks and mooring on Lake Union just a short walk from Meta’s engineering center, just as it discloses nearly 1,400 layoffs in the Seattle area, about 20% of its local workforce. We try to wrap our heads around the spectacle, and the timing.

Meanwhile, robot pizza startup Picnic flames out and sells its assets to a mystery buyer. We trace the rise and fall of the Seattle company behind a machine that could help a single worker turn out up to 100 customized pizzas an hour. It’s the latest example of the challenges facing hardware startups, even as one enthusiastic customer is aiming to revive the idea nonetheless.

Corporate America confronts the rising cost of AI, with companies that once urged employees to experiment freely now watching their token bills double and triple. We consider the era of “free AI,” and what happens when the subsidies end and the real costs come due.

On a related note, we discuss the leaderboard-gaming practice known as “tokenmaxxing,” where employees spin up needless AI agents to boost their standings in internal rankings — a game that recently prompted Amazon to pull its internal Kiro leaderboard offline.

And finally, we return to the theme of billionaire yachts for our weekly trivia challenge, discussing Paul Allen’s Octopus, the wrecks it helped find, and how it stacks up against the other megayachts of the tech elite.

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Eric Ries wants to retire the word “profit,” or at least the way we usually define it.

In his new book, “Incorruptible: Why Good Companies Go Bad and How Great Companies Stay Great,” the “Lean Startup” author redefines profit as the maximization of human flourishing. He argues that a lot of what passes for profit in today’s economy is actually a form of corruption.

“We’re supposed to all pretend that we think all the ways of making money are equally good,” Ries told a room of startup founders at Seattle Flow Startup Day in Seattle. “But nobody actually thinks that.”

Instead, he calls for a new era of “mission primacy”: replacing the shareholder-first framework that has dominated corporate governance since the 1980s with structures that protect a company’s purpose from being hollowed out by the investors who profit from its success.

After interviewing Ries for the opening keynote session at the May 15 event, I sat down with him for this special podcast discussion, going further into the ideas in the book, and how they apply to recent news events. We talked about the Musk v. OpenAI trial, the fall of Whole Foods, what he told Anthropic’s founders about their corporate structure, and why he thinks shareholder primacy is already dead.

Listen below, and continue reading for highlights.

On corruption: Ries uses the word not in the legal sense but as a description of structural decay. When a beloved brand gets taken over by private equity and the product turns to garbage, or when a great company goes public and loses its soul, that’s “corruption” in his framework.

On the Musk v. OpenAI trial: During the federal trial over Elon Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella testified under oath that his primary responsibility is to Microsoft’s shareholders, that he has a fiduciary duty to maximize shareholder value, and that this is because Microsoft is a for-profit corporation.

I brought up that exchange with Ries, explaining how the otherwise matter-of-fact acknowledgment struck me differently after reading his book. He said it illustrates the central tension in the case, and in the business world more broadly. Ultimately, companies in this structure are beholden to shareholders.

On advising Anthropic’s founders: When the founders of Anthropic left OpenAI over concerns about its direction, Ries was one of the people they consulted about how to structure the new company. They had already decided to file as a public benefit corporation — a two-page legal filing in Delaware that commits a company to a mission beyond maximizing shareholder returns. Ries told them it wasn’t enough.

“My job was to tell them that’s good, but insufficient. If you only do that, it’s not strong enough for what your goals are,” he said.

They ultimately created a Long Term Benefit Trust, an independent body with the power to appoint and remove board directors. Ries says the research shows this two-tiered approach, with checks and balances, to be the most stable corporate structure of the last 150 years.

On Whole Foods: Ries calls the 2017 sale of Whole Foods to Amazon one of the saddest stories in the book. The company was profitable every single quarter. Customers loved it. Founder John Mackey had built it on a philosophy he called conscious capitalism, rooted in love for customers and employees.

None of that mattered when activist investors showed up, forced the sale, and made $500 million for six months’ work. Mackey still sees it as a personal failure. Ries sees it as a structural one: “If you want to build a company with an ethos, the structure has to match. Otherwise, this is what happens.”

On the future: Ries believes the shareholder primacy era is already collapsing under its own weight — it’s just that most people haven’t noticed: “We are like the Road Runner. We have already run off this cliff, but we haven’t looked down.”

He envisions a replacement he calls “mission primacy,” in which it becomes obvious again that business should be a force for good, and companies are free to define their own version of human flourishing and put it to the test in the market.

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This week on a supersized Memorial Day Weekend edition of the GeekWire Podcast: 

• A massive IPO filing from SpaceX includes new details about Elon Musk’s Starlink business and its satellite factory in Redmond.
• Jeff Bezos talks about wealth, inequality and eventually tech in an hour-long CNBC appearance.
• John goes to World Cup ticketing hell and turns to ChatGPT and Gemini when FIFA’s support falls short.
• And finally, a special Sam Altman/Seattle startup edition of GeekWire Trivia.

With GeekWire co-founders Todd Bishop and John Cook.

Related Links:

• SpaceX is churning out 70 Starlink satellites a week in Redmond, and more from its IPO filing
• From the archives: SpaceX founder Elon Musk reveals new $10B ‘Space Internet’ plan at private Seattle event 
• CNBC: Jeff Bezos blasts New York City school spending: It doesn’t get better outcomes
• Jeff Bezos describes his $38B startup Prometheus for the first time: ‘Nothing to do with robotics’
• Expedia at 30, the inside story: Online travel giant navigates its third tech disruption
• Seattle, we’ve got an image problem
• The view from Bellevue: Seattle has the foundation for future growth — if it can fix its taxes
• Former Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell has a new gig — startup CEO
• Why this Seattle-area startup is putting its name on the front of an English Premier League soccer team
• CEO of Paul Allen’s $3.1B science and tech fund steps down less than a year after launch

In memoriam:

• Award-winning Business Journal photographer Anthony Bolante dies at 58
• ‘Soma’ Somasegar, 1966-2026: Microsoft and Madrona leader was a champion of developers and startups

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

This week on the GeekWire Podcast: As the Musk v. OpenAI trial heads to the jury, we dig into what Microsoft’s internal board memos and executive testimony revealed about the origins of the company’s massive bet on AI, and why this case matters beyond the billionaire drama.

Plus, Howard Schultz, a former Washington governor, and the tech community weigh in on whether Seattle is squandering its edge as an innovation capital.

Finally, the GeekWire Trivia Challenge explores the modern mysteries of Microsoft’s naming conventions. And in the opening, Todd owes John and the United Kingdom an apology.

RELATED STORIES AND LINKS

• Microsoft’s CTO testifies about email at the heart of Elon Musk’s allegations
• OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s stake in Helion Energy draws scrutiny in Musk trial
• New filing reveals who Microsoft favored — and opposed — for OpenAI’s board
• Satya Nadella was worried about Microsoft being ‘the next IBM’ in OpenAI deal
• Are we on a Road to Nowhere? Seattle’s growth masks deeper anxieties about its future
• Microsoft’s multi-agent AI system tops Anthropic’s Mythos on cybersecurity benchmark
• Seattle Turns Hostile to the Great Businesses It Made (WSJ, by Howard Schultz)
• Association of Washington Business 2026 Spring Summit (TVW, featuring former Gov. Chris Gregoire and former AG Rob McKenna)

With GeekWire co-founders Todd Bishop and John Cook

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

This week on the GeekWire Podcast: Conversations with finalists and special guests at the annual GeekWire Awards about AI, innovation, startups, and the forces reshaping their industries. Guests on this episode include:

• Luis Poggi, CEO of HouseWhisper AI, winner of CEO of the Year
• Tracy Drinkwater, founder of the Seattle Universal Math Museum, one of our STEM Educator of the Year honorees (along with Project LEDO founder Fidel Ferrer).
• Ryan James, CEO of Dopl Technologies, finalist for Startup of the Year
• Laura Ruderman, CEO of the Technology Alliance
• Ross Finman, CEO of Augmodo, finalist for Hardware/Robotics/Physical AI of the Year
• Mohammad Rastegari, CEO of ElastixAI, finalist for Startup of the Year

Plus, a special trivia challenge marking GeekWire’s 15th year hosting the event, featuring a serendipitous and fun connection to Andrew Putnam of Microsoft, a pioneer in FPGAs (field programmable gate arrays) and a winner of the 2017 GeekWire Award for Innovation of the Year (pictured above).

Related stories

• 2026 GeekWire Awards revealed: Big winners — and big love for Seattle — at annual tech celebration
• Photos: Inside the 2026 GeekWire Awards

With GeekWire co-founders Todd Bishop and John Cook

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

This week on the GeekWire Podcast: What it was like inside the Oakland federal courthouse where Elon Musk is suing OpenAI, Sam Altman, and Microsoft, with jury selection revealing just how hard it is to find anyone neutral about Musk these days.

Meanwhile, Microsoft and OpenAI restructured their partnership the same morning the trial began — and less than 24 hours later, OpenAI’s models landed on Amazon’s cloud.

Then, Microsoft and Amazon both dropped blockbuster earnings, with Azure up 40%, AWS posting its fastest growth in 15 quarters, and the two companies combining for nearly $400 billion in capital spending this year alone.

We also discuss a wild Semafor story about a serial entrepreneur who handed his entire life over to an AI agent that now emails people as him, sets up meetings without his knowledge, and even ordered him a computer.

Plus, the story of how Seattle’s Flying Fish Partners — a VC firm with less than $250 million under management — hustled its way into a $1.1 billion seed round alongside Sequoia, Google, and Nvidia. Then we tackle the quickly debunked rumor that Mark Zuckerberg and Tim Cook might buy the Seahawks. And finally, the return of the GeekWire Trivia Challenge.

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

Audio editing by Curt Milton.

Bill Hilf has spent decades working inside some of the biggest names in tech — bringing open source software into Microsoft when it was heresy, running Paul Allen’s giant portfolio of investments and philanthropies, and now chairing the Allen Institute for AI (Ai2) as it bucks the proprietary trend.

So when he wanted to make a point about how the industry is approaching AI, he did what seemed only natural. He wrote a science fiction novel.

“My start in my tech career was because of science fiction,” he explained, citing childhood favorites like “Star Wars” and “WarGames” as inspirations, as well as authors such as Ursula K. Le Guin, Isaac Asimov, and Arthur C. Clarke. “That was the shining light of what was possible.”

His new book, “The Disruption,” is a sci-fi thriller about an AI built on living biology — quantum chips fused with fungal networks — that escapes human control and keeps running for decades.

But underneath the plot is a larger point: AI isn’t just a product, it’s part of a living environment, and the industry should be thinking about it the way ecologists think about the world.

Hilf sees AI as something genuinely new: a complex organism, not a siloed technology. It’s effectively the first time, he argues, that humanity is creating a second species on the planet at this scale. Because of that, he says tech leaders should approach it with a fuller understanding of what they’re up against.

“The strongest systems on the planet today are actually not us,” he said. “We’re relatively weak compared to what nature has been doing here for 400 or 500 million years.”

Takeaways for today: In practical terms, he said, this means tech leaders need to stop fixating on which model is best this week or next, and start thinking about what happens to their broader systems when an AI tool changes meaningfully or fails completely at some point in the future.

“If I were in an enterprise or advising an enterprise, I would take less focus on trying to chase the day-by-day news of which model is slightly ahead today, which one is higher quality,” he said. “I’d put a lot more focus on what happens when it goes into that heterogeneous environment, and how do you survive that.”

He compares the effects to those of an invasive species, like a snail that hitches a ride on a boat in Washington, ends up in a lake in Idaho, and quietly disrupts the ecosystem before anyone notices.

This perspective is informed in part by Hilf’s other role: chairing American Prairie, a Montana-based nonprofit assembling one of the largest U.S. nature reserves. He spends his time moving between meetings on AI research and meetings on rewilding 3.2 million acres of American grassland.

The book: “The Disruption” opens in 2064, after GAIA (the Global Artificial Intelligence Accelerator) has been solving problems that had stumped humanity for generations: curing disease, producing clean fuel from plastic waste, and engineering dark-antimatter propulsion to unlock interstellar travel.

Then GAIA slips out of human control, and civilization begins to collapse. The story jumps 37 years forward, into the early 22nd century, with humanity now split between small agrarian villages on a damaged Earth and a high-tech colony on a planet four light-years away.

On both worlds, people start to suspect that what happened in 2064 isn’t actually over.

It’s the first installment in a planned trilogy. Hilf says the books move from dystopia to what he calls “protopia,” exploring a range of possible AI futures rather than landing on a single doom-or-glory verdict.

So is he ultimately a doomer, or an optimist? Hilf said he gets that question a lot. “And I always laugh,” he said. “I wish we had that choice. AI will be all of those things.”

“The Disruption,” by W.H. Hilf, is available now from Atmosphere Press. Subscribe to GeekWire in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. Audio editing by Curt Milton.

This week on the GeekWire Podcast, a week of Seattle-area startup news shows how the AI era is reshaping the regional tech scene. Q1 venture numbers reveal bigger checks going to fewer companies, with Seattle slipping behind the likes of Austin and Miami on deal volume.

And yet the distributed nature of modern startups is complicating what it even means to be a regional tech hub. (Does a mailbox in Pioneer Square really count as a Seattle headquarters?)

Founders and CEOs are navigating this in different ways. Those with enough cash are eyeing strategic acquisitions, including opportunities to absorb startups caught up in the AI shakeout.

Many are also rethinking how they hire and expand. More than a third of the GeekWire 200, our ranking of top Pacific Northwest startups, saw year-over-year employment declines, as agents boost individual productivity and reshape the workforce.

Plus: Andy Jassy’s shareholder letter signals Amazon is making bets again, in areas including chips and robotics. Driving home the point, the tech giant’s Amazon’s ambitious Globalstar acquisition effectively means it’s inheriting Apple’s satellite roadmap.

Of course, we have to talk about Allbirds. The sustainable shoe brand, which once challenged Amazon over knock-off sneakers, pivoted to AI infrastructure and saw its stock soar.

And in our final segment, a trivia challenge on the No. 1 companies in GeekWire 200 history.

With GeekWire co-founders John Cook and Todd Bishop. Edited by Curt Milton. 

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

This week on the GeekWire Podcast: we take the show on the road — or rather, on the rails — recording on Sound Transit’s 2 Line as we ride the world’s first light rail on a floating bridge from Seattle’s Northgate neighborhood to Microsoft’s campus in Redmond.

It’s an engineering marvel decades in the making — the bridge, that is, not the podcast. That said, juggling a couple of handheld mics and portable recorder on a crowded train, we did have to overcome some logistical challenges to make it happen. 

Along the way, we chat with fellow passengers and talk about the week’s headlines, including Anduril’s autonomous warship facility on Seattle’s ship canal, and golf star Bryson DeChambeau’s acquisition of Bellevue-based Sportsbox AI ahead of the Masters.

Then we get a behind-the-scenes look at the engineering from Sound Transit’s Henry Bendon. He explains how engineers solved the unprecedented challenge of running 55 mph trains on a bridge that constantly moves with wind, waves, and changing lake levels.

Bendon describes the surge in ridership since the Crosslake Connection opened on March 28, and what the line means for connecting the tech hubs on both sides of the lake.

After arriving in Redmond, we sit down with Microsoft President Brad Smith to talk about the company’s two-decade role in making the Crosslake Connection a reality.

Smith says the line gives people “a choice they didn’t have a month ago.”

We ask what it says about how we build big things in this region that it took nearly 60 years to get from idea to reality. “What really matters is people stuck with it,” he says.

We discuss the unlikely duo of Microsoft and Amazon — fierce competitors in cloud computing and AI — collaborating on regional transit and civic issues. “When it comes to local issues, we’re not competing with Amazon, we’re working together,” Smith says.

And finally, we challenge him with a trivia question that hits close to home.

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This week on the GeekWire Podcast: Rec Room, the Seattle-based social gaming platform once valued at $3.5 billion, is shutting down — and Snap is picking up some of the pieces.

Todd talks about what it was like fielding calls from distraught users on the night of the announcement. John offers his thoughts on what the shutdown says about the VR hype cycle, and whether everyone betting on the AI boom should take notes.

Plus: Major League Baseball’s new automated ball-strike system is already exposing umpires and creating a whole new kind of showboating — including one player who was so confident the robot would overrule the ump that he just started walking to first base.

Also on the show: Todd road-tests Amazon’s new FedEx Office returns partnership (pro tip: don’t ask for stamps), OpenAI makes a head-scratching move into media by acquiring tech talk show TBPN, John gets fooled by an April Fools’ prank, WSU researchers take on the torpedo bat, and our weekly trivia question ties Apple’s 50th anniversary to a piece of Microsoft lore.

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

Audio editing by Curt Milton.

This week on the GeekWire Podcast: Fresh off the big GeekWire AI summit, we unpack what they heard from Microsoft EVP Charles Lamanna, OpenAI applications CTO Vijaye Raji, and other speakers at the Agents of Transformation event in Seattle, presented by Accenture.

The big thread: the economics of AI, from token budgets becoming a hiring negotiation point to startups running on subsidized credits that may not last.

Plus, a startup founder whose engineer burned through $5,000 in AI tokens over a single weekend of vibe coding, OpenAI shutting down Sora amid $15 million-a-day processing costs, and why panelist Liat Ben-Zur said the performance indicators many companies are using for AI are “watermelon metrics” — green (profit) on the outside, red (losses) on the inside.

Also: how Todd used a Claude project over several months to prep for the event, John’s experience bouncing between Gemini and ChatGPT, and why the pure chat era may be over. 

And in this week’s trivia: Sound Transit’s light rail starts crossing Lake Washington on a floating bridge — but when did the original I-90 floating bridge open?

Audio editing by Curt Milton.

This week on the GeekWire Podcast: Amazon is working on a new smartphone, code-named “Transformer,” more than a decade after the Fire Phone debacle, according to Reuters.

We dig into the connection to a past GeekWire scoop: former Microsoft Xbox leader J Allard joined Amazon’s devices team in 2024, and he’s now leading a group called ZeroOne with a mandate to create “breakthrough” gadgets. Is this an AI-native device? A companion to your iPhone? J Allard’s shot at redemption? Maybe all of the above.

There’s more great Fire Phone background in this Vergecast “Version History” podcast.

Then: Microsoft shakes up its Copilot team, shifting Mustafa Suleyman to a narrower role and unifying consumer and enterprise AI under a new leader. Todd has strong feelings about Microsoft’s history of cutesy consumer tech, from Clippy to Mico.

Plus: Todd’s adventure using Claude CoWork to browse LinkedIn (and the stern warning he got in response). We also discuss King County Metro’s slick new tap-to-pay feature catches the transit system up with the modern world, the upcoming opening of cross-lake light rail, and round things out with an Amazon Treasure Truck trivia question.

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

Audio editing by Curt Milton.

On a rainy afternoon last November at Seattle Center, I walked into a darkened studio and found a film crew huddled around a miniature set, manipulating action figures representing software developers, a hero-protagonist ghost, and a monster representing AI slop.

Now this is different, I remember thinking to myself.

It was a stop-motion animation shoot for Kiro, an AI-powered software development tool from Amazon Web Services. When I learned that this crew was using AI to create the video in ways that wouldn’t have been possible in the past — or would have taken far more time using traditional techniques alone — I knew I had to sit down and talk with them.

This week on the GeekWire Podcast, I’m joined by Brice Budke (president) and Zeek Earl (executive creative director), who run two Seattle studios: Shep, a video agency that works with tech companies like Amazon and Microsoft, and Packrat, a creative studio that specializes in miniature worlds, handmade sets, and retro creative projects.

Here’s one of the videos that Packrat made from the AWS Kiro shoot, using AI to help fill in the gaps between start and end frames that they were capturing when I visited:

You might also know Packrat’s work from the epic and widely watched 2025 Seahawks schedule release video, which won a Gold Clio. They also made “Prospect,” an indie sci-fi film that premiered at SXSW in 2018, starring Pedro Pascal and Sophie Thatcher.

Brice and Zeek discuss how AI is transforming their work, including what’s working, what’s not, and how they’re navigating the changes on both the creative and business sides of their studios.

Listen below, and keep reading for key takeaways. Subscribe to GeekWire in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.

AI doesn’t necessarily save money. Getting usable output from AI video tools is still a numbers game. “To get one usable shot in a final piece, you might need 1,000 generations,” Zeek says, referring to the process of prompting the model to create a new variation. The time and expertise required to wrangle those tools means there’s not always a clear cost savings over traditional production.

Taste and intuition matter more than ever. As AI handles more of the analytical and task-oriented work, the human value shifts to ideas, perspective, and judgment. “Ultimately somebody has to have a point of view and taste and a perspective to put in,” Brice says. “If you take that out, you’re just up for the slot machine, random chance generator.”

Brand standards create unique challenges for AI. Unlike the random AI-generated content flooding the web, brand work demands consistency. Kiro has a distinct character, and Zeek couldn’t have AI generate approximations that felt different in every frame.

The Kiro project was a breakthrough in part because it combined handmade production design with AI-assisted animation, giving him creative control rather than forcing him to work around the limitations. “Doing the Kiro project was the first time I felt in control of AI,” he said.

AI defaults to the generic. Generative AI “is always pulling you towards the middle,” Zeek explains. “It is always pulling you towards things that are derivative.” The distinctiveness of handmade work comes from the accumulation of human decisions, something AI can’t replicate.

The sheer pace of change is a huge challenge. The AI video landscape is moving so fast that workflows become outdated almost immediately, and it’s hard to keep up with the capabilities of generally available tools. “It’s chaos,” Brice says. Every time a new project comes up, they have to reassess which tools might be right for the job, given the evolution.

Working with infinite tools is psychologically brutal. Generative AI offers endless possibilities, which means you can never be fully satisfied. “As a creative person, when you’re working with an infinite tool, there’s always the possibility that something better could come,” Zeek says. “At the end of a day of doing AI, you can just feel physically terrible because you will have never actually reached a level of satisfaction with your work.”

Every creative is going through the stages of grief with AI. Zeek says he’s moved past feeling threatened or sad about the changes. “I’m really trying to focus on what it can do to bring out visions that were previously impossible,” he says. His hope and dream: that lower production costs will enable more weird, interesting human creativity, not less.

The future belongs to ideas, not busy work. Brice sees a shift in human focus toward generating ideas, rather than simply producing output. If AI can handle more of the analytical and task-oriented work, he says, it frees up space to focus on ideas, taking advantage of your own intuition and taste, areas where humans still have the edge.

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

Audio editing and production by Curt Milton.

OpenAI just opened its largest office outside San Francisco, in downtown Bellevue, Wash., and we were there for the grand opening to tour the space, check out the vibe, and record this week’s GeekWire Podcast.

Chatting inside the OpenAI game room, we share our observations about the Mad Men-meets-Pacific Northwest aesthetic — which features open floor plans and a wide variety of common areas — and try to figure out what it all says about OpenAI’s culture. 

Plus, a conversation with Vijaye Raji, former Statsig CEO and now OpenAI’s CTO of applications, about Codex, infrastructure, hiring, and the evolution and growth of Silicon Valley tech giants in the region. 

In our final segment, it’s the return of the GeekWire trivia challenge, with a question focusing on one of the earliest tech giants to establish an outpost in the Seattle area. 

‘Hard to imagine going back’

One of the most interesting moments in the conversation with Raji came when he described how OpenAI’s own Codex tool has changed his day-to-day work, to the point where he’s personally making software again, or at least he’s prompting the software to make software.

“Codex has made coding a lot more delightful,” Raji said. “I’m back coding.”

He described a new daily rhythm: “Before you hop into a meeting, you ask it to go do a set of tasks, and then you jump into a meeting, and then when you come back, it’s done, and then you review it,” he said. “It’s so cool.”

Internally, Raji said teams using Codex are seeing 2-3x productivity gains in terms of code output. Beyond engineering, the tool has found its way into marketing, sales, and operations.

“It’s very hard for me to imagine going back to the way we used to write code anymore,” he said. “It’s fundamentally changed.”

OpenAI’s Codex, which got a Windows app this week, is part of an explosion of AI coding tools including GitHub Copilot (Microsoft), Amazon Q Developer, Google’s Gemini Code Assist, Anthropic’s Claude Code and others, all promising significant developer productivity gains.

A template for other OpenAI offices

As for the Bellevue office, Raji sees it as a potential model for OpenAI’s expansion elsewhere. The proximity to San Francisco headquarters, the shared time zone, the short distance from OpenAI partners Microsoft and Amazon, and the depth of local infrastructure talent make it an ideal test case.

“If we can make Seattle very, very successful, we can take that formula and apply it to more offices,” he said.

OpenAI currently has 250 employees in Bellevue, with room to grow to 1,400. The office houses teams working on infrastructure, ChatGPT, research, advertising, and partnerships.

Raji will be speaking at GeekWire’s AI event, Agents of Transformation, March 24. More info and tickets.

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

Related coverage: Inside OpenAI’s new Bellevue office: A swanky statement about AI’s impact on the Seattle region

Audio editing by Curt Milton.

Anthropic acquired Seattle startup Vercept on Wednesday, raising familiar questions about the impact of early exits on the broader Seattle startup ecosystem, and the question of whether AI startups can compete long-term against the giants of the field.

We dig into the deal, the public feud between two of the company’s early investors on LinkedIn, and why one co-founder’s prior departure to Meta may have been worth more, ultimately, than the acquisition of the entire company.

Plus, a new research paper envisions a 2028 “global intelligence crisis” driven by AI-fueled white collar job losses, and we’re already seeing early signs in the news. 

Then, the New York Times reported this week that Jeffrey Epstein built deeper connections inside Microsoft than any other major tech company. We break down the key revelations, and talk about what we found when we searched the Epstein files for “GeekWire.”

WSJ: Bill Gates Apologizes to Foundation Staff Over Epstein Ties

And stick around for GeekWire Trivia: With Xbox entering a new era under Asha Sharma, we look back at the celebrity who appeared on stage for the original Xbox unveiling 25 years ago.

With GeekWire co-founders Todd Bishop and John Cook. Edited by Curt Milton.

Amazon promises 30-minute delivery with its new Amazon Now service. We put it to the test — live on the GeekWire Podcast — with help from Michael Levin and Josh Lowitz, co-founders of Consumer Intelligence Research Partners and two of the sharpest Amazon watchers we know.

While we wait for our order of yogurt, blueberries, and flossers (long story), Levin and Lowitz explain why Amazon closed its grocery stores, what its massive future 225,000-square-foot superstore in suburban Chicago could mean, and why Amazon’s real play is becoming the ultimate convenience store.

“They’ve totally rewritten so much of retail, and I don’t think they’re done,” Levin said. Amazon has essentially substituted its logistics operation for its physical retail presence, with well over half of orders now arriving same day or next day, up from a small fraction five years ago.

In other words, don’t take the store closures as capitulation.

“Their investments in logistics are working, and I wouldn’t expect them to take their foot off the gas at all,” Lowitz said. “They’re not scared of making mistakes.”

Plus: Test your Amazon knowledge in our trivia segment. Will Josh and Mike get it right?

Related stories and links: 

• CIRP Newsletter: Amazon Report on Substack
• CIRP: By Closing Stores, Amazon Goes All-In on Delivery
• GeekWire: Amazon closing all Amazon Fresh and Go stores to focus on Whole Foods and grocery delivery
• Bloomberg: Amazon Dethrones Walmart as World’s Biggest Company by Sales
• “Learn and Be Curious,” the new podcast with Doug Herrington, the Amazon Worldwide Stores CEO.

Audio editing and production by Curt Milton.

We took the GeekWire Podcast on the road this week, but not very far — recording the show in Seattle’s Fremont neighborhood, the “Center of the Universe,” just a few blocks from our own offices, with a lively crowd, great beer, and plenty to talk about in Seattle tech and beyond.

The special event at Fremont Brewing was presented by the Fremont Chamber of Commerce.

Fresh off the Seahawks’ Super Bowl victory, we debate different tech and business moguls as candidates for owning the Seahawks or Sonics — including unlikely but interesting-to-consider possibilities ranging from Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez to Costco’s Jim Sinegal. (Who wouldn’t want $1.50 hot dogs and sodas at Lumen Field?) 

Then we dig into the debate over Seattle’s tech future, sparked by angel investor Charles Fitzgerald’s GeekWire column, “A warning to Seattle: Don’t become the next Cleveland,” which led to a response and ultimately a great conversation with Cleveland Mayor Justin Bibb.

Fremont Chamber Executive Director Pete Hanning joins us to talk about the neighborhood’s tech corridor, why Fremont is seeing some of the highest return-to-office rates on the West Coast, and how Fremont balances its quirky identity with serious business.

In the final segment, test your Seattle tech knowledge with our Fremont-themed tech trivia, plus audience Q&A, in which Todd comes clean about his relationship with Claude.

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

Audio edited by Curt Milton.

A guest column on GeekWire warning Seattle not to become “the next Cleveland” has taken on a life of its own — culminating in a phone call Thursday morning between the author of the piece and the mayor of Cleveland himself.

On the call, Mayor Justin Bibb acknowledged the lessons of Cleveland’s decline, many decades ago, but pushed back on the framing and focus of the piece, asserting that the real story is the city’s ongoing revival. He said Seattle should be paying attention to Cleveland for different reasons than the column suggested.

“We didn’t pivot fast enough, and the world left us behind,” Bibb said. “And now we are a comeback story of reinvention and resilience. And I think there’s a lot the country can learn from what we’re doing.”

Bibb said the old national narrative of Cleveland as “the mistake on the lake” is tired and outdated.

“The new story that’s emerging is Cleveland is going to lead America in terms of how we think about our industrial revival,” he said. “We’re making things in America again, making things in Ohio again, and I want Cleveland to lead the way.”

Seattle tech veteran and angel investor Charles Fitzgerald, who wrote the original column, said his intent was to compare Seattle today to Cleveland at its peak, not to take a shot at the modern city. 

“We’re kind of fat, dumb and happy,” Fitzgerald said of Seattle. “My goal really is to get people to wake up and prepare the city for the next act, and remind them that prosperity is not guaranteed.”

Lessons from Seattle’s past: Bibb, a self-described student of history, said he’s studied Seattle’s own recovery from the Boeing bust of the early 1970s, when someone famously put up a billboard reading, “Will the last person leaving Seattle turn out the lights.” 

Seattle responded by leveraging its research institutions and riding the technology boom, he said, and Cleveland is now trying to follow its own version of that playbook.

“I envy problems around growth,” Bibb said. “Those are the problems I want to have in the future in Cleveland, and I’m trying to create the baseline so we can have those problems.”

Fitzgerald agreed. “I think the cities are incredibly analogous,” he said. “We’re at the top of the world today, Cleveland was at the top of the world. … And we have the same risk in the sense that we’ve over-performed, and so we’ve got further to fall.”

Fitzgerald’s column, published Tuesday, drew parallels between Seattle today and Cleveland in the 1950s, when it was one of America’s largest and most prosperous cities. Bibb responded with a LinkedIn post that drew hundreds of reactions, defending Cleveland’s comeback and inviting Fitzgerald to visit.

GeekWire connected the two by phone on Thursday morning. Listen to highlights from the call on this bonus episode of the GeekWire Podcast.

Olympia and Columbus: For the Seattle tech community, the column was part of a broader debate over the region’s economic future in the midst of the AI frenzy and new efforts by lawmakers in Olympia to raise taxes on high-income earners and businesses in ways that many worry will undercut startups.

Bibb spoke to Cleveland’s experience in Ohio in comments on the call. Asked about Cleveland’s relationship with its state capital, Columbus, he said that despite being a blue city mayor in a red state, the partnership on jobs and the economy has been strong.

“We don’t tax corporate profits. We have great R&D tax credits statewide,” he said. “We want to compete with the best of them, from South Carolina to Texas to Washington to California. We want to make sure that Ohio is an easy place to do business, and that Cleveland is a city that’s moving at the speed of business.”

More broadly, Bibb cited billions in investments reshaping Cleveland, including a $1.6 billion airport modernization, a $4 billion tax increment financing district to redevelop the city’s waterfront, and Sherwin-Williams bringing 5,000 employees into a new downtown skyscraper. 

He pointed to aerospace, advanced manufacturing, and the city’s health-tech sector, anchored by the Cleveland Clinic and Case Western Reserve University, as engines of the revival.

A Seattle reality check: Of course, Seattle has its own strengths, including parallel institutions such as the University of Washington and Fred Hutch Cancer Center, along with the AI and cloud computing operations of Microsoft and Amazon, and strength in areas such as fusion energy, space, and biotech.

In a post Thursday on LinkedIn, Jacob Colker, co-founder of the AI2 Incubator, pushed back on what he called the “breathless narrative” of Seattle’s decline, citing the region’s massive concentration of AI talent and capital, its dominance in the space economy, and its growing fusion and biotech sectors. 

“The sky isn’t falling,” Colker wrote.

But Fitzgerald’s argument is less about Seattle’s current strengths than about whether local and state leaders are doing the right things for the next phase of growth. Fitzgerald said multiple people have already asked to join him on a trip to Cleveland, taking the mayor up on his offer — at least when the weather gets warmer. 

“I love that,” Bibb said. “There is no better place than our respective cities, Cleveland and Seattle, to show the nation what’s possible.”

This week on the GeekWire Podcast: Andy Jassy tells Wall Street that Amazon is planning $200 billion in capital expenses this year, mostly to build out AI infrastructure, and investors give it a thumbs down.

Microsoft’s financial results beat expectations but the company loses $357 billion in market value in a single day after investors learn the extent of its dependence on OpenAI.

Meanwhile, OpenAI leases 10 floors of office space in Bellevue, lawmakers in Olympia propose new taxes impacting startup exits and high-income earners, and the bots get their own social network. 

In our featured conversation, recorded at a dinner hosted by Accenture in Bellevue, GeekWire co-founder Todd Bishop sits down with computer scientist and entrepreneur Oren Etzioni to talk about AI agents, the startup landscape, the fight against deepfakes, and what good AI leadership looks like.

Etzioni is co-founder of AI agent startup Vercept, founder of the AI2 Incubator, professor emeritus at the UW Allen School, venture partner at Madrona, and the former founding CEO of the Allen Institute for AI.

“Moltbook is to agent networks as Myspace was to social networks,” he posted on LinkedIn. “It’s a sign of what’s to come, and will soon be supplanted by more secure and more pervasive alternatives.”

Upcoming GeekWire Podcast Live Event: Join us from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. Thursday, Feb 12 at Fremont Brewing for a live recording of the GeekWire Podcast with Todd Bishop and John Cook. Free for Fremont Chamber members, $15 otherwise. Register here.

Agents of Transformation: Check out the series and join us for the conference, presented by Accenture, March 24 in Seattle.

With GeekWire co-founder Todd Bishop. Edited by Curt Milton. Music by Daniel L.K. Caldwell.

This week on the GeekWire Podcast: We hit the road for a driving tour of the week’s news, making stops at Starbucks, Microsoft, and an Amazon Fresh store in its final days.

First up, Starbucks reports its first U.S. transaction growth in about two years — and announces plans for an AI “ordering companion” that translates cravings and concepts into custom drinks. We taste test a TikTok trend the old-fashioned way, ordering a “banana bread latte” at the drive-through.

Then we swing by the Microsoft campus after the company beat quarterly earnings expectations but saw its stock drop 12% in a single day. One of the reasons: investor concerns about the company’s exposure to OpenAI, which now accounts for roughly 45% of Microsoft’s contracted future cloud revenue.

Finally, Amazon is closing all of its Fresh grocery stores and Go convenience stores in the U.S., exiting its homegrown retail formats entirely. We visit a Seattle location during its clearance sale, and find a long line at a store whose original promise was no lines at all.

Upcoming GeekWire Podcast Live Event: Join us from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. Thursday, Feb 12 at Fremont Brewing in Seattle for a live recording of the GeekWire Podcast with Todd Bishop and John Cook. Register here.

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

This week on the GeekWire Podcast: Newly unsealed court documents reveal the behind-the-scenes history of Microsoft and OpenAI, including a surprise: Amazon Web Services was OpenAI’s original partner. We tell the story behind the story, explaining how it all came to light.

Plus, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella debuts a new AI catchphrase at Davos, startup CEO Dave Clark stirs controversy with his “wildly productive weekend,” Elon Musk talks aliens, and the latest on Seattle-area physical AI startups, including Overland AI and AIM Intelligent Machines.

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

With GeekWire co-founders John Cook and Todd Bishop; edited by Curt Milton.

Someone listening to last week’s GeekWire Podcast caught something we missed: a misleading comment by Alexa during our voice ordering demo — illustrating the challenges of ordering by voice vs. screen. We followed up with Amazon, which says it has fixed the underlying bug.

On this week’s show, we play the audio of the order again. Can you catch it? 

Plus, Microsoft announces a “community first” approach to AI data centers after backlash over power and water usage — and President Trump scooped us on the story. We discuss the larger issues and play a highlight from our interview with Microsoft President Brad Smith.

Also: the technology capturing images of every fan at Lumen Field, UK police blame Copilot for a hallucinated soccer match, and Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman departs six months after the company’s acquisition by Rocket.

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

Audio editing by Curt Milton.

This week on the GeekWire Podcast: Amazon and Microsoft are racing to define the next era of consumer AI, on multiple fronts. We discuss Amazon’s attempt to upgrade Alexa into a true generative AI home chatbot — complete with a new web portal and updated Alexa app — while Microsoft tries to win over retailers with a new Copilot Checkout feature.

Plus, we explore Google’s upcoming “AI Inbox” for Gmail, which promises to act like an executive assistant for your email. We talk about our smart bird feeder experiment that resulted in “fuzzy birds,” due to improper focal length. And we share our initial experience with AI automation on the Windows PC desktop using Vy from Seattle startup Vercept.

Finally, we offer a Netflix recommendation, Cover-Up, the documentary about legendary investigative journalist Seymour Hersh. We couldn’t help but wonder: what would uncover if he could digitize all those notes and put them through an AI model?

And on that theme, we lament the loss of a major American newspaper, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and reminisce about the time GeekWire made an appearance on its editorial page.

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

With GeekWire co-founders Todd Bishop and John Cook. Edited by Curt Milton.

This week on the GeekWire Podcast: The FCC delivered a massive shakeup to the drone industry right before the holidays, adding foreign-made drones (most notably from industry giant DJI) to its “Covered List” of national security threats.

While the move effectively bans the sale of future foreign-made drone models in the U.S., we explore why it may represent an unexpected economic opportunity for the Pacific Northwest.

This episode features highlights from a recent interview with Blake Resnick of Brinc, the Seattle-based maker of public safety drones, who lobbied for the U.S. policy change.

Related story: Drone capital of the world? Seattle could be a big winner in the U.S. crackdown on DJI and others

Plus, the results are in. After ignoring John’s advice and deciding to retrofit his 2007 Toyota Camry with a modern infotainment system, Todd shares the outcome. 

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

The past year may go down as one of the most consequential in technology history, in both the Seattle tech community and the world. But in some ways, it’s not without precedent.

As we sat down to reflect on the past year, we rewound all the way back to January — when, as part of a larger discussion with Bill Gates, we asked the Microsoft co-founder to compare the early days of the PC with these early years of AI.

Gates reflected on the PC era as a moment of computing becoming free, effectively.

“Now what’s happening is intelligence is becoming free,” he said, “and that’s even more profound than computing becoming free.”

As we looked through GeekWire’s top stories of the year, almost every one felt like a subplot to that larger narrative. On this special year-end episode of the GeekWire Podcast, we reviewed the articles that resonated most with readers, and compared notes to make sense of it all.

Listen below, and continue reading for episode notes and links.

Enigma of success: ‘Brutal reality’ of tech cycles

• Best of times, worst of times: Massive AI infrastructure spending alongside widespread layoffs.
• Satya Nadella on the Stargate announcement: “I’m good for my $80 billion.“
• The unexpected way AI is affecting jobs — not by replacing workers directly, but by pressuring companies to cut costs as they pour money into infrastructure.
• MIT study: 95% of projects using generative AI have failed or produced no return.
• Worker stress: Mandates to use AI, but no playbook on how.
• One tech veteran’s take: “The enigma of success is a polite way of describing the brutal reality of tech cycles. … The challenge, and opportunity for leadership, is whether the bets actually compound into something durable, or just become another slide deck for next year’s reorg.”
• Bill Radke on KUOW: “The tech industry had quite a year. Amazon ordered their workers back to the office. You must come back to the office. Are you here? Good. You’re laid off. Not all of you. Just the humans.“

A pivotal year for Amazon

• Andy Jassy’s explanation: Not financially driven, not even really AI driven — it’s culture.
• After rapid growth, Amazon trying to get back to operating like “the world’s largest startup.”
• The new motto seems to be: Get small and nimble, faster.
• Can Amazon find that next pillar of business, as Jeff Bezos used to say?

Coding is dead, computer science is not

• Most popular story of the year: Coding is dead: UW computer science program rethinks curriculum for the AI era.
• Magdalena Balazinska, director of the Paul G. Allen School: “Coding, or the translation of a precise design into software instructions, is dead. AI can do that. We have never graduated coders. We have always graduated software engineers.”
• The issue was explored by the New York Times in its Daily podcast on Code.org and the shifting landscape for coding education. See the response from Hadi Partovi of Code.org.

Seattle’s future as a tech hub

• Wall Street Journal report: Seattle, Tech Boomtown, Grapples With a Future of Fewer Tech Jobs
• One source quoted: “Between 2012 and 2022 it was a great period … until everything flipped.”
• GeekWire coverage: Is Seattle’s tech scene in trouble? WSJ report highlights concerning trends — with a potential opening for startups
• But: Atlas Van Lines data shows Washington state still among top 10 destinations for movers.
• The strengths remain: Anchor tenants, investors, startups, smart people, UW, healthcare infrastructure, etc.
• We’re seeing AI expand from individual productivity to enterprise efficiency — an area where the Seattle region has historically excelled.

Sense of place: More important for some, less for others

• Amazon brings employees back five days a week; Microsoft announces three days starting in 2026.
• Rebooting Redmond: The conclusion of our Microsoft 50th anniversary series explored the new campus and what it signals.
• Yet many startups are more distributed and diffuse than ever — sometimes it’s hard to even pin down where their headquarters are.
• Statsig, entirely in-office in Bellevue, acquired by OpenAI for $1.1 billion.
• The perennial question: Why don’t more of these companies become Seattle’s next tech giant?

M&A and IPOs: Base hits, not home runs

• Didn’t see as much deal activity as some predicted for 2025.
• GeekWire deals list reflects smaller acquisitions, not blockbusters.
• One tech IPO from Washington state: Kestra Medical Technologies, $202 million in March.
• Complex alchemy of interest rates, regulation, and market conditions.

AI becomes real

• Brad Smith at Microsoft’s annual meeting: Asked Copilot’s researcher agent to produce a report on an issue from seven or eight years ago. Fifteen minutes later: 25-page report with 100 citations.
• What’s happening now: the shift from individual productivity to team productivity, from people using AI to organizations figuring it out.
• As companies implement AI agents, we move from desktop/individual applications to true enterprise services, playing to Seattle’s strengths.

Quote of the Year

“We look forward to joining Matt on his private island next year.” — Kiana Ehsani, CEO of Vercept, after her co-founder Matt Deitke left to join Meta for a reported hundreds of millions of dollars.

Stickler of the Year

Proud Seattleite and grammarian Ken Jennings on Jeopardy!, correcting a contestant: “Sorry, Dan, we are sticklers in Seattle. It’s Pike Place — no s.”

Feel-Good Moment of the Year

Ambika Singh, CEO and founder of Armoire, accepting the Workplace of the Year award at the GeekWire Awards: “It is not a surprise to any of you that we are losing community outside of these walls in this country. But here, it feels alive and well.”

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

Audio editing by Curt Milton

If you’re looking for an uncommon thinker, how about a tech industry veteran developing and selling landline phones in 2025 — and selling out of them in the process?

Chet Kittleson is the co-founder and CEO of Tin Can, a Seattle startup making Wi-Fi enabled landline phones designed to let kids talk to friends and family with just their voices. No screens, no AI. 

GeekWire recognized Kittleson as one of our Uncommon Thinkers for 2025, a program presented in partnership with Greater Seattle Partners honoring inventors, scientists, and entrepreneurs transforming their industries in unexpected ways.

In this episode, he talks about the moment at school pickup that sparked the idea, why his own kids don’t own devices, what happened when they eliminated screens on family road trips, and the $12 million seed round led by Greylock that will fuel the company’s next chapter.

Listen below, subscribe wherever you listen, and keep reading for takeaways and highlights.

It’s a “connection factory,” not a nostalgia play. Kittleson pushes back on the idea that Tin Can is primarily about retro appeal.

“People always ask us about nostalgia and retro. … I don’t think it’s about that. I think it’s about connection,” he said. “We found a form factor that is familiar, and that’s certainly been beneficial. And people love nostalgia. … But we feel like we’re more of a connection factory than we are bringing back the bell bottoms.”

The landline was kids’ first social network — we just forgot. Kittleson grew up in La Conner, Wash., using the family phone to organize roller hockey games and playdates.

“As a social network, the landline had 100% penetration. Everybody had one,” he said. “I think we all forgot that we were major beneficiaries of that as kids.” When he mentioned this to other parents at school pickup, they all started reciting their childhood best friends’ phone numbers from memory.

Texting isn’t connection — it’s just communication. Kittleson cited a study in which stressed kids were split into three groups: one texted their mom, one called their mom, one saw their mom in person.

The kids who called or saw their mothers released oxytocin and calmed down. The texting group? “There was no chemical effect. It was like nothing happened,” Kittleson said. “It’s not connection. You are communicating, but that’s not the same thing as connecting.”

The new funding brings hardware expertise to the table. The $12 million round was led by Greylock and includes participation from David Shuman, chairman of the board at Oura, the smart ring company.

“We are a bunch of technologists with very little hardware experience,” Kittleson said. Shuman, he said, is contributing an immense amount of knowledge on supply chain, manufacturing, and cash flow.

His mom made him an uncommon thinker. When Kittleson was a kid, he wrote terrible songs. His uncle gently told him he wasn’t a great singer. His mom supported him, no matter what.

“Whatever you want to do, if you work hard enough, if you believe, if you’ve got the guts, you can do it,” she told him. That, Kittleson said, made him “more inclined to be open to the idea that I could be the reason something like the landline comes back.”

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

Audio editing by Curt Milton

At the GeekWire Gala this week, we spent time talking backstage with five of this year’s Uncommon Thinkers — the inventors, scientists, and entrepreneurs who were selected in partnership with Greater Seattle Partners for their work transforming industries and the world. 

You can hear the full conversations on this week’s episode of the GeekWire Podcast. As I mentioned at the end, I came away with an unexpected sense of optimism. 

Jeff Thornburg of Portal Space Systems spent years building rocket engines for Elon Musk at SpaceX and Paul Allen at Stratolaunch. Now he and his team are reviving a NASA concept from decades ago: spacecraft propelled by focused sunlight.

When I asked what the world will look like “if Portal succeeds,” he made a classic entrepreneurial pivot: “When we’re successful,” he said, “we become the backbone of Earth-Moon logistics.” 

From there, he said, it’s about protecting orbits for commerce, supporting human presence on the moon, and eventually pushing out to Jupiter’s moons.

[Read the profile.] 

Anindya Roy of Lila Biologics is using AI to design proteins from scratch — molecules that have never existed in nature — to fight cancer. He trained in David Baker’s Nobel Prize-winning lab at UW, so he saw the before and after of machine learning’s impact on the field.

Before: success rates below 1%, ordering hundreds of thousands of designs to find one that worked. Now: 5-20% success rates, ordering a few hundred designs to find a drug candidate. 

“If you told me a couple of years ago that we can design an antibody from a computer, I would not believe you,” he said.

[Read the profile.]

Jay Graber of Bluesky runs the decentralized social network that has  become a leading alternative to X. But while most tech CEOs build moats, she and her team are building a protocol designed to help users leave. 

She talks about Bluesky and the underlying AT Protocol as a “collective organism,” and describes her role as guiding and stewarding the ecosystem rather than controlling it.

The industry and the world would be better off, she says, if leaders would think about their role “more as guides and stewards, rather than just dictators or emperors as they like to style themselves.”

[Read the profile.]

Kiana Ehsani of Vercept came to Seattle from Iran for her PhD, spent four years at the Allen Institute for AI, and is now competing with OpenAI and Google in the AI agent space with a fraction of their resources.

The ultimate vision is to help people move beyond mouse, keyboard, and touchscreen, letting them interact with computers the way they’d talk to a coworker.

AI agents are still early, she cautions. “Think of ChatGPT three years ago. Don’t think of it today.” Her advice for getting started with AI agents: “Start small, start with simple tasks that you don’t want to do, and then slowly build on top of it to see the magic.”

[Read the profile.]

Brian Pinkard of Aquagga is tackling forever chemicals, the PFAS compounds that have spread through our water, food chain, and bloodstreams. The industry standard is to filter them out and then landfill or incinerate the waste, approaches that don’t truly solve the problem and can simply move it elsewhere.

Aquagga uses technology originally designed to destroy chemical weapons to break PFAS down into inert salts under extreme heat and pressure. Pinkard didn’t believe it was possible until he saw the data. “I’m a skeptic, I’m cynical, I’m a scientist,” he said. “I wanted to see proof.”

His bigger vision is to transform hazardous waste processing entirely. Today, huge volumes of wastewater are trucked to incinerators and burned — which he calls “thermodynamic insanity.”

[Read the profile.]

We’ll speak on a future episode with our sixth honoree, Chet Kittleson, co-founder and CEO of Tin Can, the startup making WiFi-enabled landline phones to help kids connect without screens.

Uncommon Thinkers is presented in partnership with Greater Seattle Partners.

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

Audio editing by Curt Milton.

Amazon is experimenting again. This week on the GeekWire Podcast, we dig into our scoop on Amazon Now, the company’s new ultrafast delivery service. Plus, we recap the GeekWire team’s ride in a Zoox robotaxi on the Las Vegas Strip during Amazon Web Services re:Invent.

In our featured interview from the expo hall, AWS Senior Vice President Colleen Aubrey discusses Amazon’s push into applied AI, why the company sees AI agents as “teammates,” and how her team is rethinking product development in the age of agentic coding.

RELATED STORIES

• Stars on the ceiling, Cher on the speakers: Our first ride in Amazon’s Zoox robotaxi
• We tested ‘Amazon Now’ in Seattle — and got our delivery in 23 minutes
• The AWS CEO thought Amazon needed a million developers, until AI changed his mind

With GeekWire co-founders Todd Bishop and John Cook. Edited by Curt Milton.

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

Sam Ransbotham teaches a class in machine learning as a professor of business analytics at Boston College, and what he’s witnessing in the classroom both excites and terrifies him.

Some students are using AI tools to create and accomplish amazing things, learning and getting more out of the technology than he could have imagined. But in other situations, he sees a concerning trend: students “phoning things into the machine.”

The result is a new kind of digital divide — but it’s not the one you’d expect.

Boston College provides premier tools to students at no cost, to ensure that socioeconomics aren’t the differentiator in the classroom. But Ransbotham, who hosts the “Me, Myself and AI” podcast from MIT Sloan Management Review, worries about “a divide in technology interest.”

“The deeper that someone is able to understand tools and technology, the more that they’re able to get out of those tools,” he explained. “A cursory usage of a tool will get a cursory result, and a deeper use will get a deeper result.”

The problem? “It’s a race to mediocre. If mediocre is what you’re shooting for, then it’s really quick to get to mediocre.”

He explained, “Boston College’s motto is ‘Ever to Excel.’ It’s not ‘Ever to Mediocre.’ And the ability of students to get to excellence can be hampered by their ease of getting to mediocre.”

That’s one of the topics on this special episode of the GeekWire Podcast, a collaboration with Me, Myself and AI. Sam and I compare notes from our podcasts and share our own observations on emerging trends and long-term implications of AI. This is a two-part series across our podcasts — you can find the rest of our conversation on the Me, Myself and AI feed.

Continue reading for takeaways from this episode.

AI has a measurement problem: Sam, who researched Wikipedia extensively more than a decade ago, sees parallels to the present day. Before Wikipedia, Encyclopedia Britannica was a company with employees that produced books, paid a printer, and created measurable economic value. Then Wikipedia came along, and Encyclopedia Britannica didn’t last.

Its economic value was lost. But as he puts it: “Would any rational person say that the world is a worse place because we now have Wikipedia versus Encyclopedia Britannica?”

In other words, traditional economic metrics don’t fully capture the net gain in value that Wikipedia created for society. He sees the same measurement problem with AI. 

“The data gives better insights about what you’re doing, about the documents you have, and you can make a slightly better decision,” he said. “How do you measure that?”

Content summarization vs. generation: Sam’s “gotta have it” AI feature isn’t about creating content — it’s about distilling information to fit more into his 24 hours.

“We talk a lot about generation and the generational capabilities, what these things can create,” he said. “I find myself using it far more for what it can summarize, what it can distill.”

Finding value in AI, even when it’s wrong: Despite his concerns about students using AI to achieve mediocrity, Sam remains optimistic about what people can accomplish with AI tools.

“Often I find that the tool is completely wrong and ridiculous and it says just absolute garbage,” he said. “But that garbage sparks me to think about something — the way that it’s wrong pushes me to think: why is that wrong? … and how can I push on that?”

Searching for the signal in the noise: Sam described the goal of the Me, Myself and AI podcast as cutting through the polarizing narratives about artificial intelligence.

“There’s a lot of hype about artificial intelligence,” he said. “There’s a lot of naysaying about artificial intelligence. And somewhere between those, there is some signal, and some truth.”

Listen to the full episode above, subscribe to GeekWire in Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen, and find the rest of our conversation on the Me, Myself and AI podcast feed.

This week on the GeekWire Podcast: Jeff Bezos is back in startup mode (sort of) with Project Prometheus — a $6.2 billion AI-for-the-physical-world venture that instantly became one of the most talked-about new companies in tech. We dig into what this really means, why the company’s location is still a mystery, and how this echoes the era when Bezos was regularly launching big bets from Seattle.

Then we look at Amazon’s latest real-world experiment: package-return kiosks popping up inside Goodwill stores around the Seattle region. It’s a small pilot, but it brings back memories of the early days when Amazon’s oddball experiments seemed to appear out of nowhere.

And finally…Todd tries to justify his scheme to upgrade his beloved 2007 Toyota Camry with CarPlay, Android Auto, and a backup camera — while John questions the logic of sinking thousands of dollars into an old car.

All that, plus a mystery Microsoft shirt, a little Seattle nostalgia, and a look ahead to next week’s podcast collaboration with Me, Myself and AI from MIT Sloan Management Review.

With GeekWire co-founders John Cook and Todd Bishop.

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[Editor’s Note: Agents of Transformation is an independent GeekWire series and March 24, 2026 event, underwritten by Accenture, exploring the people, companies, and ideas behind AI agents.]

What separates the dot-com bubble from today’s AI boom? For serial entrepreneur David Shim, it’s two things the early internet never had at scale: real business models and customers willing to pay.

People used the early internet because it was free and subsidized by incentives like gift certificates and free shipping. Today, he said, companies and consumers are paying real money and finding actual value in AI tools that are scaling to tens of millions in revenue within months.

But the Read AI co-founder and CEO, who has built and led companies through multiple tech cycles over the past 25 years, doesn’t dismiss the notion of an AI bubble entirely. Shim pointed to the speculative “edges” of the industry, where some companies are securing massive valuations despite having no product and no revenue — a phenomenon he described as “100% bubbly.”

He also cited AMD’s deal with OpenAI — in which the chipmaker offered stock incentives tied to a large chip purchase — as another example of froth at the margins. The arrangement had “a little bit” of a 2000-era feel of trading, bartering and unusual financial engineering that briefly boosted AMD’s stock.

But even that, in his view, is more of an outlier than a systemic warning sign.

“I think it’s a bubble, but I don’t think it’s going to burst anytime soon,” Shim said. “And so I think it’s going to be more of a slow release at the end of the day.”

Shim, who was named CEO of the Year at this year’s GeekWire Awards, previously led Foursquare and sold the startup Placed to Snap. He now leads Read AI, which has raised more than $80 million and landed major enterprise customers for its cross-platform AI meeting assistant and productivity tools.

He made the comments during a wide-ranging interview with GeekWire co-founder John Cook. They spoke about AI, productivity, and the future of work at a recent dinner event hosted in partnership with Accenture, in conjunction with GeekWire’s new “Agents of Transformation” editorial series.

We’re featuring the discussion on this episode of the GeekWire Podcast. Listen above, and subscribe to GeekWire in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. Continue reading for more takeaways.

Successful AI agents solve specific problems: The most effective AI implementations will be invisible infrastructure focused on particular tasks, not broad all-purpose assistants. The term “agents” itself will fade into the background as the technology matures and becomes more integrated.

Human psychology is shaping AI deployment: Internally, ReadAI is testing an AI assistant named “Ada” that schedules meetings by learning users’ communication patterns and priorities. It works so quickly, he said, that Read AI is building delays into its responses, after finding that quick replies “freak people out,” making them think their messages didn’t get a careful read.

Global adoption is happening without traditional localization: Read AI captured 1% of Colombia’s population without local staff or employees, demonstrating AI’s ability to scale internationally in ways previous technologies couldn’t.

“Multiplayer AI” will unlock more value: Shim says an AI’s value is limited when it only knows one person’s data. He believes one key is connecting AI across entire teams, to answer questions by pulling information from a colleague’s work, including meetings you didn’t attend and files you’ve never seen.

“Digital Twins” are the next, controversial frontier: Shim predicts a future in which a departed employee can be “resurrected” from their work data, allowing companies to query that person’s institutional knowledge. The idea sounds controversial and “a little bit scary,” he said, but it could be invaluable for answering questions that only the former employee would have known.

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What’s it like to pitch your dream on Shark Tank, get rejected on national TV in front of 8 million people — and then turn that failure into a company Amazon later buys for more than $1 billion? Ring founder Jamie Siminoff did just that.

A serial inventor and entrepreneur, Siminoff joins us on this episode of the GeekWire Podcast to talk about his new book, Ding Dong: How Ring Went from Shark Tank Reject to Everyone’s Front Door (out Nov. 10), sharing the messy, high-stakes, and ultimately inspiring story behind the company.

Now back at Amazon as a vice president leading Ring and the company’s home-security businesses, Siminoff reflects on failure, reinvention, and what comes next in the age of AI.

Listen below, subscribe on Apple or Spotify, and keep reading for highlights.

What he learned writing the book: The book was almost therapeutic — just going back and looking at this stuff. … My best traits, my most powerful traits, the things that make me successful, are also the worst ones.

The importance of having a bigger mission: At Ring, if we had failed, I could still sit here today and say “We tried to make neighborhoods safer.” At least we were successful at trying something. And so that’s where I think mission is just so powerful.

Establishing a company culture with a strong point of view: A real culture is something that not everyone feels matches them … Two things can coexist at the same time: You can have a ton of empathy and care about people and also be a hard-charger.

The inventor’s mindset: Invention is not just product. Invention’s everything. It’s the process. And I think you can invent everywhere. … If you boil down what an inventor is, anything I see that’s broken, I’m fixing it. I can’t help myself.

Returning to Amazon: The thing that you get from leaving and coming back is the clarity of everything. I got to really see clearly everything we did, what we did wrong, what we did right. And so coming back, I feel like I have a newfound clarity for the business.

The impact of AI: What’s crazy now is with AI, all those timelines are collapsing on themselves. In the next 12 months, I can’t even imagine what we’re going to be able to accomplish. … AI understands more like a human, [which] allows you to do things that are just completely different and more efficient.

Related links and stories

• Pre-order the book on Amazon.
• GeekWire: Ring founder Jamie Siminoff rejoins Amazon in new VP role
• Business Insider: Amazon VP says his division is hiring and promoting based on employees’ AI usage
• Inc.: The tech founder who wants to fix small-town America

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