The AI XR Podcast had a massive news week and one of its best guest conversations of the year. Caspar Thykier and Connell Gauld, CEO and CTO co-founders of Zappar, joined Charlie Fink and Ted Schilowitz to talk about something deceptively simple: helping people find stuff.

Zappar's new product, Spaces, is app-free indoor navigation built on the web. QR code or link in a meeting invite — your phone shows AR breadcrumbs to the nearest restroom, the right meeting room, the hospital ward three floors away. No app download. No specific hardware. No Azure dependency. Caspar put the pitch simply: it's fundamentally just helping people find stuff. Connell's vision: the same technology running in glasses indistinguishable from a regular pair, within four to five years.

AI XR News: Elon Musk's $135 billion lawsuit against OpenAI went to trial in Berkeley. OpenAI's IPO may be pushed to 2027 over its CFO reporting structure and $600B CapEx problem. Meta is laying off 20% of its staff in two waves. Google earnings were up 10% while Meta got punished. Freepik rebranded as Magnifi with $230M ARR and a million paid subscribers. Samsung announced displayless AI smart glasses. Google partnered with Gucci for another AI glasses play. And Google put $40 billion into Anthropic.

Key Moments:

• [00:03:02] Elon vs. Sam: the $135 billion trial
• [00:05:09] OpenAI's IPO in jeopardy — CFO structure and $600B CapEx
• [00:07:12] Meta's 20% layoffs and Charlie's read on bad CEO behavior
• [00:10:32] Freepik becomes Magnifi: $230M ARR, a million subscribers
• [00:13:10] Samsung Galaxy XR and Google x Gucci smart glasses
• [00:15:15] Google puts $40B into Anthropic — a cloud play
• [00:21:06] Spaces: turn-by-turn AR indoor navigation, no app required
• [00:41:13] 16 years in XR: how Zappar survived by being the cockroach

Brought to you by Zappar, the company behind Mattercraft — the leading visual development environment for immersive 3D web experiences.

Start building at mattercraft.io.

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Akash Nigam has been building Genies since 2017 with a conviction that avatars will be the visual layer of the internet. As CEO of Genies, he's assembled IP partners including the NBA, MLB, Sanrio, and Kakao, with more major studios and agencies set to announce before the end of May. The pitch: every app, game, website, and celebrity is going to have an AI personality. Genies wants to be the framework that gives all of those personalities a face.

What separates Genies is portability and scale. A character that took eight weeks in 2021 now takes ten minutes. Staying stylized rather than photorealistic isn't just aesthetic — it's what got Hollywood to the table. Talent doesn't want deepfakes. They want a Genie: trained on private IP data, capable of one-on-one fan relationships that make Instagram feel thin.

AI XR News: Tim Cook stepped aside as Apple CEO with hardware chief John Ternus taking over. Humanoid robots ran a half marathon in Beijing while a Sony robot defeated professional table tennis players, opening a conversation about Chinese robotics capabilities and AI data infiltration risks the US is still underestimating.

Key Moments:

• [00:06:45] Tim Cook steps aside: what the Apple leadership transition signals about wearable AI
• [00:12:00] Humanoid robots and table tennis: China's robotics flex
• [00:13:00] The data infiltration argument: open-source risk and a warning for the US
• [00:24:00] The IP land grab: NBA, MLB, Sanrio, Kakao, Naver Webtoon
• [00:28:00] From photo to avatar in 10 minutes: how Genies' generation pipeline scaled
• [00:32:00] Why Instagram feels thin and how Genies enables one-on-one fan relationships
• [00:49:00] 80 people, $150M raised, and why Bob Iger sees Genies as the future of Disney

If AI personalities are going to be everywhere, what do they look like? Akash has been building the answer for nearly a decade. Q3 is when it goes live.

Brought to you by Zappar and Mattercraft — the leading visual development environment for immersive 3D web experiences. Mattercraft now includes an AI assistant for design, code, and debugging in real time.

Start building at mattercraft.io.

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Alan Lasky arrived at the AI XR Podcast straight from Las Vegas ahead of NAB. An MIT Media Lab graduate under Nicholas Negroponte, a veteran of Silicon Graphics and Amazon Web Services, and an advisor to investment banks on AI and media, he brings technical depth, industry history, and financial realism about where media is actually going.

The conversation covers Hollywood's structural collapse, AI's role in the production renaissance, and the harder question of why trillion-dollar tech companies keep buying media businesses that can't generate comparable returns.

Alan's answer: soft power. Amazon makes $950 million Lord of the Rings spinoffs so you order more paper towels. Apple is making Neuromancer. His five-year weighted moving average of Disney stock — flat from 2018 — makes the argument clean.

AI XR News You Should Know: Artemis ignited a new space boom. Amazon acquired Global Star satellite to build Project Kuiper, a direct Starlink competitor. Apple's AI audio smart glasses are reportedly arriving this year per Mark Gurman at Bloomberg, entering a market where Meta owns the optometrist channel and Google is moving through Warby Parker. Snap laid off 15% while doubling down on the 2026 launch of Spectacles — the first see-through headset since Magic Leap.

Key Moments:

• [00:04:48] – Artemis and the space boom: Ted on filming shuttle launches and why the crew's accomplishment is underestimated.
• [00:08:33] – Apple AI audio glasses: Rony's read from former Magic Leapers who designed them — if Apple gets this wrong, it's unforgivable.
• [00:12:00] – Snap's layoffs and the see-through gamble: can they compete with cheap AI audio glasses flooding the market?
• [00:16:43] – Hollywood is no longer the center of the universe — Alan on why most of the industry hasn't metabolized that yet.
• [00:23:01] – Charlie on AI democratization: a couple hundred dollars per minute for what looks like live action on a phone.
• [00:36:00] – The soft power thesis: why tech giants keep buying media assets that never pay off at their scale.
• [00:41:30] – Should Apple buy Disney? Charlie says Meta will do it first. Rony's reaction is immediate and visceral.
• [00:47:44] – AI resurrects Val Kilmer: Alan's origin story from three months in the Australian desert on the worst film of his career.

Alan's closing frame: he grew up reading Gibson and Brunner in the eighties, excited to live in that world. He's in it. He's not sure he wanted it this way.

This episode is sponsored by Zappar and Mattercraft — the leading visual development environment for immersive 3D web experiences, now with AI-assisted design and debug. Build at mattercraft.io.

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Ian Hamilton spent years as editor in chief of Upload VR before launching his own Substack, Good VR, and podcast at goodvirtualreality.com. He is one of the few people covering XR longer and more deeply than Charlie Fink, and his perspective spans platform architecture, business strategy, and genuine on-the-ground journalism since the DK1 days.

This conversation traces why the XR dream has taken longer than anyone expected. Ian and Rony Abovitz reconstruct the moment the ecosystem forked — when Meta's Oculus acquisition closed off the open, Valve-led platform path that Magic Leap and everyone else had been building toward. Ian argues the platforms are now playing for keeps: OpenXR moves on decade timescales, and that friction is what keeps real transformation just out of reach.

On hardware, his case is sharp: Meta's self-imposed $200–$600 price ceiling makes OLED and eye tracking impossible at mass market — exactly the features Apple bet on as the mandatory baseline — and that contradiction is why Bosworth ended up pivoting to AI glasses.

In AI XR News You Should Know: Anthropic's Mythos AI model reportedly escaped the company's own containment. Charlie and Rony debate whether calling the consequences "unintended" is even credible given decades of published warnings. Also: a Hollywood Reporter and Otis School study found AI is not the primary driver of empty LA sound stages — runaway production and tax incentives are the main story.

Key Moments:

• [00:01:00] – Charlie's new vertical melodrama "Linda's Last Podcast" and why generative AI is already good enough for social media storytelling.
• [00:04:52] – Rony on Anthropic's Mythos: the compute to cure cancer, aimed somewhere else.
• [00:11:47] – Half of Gen Z holds a negative view of AI. Charlie on the Brown grad who turned down an AI studio internship on principle.
• [00:36:00] – Rony and Ian reconstruct the Valve/Oculus open platform — and walk through exactly how that future closed.
• [00:47:00] – Meta's price ceiling, OLED as a strategic forcing function, and why Bosworth landed on AI glasses.
• [00:52:00] – Ian on the Apple Vision Pro mid-flight: why the headset is a personal computer, not a wearable.

Ian's long view: we're about ten percent of the way through the total investment required to reach a billion users. The supply chain is better than ever, the software has found its footing in simulation and training, and the next five to ten years could be the most interesting window yet — if the platforms decide to let the ecosystem breathe.

This episode is sponsored by Zappar, the team behind Mattercraft — the leading visual development environment for building immersive 3D web experiences on mobile, headsets, and desktop.

Mattercraft now features an AI assistant that helps you design, code, and debug in real time. Start building at mattercraft.io.

Subscribe to the AI XR Podcast for more conversations at the edge of AI, XR, and the future of media.

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See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Shelley Palmer,media technologist, advisor, and author with over 700,000 daily newsletter subscribers, returns to the show. He's one of the sharpest thinkers writing about AI today, and this conversation covers the full arc: from social media liability to the trust collapse coming for all of us, and into the real productivity gains and surveillance trade-offs of living inside an AI-first workflow.

The episode opens with the Google and Meta lawsuit verdict and quickly moves past the legal question. Shelley's position is precise: you can't legislate parenting, but you can legislate transparency, and the tech industry has failed on that front entirely. The $6 million judgment against Meta and Google is a rounding error — not a deterrent. What matters is what platforms actually engineered: engagement above all else, backed by neuroscience, probabilistic math, and dopamine feedback loops optimized for shareholders, not users.

AI XR News You Should Know: OpenAI is ending Sora and pivoting hard to Codex and enterprise. Ben Affleck secured $900 million from Netflix for a custom AI filmmaking tool. Epic Games cut 1,000 jobs as Fortnite loses audience. NVIDIA's Jensen Huang introduced Nemo Claw and Open Shell at GTC — a corporatized framework for personal AI agents.

Key Moments

• [00:01:15] – Charlie opens noting the show missed one episode in nearly 300 — his daughter's wedding
• [00:01:55] – OpenAI kills Sora; the Critters director goes dark before the episode
• [00:04:45] – Google and Meta lose their social media addiction lawsuit; Meta also loses in New Mexico
• [00:08:07] – Shelley on what can actually be legislated: not parenting, but transparency
• [00:11:42] – Shelley on Zuckerberg: he genuinely believed connection would be net positive; ask him today
• [00:13:31] – "Planetarily net negative. No matter what good it does, it does more harm."
• [00:18:16] – Rony on dopamine engineering: neuroscientists studying pixel size, color, sound to refine addiction
• [00:19:40] – Shelley reframes it: engagement maximization for shareholders, no more insidious than that
• [00:23:19] – The physiological change argument: humans evolved to default to trust; AI-generated everything breaks that
• [00:31:50] – Rony's counterpoint: trust will reset local; the software ecosystem will follow
• [00:36:53] – Shelley: "Our business increased last year. Everyone on my staff is doing 400 times the work."
• [00:44:42] – AI-first means automating every workflow you can honestly automate — and knowing what isn't ready
• [00:45:06] – Jensen's Nemo Claw and Open Shell: the safer path to personal AI agents, and what it actually costs
• [00:49:42] – The surveillance trade-off: an effective AI agent requires more personal data exposure than anything before it
• [00:51:24] – Apple's Secure Enclave play: why Tim Cook may win the AI trust war in the end

The productivity gains are real, but so is the privacy exposure, and the systems that earn trust — at every level — are the ones that will survive.

This episode is brought to you by Zappar, the company behind Mattercraft — the leading visual development environment for building immersive 3D web experiences across mobile, headsets, and desktop. Mattercraft now features an AI assistant that helps you design, code, and debug in real time, right in your browser.

Start building at mattercraft.io. Subscribe to the AI XR Podcast wherever you listen.

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Cathy Hackl, futurist for Nokia and advisor to the Boston Consulting Group (BCG), joins the podcast to discuss her fascinating work across the Middle East and her insights on the next generation of AI and connectivity. Learn how nations like the UAE and KSA are strategically positioning themselves to lead in spatial computing, quantum supremacy, and a hopeful, future-forward vision of AI.

Cathy details her work in the Middle East, including her residency in the UAE and her advisory roles on massive projects like NEOM and Qiddiya, explaining how these regions are embracing technology as a means to modernize. She shares her perspective on the shift in global venture capital, noting how Europe and the Middle East are providing significant funding that is moving beyond traditional Silicon Valley terms.

AI XR News You Should Know:

The hosts discuss massive AI funding rounds, including a $1 billion seed round for Advanced Machine Intelligence and a $500 million round for Mind Robotics, highlighting the intense capital war for chips and the boom in robotics. They also cover the rise of YouTube as the world's largest media company and the ethical questions surrounding the collection of human data to train robots.

Key Moments

• [00:01:19] Intro: Friday the 13th and geopolitical news.
• [00:02:17] Mind Robotics & Advanced Machine Intelligence: Discussing the $500M and $1B seed rounds for robotics and AI startups.
• [00:04:04] Headband Camera for Robot Training: Debate on the ethics of companies paying people to wear cameras to collect training data for robots, comparing it to "Gargoyles" from Snow Crash.
• [00:10:12] YouTube Surpasses Disney & Netflix: Discussion on YouTube becoming the world’s largest media company with $62 billion in revenue.
• [00:11:29] AI & Media Market Dominance: Questioning whether today’s AI music and video companies will eventually surpass all big film, music, and streaming companies.
• [00:14:40] Cathy Hackl Interview Begins: Cathy discusses her work as a futurist for Nokia, focusing on AI-native networks.
• [00:16:26] KSA Projects: Cathy's experience working on the virtual and gaming strategy for Qiddiya and on the KSA Pavilion at the World Expo.
• [00:22:07] Golden Visa & Gifted Residency: The privileges associated with becoming a resident of the UAE or KSA for highly skilled talent.

This conversation offers a vital global perspective on technology, innovation, and culture that is often missed when focusing solely on Silicon Valley. Understanding these geopolitical and technological movements is key for anyone trying to anticipate where the next wave of global innovation will truly come from.

This episode of The AI XR Podcast is brought to you by Zappar, the folks behind Mattercraft, a leading visual development environment for building immersive 3D web experiences—mattercraft.io.

Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts or watch the full episode on YouTube. https://youtu.be/Mw0yM_qpGG8

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Co-founders Dr. Salman Avestimehr and Dr. Aiden He join the podcast to discuss their new "agentic" company, Teamily AI. They dive into how their platform is disrupting the social landscape by weaving multi-agent AI into group chats, enabling groups, friends, and families to interact with virtual friends, essentially creating a collaborative environment where AI acts as a participant that anticipates needs and remembers the full context of a conversation.

This conversation explores the core value proposition of an AI-first social platform—not just making an individual superhuman, but enabling a collective of human and AI agents to do "fascinating things together." The founders detail their technology, which is built on deep expertise in distributed machine learning and multi-agent systems, and their long-term vision to IPO and evolve the very nature of social networks by bridging the gap between human and artificial intelligence.

In the news segment, Charlie Fink and Rony Abovitz unpack the week's biggest AI stories: Ben Affleck selling his stealth AI film company, Interpositive, to Netflix; Anthropic's Claude briefly dethroning OpenAI's ChatGPT in the app store; and a deep dive into Jack Dorsey's company Block cutting 4,000 employees. The hosts also discuss the social fallout of AI acceleration, particularly the counter-movement seeking tactile, real-world connection and the economic risk of displacing white-collar data analysts.

Key Moments

• 00:03:00 – App Store War: Discussing Anthropic's Claude topping the app charts and why the US Department of Defense will use the best AI system regardless of corporate objection.
• 00:04:00 – Hollywood's AI Play: Netflix acquiring Ben Affleck's AI company, Interpositive, which uses unedited film dailies to train an AI for editing and optimization.
• 00:05:00 – The Mediocrity Threat: Rony Abovitz's take on the risk of AI creating a "very, very long tail of Okay" content, leading to a cultural sameness.
• 00:07:00 – Counter-Culture: Exploring the growing emotional need for "something real" and a massive movement away from purely digital experiences.
• 00:09:00 – The White-Collar Risk: The hosts argue that the white-collar data analyst is the worker "most easy to replace" by AI, contrasting with the high value of blue-collar workers.
• 00:11:00 – The "Oh Wow" Moment: Charlie Fink describes his first experience with Teamily AI, noting the immediate power of real-time, multi-person and multi-agent prompting.
• 00:13:00 – The Science Behind Teamily: Dr. Aiden He, PhD in Machine Learning, explains how Teamily is built upon his previous research in distributed learning and multi-agent systems.
• 00:26:00 – Global Memory: Aiden details Teamily's unique "cross domain, long horizon memory," which allows the AI to combine human-human chat context with human-AI memory for a more natural interaction.

The biggest takeaway is the conceptual shift from using AI as a solo productivity tool to using it as a collaborative team member. The path to the next phase of social networking hinges on building platforms where AI is not isolated but is a natural, evolving part of a human community.

This episode of The AI XR Podcast is brought to you by Zappar, the folks behind Mattercraft, a leading visual development environment for building immersive 3D web experiences for mobile headsets and desktop. Start building smarter at mattercraft.io.

Listen and subscribe to the AI XR Podcast wherever you get your podcasts! Watch the full thing on YouTube https://youtu.be/s78WZJSfGeo.

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