Generative artificial intelligence continues to be the subject captivating the technology world, and more seminal moments concerning the technology may have taken place this past week. On Thursday, Human Inc. unveiled its long-awaited AI-powered wearable, the $699 AI Pin.

Industry analysts John Furrier (pictured, left) and Dave Vellante (right) discussed that development and much more on the latest episode of theCUBE Podcast. The AI Pin is a very Apple-esque product, having been developed by former iPhone creatives and engineers.

“It’s a really elegant device that takes pictures, picks up sounds, and it’s almost like a body camera, personal assistant,” Furrier said. “You can get augmented gesturing, just incredible. It’s a case study for a wearable future.”

The presentation offered while introducing the AI Pin was like witnessing a moonshot, according to Furrier — a big, audacious idea aiming for the moon. It was clear that the company spent a lot of time building this device, both from an operating system standpoint and when it came to its capabilities.

“It’s elegant looking. It’s not an eyesore device like the Google Glass. It’s a moonshot device,” he said. “Will it fail? Maybe. But it was damn cool.”

Of course, those concerned with privacy are voicing big concerns about this new technology. That’s because, in essence, the technology represents having cameras on one’s body.

“It’s a body cam. We were joking years ago. Remember, we said people can have body cams and streaming their own lives, and then bring it into theCUBE,” Furrier said. “We had this vision of like, hey, everyone could walk around re:Invent and we’ll just run a Kinesis pipeline into the cloud and stream into theCUBE.”

With this new technology, that just might happen. That moonshot effort will be one to keep an eye on in the weeks and months to come.

The latest on IBM and watsonx

When it comes to IBM Corp. and its efforts with AI, it’s easy to be a skeptic. But as Vellante noted in the latest post in his Breaking Analysis series, it’s possible the company is turning a corner.

The company announced watsonx in May, “and then they’ve announced all these other modules, AI and now they’ve got governance coming in December. And they’ve got this really robust roadmap,” Vellante said. “I think IBM finally got it right with Watson.”

Watson 1.0 may have just been a failure. But Watson 2.0 is actually “really, really good,” with a robust stack from silicon all the way through the analytics, up to the ISVs and its own SaaS, according to Vellante.

“They’ve got AI chips, they’ve got partnerships, obviously Hugging Face is a big partner,” Vellante said. “I was really impressed.”

That’s notable given the fact that Vellante had been critical in the 2010s for IBM’s inability to turn research and development into products. He had visited IBM’s research facilities and in the past saw IBM trying to make Watson do things it wasn’t intended to do.

“What [has been] really interesting was the cultural change that I see in IBM, from the standpoint of going from research to product, commercializing it and dropping it to the bottom-line income statement,” Vellante added.

A look ahead as AI madness continues

There are a number of big events on theCUBE’s calendar in the weeks to come, including SuperCompute 2023, the International Conference for High-Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis. Coverage of Microsoft Ignite and AWS re:Invent is also on the way during theCUBE’s Supercloud 5 event.

“AI madness is just so much fun,” Furrier said. “I have to say, I love this market. I love what’s going on. I love the disruption. I love how everybody’s winning.”

It will be interesting to continue to watch the mid-range, but the big winners are likely to be the big players, startups and small companies, according to Furrier. It’s also likely that the next generation of developers in open source is going to set the agenda.

“You watch the big guys get dressed for the party. OK, but the action is in open source,” Furrier said.

That’s where everyone is trying to read the tea leaves right now, he noted. If one is not in open source, they might miss what’s going on there.

“Great benchmarks, great technology, great innovators. And then the big guys are tooled up for the picks and shovels,” Furrier said. “The market is going to be huge.”

Watch the full podcast below to find out why these industry pros were mentioned:

Steve Jobs, co-founder and former CEO and chairman of Apple
Ben Thompson, business, technology and media analyst
Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI
Rob Thomas, SVP, software and CMO of IBM
Vincent Hsu, IBM fellow, CTO and VP for IBM Storage
Jeff Jonas, founder and chief scientist, CEO of Senzing
Dario Gil, SVP and director of research at IBM
Dustin Kirkland, experienced engineer, product manager, executive and advisor
Tim Hockin, distinguished software engineer at Google
In Sik (Insik) Rhee, general partner at Vertex Ventures US
Charles Fitzgerald, consultative strategist and investor
Arvind Krishna, chairman and CEO of IBM
Adam Selipsky, CEO of AWS
Andy Jassy, president and CEO of Amazon
Satya Nadella, chairman and CEO of Microsoft
Reid Hoffman, partner at Greylock Partners
Robert Hof, editor-in-chief at SiliconANGLE Media
Paul Gillin, enterprise editor at SiliconANGLE Media
Mark Albertson, senior writer at SiliconANGLE Media
Jerry Liu, co-founder and CEO of LlamaIndex
Howie Xu, SVP of engineering and AI/ML at Palo Alto Networks
Savannah Peterson, founder and chief unicorn of Savvy Millennial and host of theCUBE
Jeetu Patel, EVP and GM of the Security and Collaboration Business Units at Cisco
Jonathan Davidson, EVP and GM for Cisco Networking
Sam Palmisano, president and CEO of HealthLink, former CEO of IBM
Lou Gerstner, former CEO of IBM
Larry Ellison, chairman of the board and CTO of Oracle
Michael Dell, chairman and CEO of Dell Technologies
Sanjeev Mohan, principal at SanjMo
Tony Baer, principal at dbInsight
Merv Adrian, independent analyst
David Floyer, CTO and co-founder of Wikibon
Ray Wang, principal analyst, founder and chairman of Constellation Research
Lisa Martin, owner and principal at LuccaZara and host of theCUBE
Rob Strechay, analyst at SiliconANGLE Media
Rebecca Knight, host of theCUBE

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Photo: SiliconANGLE