The future of AI might be on your finger

Support for today's show comes from Anthropic, the team behind Claude. You know how sometimes a problem just grabs you? Like, you sit down thinking it's a quick thing, and suddenly it's midnight. That's exactly the kind of mind Claude is built for, people who don't just want the answer, they wanna chase the thing that's underneath it. Anthropic positions Claude as a thinking partner, not a search engine. It works through the problem with you, and it doesn't try to wrap things up neatly, which if you've spent any time on this show, you know that's a feature, not a bug. Get started with Claude for free at claude.ai/access and see why problem solvers choose Claude as their thinking partner.

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Can you tell me about the, uh, Access podcast?

Yeah, Access is a tech industry podcast hosted by Alex Heath and Ellis Hamburger. They interview big players and emerging founders, kind of the inside baseball of Silicon Valley.

Okay, this product is dope. This week on the show, we're sitting down with Mina Thami, the co-founder of Sandbar. It's a startup building what might be the most interesting AI wearable you've never heard of, a smart ring that doesn't just capture your thoughts, but talks back to you in your own voice. We get a live demo of the hardware. We dig into Mina's background in neural interfaces at MIT and Meta, and then we talk about why the future of AI might literally be on your finger. Plus, Ellis and I get into what's happening inside OpenAI right now, and why the race between ChatGPT and Claude is about to get a lot more interesting. Welcome to Access. [upbeat music] Welcome to Access. I am Ellis Hamburger here with my co-host, Alex Heath. What's going on, my friend?

I'm good, man. You are actually in Mexico right now.

Technically.

Back to the future.

Using a rift in the space-time continuum.

By the time this episode comes out, you will have just come back from hopefully a very relaxing beach vacation.

I sure hope so. Because [laughs]

[laughs]

... I think ever since I started meaning a few years ago, and, uh, going through this renovation that went a lot over budget, and et cetera, et cetera, kids, I haven't really had an actual vacation in, like, years aside from, like, family commitments. So yeah, I'm hopeful that this Cabo resort will literally do everything for me and everything for us.

We're gonna have some recreational drugs. What are we gonna be doing down there?

Recreational, uh, Miami Vice cocktails.

Yes.

Um, d- I mean, do you unplug when you're actually on vacation?

It's hard, man. I... It takes me... I found, especially since starting, you know, a company, it takes me almost two days to fully let myself relax. So when you do the, like, short weekend or long weekend, you know, getaway, which I've done in Cabo