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Amazon Fire TV Omni Series
Amazon

Amazon’s first TV sets, which you can talk to and control without a remote, go on sale this week. I’ve been testing the $830 Amazon Fire TV Omni Series for a few days. It’s a good TV for the money, and Alexa can be useful, but the software interface doesn’t look as sharp as it should on a 4K TV.  

Amazon has traditionally sold Fire TV Sticks and Fire TV Cubes that plug into existing sets, or partnered with other device makers who integrate its Fire TV software. Usually, there are buttons on the remotes that let you use Alexa to control the TV. With the Omni Series, however, Amazon brings its Alexa assistant right into the TV.

Amazon’s Jason Parrish, who led the product management of the Omni series TVs, told me the goal of the TV is to make living rooms smarter through what he calls ambient computing, with Alexa at the center of how we watch TV, listen to music and interact with our smart homes. The higher-end Omni Series has generated about two-thirds of all of Amazon’s pre-orders for TVs, Parrish said, showing it’s more popular than the more affordable 4-Series so far and that, seemingly, Amazon fans like the idea of talking to their televisions.

Amazon makes most of its money from its AWS cloud business and is better known as an online retailer. But its hardware, which ranges from tablets to e-readers and smart speakers, helps bring people right to its storefront and its ecosystem of ads and services.

I tested the 65-inch Amazon Fire TV Omni Series television, but there’s also a lower-end cheaper TV known as the 4 Series, which starts at $370.

What’s good

Amazon Fire TV Omni Series
Amazon

The Omni Series has a high-end physical design with an edge-to-edge 4K screen that’s sharp and, with the right adjustments, colorful. I like the slim metal bezel on the bottom, and the fact that I can just ask it to do what I want.

A remote is included, but even without touching it I could ask Alexa to play TV shows or movies, to tell me the weather (which pops up in a small bar at the bottom of the screen) or to tune to a specific channel on YouTube TV. It works even if I’m standing across the room. 

Amazon Fire TV Omni Series
Todd Haselton | CNBC

This is different from Amazon’s Fire TV Cube, which also had Alexa but required the TV screen to be switched on before it could respond.

Parrish said Amazon found when customers walk into the room and say “‘turn on the lights,’ they don’t want their TV to turn on and just stay on.”

“Or if you say ‘what time is it?’ you don’t need a 65-inch screen to tell you that. So that was the type of thing that we wanted to rethink,” he added. Parrish explained customers interact and engage with content more when they use voice instead of a remote.

Amazon Fire TV Omni Series
Todd Haselton | CNBC

There are four microphones along the top of the TV that are always listening for “Hey Alexa.” Parrish said the microphones are as far away from the speakers as possible so that they can still hear you if you’re playing music or watching TV.

“The goal there is to be able to make a request while you’re watching TV and not just kind of halt everything that you’re doing. You should be able to do it while you have that show going on and we also want to make sure that we’re not impacting your TV watching when it comes to responses,” Parrish said.

I liked that I could say “Alexa, pause” instead of trying to find the remote when I wanted to get up off the couch. It’s also useful to give commands like “Alexa, mute” or “Alexa, turn up the volume,” and I started to get used to not using the remote as often.

As with Amazon’s Echos, there’s an easy toggle to switch off the microphones. It’s right under the TV screen.

The microphone switch on the bottom.
Todd Haselton | CNBC

Alexa can do all sorts of other things, too, like switch inputs to your Xbox or cable box (which it can also control with an included cable), help you shop for things (“Alexa, shop for soap,”) or show you the current stock price of a company even while a show is playing. It’s useful. There’s a smart home dashboard, too, so you can see all of your cameras and lights.

Alexa will pop up some responses at the bottom of the screen, which is useful.
Todd Haselton | CNBC

The Omni TV, unlike the 4-Series, supports webcams through a USB port in case you want to video chat with other folks who own the same TV or who have other products with Alexa installed, like phones, Amazon tablets or Amazon’s Echo Show smart screens. It worked with a Logitech webcam Amazon sent me to test. Likewise, you can check in on cameras around your home by giving commands like “show the nursery camera,” for example. And a small video feed will pop up over the show you’re watching if someone rings the doorbell.

Amazon Fire TV Omni Series
Todd Haselton | CNBC

Movies and TV shows looked really good on the LED display, considering the TV’s sub-$1,000 price. The 65-inch model I tested and the larger 75-inch version support the clearest standards, like Dolby Vision, HDR 10, HLG, and Dolby Digital Plus, for good balance in bright scenes and better color and contrast than cheaper sets. I liked the image best after I turned up the color saturation a little bit from the presets. Also, the blacks aren’t as pure black and inky as you might find on much more expensive TVs with nicer miniLED or OLED screens.

Amazon Fire TV Omni Series
Todd Haselton | CNBC

The built-in speakers are better than most TV speakers and get nice and loud, but I still prefer a soundbar for deeper bass and richer sound.

What’s bad

Amazon Fire TV Omni Series
Todd Haselton | CNBC

Alexa understood most of my commands just fine, especially general ones that you’d typically give to an Echo.

However, there are some things that it just doesn’t support on a TV, and I had to learn those limitations by trial and error. For instance, you can adjust the TV color modes, like presets for movies or sports, but you cannot adjust the brightness with Alexa. 

Likewise, it works well if you say “Alexa, play the movie ‘Hackers,'” but didn’t correctly understand “Alexa, play the latest episode of ‘Succession'” — instead, it began playing the very first episode of the show. Amazon explained those inconsistent results can come down to how some apps — in this case, HBO Max — catalog their shows.

Parrish explained how Alexa tries to understand the user’s intent when a voice request is made. Amazon optimized the TV to understand that you probably want to view something instead of listening to it.

“‘Hamilton’ is obviously now on Disney as a movie, but it’s a very popular soundtrack as well,” Parrish said. “So a Fire TV, when you ask to play ‘Hamilton,’ it will get you to Disney Plus. It will bias towards video. Whereas on an Echo it will send you to Prime Music or Spotify or whatever your preferred music player is.”

Alexa is good, but it’s still learning.

I’m not a fan of the ads, like the “Jet-Puffed” food ad on the main screen, or the 1080p UI.
Todd Haselton | CNBC

My biggest gripe with the Omni Series TV is that the home screen and user interface still render in 1080p, a quarter of the 4K resolution. This isn’t a big deal if you sit about nine feet away from the TV, but I sit closer. The icons were blurry when I sat about four to five feet from the screen. You may never notice this unless you walk up close, but I look at nice screens for a living and it bothered me.

Amazon said the software is kept at a lower resolution to make sure the user interface is smooth and optimized. In fact, the TV felt sluggish and temporarily froze when I was moving through menus at first. Amazon advised me to do a factory reset and that fixed my problems. Still, it’s concerning that the experience wasn’t perfect out of the box.

You can avoid the lower resolution user interface by ignoring the Fire TV home screen altogether and using something else, like an Xbox Series X, a PlayStation 5 or an Apple TV through one of the HDMI inputs. An Apple TV 4K user interface looks nice and crisp as expected. But that sort of defeats the main purpose of buying an Amazon TV. 

Then, there were the ads. I don’t mind sponsored ads on Fire TVs and other cheap gadgets that plug into TVs, like the Google Chromecast and Roku devices. But I don’t like when an $820 TV displays ads for sponsored TV shows and movies, and subscription apps and channels I might want to buy. There was even a big ad on the home screen for an Amazon TV Fire stick — something you wouldn’t need if you bought this TV. Most TVs with a smart interface do this, too, and it’s how Amazon makes money, but it’s not a great experience.

“Having content promoted in our UI is kind of core to our experience,” Parrish told me. “We’ll probably have a lot of customers that are familiar with Fire TV and we’ll probably have some that aren’t. We look forward to hearing what they have to say.”

Should you buy it?

Amazon Fire TV Omni Series
Amazon

The Amazon Fire TV Omni Series is a nice TV set for $830. TV shows and movies look great once you adjust the picture to your liking. It’s easy to do in settings.

Alexa is convenient to have and it grows on you once you get used to doing some things by voice and others with the remote. It’s fun to just walk into a room and say “Alexa, tune to CNBC” without knowing where the remote is.

You’ll get the most out of Alexa on the Omni Series if you have lots of Amazon Echos and a smart home that’s tied in with Amazon’s ecosystem. It works well once you get the hang of what it can and can’t do.

I’m just bummed about the lower resolution home screen UI, even though movies and TV shows look good in 4K. I understand most folks may still end up watching full HD content anyway, since so much live TV isn’t even 4K, but the software should still look sharp even up close.

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Microsoft AI chief Suleyman sees advantage in building models ‘3 or 6 months behind’

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Microsoft AI chief Suleyman sees advantage in building models ‘3 or 6 months behind’

Microsoft owns lots of Nvidia graphics processing units, but it isn’t using them to develop state-of-the-art artificial intelligence models.

There are good reasons for that position, Mustafa Suleyman, the company’s CEO of AI, told CNBC’s Steve Kovach in an interview on Friday. Waiting to build models that are “three or six months behind” offers several advantages, including lower costs and the ability to concentrate on specific use cases, Suleyman said.

It’s “cheaper to give a specific answer once you’ve waited for the first three or six months for the frontier to go first. We call that off-frontier,” he said. “That’s actually our strategy, is to really play a very tight second, given the capital-intensiveness of these models.”

Suleyman made a name for himself as a co-founder of DeepMind, the AI lab that Google bought in 2014, reportedly for $400 million to $650 million. Suleyman arrived at Microsoft last year alongside other employees of the startup Inflection, where he had been CEO.

More than ever, Microsoft counts on relationships with other companies to grow.

It gets AI models from San Francisco startup OpenAI and supplemental computing power from newly public CoreWeave in New Jersey. Microsoft has repeatedly enriched Bing, Windows and other products with OpenAI’s latest systems for writing human-like language and generating images.

Microsoft’s Copilot will gain “memory” to retain key facts about people who repeatedly use the assistant, Suleyman said Friday at an event in Microsoft’s Redmond, Washington, headquarters to commemorate the company’s 50th birthday. That feature came first to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which has 500 million weekly users.

Through ChatGPT, people can access top-flight large language models such as the o1 reasoning model that takes time before spitting out an answer. OpenAI introduced that capability in September — only weeks later did Microsoft bring a similar capability called Think Deeper to Copilot.

Microsoft occasionally releases open-source small-language models that can run on PCs. They don’t require powerful server GPUs, making them different from OpenAI’s o1.

OpenAI and Microsoft have held a tight relationship shortly after the startup launched its ChatGPT chatbot in late 2022, effectively kicking off the generative AI race. In total, Microsoft has invested $13.75 billion in the startup, but more recently, fissures in the relationship between the two companies have begun to show.

Microsoft added OpenAI to its list of competitors in July 2024, and OpenAI in January announced that it was working with rival cloud provider Oracle on the $500 billion Stargate project. That came after years of OpenAI exclusively relying on Microsoft’s Azure cloud. Despite OpenAI partnering with Oracle, Microsoft in a blog post announced that the startup had “recently made a new, large Azure commitment.”

“Look, it’s absolutely mission-critical that long-term, we are able to do AI self-sufficiently at Microsoft,” Suleyman said. “At the same time, I think about these things over five and 10 year periods. You know, until 2030 at least, we are deeply partnered with OpenAI, who have [had an] enormously successful relationship for us.

Microsoft is focused on building its own AI internally, but the company is not pushing itself to build the most cutting-edge models, Suleyman said.

“We have an incredibly strong AI team, huge amounts of compute, and it’s very important to us that, you know, maybe we don’t develop the absolute frontier, the best model in the world first,” he said. “That’s very, very expensive to do and unnecessary to cause that duplication.”

WATCH: Microsoft Copilot beginning of a seismic shift in AI integration, says Microsoft AI CEO Suleyman

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Former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer says, as shareholder, tariffs are ‘not good’

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Former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer says, as shareholder, tariffs are 'not good'

President Trump’s new tariffs on goods that the U.S. imports from over 100 countries will have an effect on consumers, former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer told CNBC on Friday. Investors will feel the pain, too.

Microsoft’s stock dropped almost 6% in the past two days, as the Nasdaq wrapped up its worst week in five years.

“As a Microsoft shareholder, this kind of thing is not good,” Ballmer said, in an interview with Andrew Ross Sorkin that was tied to Microsoft’s 50th anniversary celebration. “It creates opportunity to be a serious, long-term player.”

Ballmer was sandwiched in between Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and current CEO Satya Nadella for the interview.

“I took just enough economics in college — that tariffs are actually going to bring some turmoil,” said Ballmer, who was succeeded by Nadella in 2014. Gates, Microsoft’s first CEO, convinced Ballmer to join the company in 1980.

Gates, Ballmer and Nadella attended proceedings at Microsoft’s Redmond, Washington, campus on Friday to celebrate its first half-century.

Between the tariffs and weak quarterly revenue guidance announced in January, Microsoft’s stock is on track for its fifth straight month of declines, which would be the worst stretch since 2009. But the company remains a leader in the PC operating system and productivity software markets, and its partnership with startup OpenAI has led to gains in cloud computing.

“I think that disruption is very hard on people, and so the decision to do something for which disruption was inevitable, that needs a lot of popular support, and nobody could game theorize exactly who is going to do what in response,” Ballmer said, regarding the tariffs. “So, I think citizens really like stability a lot. And I hope people — individuals who will feel this, because people are feeling it, not just the stock market, people are going to feel it.”

Ballmer, who owns the Los Angeles Clippers, is among Microsoft’s biggest fans. He said he’s the company’s largest investor. In 2014, shortly after he bought the basketball team for $2 billion, he held over 333 million shares of the stock, according to a regulatory filing.

“I’m not going to probably have 50 more years on the planet,” he said. “But whatever minutes I have, I’m gonna be a large Microsoft shareholder.” He said there’s a bright future for computing, storage and intelligence. Microsoft launched the first Azure services while Ballmer was CEO.

Earlier this week Bloomberg reported that Microsoft, which pledged to spend $80 billion on AI-enabled data center infrastructure in the current fiscal year, has stopped discussions or pushed back the opening of facilities in the U.S. and abroad.

JPMorgan Chase’s chief economist, Bruce Kasman, said in a Thursday note that the chance of a global recession will be 60% if Trump’s tariffs kick in as described. His previous estimate was 40%.

“Fifty years from now, or 25 years from now, what is the one thing you can be guaranteed of, is the world needs more compute,” Nadella said. “So I want to keep those two thoughts and then take one step at a time, and then whatever are the geopolitical or economic shifts, we’ll adjust to it.”

Gates, who along with co-founder Paul Allen, sought to build a software company rather than sell both software and hardware, said he wasn’t sure what the economic effects of the tariffs will be. Today, most of Microsoft’s revenue comes from software. It also sells Surface PCs and Xbox consoles.

“So far, it’s just on goods, but you know, will it eventually be on services? Who knows?” said Gates, who reportedly donated around $50 million to a nonprofit that supported Democratic nominee Kamala Harris’ losing campaign.

— CNBC’s Alex Harring contributed to this report.

WATCH: There will be many LLM winners, says infrastructure investor Morrison

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AppLovin can offer TikTok ‘much stronger bid than others,’ CEO says

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AppLovin can offer TikTok 'much stronger bid than others,' CEO says

Piotr Swat | Lightrocket | Getty Images

AppLovin CEO Adam Foroughi provided more clarity on the ad-tech company’s late-stage effort to acquire TikTok, calling his offer a “much stronger bid than others” on CNBC’s The Exchange Friday afternoon.

Foroughi said the company is proposing a merger between AppLovin and the entire global business of TikTok, characterizing the deal as a “partnership” where the Chinese could participate in the upside while AppLovin would run the app.

“If you pair our algorithm with the TikTok audience, the expansion on that platform for dollars spent will be through the roof,” Foroughi said.

The news comes as President Trump announced he would extend the deadline a second time for TikTok’s Chinese-owned parent company ByteDance to sell the U.S. subsidiary of TikTok to an American buyer or face an effective ban on U.S. app stores. The new deadline is now in June, which, as Foroughi described, “buys more time to put the pieces together” on AppLovin’s bid. 

“The president’s a great dealmaker — we’re proposing, essentially an enhancement to the deal that they’ve been working on, but a bigger version of all the deals contemplated,” he added.

AppLovin faces a crowded field of other interested U.S. backers, including Amazon, Oracle, billionaire Frank McCourt and his Project Liberty consortium, and numerous private equity firms. Some proposals reportedly structure the deal to give a U.S. buyer 50% ownership of the company, rather than a complete acquisition. The Chinese government will still need to approve the deal, and AppLovin’s interest in purchasing TikTok in “all markets outside of China” is “preliminary,” according to an April 3 SEC filing.

Correction: A prior version of this story incorrectly characterized China’s ongoing role in TikTok should AppLovin acquire the app.

WATCH: AppLovin CEO Adam Foroughi on its bid to buy TikTok

AppLovin CEO Adam Foroughi on its bid to buy TikTok

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