Sam Abuelsamid

Tim Cook's surprise departure shakes Apple just as AI and product strategy take center stage, sending big questions through Silicon Valley about what comes next. From Toyota's camera-filled Woven City to questionable US police tracking and a Signal privacy gap, this episode digs into how quietly surveillance tech is encroaching on daily life. Toyota Woven City Tim Cook to become Apple Executive Chairman; John Ternus to become Apple CEO Continuous glucose monitoring made me continuously crazy Meta will lay off 10% of its workforce, the company told staff today Meta projected $16 billion in scam ad revenue. Now the lawsuits are piling up. In another wild turn for AI chips, Meta signs deal for millions of Amazon AI CPUs Google is investing up to $40 billion in a company that is beating Gemini. That is the point. OpenAI Releases 'Spud' GPT-5.5 Model China's DeepSeek previews new AI model a year after jolting US rivals Now we know who paid $100,000 to unlock a Sam Altman podcast interview Scoop: NSA using Anthropic's Mythos despite Defense Department blacklist Anthropic: No "kill switch" for AI in classified settings Mozilla Used Anthropic's Mythos to Find and Fix 271 Bugs in Firefox Unauthorized group has gained access to Anthropic's exclusive cyber tool Mythos, report claims What smart people are saying about SpaceX's $60 billion deal with Cursor: 'The Hunger Games have just begun' Australia's Teen Social Media Ban Isn't Working. Half Their Teens Still Have Access, Survey Finds Apple fixes bug that cops used to extract deleted chat messages from iPhones Nevada Police Can Now Track Cellphones Without a Warrant Brussels launched an age checking app. Hackers took 2 minutes to break it 'Scattered Spider' Member 'Tylerb' Pleads Guilty Iran claims US used backdoors in networking equipment The Onion has agreed to a new deal to take over Infowars 'Hairdryer used to trick weather sensor' to win $34,000 bet To buy this Bay Area home, you'll need Anthropic equity | TechCrunch This Alberta Startup Sells No-Tech Tractors for Half Price The Hottest Phone for Kids Right Now Is a $100 Landline This pasta sauce wants to record your family Host: Leo Laporte Guests: Sam Abuelsamid , Victoria Song , and Stacey Higginbotham Download or subscribe to This Week in Tech at https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-tech Join Club TWiT for Ad-Free Podc

Tim Cook's surprise departure shakes Apple just as AI and product strategy take center stage, sending big questions through Silicon Valley about what comes next. From Toyota's camera-filled Woven City to questionable US police tracking and a Signal privacy gap, this episode digs into how quietly surveillance tech is encroaching on daily life. Toyota Woven City Tim Cook to become Apple Executive Chairman; John Ternus to become Apple CEO Continuous glucose monitoring made me continuously crazy Meta will lay off 10% of its workforce, the company told staff today Meta projected $16 billion in scam ad revenue. Now the lawsuits are piling up. In another wild turn for AI chips, Meta signs deal for millions of Amazon AI CPUs Google is investing up to $40 billion in a company that is beating Gemini. That is the point. OpenAI Releases 'Spud' GPT-5.5 Model China's DeepSeek previews new AI model a year after jolting US rivals Now we know who paid $100,000 to unlock a Sam Altman podcast interview Scoop: NSA using Anthropic's Mythos despite Defense Department blacklist Anthropic: No "kill switch" for AI in classified settings Mozilla Used Anthropic's Mythos to Find and Fix 271 Bugs in Firefox Unauthorized group has gained access to Anthropic's exclusive cyber tool Mythos, report claims What smart people are saying about SpaceX's $60 billion deal with Cursor: 'The Hunger Games have just begun' Australia's Teen Social Media Ban Isn't Working. Half Their Teens Still Have Access, Survey Finds Apple fixes bug that cops used to extract deleted chat messages from iPhones Nevada Police Can Now Track Cellphones Without a Warrant Brussels launched an age checking app. Hackers took 2 minutes to break it 'Scattered Spider' Member 'Tylerb' Pleads Guilty Iran claims US used backdoors in networking equipment The Onion has agreed to a new deal to take over Infowars 'Hairdryer used to trick weather sensor' to win $34,000 bet To buy this Bay Area home, you'll need Anthropic equity | TechCrunch This Alberta Startup Sells No-Tech Tractors for Half Price The Hottest Phone for Kids Right Now Is a $100 Landline This pasta sauce wants to record your family Host: Leo Laporte Guests: Sam Abuelsamid , Victoria Song , and Stacey Higginbotham Download or subscribe to This Week in Tech at https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-tech Join Club TWiT for Ad-Free Podc

What do jailbreaking fighter jets, lost Amazon vans, and swapping your phone's smart features for a handful of mud have in common? TWiT dives into the wild, occasionally absurd future of tech, where yesterday's sci-fi is tomorrow's supply-chain headache. Mark Zuckerberg and his Ray-Ban entourage have their day in court Instagram Boss Says 16 Hours of Daily Use Is Not Addiction Meta Begins $65 Million Election Push To Advance AI Agenda - Slashdot Australia's Social Media Ban Is Isolating Kids With Disabilities—Just Like Critics Warned Google I/O 2026 set for May 19-20 Pixel 10A hands-on: More like a slightly better Pixel 9A than a slightly worse Pixel 10 Google announces Gemini 3.1 Pro, says it's better at complex problem-solving Tucson Daily Brief Leaked Email Suggests Ring Plans to Expand 'Search Party' Surveillance Beyond Dogs A $10K+ bounty is waiting for anyone who can unplug Ring doorbells from Amazon’s cloud Amazon delivery van accidentally gets stuck in the sea in Britain Tesla 'Robotaxi' adds 5 more crashes in Austin in a month – 4x worse than humans Government Docs Reveal New Details About Tesla and Waymo Robotaxis' Human Babysitters The Supreme Court's Tariff Ruling Won't Bring Car Prices Back to Earth A flood of cheap used EVs is coming Signal guide for everyday folks PayPal discloses data breach that exposed user info for 6 months Federal ban on TP-Link routers shelved, but Texas fights on You probably can't trust your password manager if it's compromised Mississippi health system shuts down clinics statewide after ransomware attack Fake Job Recruiters Hid Malware In Developer Coding Challenges F-35 Software Could Be Jailbreaked Like an IPhone: Dutch Defense Minister - Slashdot In a blind test, audiophiles couldn't tell the difference between audio signals sent through copper wire, a banana, or wet mud — 'The mud should sound perfectly awful, but it doesn't,' notes the experiment creator | Tom's Hardware Lab-Grown Meat Exists (But Nobody Wants To Eat It) CERN rebuilt the original browser from 1989 Host: Leo Laporte Guests: Sam Abuelsamid , Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ , and Nicholas De Leon Download or subscribe to This Week in Tech at https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-tech Join Club TWiT for Ad-Free Podcasts! Support what you love and get ad-free audio and video feeds, a members-only Discord

What do jailbreaking fighter jets, lost Amazon vans, and swapping your phone's smart features for a handful of mud have in common? TWiT dives into the wild, occasionally absurd future of tech, where yesterday's sci-fi is tomorrow's supply-chain headache. Mark Zuckerberg and his Ray-Ban entourage have their day in court Instagram Boss Says 16 Hours of Daily Use Is Not Addiction Meta Begins $65 Million Election Push To Advance AI Agenda - Slashdot Australia's Social Media Ban Is Isolating Kids With Disabilities—Just Like Critics Warned Google I/O 2026 set for May 19-20 Pixel 10A hands-on: More like a slightly better Pixel 9A than a slightly worse Pixel 10 Google announces Gemini 3.1 Pro, says it's better at complex problem-solving Tucson Daily Brief Leaked Email Suggests Ring Plans to Expand 'Search Party' Surveillance Beyond Dogs A $10K+ bounty is waiting for anyone who can unplug Ring doorbells from Amazon’s cloud Amazon delivery van accidentally gets stuck in the sea in Britain Tesla 'Robotaxi' adds 5 more crashes in Austin in a month – 4x worse than humans Government Docs Reveal New Details About Tesla and Waymo Robotaxis' Human Babysitters The Supreme Court's Tariff Ruling Won't Bring Car Prices Back to Earth A flood of cheap used EVs is coming Signal guide for everyday folks PayPal discloses data breach that exposed user info for 6 months Federal ban on TP-Link routers shelved, but Texas fights on You probably can't trust your password manager if it's compromised Mississippi health system shuts down clinics statewide after ransomware attack Fake Job Recruiters Hid Malware In Developer Coding Challenges F-35 Software Could Be Jailbreaked Like an IPhone: Dutch Defense Minister - Slashdot In a blind test, audiophiles couldn't tell the difference between audio signals sent through copper wire, a banana, or wet mud — 'The mud should sound perfectly awful, but it doesn't,' notes the experiment creator | Tom's Hardware Lab-Grown Meat Exists (But Nobody Wants To Eat It) CERN rebuilt the original browser from 1989 Host: Leo Laporte Guests: Sam Abuelsamid , Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ , and Nicholas De Leon Download or subscribe to This Week in Tech at https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-tech Join Club TWiT for Ad-Free Podcasts! Support what you love and get ad-free audio and video feeds, a members-only Discord

Sam Abuelsamid thinks Tesla's driver assist technology is unsafe. The mobility ecosystem analyst at Guidehouse Insights is a vocal critic of the electric vehicle giant's AI-powered "Autopilot" technology . A former mechanical engineer, automotive journalist and Ford and General Motors employee, Abuelsamid also charges that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has grossly undervalued safety considerations for self-driving and partially self-driving vehicles. While Abuelsamid acknowledges that Tesla has advanced society's views on driving technology by appealing to consumers and popularizing electric vehicles, he also refuses to call such vehicles "autonomous." Instead, he refers to them as "automated," because, as he points out, few fully driverless vehicles are on the road. In addition, Abuelsamid contends that Tesla has tried to do safety "on the cheap" by relying on cameras only to power Autopilot features and not using considerably more expensive sensor arrays. "I think they've been utterly reckless and irresponsible in their approach to automated driving by putting experimental software in the hands of average consumers who are not trained in how to properly test and evaluate this kind of safety critical software," Abuelsamid says Meanwhile, autonomous vehicle technology vendors including Cruise, Waymo, Zoox and Motional are using multiple types of sensors, he says. One Tesla fan and investor, Ross Gerber, CEO of Gerber Kawasaki Wealth and Investment Management, has disputed Tesla safety critics. He argues that autonomously driven Teslas will get increasingly safer with hundreds of thousands of consumers driving and testing out the beta version of the popular carmaker's full self-driving capability. But Abuelsamid faults NHTSA for failing to effectively oversee safety aspects of autonomous vehicle technology vendors. "I think the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has been negligent in not doing more to require sharing of data from these test vehicles to build an understanding of how these things function," he says. "At a minimum what we need is the electronic equivalent of what we have to do as humans to get a driver's license." Go to TechTarget News for reports on autonomous vehicle technology and other AI developments.

Ant Pruitt & Leo Laporte's Excellent CES Adventure continues: Folding Phones: Mate X/Galaxy Fold/FlexPai Panasonic's Lumix S1H mirrorless Camera & AG-CX10 4K streaming camcorder Robots from Pudu, Varram, Hobot, Unitree, Promobot, Cabot, Omron, Torooc Autel's Evo II 8K drone NXP Semiconductors' IoT and automotive tech AEye's artificial perception system for autonomous vehicles Audi's E-Tron Sportback and future tech Ford Mustang Mach-E SUV Hosts: Leo Laporte and Ant Pruitt Guest: Sam Abuelsamid Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/twit-events .

Ant Pruitt & Leo Laporte's Excellent CES Adventure continues: Folding Phones: Mate X/Galaxy Fold/FlexPai Panasonic's Lumix S1H mirrorless Camera & AG-CX10 4K streaming camcorder Robots from Pudu, Varram, Hobot, Unitree, Promobot, Cabot, Omron, Torooc Autel's Evo II 8K drone NXP Semiconductors' IoT and automotive tech AEye's artificial perception system for autonomous vehicles Audi's E-Tron Sportback and future tech Ford Mustang Mach-E SUV Hosts: Leo Laporte and Ant Pruitt Guest: Sam Abuelsamid Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/twit-events .

On this episode of Shift: A podcast about mobility, Sharon and Pete talk to Sam Abuelsamid from Navigant Research about the company’s automated driving vehicle leaderboard. They also discuss mobility challenges in urban areas and ways to combat them.