Jeff Frick

I am not telling you something to sell you something. I am sharing something to entertain, educate, and get you to stop and think for a minute. | Top Voice | Friday Five | Turn the Lens | Work 20XX

With over 30 years of experience in the media industry, I am a podcast host and a media entrepreneur who is passionate about the future of work, leadership, and innovation. I have founded and led Menlo Creek Media, a company that helps leaders, marketers, and communications professionals navigate and leverage an AI-driven asynchronous world, by offering executive training for podcast hosts and guests, content creation and media library curation and amplification programs, and community development programs.

I also host two podcasts, Work 20XX and Turn the Lens, where I facilitate the spread of best practices, insights, learning, and wisdom on topics that matter to the modern workforce and society. I aim to be a trusted source of information and inspiration for my listeners, by featuring smart and diverse guests, engaging in lively and thoughtful conversations, and sharing nuggets of knowledge. My goal is to help people get more impact with their communications and content investments and to empower them to thrive in a time of rapid change and uncertainty.

Founder & Principal

Please visit www.MenloCreek.com for a more comprehensive list of services and resources. 

Helping Leaders, Marketers, and Communications professionals navigate and leverage an AI driver asynchronous world. 

Host of 'Work 20XX'  with Jeff Frick show on the Future of Work 
Host of 'Turn the Lens' with Jeff Frick on Leadership and of other topics of interest.

We are able to take a model that is trained on very general purpose physical interaction data, and we train on more and more of it. And every single task that we are tracking continues to get better. - Pete Florence

To be honest, it doesn't even really necessarily matter too much what the x axis is. Other than like the x axis is something that we can continually do more of and the y axis is some measure of how good the robots are. And we see that we can just continue to pour in more and more effort on that x axis and the y axis continues to get better and better. - Pete Florence

And that is like a landmark type of moment - Pete Florence
----
Landmark moment.

I was blown away when I saw the slide earlier in Pete's keynote. Not enough parameters, the models crap out (a technical term), but push past 7 billion, and the magic happens. Improve on one, improve on all. Pete and the team at Generalist recently announced a 10 billion parameters plus foundational model.

So excited to share this conversation with Pete Florence, Co-Founder and CEO of Generalist. Generalist is another example of the latest round of startups around 'Embodied AI', AI that does things in the environment, among us. Pete has a deep research foundation, and we retraced some of the key moments in getting from the highly specialized world of industrial robots, to the 'every use case is a corner case' of interacting in the physical world outside a pen, to respond to any number of task demands and unforeseen environmental challenges standing between the present, and completing the assigned task. 

As Pete said, take the model and make it the robot brain.
Make it big enough, and the time you spend training on one thing, improves the performance on all things... 
Bang. Stops you in your tracks. 

Thrilled to co-release my conversation with Pete Florence on Turn the Lens, in collaboration with Humanoids Summit, brought to you by ALM Ventures, from Humanoids Summit 2025 Silicon Valley, December 2025.

Full Length Conversation
Pete Florence: Generalist, Scaling Laws, Train One Improve All | Turn the Lens with Jeff Frick Ep46 
https://lnkd.in/gta8S7Da

In collaboration with Humanoids Summit, brought to you by ALM Ventures, 
from Humanoids Summit 2025 Silicon Valley, December 2025
Thanks Modar Alaoui and Jesica Chavez 🤖🎙️ Chavez 

For more on Humanoids Summit, including 
May 2026 Summit in Tokyo visit 
https://lnkd.in/ga487tGq 

For more from Humanoids Summit SV 
https://lnkd.in/geeUa5Dp  

#embodiedai #physicalai #humanoidssummit #turnthelens #robotics #humanoids #Generalist

• Embodied • Scaling • Policy • Dexterity • Trades • 

First Friday Five of 2026. Embodied AI, when AI has arms and legs and can do things. When every case is a corner case, never before experience in training. (for instance, EVERY Waymo ride)

Thrilled to co-release the first five interviews we did at Humanoids Summit SV in December in collaboration with Humanoids Summit, ALM Ventures, Modar Alaoui and team.

And so much more to come. 
#Embodied #Scaling #Policy #Dexterity #Trades #FridayFive #Newsletter #TurnTheLens #Work20XX

It's been a few weeks, but we're back in the saddle. Closed out last year with ten interviews from at the Humanoids Summit SV in Mountain View, CA at 

Open article: • Embodied • Scaling • Policy • Dexterity • Trades • by Jeff Frick • 5 min read

• Embodied • Scaling • Policy • Dexterity • Trades •

All movement generates emotions, no matter what that movement is. Because we used to get eaten. - Dr. Catie Cuan

When you're moving around people, it's not enough to think about efficiency. You have to think about efficiency and impression. - Dr. Catie Cuan

Until now, everything that moves in our environment is a part of nature. So you have evolutionary encoding, you understand a tree operating under the movement of the wind. But we don't have any priors for autonomously moving machines. People will create all kinds of stories about what that movement means. - Dr. Catie Cuan
--
People love to fill in the blanks.

We can't help but see patterns everywhere we look, even if they don't exist.
And we add emotion, anthropomorphization, and other details to create the comfort of an explanatory story for the confusing world around us.

Smart roboticists are getting ahead of this, trying to "set the story" up front, so people don't fill in the blanks with who knows what.
Choreography in robotics, think user experience in classical computing.

Full Length Conversation
Dancing with Robots: Dr. Catie Cuan on Choreorobotics and the Future of Robotics | Humanoids Summit, hosted by Jeff Frick 
https://lnkd.in/gThRTDWg

For more on Humanoids Summit 
https://lnkd.in/ga487tGq

#robotics #humanoidssummit #choreography #humanrobotinteraction #embodiedAI #UX #adoption #movementmatters #emotion #movement #perception #people #robots #choreorobotics

30 years in Silicon Vallery! Currently, as an Industry Analyst, I help vendors with go to market strategy and the buyers in selecting the factors while picking technology and/or implementation vendors. I have done extensive research/work in Go to Market area for New Products and Services for several of my employers and customers which include Amazon AWS, IBM, Google Cloud, Oracle, VMware/Broadcom, Cisco, Dell Technologies. I have consistent interactions with PR, Analysts and Technology Media. 

I have built and architected Cloud and Edge Computing Products and enabled AI and Digital Transformation Programs worldwide. I have extensive experience in Cloud Architecture, Pre-Sales, Datacenter/Applications Rationalization and Cloud Migrations. I have directed Cloud Center of Excellence programs at Rackspace and Oracle. Led Cloud Partnerships and Alliances Work for Oracle Cloud Marketplace. built and led Data Center & Applications Audits Organization at EMC and VMware, which audited Million+ Servers worldwide.

I know SDLC at depth (been in product development roles for more than a decade) and Datacenter/Applications Operations. Global Experience, have served 100+ customer in 10+ countries. Direct involvement in more than 20 cloud implementations & migrations in last 10 years. In first 12 years of his career. Wrote enterprise software applications at McDonalds Corporation, VISA, CommerceOne, PeopleSoft and VMware

I have worked with more than 50 Fortune 1000 companies in the last 20 years in different capacities. Well-connected in Silicon Valley Startups & VC Community. Experience in building Organizations and Companies from Scratch. I also have an IPO (CommerceOne) feather in my cap :)

Sarbjeet Johal

Congratulations to team Skild AI on $1.4 billion funding round at $14 billion valuation! Last week, on NVIDIA keynote stage, at #CES2026, just before Jensen Huang’s keynote, Deepak Pathak spoke about their value proposition in clear terms. 

David Vellante John Furrier Shelly Edward Ludlow Jon Fortt Brian J. Baumann

Jensen’s Keynote at #CES2026 will kick off soon! Analysts are in, bright and early for NVIDIA keynote in Las Vegas! 

I am sitting here with best of the bunch, Janakiram MSV,Zeus Kerravala, and Rob Strechay! 

cc John Furrier Crawford Del Prete David Vellante Rob Tiffany⚡️ Ed LudlowJon Fortt #CES26

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NVIDIA, has hired Google marketing executive Alison Wagonfeld to be their 1st Chief Marketing Officer. I have had the pleasure of working with Alison's team from Google Cloud side. I wish her the best in this key role at a vendor which is highly consequential in AI space!

San Francisco based humans& raises $480 million seed funding round at $4.48 billion valuation.  Natasha Mascarenhas of Bloomberg reports with Edward Ludlow and Caroline Hyde, moments ago. 

The round was led by SV Angel and co-founder Georges Harik, with participation from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, NVIDIA (NVDA, Financial), and others.

This investment in Humans& was spearheaded by SV Angel, founded by serial entrepreneur Ron Conway, and Georges Harik, an early Google (GOOGL) employee and co-founder of Humans &. Other notable investors include Jeff Bezos and GV, previously known as Google Ventures. 

cc Eric Zelikman

Google jumps into #AgenticCommerce and introduces UCP (Universal Commerce Protocol) standard. 

My POV, this is huge! I can attest it from experience of working with Commerce One for 5 years. Google states that UCP standard covers from catalog to post sales service - and I know that it’s a cumbersome problem to solve. I look forward to dig deep into the details of this standard put forth by Google. 


Vidhya Srinivasan, VP of Ads & Commerce Google explains 👇🏽


Crawford Marsha Jim John David Savannah Peterson Andy Wang Alison McCauley Regina Stephanie #NRF2026

#Dilbert creator, Scott Adam is no more! RIP, Scott! You have entertained us, the nerds, for several decades! 

I always saw him past his controversies, as an artist! 

#ScottAdams

“Google-Apple AI deal absolutely hits OpenAI where it hurts”, says Deirdre Bosa of CNBC, and I agree! 

Google crosses $4 trillion in market cap on back of the news of Google - Apple AI deal, leaving Microsoft ~ half trillion US dollars behind in market cap. 

“After careful evaluation, we determined that Google’s technology provides the most capable foundation for Apple Foundation Models and we’re excited about the innovative new experiences it will unlock for our users,” Apple said in a statement earlier today, Jan 12, 2026.


News: Apple picks Google’s Gemini to run AI-powered Siri coming this year. 

John Furrier Jon Fortt David Vellante Dion Hinchcliffe Brian Solis R "Ray" Wang Richard Seroter

During #CES2026, I spoke to Charlie Wood, PhD, Director of Data & Al Product Management at Caterpillar Inc. about their showcase at CES this year. We talked about KAT AI and more… 

Yes, I did inquire about Caterpillar getting into #Datacenter Power business, no information was available on that front in this setting. 

At #Caterpillar, AI, autonomy, and strategic partnerships are powering smarter solutions for construction, mining, energy and beyond.

#KATai #DeskToDust Andrew Bonfield Joe Creed David Vellante John Furrier Brad Nima Badiey Mandy Dhaliwal  Brooke Jamieson Evan Kirstel  Adriana (Adri) Scalora Shelly DeMotte Kramer Andy Wang Savannah Peterson Rob Strechay Brian J. Baumann

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The Battle

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Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Jeff Frick's LinkedIn Performance

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