Ring’s Jamie Siminoff thinks AI can reduce crime

Today I’m talking with Jamie Siminoff, founder of Ring, the video doorbell and security company. Jamie actually wouldn’t let me call him the CEO. He says his title is and always has been chief inventor, so obviously, we talked about that a little bit.

Jamie just published a book about his experiences launching and leading Ring. It’s called Ding-Dong: How Ring Went from Shark Tank Reject to Everyone’s Front Door. And I have to admit that it is a great title for a doorbell company.

The last time I interviewed Jamie was all the way back in 2018, right after he’d sold Ring to Amazon, and when we were piloting Decoder on The Vergecast with some sneaky backdoor interviews.

Since then, Jamie left Ring and Amazon, both started and sold another company, and he’s only recently returned to Amazon to lead Ring once again. In that time, we also started Decoder, so it felt like the perfect opportunity to talk to Jamie about why he left, why he came back, and what’s next for Ring.

Jamie’s mission with Ring has always been to make the world safer, and he has an expansive view of what that means. Seriously, you’re gonna hear him mention Ring’s new AI-powered Search Party feature that helps find lost dogs a lot during this conversation, but his goals and his vision for safety are enormous. He told Verge reporter Jennifer Tuohy in an interview last month that he thought Ring could almost “zero out crime” in the average neighborhood within the next year.

That’s a big promise, right on the face of it. It’s also potentially a very troubling one as we face more and more erosion of privacy and a surveillance panopticon that seems to only ever expand. Sure, Ring is a private company, as are many others, but public entities like police, immigration enforcement, and other agencies use private companies’ data all the time in all kinds of ways. They can just go buy it like anyone else, or sometimes they get it for free if they ask.

Ring’s various partnerships with police departments were pretty controversial when they first spun up, especially against the background of the Black Lives Matter protest movement in 2020. Amazon stepped back a little bit from working directly with the police after Jamie left the company, but now that he’s back, Ring is once again very gung-ho about police partnerships.

But here in 2025, the combination of surveillance and public safety is more controversial than ever. There are federal authorities snatching people off the streets in many cities simply because they look like they could be immigrants and building giant biometric databases of everyone’s faces. This is scary stuff.

There’s also the question of what safety really means. You’ll hear me push Jamie on this throughout this conversation, as he lays out his vision of an ideal neighborhood. To him, it’s one where constant monitoring erases crime. His model is one of constant pervasive security forces, which is not really mine, and we went back and forth on this a few times.

Of course, we also talked about Ring’s technology itself, and I definitely asked Jamie when Ring would support new smart home standards like Matter and Thread. There’s a lot in this one, and Jamie was game for all of it.

Okay, Jamie Siminoff, founder and chief inventor of Ring. Here we go.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Jamie Siminoff, you are the founder, the former CEO, now you’re back at Amazon, and you are the chief inventor of Ring. You’re also the author of a new book called Ding Dong — a great title — How Ring Went from Shark Tank Reject to Everyone’s Front Door. Welcome to Decoder.

I’m excited to talk to you. I’ve interviewed you before when we were secretly piloting Decoder on the Vergecast feed in 2018. You and I did a great interview, which was right after you’d sold the company to Amazon. Since then, you left Amazon, and you’ve come back as chief inventor of Ring; that’s a big deal. There’s a lot there that I want to unpack, but let’s just start with the basics. Why’d you go, why’d you come back?

I actually did stay for five years, so it was a fairly long time; I didn’t just sell and leave. I built it literally from my garage to when I sold it to Amazon. We had gone from 3 million, $30 million, 170, 480, so it was crazy. Then we got to Amazon and we almost 10X the revenue there, got it profitable. I was flat out for so many years that I finally got to a point where I could feel myself not being the best leader of the overall business. I could just feel that I was just burning out. So, in 2022, 2023, I talked to leadership at Amazon, and they were awesome, they were like, “Do something else here, do this,” and I was like, “I think, guys, I just need to step back and reset.” And of course, as soon as I did that and got out, I realized that I only like doing one thing, which is Ring.

I love Ring, I love the mission we have, I love what we do, and, fortunately, it worked out that I was able to come back. And so, I was able to take a little bit over a year off, almost two years off, do some other stuff that I realized I just … It was cool but I just didn’t get the same satisfaction. When I wake up in the morning as the chief inventor of Ring, I pop out of bed, I’m ready to go, I want to get to the office. I just want to get here and do stuff, and that’s true, and so it’s been fun.

I want to dig into all that. The book is about that grind: Starting the company, going on Shark Tank. There’s a great section about how you felt about Mark Cuban, and you thought he was going to invest, but he didn’t — that’s an interesting story. There are a lot of bumps on that road. There was a lawsuit from ADT that you thought was going to kill the company.

There was a great scene where you had accidentally written, I think, the number of weeks of payroll you had left on the whiteboard, and your team saw it and got kicked out. That grind is a lot, but Ring is a very different company now. It’s the market leader, it’s a brand, it’s up there in the hall of fame of tech brands, it means things to a lot of people. What’s your perspective on that now? To go from you had this idea to now, everyone’s expectations of what Ring is are outside of your control?

To unpack it, I think it is part of why I left. It got so, I’d say, in a way, overwhelming. It was crazy. I literally did start this in my garage. I had an idea and I started in my garage, it’s the true American dream, got on Shark Tank, and the next thing you know, you’re at Amazon. This thing is still building; it becomes a verb, and it’s the thing. And so, I didn’t understand how impactful it truly was until I left and that’s from … When you’re in the business, you’re trying to figure something out, you’re trying to fix something, you’re talking to, we call our customers neighbors, you’re talking to a neighbor about a problem you have and so you don’t feel the impact of it. And as soon as I stepped out of it, fully where I didn’t have any of those other signals, I did have this just holy cow moment of, wow, this is really something. The impact is truly there on every single level.

So, going back, I came back with, I’d say, a newfound respect for that, a newfound understanding of that, and also I think a very clear mission for myself of what to do here. Not just the mission of the company, but even for myself, of what I can do to have a greater impact at Ring for our neighbors.

I want to dig into that because of the notion that we should have cameras everywhere, and that will connect directly to safety, which is what you have been talking about the whole time. I went back and looked at our interview in 2018; you were talking about that back then as well, but that has always been your thesis. If we can put enough of these products everywhere, we can dramatically increase safety.

I know you just spoke with our reporter, Jen Tuohy, and you said we can bring crime down to zero if we get it right with AI. There’s a lot there. But the reason I want to start with why go and come back and connect it to what you think Ring is now, is because Amazon itself has changed dramatically in just the short time that you left.

You left when Andy Jassy was just the new CEO, and Dave Limp was still the head of products and services. Dave left; he went to join Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos’s space company. Panos Panay, whom I know very well, is the new head of devices and services. He’s got a big vision for how to bring that ecosystem together, make it tighter. Is Amazon differently situated for you now to achieve your goals? Was that part of it?

I think Ring changed every year for me. So, when you would go from a $3 million company to a 30 million one … I think I’m very comfortable with how every year, something is different, it’s like coming back would be different. But certainly, yeah, there’s been a ton of changes at Amazon. I think they’ve been, if you look at, I think, any metric, they’ve been positive. Dave Limp is still a great friend of mine. I travel with him, my son became very close friends with his son, so he’s still within the family, and so I still stay in touch with him. Panos has been very awesome to work with, we’ve had a lot of fun, and we’ve been building stuff. We already launched some stuff at our launch event in the fall. These Alexa Plus greetings and some of these familiar faces and some of this stuff. So, I do think the idea of bringing the brands together is very smart. Let’s leverage what we have as Amazon together, especially with AI, and see how we can get the most out of it for everyone.

Take me inside the process here. You leave, then, in short order, Dave leaves, Panos shows up, it’s 18 months later, when we’re hearing rumors that you’re coming back, and then you come back. Did Panos call you and say, “Hey, you’ve got to come back and run this thing?” Did you show up and say, “Hey, you got a new vision, I’m here for it?”

It’s not as Hollywood as you’d hope for, maybe, but it was that we started just chatting a little bit. I was giving some ideas of what I would … The reality is, I left before AI, I’ll say. Sure, there were neural networks and there was computer vision. But what we see in AI today was not there when I was burning myself out in ‘22 and ‘23; there were pieces of it, but not anything like what we have today. And so, I started seeing things like our Search Party for Dogs. I was thinking how we could not, as Ring, be looking for pets that are lost in neighborhoods using AI. This is amazing, we could do this now. So, I started to talk to them about some of these ideas. I think they liked the ideas, and then things came together where it made sense, and I told them, I said, “I think I made a mistake leaving”… Or I shouldn’t say I made a mistake.

I left for the right reason of being burnt out. I think I wish I had done more of a sabbatical, who knows if that would’ve even worked, but I do love Ring. I want to be here to take it through this next generation of AI and what we can do for the impact on neighbors with Ring, and really fully see out my vision of what we started within the garage so long ago.

That vision really implies there are going to be a lot of cameras, right? Amazon obviously has that scale. I’m curious… As you look at Ring now, again, it’s a verb, it’s a household name, and you could do more if you had even more cameras, right? If you could connect other competitor cameras to Ring, if there are other parts…

Yeah. It’s been rumored — by me — that there are over a hundred million cameras that we have out in the field.

But you could make that number a lot bigger. I’m just wondering if you think the centerpiece of the ecosystem is your cameras or if it’s the network.

The centerpiece of Ring is the mission to make neighborhoods safer. I really think you have to go back to that. And, so far, it’s been … I do believe, by selling our own first-party cameras, it’s been very good; we’re able to tie into them in a way that makes it easy. If it became that, to make neighborhoods safer, tying into third-party cameras was the right way to go, and that’s faster, sure. I think, definitely doing partnerships, how we could do that, I really do believe whatever we can do to get there faster. That said, I do think there has been value, and other companies have seen this, of having vertically integrated software to hardware. That does help. And, a lot of times, when it’s not like that, it creates a lot of issues with customers and experience.

I asked that because I was reading your book, and there’s a paragraph in here that just made me start laughing. I’m just going to read the paragraph. “There was risk in agreeing not to be bought by Amazon; they could swoop in and buy one of our competitors, like Blink, based in Boston, smaller than us but growing fast and impressively creative.” Amazon did buy Blink.

And the last time I spoke to you, in 2018, I said, “When are you going to integrate Ring and Blink? I have Ring cameras, I have Blink cameras, it’s crazy to me these are not the same platform,” and you’re like, “We’ll work on it.” And then I interviewed Dave Limp and asked him the same question; he was like, “We’re working on it.” And I interviewed Panos recently, and I asked him the same question, and we’re working on it. And it’s not even third-party cameras, it’s inside Amazon’s own ecosystem, there aren’t these integrations to make the network…

So, one integration. I think having Blink… Blink has been a great brand that just … You have Blink, it delivers a different experience for customers. I think that’s good. I don’t think it’s bad to have different experiences for customers, and not everything has to be integrated. I think that’s actually fine. That said… we’re working on it.

I got to give you that. But no, but Search Party for Dogs, this thing that we’re doing, we’re making sure that that works with Blink cameras. So, I think there are ways to start to tie more of those pieces, again, to make neighborhoods safer, to tie those pieces together. And yeah, it is a … The hard part is, Blink was truly … It was a start-up, it was a separate company. Ring was a separate company, Amazon bought both, and it is hard to … They both grew very fast when they got here, and it’s actually … It’s really hard to integrate when you’re growing fast. In some ways, it’s that you get one or the other. It’s “do you want to grow fast or integrate?” And, actually, part of it has been hard because both brands, and Blink has been extremely successful, have just grown really fast.

The reason I asked that question in that way and in that sequence is that Dave left, Dave’s strategy, and I talked to him about this at length, was that we should get Alexa everywhere. We’re going to have this platform for ambient computing, and we need to put microphones and speakers everywhere and get the intelligence as far out and as many places on the edge as we can. We’ll see what works and then that will become the basis of the ecosystem. And that led to Alexa and microwaves; there were just a lot of ideas.

In Dave’s product launch events, we used to clock how fast products could get introduced.

That’s Dave. I’ve known Panos for years. Panos is not that personality. He’s like, “I’m going to make one diamond and then we’re all going to look at this diamond and I’m going to tell you how shiny it is.” And it is very effective, and he’s very charming in doing that, and he has really pulled everything together.

When I’ve talked to him about what Amazon should be in the AI moment, and when I’ve talked to him about what the Amazon consumer ecosystem should be in the AI moment, it really is pulling things together. Ring is a start-up, you’re the founder, you’ve come back. How much push and pull is there between Ring, which is an ecosystem unto itself, a household name, and it’s part of the larger Amazon ecosystem? I know the strategy is to pull it together and make it more integrated.

I think we’re trying to figure that out. Alexa Plus, for sure, is the centerpiece of the … It’s the center of the universe, it’s where gravity comes from, and so we’re all floating out there around it in its solar system. I think it is trying to figure out where to naturally bring it in and try to make it a better experience for customers as we do that. And then the other one is… But, at the same time, Ring also has, as you said, been pretty successful on its own. And so, you want to make sure you also just don’t smash things together for no reason and figure that out so that it doesn’t hurt customers. Because there’s also been, historically, I think people have gone that way too, where they’ve just taken two things and just pushed them together so hard that it doesn’t actually work for customers.

And so, I think we’re doing a good job of it. I think Panos and I are working well together. There’s also Daniel at Alexa. There’s also Fire TV in that, so it’s with Aidan. We have a whole team that’s, I think, coalescing and coming together and figuring things out. There’s also Nick with eero. There’s actually a lot there that we can bring together naturally, and I think it does create a great experience in the home, and I’m looking forward to what we can do with that. Alexa certainly will be the centerpiece as the agentic AI to it.

These are the Decoder questions. I always ask everybody how their teams are structured. You left, you came back. Did you restructure Ring at all? Did you make any changes to how Ring was operating? How were you structured, and how are you structured now?

I did. I’m certainly not enough of a student of business to even tell you what type of structure it is, but I certainly did … I would say I let things probably go in places where they … I built it, again, from my garage to five years at Amazon. There are things that, when I left, I realized I was doing wrong, that I had set up wrong. And a lot of the problems at Ring, I’d say that I came back to, most of them I’ll even say were things that I had set up that I just had allowed to fester and become wrong. So, when I came back, I did have a lot of clarity around how to fix that. I came in pretty quickly, and we fixed a lot of things. You saw the results of that with the fall event. We got a lot of product out, we’re getting a lot of product out, we have a lot of new inventions happening, even the Search Party for Dogs, all the stuff. I’ve only been back for, I don’t know, seven, eight months now, and we’ve literally launched from start to finish hardware products, which I’d say I don’t think we ever did in the history of Ring that fast.

And a lot of that is reorienting how teams are, AI just pushing things, understanding where to push, and a newfound energy. It has been fun to come back and, again, for being able to see it from the 30,000-foot, clear level, no noise, I got to really understand what it should do. Then, coming back, I feel like I had this clarity, this sniper focus on it.

Give me an example. This is a weedsy show about structure more often than not. What are the actual changes you made?

I’ll go into why. So, over time, processes, you start building a product, and it takes X months, and you just … The PDP process and they always have every … It’s three-letter words for everything, and then people even forget what the three-letter words are, but we still have the process, so it’s all these different … So, we’re trying to get something out. It was a product we came up with when I came back. We wanted to launch it; it is shipping now, so this is, let’s call it, seven months. So, from zero to seven months, that’s crazy, and the team said we can’t do this. And so, before I would’ve been like, “Okay, okay, let’s look at it,” and they would’ve shown me the PDP process or some three-letter word, and it’s 90 days, and I’d be like, “Oh, well, I guess you can’t do it. You have 90 days for the PDP process. How can we” … So, I would’ve just let that go.

So, this time, no. Why? Why? Why? And we drove down and drove down and drove down and drove down and then you realize that process could be four hours if everything goes okay. But they give it 90 days because, if something goes wrong, you need the time to fix it. And I’m like, “Well, the problem is, of course, you’re going to need the time to fix it. And, of course, it’s going to go wrong if you give yourself the time.” So, let’s just say we only have four hours for it, let’s give it one day, and, of course, we’re not going to ship a broken product, so don’t worry. If it’s broken, we’re not going to ship it, and we’ll just push it out, but let’s actually … But if we don’t pull that in, we’re also not telling the factory to start cutting the steel, and everything cascades from that. And so, we took this product, we broke everything down from that, and, instead of it taking probably 18 months, which would’ve been the regular, it shipped in six months.

All right. Now what’s the product?

I’m not going to tell you.

You’re not going to get that out of me. It’s one of the products we shipped. Just look through the nine cameras I shipped.

And one of them must have the accelerated approval process.

Nine cameras, I shipped nine new cameras. Just look through those, just look at those.

Right. I’ll see. I’ll see which one is the most obviously accelerated PDP product.

You can see that as consumers, right? Did you change anyone on your team? Did you change how your reporting lines work inside of Amazon? Did you change where … I’m curious. You have this outside view, so how did you think about making those changes?

Yeah, we changed a bunch of stuff, changed a bunch of the reporting stuff. I’ve never been a big reporting person. At Amazon, you do. A big company does; you need to have a structure. I’ll admit it, I hate to admit it, but you do need to have a decent structure. You have 1.5 million people, 1.7, I don’t even know what Amazon is, but it’s a lot, so I guess you have to have some structure. But I did, yeah, I did change who goes where. I brought in some people that I’d say others probably thought were more junior, that maybe wouldn’t normally report to me, and I had them report to me. I broke apart how I made them individual contributors. So, instead of having reporting people and trying to make these triangles, I said you’re just going to run this thing, and you’re going to report to me, and let’s see how that works.

I’d say I’m also more willing to break stuff this time, a little bit more willing to try to break things. Then, obviously, within reason, you break things and then fix them up if you have to, and we’re not always right. We try some stuff and change it. But certainly, yeah, no, change some people around, change some stuff around, and so far I think we’ve really gotten fast and it’s been … The team seems excited. There’s always going to be some people who are less excited when you have changes, but overall, I do feel like, actually, the energy here is… I’ll call it exciting.

One of the more interesting themes that we experience making Decoder is that everybody who comes into contact with Amazon leaves just speaking Amazon. Talking about one-way doors and two-way doors and two pizza teams and single-threaded owners, it’s very rare that Amazon’s culture does not turn into everyone’s culture. You have the opportunity to leave and come back. What parts of Amazon’s culture were valuable out in the world, and what parts of Amazon’s culture did you think: Oh, this actually isn’t working. When I go back, I want to actually reorient myself and tweak that.

They’re still writing the memos and all that stuff.

Yeah. So, I get out in the real world, I’m in a real meeting with people, they’re doing a PowerPoint, and I literally lose my mind. I can’t sit here, I can’t do this. I can’t get information in this way anymore, like I’ve been so trained. The thing about a doc that’s so amazing is you get to teach yourself the information. So, you get to go at your speed, you get to think about things, and you get to process it yourself. When it’s on a PowerPoint, someone’s literally there teaching you at the speed of the entire room, so it’s all dumbed down. And so, I realized that, to me, the doc is one of these just uber, uber powerful things. The one-way door and two-way door thing, I do think it’s a great concept, but I think it’s been weaponized so much that it’s too easy to say something’s a one-way door. And so, what I’ve decided since I came back is that there are one-way doors, but you better not be able to break them down with a hammer. So, to me, don’t tell me it’s a one-way door unless it’s really a one-way door because a lot of the things that we decide are …

And for anyone listening who doesn’t understand it, the two-way door decisions are that it doesn’t matter, you could make the decision, you just go back on it, it’s a very sort of easy decision. One-way door decisions are supposed to be something that, if you make that decision, basically, you, in essence, can’t change; it’s so impactful that you can’t change it. And I think, over time, people have leaned too far into one-way doors, as this is a one-way door decision, and we have to meet on it, versus, no, it’s actually not. It is a little bit painful, but so what? And so, yeah, my mental model is, if you can break down the one-way door, it’s a two-way door.

Give me an example of your decision-making framework, then. This is the other question I ask everybody on Decoder. Again, the joke is, whenever I ask anybody who’s come within 100 miles of Amazon headquarters, I say, “How do you make decisions?” and I hear about one-way doors and two-way doors. It’s obviously riffed on that, right? What’s your framework?

But it is a good mental model. So, it does work because you should be allowing people at scale to make decisions that could be changed. It makes sense, right? It’s fast. If you want to make a decision that can be changed and is not that impactful, make the decision. If it’s a super impactful decision, we should talk about it. But then it’s the bar on that, how do you change the gauge to how sensitive you are to what is a one-way door, that to me is what we have to do. When I came back, that’s where we have to figure that out. And I do think I’m very good… My superpower is that I’m good at making these decisions. I was just in a meeting where we were branding a bunch of features, and I’m like, “Do this, this, and this,” and they’re like, “Ah, do we need to have seven meetings?” and I’m like, “No, just do these.” They’re like, “Oh, oh,” everyone’s shocked, and I’m like, “Guys, if it’s a bad brand, we can just change it, it’s a feature.” But you don’t want to do that, you don’t want to call …

It’s a new AI feature for us for one of our motion alert things. You wouldn’t want to rebrand it. It’s not great, but it’s also customers, our neighbors aren’t going to care if we go from calling it this to that, it’s not going to ruin their experience. What’s going to hurt them is us not launching something or taking more time; that’s worse. And so, to me, I’d much rather make quick decisions than stew on these things. But I do think the one-way door, two-way door is still a good framework. I think what’s difficult is trying to figure out which decisions are a real one-way door.

Do you think that the ability to move fast is the luxury of being the market leader, ensconced at Amazon?

I think it’s the luxury of also being a founder. I do appreciate the fact that the difference is being able to be the founder and having that. Even though I am … Listen, I’m an employee of Amazon, I’m not trying to act as if I’m not, but there is something that you get from being the founder overall that I’d say it’d be harder to have if you just came in as a VP of whatever and you were recruited in.

That piece, the founder mode dynamic inside of a big company, Amazon has preserved it, I think, more than anyone. You mentioned Nick Weaver. I’ve known Nick forever. I knew Nick when he was selling eero to Amazon; he retained the title of CEO. You had the title of CEO, you left, you came back, you told me right before I started recording.

Actually, I did not … I always had the chief inventor. I actually never took CEO. Even when I was at Ring, I never had the CEO title. If you go back to my oldest emails, it says chief inventor and founder.

Well, you get to do that when you’re the founder of a standalone company.

You can pick whatever title you want.

But inside of Amazon’s structure, you’ve purposefully not taken that title. Is there a reason for that inside Amazon? Do you have all the authority of a CEO inside that Amazon structure, and you just don’t have the title?

I would say I probably do. I try to, though … I probably have what would be considered internally a CEO. I think it’s a little bit of a misnomer inside of a big company because the reality is there’s a CEO, there’s Andy, and then … I definitely have the feeling of autonomy to lead and make decisions for the area that I’m responsible for. So, whatever that’s called, I do feel like I have that. I think Nick feels like he has that with eero, and I think that’s why … Listen, it is not a thing, it is why people stay because you give them, whether it’s a CEO title or …

But they certainly have the power to make the decisions and, in the end, what we like to do, what Nick likes to do, what founders like to do is build stuff and make stuff happen. And so, that’s the thing I miss most about being outside of Amazon and Ring: I can make things happen at scale here, which, in a way, is just unbelievable. We’re launching this Dog Search Party thing, which is one of the most … I’m so excited about this thing because we’re going to find, hopefully, all these dogs. There are over a million dogs that are entered into our neighbor’s app every year, so the problem is crazy.

When I asked, “How many dogs are actually entered into our neighbor’s app?” I’m thinking they’re going to come back with … If they said 50,000, I’d be like, “That’s a lot. Wow, 50,000, that’s crazy.” They’re like, “There’s over a million pet interactions a year on the neighbor’s app,” and my mind exploded. That’s crazy. And so, to be able to touch something like that, build something like that, and think of something at that scale, and get it out there and impact people, that’s … I don’t know who … Especially for an inventor or a founder, that’s the coolest thing ever.

I want to actually talk about Search Party and how that interacts with Amazon’s platforms and Amazon’s scale. I am curious… There are founders. There’s moving fast. I want to put some of the one-way door, two-way door dynamics into practice here.

I look across Amazon’s portfolio, which is coming together. I look at eero; eero has a big bet on Thread radios. My eero routers, there’s one sitting right over there, and it has a Thread radio in it.

One day, that’s going to connect to Apple’s Thread network, and, for some reason, the iPhone has a Thread radio in it now. This is the smart home standard that a bunch of big companies, including, to some extent, Amazon, are pushing toward.

You made a bet a long time ago when Ring was started on a different protocol, on Z-Wave, which I would describe as the security system protocol. That’s the one that all the security systems run on. That feels like a one-way door. You made that decision; there’s no coming back from it now to the big standard that your stable-mate at Amazon has bet on. Blink operates on a totally different, random, inexpensive RF protocol; there’s a whole thing over there about why those cameras are cheap and can run on AA batteries forever. That’s just an Amazon … A big company has three divisions, and they’ve all made three different technology bets. Someone, Andy Jassy, could say, “What are we doing here? Make it all one platform.”

You didn’t even make it as bad as it actually is. I also came out with Sidewalk, which is another protocol.

So, it’s even worse than you’re saying.

Put that into practice. How does that work? Is there a meeting where someone’s like, “Yo, we could get a ton more value if we undo what felt like a one-way door decision and we all center ourselves on one platform, one protocol?”

Listen, for sure, especially those protocols, they get close to a one-way door, or the product that ships is the definition of a one-way door. You ship a Z-Wave product, that is a Z-Wave product, that’s it. A Z-Wave product is a Z-Wave product, so that is a one-way door decision. The two-way door part, though, is if all of a sudden, you see something in Thread that’s really happening. The replacement cycle on these products, call it, even on the long side, maybe three to five years, maybe six, seven, eight years. So, if, all of a sudden, you saw that everything was really going to go Thread and it was that’s it, and if you were not on Thread, you were … Thread or dead. If that was what we decided, we could flip to that; we have enough of our toe in the water to figure that out.

And so, maybe you hurt yourself for a tiny short-term thing, but you’ve also tried to figure out other things in the long term. So, I think that one, as much as it’s a one-way door on the actual product, I think it’s still a two-way door to figure that out. And I do think, Sidewalk… I think we’re going to see a lot of interesting stuff with Sidewalk next year, which is an IoT protocol, but more of a replacement for internet for the trillion devices that are going to need to come online that have very low data. So, very low, low data in and around the home devices.

The connection I would make there is you look at a Ring camera today … Let me start this the other way. The connection I make there is that you look at the first Ring cameras, you look at the DoorBot, and you had to invent a lot of stuff. There are chapters of your book that are: How am I going to get a camera to run on this power draw in this Wi-Fi enclosure? Whoops, I made the thing out of aluminum, and I shouldn’t have done that. There’s a lot of that for the people who are interested in that.

We are way on the other side of the smartphone commodity supply chain. You can just take a bunch of sensors, Wi-Fi chips, and camera modules off the shelf and make a door, and you have lots of competitors who are effectively doing that.

The innovation is going to come from, okay, AWS exists, there’s an entire AI platform for us to build on. Alexa Plus exists, there’s an entire AI platform, there are Echo devices, there’s whatever. And I’m just wondering how you think about the balance of the things you want Ring to do versus the potential benefits of taking advantage of Amazon’s ecosystem scale. Because that feels like the core tension of the entire Amazon device ecosystem.

For us, we’re lucky that most of our products… We have a lot of different products… If you look at the core products, they go to the cloud. And by going to the cloud, again, if you want to look at the two-way door, one-way door thing, the cloud is a two-way door. The cloud, a new Nvidia chip comes out, it’ll be available in the cloud, and so we are not that constrained because we’re not … Again, most of our products, especially our core products, they’re not stuck in the home where we can’t upgrade them, and that’s where we’ve been… The older Ring doorbells are doing smart video descriptions. They’re not doing it because we planned so far ahead; eight years ago, I wasn’t smart enough to put an AI chip in it. It’s because now there are AI chips in the cloud, and they’re already up there, and that’s what we use to do it.

So, I think it is… Specifically for around us, integrating with Alexa Plus is easy because it doesn’t have to be done locally. And that is the problem: when you get into these local things, did you plan ahead enough? And the planning ahead is years ahead. Because if I think of a product now, the reality is, on most products, it’s made in like six months, but it used to be that it would take you almost two years from when you thought of a product till it came out in the market. Then, it’s another year to get it to scale. So, it’s basically three years from when you think of a product till it’s at a point where it has enough in the field to matter, and so, whatever chip you chose three years earlier better have aged well because it’s out there now.

Do you think moving everything to the cloud, particularly video footage from people’s cameras from their homes, is where the privacy concerns come into play? That’s where the, hey, are we building an accidental surveillance network comes into play. I’m just looking at the headlines in my prep talk. You left, Amazon said we’re going to stop working with police, you came back, boy, Ring is going to work with police again. You have a partnership with Axon, which makes the taser that allows law enforcement to get access to Ring footage. Did that feel like a two-way door? They made the wrong decision in your absence, and you came back and said, “We’re going to do this again”?

I don’t know if it’s wrong or right, but I think different leadership does different things. I do believe that I spent a lot of time going on ride-alongs. I spent a lot of time in areas that I’d say are not safe for those people, and I’ve seen a lot of things where I think we can impact them in a positive way. And so, we don’t work with police in the way of … I just want to be careful, as we’re not … What we do allow is for agencies to ask for footage when something happens. We allow our neighbors, which I’ll say are customers, just to be clear… We allow our customers to anonymously decide whether or not they want to partake in that.

So, if they decide they don’t want to be part of this network and don’t want to help this public service agency that asks them, they just say no. If they decide that they do want to, which, by the way, a lot of people want to increase the security of their neighborhoods. A lot of people want their kids to grow up in safer neighborhoods, a lot of people want to have the tools to do that, and are in places that are dangerous. We give them the ability to say yes and make it more efficient for them to communicate with those public service agencies, and also do it in a very auditable digital format.

That’s the other side. Today, without these tools, if you wanted to have… If a police officer wanted to go and get footage from something, they’d have to go and knock on the door and ask you, and that’s not comfortable for anyone. It’s also that there’s no digital audit trail of it, and, with this, they can do it efficiently with an audit trail. It is very clear and it’s anonymous. If you say no, you never have to say … That officer’s at your door, or you have to say no, which you could, I guess, say — it’s very strange, it’d be a weird situation. If you say no on this, they don’t even know that they asked you.

I’m curious, you mentioned the audit trail. I know you’re really excited about the prospect of AI to analyze huge amounts of video and think about all the sensors in your home coming together with AI to bring people more insight. That’s interesting and, certainly, that’s how you get to build Search Party. There’s the other side of it that we cover at the Verge all the time now, which is, boy, people are using Sora to generate footage that looks like Ring video doorbell footage. And Ring, being a verb, the angle of the doorbell, all that stuff creates a feeling of authenticity, even though the footage is totally synthetic, it’s fake.

Are you thinking about that? Hey, we need to put in content credentials to Ring doorbells before law enforcement gets them, so we can verify this is real and not AI-generated?

Yeah, we’re certainly thinking about that, we’ve been thinking about that, and I do think it’s where we have to … In the end, the source of truth is going to have to come from a secure server because I do believe these AIs will be able to generate … You can see it with Sora. There are some videos where I have to watch them 50 times to understand if it’s fake or real, and, at some point, I think, if that’s where it is today, in five years, it’s going to be better. And so, the only source of truth will be from the servers where it was captured, so you know 100 percent that you’re getting the video, you’re streaming it directly from there, and there’s no chain of custody issue. I think about it a lot, and I think we have to … We’ll all have to go into a world where the origin of the information is going to matter because there’s no way for a human to determine … Even watermarks, I think, are going to get … It’s going to be very hard to out-watermark an AI at some point.

Yeah, I’m curious. There’s the, whoops, we relate to Thread standards decisions. By the way, I think you’re late to Thread. I don’t know if it’s coming through. I think you should make Ring cameras use Thread.

You let me know if that’s going to happen. That’s one decision with one set of stakes. Whoops, we relate to C2PA, which is the content authenticity initiative standard, or we need to make a better standard, and there’s going to be a format. Or, actually, we think standards are not the way to go because AI could maybe fake the metadata too, and we’re going to build an entire evidentiary system that requires the cops to come to our secure server, which we will authenticate. The stakes of that are radically different, right? In a world of AI deepfakes, where everyone presumes video evidence is the gold standard, and it’s coming from your network…

How are you thinking about structuring that decision? How are you thinking about privacy in that mix? That means you have to store a lot of video from a lot of people for a long time. And then how are you thinking about how quickly you might need to implement it in a world where AI is changing that so fast?

If you go back, and the privacy thing is that our customers control their video, that’s it. So, I think you always have it so customers —

Actually, but let me just complicate that. Presuming we have to have an authenticated server, there’s a crime in my neighborhood, and I’ve opted in, and we’re going to say the cops can only get the video from the Ring server, where we know it’s true. I might not be as in control of my video anymore.

No, not how it’s built and not while I’m here because the way it works is that you will decide if you want to or not want to share that video, which is your property, with someone. Now, once you share it, then it is up to us to figure out, to your point, how do we share it, how do we make sure that the digital fingerprint goes all the way through, or how does the chain of custody work of this video to make sure there’s no fake in the process of it? I think this is why it is important to build these systems. It’s going to be important, though. This is also where the government is going to have to step in. We’re going to have to deal with this across the board because we also have video coming off of cell phones. So, we do need to figure out how to build … And there’s going to be companies, Axon would probably be one of the companies, I don’t want to speak for them, but they have evidence.com, so to build these evidentiary systems to take in…

Because Ring is one part of taking in data around, call it a crime scene, but cell phone video is maybe even more of a source today. So, how do you take that in? How do you make sure that it actually was captured on the iPhone directly and not tampered with between the two things? We’re going to have to figure it all out. I think we have to work together on it, and the AI stuff is pushing us to do it. I am proud that with Ring, we have built it so that you can take it directly and keep it on the server. You can understand where it was, where it’s from, where it was created, and we have that digital fingerprint on it and the audit trail of it.

Are you having meetings about this problem on that cadence, and with the urgency that we have to get through PDP faster?

Yes, we are definitely trying to figure out how to make sure that our videos are always a source of truth. And right now, it is how we do our sharing. You go to a link and you take it from Ring. But I think you’re going to have to do that more and more as this world is changing, you’re just not going to be able to see … Just because someone sends you a video doesn’t mean it’s true.

That to me, just because someone sends you a video doesn’t mean it’s true, is as deep a flip of our expectations of photography and video as has ever existed in the history of photography and video.

Because up until now, you would’ve had to spend $100,000 to make that fake video or some crazy amount. If you wanted to make what you’re talking about, you have to actually produce it. And now it’s just… You type in “make me a video that looks like this and does this.” It’s crazy, and it has really flipped this on its head. So, I would say to anyone, this is where you do your research, even use AI to research where something’s coming from. You have to use multiple things to figure out what is true and what is not true. Well, we have to teach our kids that, too. That’s the world they’re going to be in, and you need to understand that.

I’m asking you all this because, again, you told my colleague Jen Tuohy that, with Ring cameras, we can get very close to zero out crime. That’s the combination of Ring and AI, and that you can get much closer to the mission than I ever thought. Zeroing out crime with Ring cameras, there are a lot of steps there. Explain what you mean by we can…

And also, I’d like to asterisk that. If you listen to the overall of what I said, I said in certain situations. So, around neighborhoods, I said, if you have all of our different products in a neighborhood, I do think, with AI, that we can finally see a path. Where before I would say, with the mission… We want to reduce crime in neighborhoods, great. We want to make neighborhoods safer, okay, sure, but it was a forever mission. I couldn’t see with technology how to get to a point that you were … I could see where you were impactful, but you could never get… But when you put AI into it, now, all of a sudden, you have this human element that AI gives you. I think, with our products in neighborhoods and, again, you have to be a little bit specific to it, I do see a path where we can actually start to take down crime in a neighborhood to call it close to zero. And I even said, there are some crimes that you can’t stop, of course.

So, yeah, it’s a little bit … It’s always crazy to say something like zero out crime, but it is a good goal to have. And I think that’s what we’re trying to do, is take the goal of how far we can go in affecting this now with AI.

Yeah. I read that quote and I was like, “Oh, that’s Jamie. I know that guy.” It’s very in character.

But mechanically, walk people through what you mean. You put enough Ring products in a neighborhood, and then AI does what to them that helps you get closer to the mission of zeroing out crime?

So, the mental model, or how I look at it, is that AI allows us to have … If you had a neighborhood where you had unlimited resources, so every house had security guards and those security guards were people that worked the same house for 10 years or 20 years, and I mean that from a knowledge perspective. So, the knowledge they had of that house was extreme; they knew everything about you and that residence and your family, how you lived, the people that came in and out. And then, if that neighborhood had an HOA with, call it private security, and those private security were also around and knew everything, what would happen? When a dog gets lost, you’d be like, “Oh, my gosh, my dog is lost.” Well, they would call each other, and one of them would find the dog very quickly. So, how do we change that and bring that into the digital world is —

Can I just ask you a question about that neighborhood specifically?

Do you ever stop and consider that that neighborhood might suck? Just the idea that every house on my street would have all-knowing private security guards, and I would have an HOA, and that HOA would have a private security force. You can easily paint that as dystopia. Everyone’s so afraid that we have private cops on every corner, and I’m paying HOA fees, which is just a nightmare of its own.

So, I would assume you live in a safe neighborhood.

No, today, I’d go to … If you want, I’ll take you to a place where people live and have to, when they get home from school, lock their doors and stay in their house, and they can’t go out and —

But I’m just saying the model. The model is, everybody is so afraid that they have private cops —

I think the model is that doing crime in a neighborhood like that is not profitable, and I think that you want people to move into another job. I don’t think that crime is a good thing and so I think … But listen, it certainly is an argument to have, I do believe that … I think safer neighborhoods allow for kids to grow up in a better environment and I think that allows them to be able to focus on the things that matter and so that’s what we’re going for. I —

I just wanted to challenge the premise.

I think it’s a fair challenge.

The model is that there are cops everywhere. That level of privacy.

Yeah, it’s not cops. I think it’s more that you’ll have the ability to understand what’s happening. It’s not like … But yeah, I think, listen, it’s a fair statement, I guess. I think I want to live in a safe place so …

Yeah. No, I’m just curious. The model is that there’s a lot of intelligence. I know that’s what you’re trying to say.

Yeah, there’s a ton of intelligence, yeah.

There’s a lot of intelligence in your neighborhood, and maybe it’s private security, maybe it’s not. What does the AI do? Does it just make the camera smarter? It lets you do a more intelligent assessment of what the cameras are seeing.

I think basically, the AI allows you to… Right now, we just say motion detection, motion detection, motion detection. It’s funny, when I started Ring… The book was fun because I got to go back and actually go through this whole story of how this thing came to be, and motion detection was an amazing invention. You’re in the airport and there’s a motion at your front door, and you look at it like, “Wow, this is crazy.” Now, with AI, we shouldn’t be telling you about motion detection; we should be telling you what’s there, when you should look at it, when it matters, and we shouldn’t be bothering you all the time. That’s what I mean by this idea of these security guards at your house or in your neighborhood. There should be this intelligence in your neighborhood that can tell you when you should be trying to be part of something, but not always tell you. So, it’s not just like car, car, dog, person, person, it’s like, “Hey, look at this. You want to pay attention to this right now.”

There’s a piece of that intelligence… Again, we have Ring cameras around our house. Boy, am I often told that there’s a package at our doorstep. We just had a baby, and there have been a lot of packages on our doorstep lately. There’s a turn where you can connect that to Amazon’s database, and the package that arrives at my doorstep, you know what’s in it. There’s a turn where you can connect it to, I don’t know, a facial recognition database, and you can tell me who is at my door.

Once you start connecting these databases, the privacy implications start to fractally explode. Now we know a lot, and maybe we know too much. And that’s where we hear from privacy advocates when we do our coverage. It’s the connecting of all the data sources that actually reduces the sense of privacy that people might feel in their home. And I hear that, if you look at my neighbor’s feed, it’s a bunch of lost pets, and then people are constantly asking if other people have heard an explosion. Everyone wants to know, “What was that sound?”

But when you connect a bunch of those databases, particularly to facial recognition, there’s a turn in the privacy conversation where the stakes ratchet up really high, where maybe it’s gone forever. How are you thinking about that decision-making? Okay, we have a lot of intelligence in the AI; it’s trivial for the AI to connect to another store of information. That’s a thing you can do with AI, especially at a big company like Amazon, where you have lots of other stores of information. There’s a line, what’s the line for you?

There is a responsibility, obviously — it’s just to build safe products. So let’s just start with that. Yeah, we did announce facial, we call it Familiar Faces, but that’s not connected, that’s just for your … Your iPhone today. If you search your iPhone, it’s crazy. Search for someone’s name in your photos, and their pictures come up. And so, I do think there’s a balance between not allowing technology to exist that should exist that helps people and gives them more efficiency, gives them safer homes and then also, obviously, not creating, to where you’re going to, this dystopian place. And so, I think that’s the responsibility, but what we’re doing with Familiar Faces is we’re just giving you the ability to say, when my wife comes home, don’t … Because it is silly. Why do I get an alert when my wife comes home? I don’t want it, I don’t need it.

I’m asking this for a lot of reasons, but I look at what’s broadly happening with surveillance footage out in the world. And I’m not saying Ring is participating in this, I’m just giving you an example. ICE has facial recognition systems, and they are arguing that a positive match in their facial recognition system is a definitive determination of someone’s immigration status. That’s way out there. I don’t think you’re doing that.

But you can get to, okay, we have facial recognition, we have a bunch of evidence coming off of Ring cameras, to make it really safe, you want to go from passive surveillance to active surveillance. That’s what the studies show. Now the camera will literally identify the criminal by face and tell the cops this person tried to steal a car from this driveway, and that’s the thing that would get you to actually zero out crime.

There’s a lot of risk in those steps. But if I draw the thread from what you’re saying, it’s all the way to that idea that the criminals won’t come here because the cameras will know who they are and tell the cops. Are you willing to go that far?

I think it’s also that the cameras will alert people in a way that … Part of what made Ring and what made neighbors safer with Ring 1.0, and I think we are in Ring 2.0, is that there was no presence at the home. How did people break into homes? They would go and be knock-knock burglars. They would knock-knock, no one was home. It was at 3:00 in the afternoon, they’d go to the homes next door, find a place that was empty, and they’d go in the home. Ring allowed you to, now, all of a sudden, when someone comes up to the door, you’re like, “Oh, I got a motion alert. Hi, what’s going on?” and so it gave a presence to the home. So, I don’t think you have to go as far as that real time stuff to get to where we’re talking about, I think it’s more of the anomaly detection and allowing people to make it so that, if someone comes in, that you’re aware of what’s happening around the neighborhood because right now there’s no awareness of what’s going on around it.

And so, I don’t think it’s as dystopian as where you’re going, and certainly it’s not what we’re building, and I do think we can impact things to a really high level in neighborhoods. Which, again, to the Jen Tuohy thing, in neighborhoods is what we were talking about, that with AI and what we’re doing with a bunch of Rings together. And I think even the Dog Search Party is a good way to look at it, which is how these cameras come together for good in the neighborhood.

What do you think about hallucinations in this context? Your competitor, Google, just launched Gemini. They can do a bunch of recognition of various Nest cameras. The immediate reports were that this thing is saying a guy named Michael’s in my house, there’s no one in my house named Michael. There’s a deer in my living room, which is obviously not happening. Google’s models are cutting-edge; they’re as good as anyone’s. But they’re still hallucinating, right?

All I’ll say is we’ve had smart video descriptions out for a while, and I would say ours are pretty good, so I won’t talk about others, but I think ours are pretty good. The idea is that these things lead to a human decision, though. It’s not that they’re autonomously creating some decision; it’s that they’re telling you what to do. So, a hallucination that there’s a deer in your living room might be annoying because you’re going to now check to see the deer in your living room, and you realize that it’s not a deer in your living room. But I do think it’s driving … That’s the idea: these things drive to a human, that they’re not creating some autonomous decision-making cycle.

Do you think the models are good enough to do all the things you want to do?

I don’t think anyone’s ever seen something like how fast AI is moving from a technology side. I’ve never seen anything where, every few weeks or every month, something comes out that has surprised us that’s that much better than the next thing.

Well, let me flip that question. Is there something you want to build where the models aren’t good enough yet?

Probably everything is there with the models being good enough. The cost of processing might be off. So, it might be that the cost to do that thing is still so expensive that it’s not rational to do. So, again, the Dog Search Party… I go back to, five years ago… Could you have built something like that? Sure, it just would’ve cost you so much money in resources, time to develop it, everything, it would be next to impossible to execute on. Whereas, today, I’d say it was reasonable. It still costs us money, but it’s reasonable to do that kind of product.

Do you think when you talk about zero out crime in a neighborhood, the idea that everyone in a neighborhood has one of those illuminated Ring signs in the front yard, is that enough to —

Is that just enough of a deterrent? The bad guys will know their face is going to be captured on video, and that will be analyzed by an AI, and something will happen. Do you have to do more outbound deterrents? How do you talk about —

I think that’s a part of it. Awareness is a big part of it. I think there are ways with lights also, using lighting to do stuff, that’s a big part of it. I think having just … If, all of a sudden, someone comes outside because something’s an anomaly, that’s a big part of it. It doesn’t have to be some crazy thing, I think a lot of these … And that’s what I was saying, is a lot of these little things add up to make that work.

So, when you think about it, okay, we can bring crime down in a neighborhood to close to zero in a neighborhood, what are the ratcheting steps? Does everyone just get the Ring camera, and your platform does all the work? Is it that someone gets caught and they tell all their friends in jail that they got caught? What are the steps?

I think it’s really about bringing neighbors together for this particular thing. So, it’s about how you individually … And we’ve always thought about how each house is its own node controlled by the neighbors, so controlled by the person, and I’ll keep going back to that, which is… One hundred percent, your video is in your control; everything you’re doing is in your control, whether you want to take part in anything is in your control. That has to be the first layer of all of it. But then, when something happens, do you want to take part in it? So, if you get an alert that this dog looks like the dog that’s in front of your house, can you contact your neighbor? You can decide not to take part in it, and then no one will ever know, and it’s fine, it’s just basically deleted, or you can take part in it. And so, I think that’s how we can do things that can make a neighborhood into this node where individual neighbors are all on their own, but when things happen, they can work together as they want to.

And you think that AI will accelerate the process of what…

I think AI is a co-pilot. It is their assistant, and it’s helping them to figure this out. Because, again, if you’re just getting every motion alert… You have eight cameras, and you’re just getting motion alerts all day — no human being can parse all this data. And so, that’s what I was talking to Jen about, is that I do think I see a way to use AI to help feed better data to us, which allows us to make better decisions and work together better.

That’s really interesting because that’s a vision of AI that has a beginning and an end. There’s a huge amount of data, AI can parse that data better, the LLM technology we have today can make better inferences out of that data, and I understand that processing chain. Let me ask you about the other side of it, which is that you’re part of a big company that has a smart home stack, that has lots of microphones and speakers in lots of people’s houses. I went to the Alexa Plus launch event, and it was so funny, they kept… Panos specifically gave the demo of “show me when the dog came home,” and then it showed footage from a Ring camera, and I went, “Oh, that’s not Alexa Plus.” Ring already had that; you’re just asking Ring to show the thing from its platform that it already had.

I see all of that. I look at the big companies, Amazon, Google, and Apple, and no one has actually managed to add the LLM to the assistant in a way that works great. We’ve all shipped it; everyone’s shipping except for Apple, which apparently had to start over. But even the ones that are shipping, Gemini with Google, Alexa Plus, are their first steps. And the idea that you can orchestrate between what’s happening … My kid just wants to ask you questions about space, which is all she wants to do with any of these tools, and I need you to turn on the light, and that is a very deterministic process that you shouldn’t get wrong.

That orchestration is very complicated, and no one has really nailed it yet. When you look at that and how Ring should interact with that, does that feel like the AI tools can do the things we need them to do? Because when I say there’s a product I want that I don’t think the models can achieve, that’s the first one that comes to mind.

The LLM-powered assistant that does everything that we thought Alexa should do when it came out in 2014.

I would say I’m very hopeful that Alexa Plus is there in a lot of ways today, and, obviously, the team is working on lots of new features as well. I do think the vision that they have there for both what’s out and in the market, as well as what’s coming, I think it’s [what you’re asking for]. I do think it’s that. And it’s also where, as you said… Ring, it is great, you bought it maybe for security, but it also tells you if you fed the dog or not, and will remind you because, actually, there’s an intelligence behind Alexa. And in this case, I’ll say it’s almost like a house manager where it’s taking this intelligence, this digital data, saying I think you didn’t feed the … It’s 8:00, you didn’t feed the dog. Do you want to feed the dog? And it’s like, “No, I did. I did it over here. You didn’t see it.” Or, “Oh, you’re right, I forgot to feed the dog.”

And so, I think that’s what we want is … Listen, I think we all want assistance, and so what I’m talking about with Ring is, obviously, I’m more focused on this idea of security assistance for your home and your neighborhood. And what you’re talking about is how you get assistance in your home, inside the home, inside the four walls if you want.

Well, it’s much more like I understand we are generating vastly more video footage than ever before, and we have vastly more sensors. LLM seems like a capable, if not always appropriate, tool to manage all that data and to get something out of it that’s human-readable, literally human-readable.

I understand that, and I see an argument; I see why there’s so much interest there. It’s the next turn, which is that there’s an always-on intelligence in my house that can understand all of these different systems and connect them all together and, actually, sometimes do very predictively dumb things. I need the lights to turn on and sometimes go out in the world and book a concert ticket, all the promises that we’re making. And I’m not actually sure, and I’m asking you because I think you have more insight into it. I’m not actually sure that LLM technology, as it’s presently constituted, can make that leap all the way.

I’d say I believe that we have all the technology pieces together today. So, the individual, if it were a construction site, all the things would be on the site, like the wood, the concrete, and all the pieces would be there. I think in your point of building the building, there might be some pieces where we have to figure out how to exactly put the concrete together with the wood to make it work exactly. But I would say we have now crossed over to where I do believe that all of the actual technology pieces are there. I think some of it might be even on the processing side; it might just be too expensive. To do what you’re trying to do might be so expensive, you might need an Nvidia H100 in your house, and that’s just … But that Nvidia N100, in a year or two, it could be 50 bucks, and so, if that’s the case, then you probably will have that.

But I look at the road map for Alexa and from what I can see, I do think we’re going to have that, in essence, always-on intelligence that goes from turning on the lights to a turkey timer or whatever, but also to doing very complex things like understanding that it’s garbage day. The garbage cans aren’t out because it’s seeing them on this [camera] and I’ve been at home. It does multiple turns of intelligence like a human would, to say can you look at this, you should do this. When I say like a security guard at your house and in the neighborhood, what I meant about it is this idea of this intelligence that really knows you. And the only way to get that historically has been, not only a full-time person, but someone who’s been there for a long time because they have to know everything you’re doing. And I do think Alexa in the home will be that, if not already, on Alexa Plus in a lot of ways today.

Well, Jamie, we’re going to have to have you back when that all comes to fruition. And when you announce the inevitable Thread-powered Ring cameras, I believe that promise was made on this show.

We’re going to call them NP cameras.

I was promised a seven-month development cycle on these cameras.

I’ll do four months. I’ve got to get faster.

The book is called Ding Dong: How Ring Went from Shark Tank Reject to Everyone’s Front Door. It is a very dishy read if you’re the person who loves reading about how hardware is built and how companies are started. I can’t recommend it enough. It is, I believe, available on Amazon.

It is. I self-published it through Amazon! What else could you do? I had to.

What’s next for Ring? What should people be looking out for?

We just launched all our new 4K cameras; they’re awesome. Search Party for Dogs is going live very soon. Lots more fun stuff is coming, and I can’t wait to show people what we can do.

All right, man. We’ll have to have you back soon. Thank you so much for being on Decoder.

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