I’ll revisit this review when the movie comes out, but this is next in my series of limited perspective movie reviews, where I take a very narrow look at a movie. I haven’t done this in a while, but of the ones I have, the Oz: Review of wizard projection technology has been the most popular.

Here’s the teaser:

We don’t exactly what year or timeline this is in. It feels like space travel is relatively new, and the commercial TV sets are ancient, so the 60’s, but in an alternate timeline. They still seem to have giant mainframes with reel to reel tape. In the comic, and in this movie I’m sure, Reed Richards and the FF have technology far more advanced than the rest of the world, so what we see in their home wouldn’t be typical. I want to focus on the robot, HERBIE.

Using just the information in this trailer, HERBIE can make sauce and is able to understand natural language. We achieved that level of AI a couple of years ago, so he’s about 70 years ahead of his time. But, I don’t think the cloud infrastructure we have is available to the FF, so this might all be local, which is impressive. Maybe Reed has a super computer on a LAN, but that would make it hard for HERBIE to leave the Baxter Building (which we don’t see, so it’s possible).

I also don’t know if the tape reels on HERBIEs face are functional or decorative, but if his AI relies on that, we have to assume that Reed has built something fundamentally different from our LLMs, or has had gains on memory usage many orders of magnitude beyond what we have. Or, he might have just figured out how to do a lot more with tape. When I was a kid, we had the 2XL, which was based on 8-Track tapes.

I look forward to seeing if there’s any in-movie explanation of HERBIE, until then, I think it’s just tricks like the 2XL. Pop in a tape, it makes marinara, and you can talk about marinara. Pop in another and it’s taco night.