He is coming from a finance background, so the math and logic part of programming should have been easy for him. I guess he was also familiar with Excel formulas, from there to learn python is not an unbelievably big step, 1.5 years should be enough.

On the photo you can see the phone connects to a webpage(172.28.172.2:3000), which I guess running on the black box, so it’s just a website actually. There are literally tutorials on the internet to create something similar, first result: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-create-an-intelligent-chatbot-in-python-using-the-spacy-nlp-library

The article also mentions 40 people working for Jolla, I just don’t understand that line, why the manager had to learn to program, if he had 40 programmers to do this?

Actually their Sailfish os is not bad, it’s based on Linux, originally developed by Intel and Nokia, and they have a proprietary Android compatibility tool which can run Android apps very well on their phone. There was an article about this tool recently, compared to waydroid by a Gnome developer: https://blogs.gnome.org/jdressler/2023/12/20/a-dive-into-jolla-appsupport/

Maybe all the programmer had better things to do, everyone could see that this current AI hype will just disappear in some years, and they just wanted to show something on MWC, and only the boss had time to dive into this bullshit.