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Yeah, this will be fun. I wrote about Netflix. There was a funny, very brief interaction between Ben Thompson of Stratechery and Netflix co-CEO Greg Peters on last Thursday's Stratechery interview, and they go back and forth. The only mention of AI in like an hour-long interview or something. It's just two little exchanges. Ben says, 'Is AI slop going to save you if it overwhelms the UGC platforms?' And basically it's like you're a refuge. So this is actual, this is real. And Greg Peters just says, 'I think it's credible. I don't know if that's the reality.' So I can't say with certainty that's where we're going to land, but it's a credible possibility. And so he's like, 'Maybe that's a bull case for me. Maybe that's a bull case.' It is interesting. I mean, Netflix has been trading down over the last couple months, but in general, it's up, I think it's 4x up since the launch of ChatGPT and is generally like near all-time highs. Like the business is doing very well. But every CEO needs to contend with the AI question, the AI issue. How will AI change their platform? And AI has already been changing Hollywood. I mean, I was reflecting on the Avengers. When did Infinity War come out? Infinity War, that was what, 2018. I just remember seeing, maybe he was even in one of the first ones. But the whole pro-CGI process for Thanos, he has this like very distinct large chin. So Josh Brolin is the actor that plays Thanos. Is he a mogger?
He is a mogger. He has this huge chin. It's actually like... he's kind of like the OG.
I don't know. He looks like chin implants. It's kind of crazy, but it has these like cracks in it and it has this like very distinct look, Thanos. And normally the way the VFX pipeline works is that you go and you put these black dots all over your face and then you wear a helmet that has a camera pointing at your face. I don't know what type of camera, but it tracks all the points. So when you smile, it sees that the actor that's driving the performance capture is smiling and then that facial movement is transferred. So they're recording the lines, they're acting it out, they're giving their facial performance and then that's transferred, all the little subtleties of how their eyebrows move, all of that is transferred to the CGI character. It can look a little flat though. So what they did with this is they still have all the points on the face, but then they interpolate from the small points that are on the face into a higher-res model. Yes, don't read that. Don't read that. Don't read that. But it is a good point.
I wasn't even reading the chat. I didn't even see that you said that. Of course I was just looking at this absurd picture.
Oh yeah, it is absurd. So all of those are tracking markers. And then the question is like, you have a much higher-resolution CGI model if you just transfer with 50 points or 20 points. You're not getting all the detail of what a human face actually looks like and the way it moves. And so Digital Domain, which was one of the many VFX studios that worked on the Marvel series, they built a straight-up machine learning pipeline. Like they used AI. It wasn't a diffusion model. It wasn't an LLM, but they used a machine learning model to basically translate from the low resolution, just a few dots, to a much higher-resolution mesh that then became the performance of Thanos on the screen. And I don't know if you remember 2018, the movies, obviously, you didn't see any of these movies, but I don't remember like AI back then.
My prefrontal cortex wasn't fully developed.
But truly, like, I mean, people did make the, oh, it's too CGI, the explosions are too crazy, it's too over the top. But in general, people weren't up in arms about like a use of AI or use of too much. Everyone was just like, this is a CGI epic, this is a crazy, you know, Marvel movie, like we're fine with all this. And there wasn't backlash to that. And I don't think that there would be backlash to this type of like AI tool. Now obviously Marvel's Avengers, that's Disney property, but the same VFX pipeline is being used all over the industry and it will continue to be used. Interestingly, I talked to Jason Carman about...
The Carminator, the Carminator, about using AI tools in filmmaking because he's obviously making movies and doing VFX and stuff. And I was like, certainly if you need to rotoscope out a background. So rotoscoping is where you are basically using like, you're cutting out like a subject from the background and then just doing like a background replacement. That's an example of rotoscoping, but it's over motion. So it's moving. So you need to track the hand here, move it over here, track it again, track it again. And it can be very, very time-consuming. Typically this is offshored to like a vendor and then they have a whole team of people that are all animating it and they have some software that's used. But I was like, this feels like something AI could just one-shot. He said that AI was not there at the level that he wanted to deliver. He wanted to deliver in 4K. And so he went to a team. I think he paid them a fortune. They did it. And when they rotoscope a head, they actually like draw new hairs on to like kind of create this. It's very like artisanal still. But obviously AI can rotoscope. You see it in the CapCut edits.
Where's the rotoscoping, Neel?
It's actually Runway. We've had Cristóbal Valenzuela on the show and pre-ChatGPT, Runway had a fantastic AI rotoscoping tool where you could basically load up a video, put a couple dots on what you wanted to keep and then flip over to the red dots and put those in the background and be like, cancel all this out. And it would sort of use that as like an intuition for the model to drop out the background. And you could do a really, really clear like cut this person out of this video just in Runway. And now that's available in CapCut and edits. And that's where you're seeing all those crazy hype reels where you know, you'll see the F1 driver like standing up and then it'll drop out the background and cut in a different background and then the F1 driver drops out and it's like this very like schizo edit. It's a really cool technique. Yeah, you can see this is Runway's editing tool. So it basically draws a mask around it. You just highlight like what do you want to actually rotoscope? This is an example of like adding motion to video, but like you're putting in a little bit of your own aesthetic taste.
Quickly, let me tell you about Restream. One live stream, 30 plus destinations. If you want to multistream, go to restream.com. So, GOAT. So, like, I don't think Netflix should take a hardline stance on AI broadly because they want to use AI tools. Obviously, they've been using AI for recommendations forever. The original collaborative filtering algorithms were machine learning models and that's how you open up Netflix and it says we think this would be good for you based on what you watched. And it is much more nuanced than just if you like, you know, K-pop Demon Hunters, we're going to recommend Squid Game next. Like, it is machine learning. And so many of these rote tasks will be AI-enabled, and they already are. And there's not going to be, I don't think there'll be a crazy pushback here. Although it's possible that there's some sort of, you know, comms mishap, especially if a director comes out and is like, we didn't use any AI in this film because they don't think they used any AI, but there's a VFX house that in the motion capture stage did use AI to up-res motion capture data. Like you could see AI being used in matte painting for the background and the director doesn't even know because they just said like, yeah, the background, just make the forest a little bit bushier and they think that they're hand painting it. After that, they were using CGI and 3D modeling it and now they're using AI and that sneaks in and then all of a sudden they face some backlash.
But I don't think that's, I think that's manageable. I don't think that's that big of a deal.
The bigger question is like how does Netflix position itself against YouTube and the UGC platforms is what we're talking about. So Neal Mohan, the CEO of YouTube, has taken a very open stance on AI. And I liked his stance. He was like, we're not going to throw an AI tag on everything. We're going to let you use AI tools right in the Shorts creator. We have Veo 3. We're great at this. Like, we're going to lean into this and the algorithm will sort out if you like it. And if you think it's slop and you don't want to see slop, the algorithm will learn that and not show you that stuff. But for the people that like that, they will be served it. But it is sort of a balancing act and there's definitely this like stated preference for like, I don't want any AI on my platform. Now, how real is that? We'll see.
Yeah. And what we were getting into earlier before the show started is Netflix's decision, the bigger, like the decision that's bigger than just like are we going to sort of lean into AI or not will just really be do we ever, does Netflix ever lean into UGC, right? They've been signing some bigger podcasts and they obviously work with independent media companies, but there's a very big difference between just allowing people to like, will they ever have an upload button? It feels like no. And I feel like that could end up being their advantage where there is...
Part of what has made YouTube magical since the very beginning was that anybody could go and put YouTube, you know, upload a video, anybody could be a creator. And I think like as the amount of content that gets created...
Yeah, 10x, 100x, 1000x because of AI.
It's going to be it. Yeah. Netflix could be this like refuge where you're like, okay, at least if I go here, I know that there was some filtering process. I know that this isn't just a total free-for-all.
Yeah. Yeah. The upload button is probably a bigger deal than like AI on Netflix.
Exactly. That's, I think that's a very good thesis. Quickly, let me tell you about Confluent. Confluent builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR, and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. And someone was asking in the chat about the Linear lineup. Of course, Linear is the system for modern software development. 70% of enterprise workspaces on Linear are using agents. And we have a great show. Mark Gurman's coming in person. Miles in person. And then we have an amazing lightning round coming up. And I think we got a surprise guest coming on too from Fund over at Voyager and then Mitchell and Gabriel...
Gabe from Rogo. Super excited for that one.
That's fun. So back to Netflix and YouTube. So YouTube has been on an absolute tear in terms of watch time on TVs. According to Nielsen, YouTube has been number one in streaming watch time in the US for nearly three years. And so this has been the backbone of the case for like, let Netflix buy Warner Brothers even though they'll get HBO Max, like you're merging two seemingly big streaming platforms but the combined watch time will still be lower than YouTube. So should be fine from a regulatory perspective. But the bigger question is like, there's this gap between Netflix and YouTube and at the start back in, I mean, Netflix is almost 30 years old. YouTube's over 20 at this point. Back in 2005, like these were seen as like wildly different platforms. One was DVDs in the mail and the other one was like a video of a guy going to the zoo on his like VHS camera. They felt extremely separate and they felt extremely separate for years and years and years. Now they are starting to converge especially around video podcasts. I feel like YouTube really drove a big boom in video podcasting because the podcast was I think invented by Apple or...
Yeah. When I started doing any work with YouTube channels and podcasts back in the day, there wasn't a lot of overlap. It was very clearly like these were just different types of creators. Totally. And then there was a big shift where it was like, wait, I'm leaving a ton of attention on the table if I'm not uploading to YouTube. And that forced a lot of creators to actually get into video.
Totally. Totally. Yeah. There was the pivot to video and then Spotify went really big into video podcasting. They went on a, I didn't realize how big of a push Daniel Ek really did around podcasting. So, seven years ago in 2019, they acquired three companies. Gimlet Media, Anchor, and Parcast.
Anchor. Mike from Lightseed's company.
Yeah. I mean all three very interesting. Anchor is more of like a product. Parcast had a bunch of...
Yeah. Anchor was like, we'll make it easy for you to create a podcast because it's still like a lot of people were there. It was...
It wasn't like it was impossible to figure out, but there was quite a bit of friction.
Yeah. And they knew that everyone who wanted to distribute a podcast wanted to distribute it everywhere. But they could sort of default you to getting into Spotify as well. So, that did very well. And then they signed exclusive deals with Joe Rogan and a bunch of other people. Even like some of the royals also signed a deal. I forget who they are. But they really spent a ton of money trying to get into podcasting. I think they were successful. I mean we see a ton of audience on Spotify.
And interesting the timing. Apparently there was, somebody sent me a chart. There was over a million podcasts launched in 2020.
Oh yeah, you saw that chart.
Jeremy shared this with us and it actually fully retraced to now there's like sub 50,000 a year. That feels like...
You would really have to, maybe they're being extremely explicit about defining what a podcast is. But either way, there was, if you look at the chart, it looks like there was like an insane bull market in podcasts and then a huge correction.
Yeah, it does feel like there was a 2020 boom during COVID. I mean, we talked to the folks at Acquired about that. And they said that during COVID, they saw a huge spike in people like just going for walks, throwing on AirPods. All of that sort of hit around the same time. AirPods were getting to like mass adoption. So, people were just throwing on podcasts constantly and it really, really grew. Anyway, Graphite, code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. So, there is this chance that with YouTube, with the trough at YouTube getting sloppier by the day, that Netflix carves out more of a unique value prop and you wind up seeing more space between the two. So I think of Netflix and YouTube as starting out extremely separate then sort of like coalescing with like Joe Rogan Experience and I mean Portnoy and Bill Simmons both are YouTube dominant and now have Netflix deals, right?
Yeah. Isn't their deal set up so that the video can only be on Netflix? Audio is still elsewhere which is...
Why, why do you remember that? Because Portnoy drilled it into your head. He said, if you want video, Netflix, Netflix, Netflix, you know, video, Netflix, video, Netflix, Barstool, video, Netflix. And it's true like that. And so I would think of Barstool, like if I'm trying to watch a Barstool YouTube video or a podcast, I would just go to YouTube, right? Now Netflix is getting into that. So the gap between Netflix and YouTube is getting like pretty narrow, like they're becoming competitors. But there's this question on the AI issue. Do they diverge more and is that valuable? The pure AI feeds like Sora and Meta, they haven't really been able to hang on to the top spots in the charts. I think Sora is around 60, 70 point ranking. But like it's still too early to call that because the quality will get better and better. The audio is still very like clockable when you hear it. And there's a lot to be done there. But the struggle will be to create like unifying conversations around particular pieces of content that are AI generated. I still feel like the K-pop Demon Hunters moment, the Squid Game moment, the Alex Honnold Taipei 101 moment, these live events, these like key things that everyone talks about are really, really valuable. And that's a lot of what's driving the Warner Brothers acquisition is, you know, people still dress up as Batman around Halloween. And if you can be the place there, that's way easier than, well, I've been getting AI generated content about a superhero, but my superhero is different than your superhero. And so if I wear a t-shirt with that superhero on it, you're like, what is that, like AI slop man? I'm not a fan of that. I like Batman. So there are some things that will remain true. So, yeah, I mean, about the upload button, it's almost better to think about Netflix less as being AI-free and more about being UGC-free. They're paying for curation and a quality bar that's backed up by a brand that's going on 30 years in the business. The AI tools will come, some fully AI generated content will come, but true slop will be filtered out by the Netflix team. And I think that that's important for a lot of viewers.
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Should we talk about Saudi Arabia?
Yes, let's talk about Saudi Arabia. What's going on in the Middle East? According to Bloomberg, Saudi Arabia is widening its search for capital, turning to some of the kingdom's wealthiest families as the government looks to ease pressure on public finances and fund the next phase of the crown prince's economic overhaul. Okay. I saw this headline and was deeply concerned. I was like, why aren't you guys supposed to be funding the whole buildout? Like we were kind of counting on you guys to be, you know, quite liquid while the rest of us over here in America are levering up. So some seemingly somewhat of a liquidity squeeze. This had been reported since back in October and we can get into it a little bit. They're also raising from, they've been trying to raise money from the Qataris. They apparently asked for something like 10 billion and the Qataris and the UAE. Qataris threw in 10b, allegedly the UAE did not and there's frustration around that.
I thought you were going to say they threw in, the Qataris threw in 10b and Saudi Arabia was like, and we deployed it.
We need another... time to reup. So, as part of these efforts, the PIF gathered about a dozen prominent families on the Red Sea last month to assess their appetite for participating in future opportunities. At the summit, which also included others from the private sector, the $1 trillion wealth fund called for more collaboration on deals, the people said, asking not to be identified. Government entities, including the Ministry of Investment, have also stepped up outreach to family offices, wealth managers, domestic businesses. According to some of the people, local families are being sought after to play a bigger role in partnering with global investors to draw more money to the kingdom, they added. So, years of excess expenditure and subdued oil revenues alongside a tighter lending environment have challenged the Gulf nation's ability to bankroll expansive projects planned under the $2 trillion Vision 2030 agenda. Officials this week said they would postpone the 2029 Asian Winter Games and the government had previously pared back spending on other elements of Saudi Arabia's economic rejig. It seems hard to host a winter games, that seems extremely expensive to host a winter games in Saudi Arabia if that's what's going on.
Don't they have some mountains?
They have mountains there. I don't know. Against that backdrop, Riyadh has been stepping up efforts to... Yeah, I know that they have some stuff indoors and I guess you can just do everything indoors, but that again, that feels expensive.
Yeah. So as opposed to like just go to Russia and walk anywhere and you can ski.
Yeah. So they've been developing something with NEOM.
Which is also I guess in the process of pivoting. Before we move on, let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. Against that backdrop, Riyadh has been stepping up efforts to look for alternative sources of financing, including a rare loan deal. Now, a range of local entities have begun to sharpen their focus on Saudi Arabia's family offices and businesses, which collectively control assets worth hundreds of billions of dollars. So, the number of family offices in the Middle East in 2019, 250, 2024, 290. Now we're up to 310 and the projection for 2030 is 350 family offices. There are big portfolios. The wealth is sizable. So the chief executive officer of the National Center for Family Business in Riyadh. These entities have long dominated the Saudi economy and close to 95% of private businesses in the kingdom are family-owned. Interesting. They're not doing a lot of IPOs over there. Many of these groups are only just starting to form family offices. As they grow in size and look to formalize strategies to help spread the wealth across multiple generations, that makes both established and new family offices a prime target for more investment. They're naturally looking to diversify and want to contribute in areas where we've just scratched the surface. In addition, more complex areas of finance are also beginning to emerge, drawing the attention of family offices. That includes private credit, an industry in its infancy in the kingdom as overstretched banks struggle to meet more explosive needs for financing. I like that the financing needs are getting explosive at this moment. Not expansive, not expanding, exploding. Lenders for years have been the primary financiers for individuals, businesses, and government entities looking to drive investment into Saudi Arabia's diversification agenda. But they are starting to pull back as liquidity tightens, leaving many local firms scrambling to find new sources of financing.
Well, we got to bring somebody on to learn more about this.
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Shako says, yes, you're bearish on the US dollar, the token used to buy AI products. Bold.
That's really good. Yes. The US dollar is all over the place. Tether is shaking up the gold market with massive metal hoard. I did not see this. This is interesting. There are roughly 370,000 nuclear bunkers in Switzerland. That's so many. I've seen a video about one of them, but I didn't realize there were so many. The legacy of the Cold War that are now rarely used. One of them, though, is a hive of activity. Every week, more than a ton of gold is hauled into the high-security vault owned by crypto giant Tether Holdings SA, which is now the world's largest known hoard of bullion outside of banks and nation states. Over the past year, Tether has quietly become one of the biggest players in the global gold market. The embodiment of a meeting of the crypto and gold worlds whose shared distrust in government debt is a major factor behind the surge in prices to never-before-seen highs above 5,200. Now it was 5,000 yesterday on the cover of the Journal. Gold is on an absolute tear and yet relatively little is known about its inner workings or its gold strategy. When two of the most senior gold traders quit leading bullion bank HSBC Holdings last year, the industry was abuzz with gossip about where they would head next. Few guessed that the answer was Tether. In an interview with Bloomberg, chief executive Paolo Ardoino described the company's role in the gold markets as similar to that of a central bank and predicted that Washington's geopolitical rivals would launch a gold-backed alternative to the dollar. Interesting. He revealed that it plans to keep plowing its enormous profits into gold while also beginning to compete with banks in trading the metal. We are soon becoming basically one of the biggest, let's say, gold central banks in the world. Interesting. This is like the original crypto narrative, right? E-gold, even before Bitcoin.
Well, was e-gold actually gold-backed?
I think that was the whole pitch was, yeah, it was trying to be digital gold and I don't think it ever really got adoption. It was very early, late 90s.
Yeah, Tether has scale now. They also launched their US-focused stablecoin this week to compete with USDC.
Yeah, the new token known by its ticker USD₮ is being issued by Anchorage. We, I think we had the CEO of Anchorage on at one point. Maybe it was really quick. Anchorage Digital Bank Corporation, which already manages the reserves of Tether's mainstay $186 billion USDT stablecoin, will do the same for the new coin as its designated reserve custodian and preferred primary dealer. So USD₮ is already available for trading as of yesterday. So we'll see. We'll see. It'd be interesting if, like, at what point does USDT depeg?
If gold keeps ripping, right?
Does, I mean, does USDT have a claim on the overall assets of Tether? I think that's not what the product is. I think the Tether stock would own the treasury.
Sure. But historically when you saw a stablecoin like depeg, it was based around the reserves.
Yeah. But I think that the contract is that they'll never give you more than a dollar.
No, I know. I know. But I'm just saying like stranger things have happened in crypto where...
No, it's always been a very profitable company. So certainly bullish for them.
Vanta, automate compliance and security. Vanta is the leading AI trust management platform. There's one funny quote in here. So Tether makes its money from its dollar stablecoin that is the giant of the sector with 186 billion in circulation. The company takes in real dollars in exchange for that USDT token and invests them in treasuries or other assets such as gold, raking in billions in interest and trading profits. Processing the physical metal is crucial, Ardoino said. So much so that the company has taken the unusual step of storing the bullion itself in a former nuclear bunker in Switzerland guarded by multiple layers of thick steel doors. And he says it's a James Bond kind of place. It's crazy. That's a great quote to give Bloomberg. It's just like James Bond. The secretive nature of...
Another, another is a positive, this is a positive reference. It's okay. If you're building a secret bunker to hold all of your gold, I think you can safely use the James Bond analogy.
The secretive nature of the gold market means that while it's easy to describe broad drivers of investment, it can be hard to pinpoint who exactly is behind the buying. China, for example, officially disclosed just 27 tons of purchases last year, but many traders believe it bought much more. Such is the scale of Tether's disclosed purchases that some market watchers have pointed to their role in shifting global prices. The purchases likely contributed to gold's 65% rally last year, Jeff said, describing Tether as a significant new buyer, which could drive sustained gold demand. Still, Tether is only a small part of a much larger rush from investors into gold with central banks and ETF investors collectively buying more than 1,500 tons of metal. I wonder if this is moving the gold watch market. Do you think, you know, the Texas Timex is booming on the back of gold spiking?
We'll see. Yeah, I think a lot of prices are still down pretty dramatically from the 2020-2021 era, but I definitely, I mean, you got to be a little bit scared right now if you're in the business of manufacturing gold watches and other precious metals just given that your input costs are going up. You know, I'm sure they have like one or two years' worth of supply. So they can be somewhat insulated, but prices will go up or at least costs will go up.
Yeah. Well, Fin.ai, the number one AI agent for customer service. If you want AI to handle your customer support, go to Fin.ai. I heard a very funny interview with an actor who was talking about why he always wears a gold Rolex and he was calling it a helicopter watch. Did I send this to you?
Yeah. And he's saying that like...
This was Armie, I think it's Armie Hammer. And he's saying, most like obscure, such a funny situation, but he's like, if you're ever in a crisis, you're on the top of a building, the zombie apocalypse is upon you, someone shows up with a helicopter and they're going to save a few people. Everyone knows what a gold Rolex is and they know that that's valuable. But if you're...
You're not going to have time to be like, no, it's an FP. It's a, it's a PC. You know, like let me explain high horology. Here's aftermarket prices.
Exactly. It's like gold Rolex is a store of value. It's always going to trade and now it's probably going to trade even higher. Yeah.
Anyway, Cisco on February 3rd, the Cisco AI Summit brings together leaders from NVIDIA, OpenAI, AWS, and more to discuss the future of AI and the economy. The whole thing will be live streamed and we'll be there for a gig. Paula says SF escape room called the permanent underclass and it's just a room with a laptop and Claude Code installed.
How do you get... there's something here that's funny.
So good. Have you ever done an escape room?
No, I have never once in my life thought that that would be fun, nor thought that I would... this is how I want to kill time.
Yeah, it's like an hour. Well, if you're good, you get out faster, right?
Yeah. Have you... are you...
I'm not into them, but I've done them and they're fun sometimes. It depends on like if it's a well-structured one. But I like puzzles. Like it's fun. It's like a fun puzzle to figure out, but you can very quickly get caught in like just overthinking what's going on and being like, oh, it must be some like complex math thing. And it's like, no, you actually just needed to like press this lever instead of like analyze the situation or something.
Are some people in there using their phones to try to figure stuff out? Because I imagine you could just say...
I imagine there's only a picture.
There's probably only a series of rooms that you're...
Yeah. Well, usually you start in one room. They're all different, but oftentimes you'll start in one room and then there'll be a series of puzzles, locks and keys and whatnot. And then oftentimes like you'll unlock something and then you'll progress to another room and then you'll progress to a third room and then you'll finally get out of like a series of rooms because it's a lot of like, they're pretty easy to set up in sort of like a defunct office space or like, you know, storefront that's just kind of like, you know, going in between. It's like the Spirit Halloween of commercial real estate. Like you just, like anyone can come in and just say like, oh, we'll be in there for like a couple months. It's not super permanent. The buildout's pretty simple. It's mostly just like some walls and decorations and like some creativity on the puzzle side.
Says, can you guys put Tyler in an escape room and see if he gets out before the show ends?
I mean, it'd be very hard to find a three-hour-long escape room. I think most of them, they aim for like 45 minutes.
Well, maybe we need to make one.
One of our guests had to leave the Ultradome and go straight to an escape room. So, you know, there are escape room fans among the TBPN army all over the place. Have you done one, Tyler?
Are you interested in it? You're a speedcuber, so you know.
Yeah. I mean, could be fun. I don't know. I'm kind of in the Jordi camp, though. I've just like never been super...
It's very like, I don't know. Maybe it's great with, it's probably great with like kids who are maybe like 8 to 10 who can do the puzzles. Like family event would be fun. And then it was a common thing like when they came out, there was definitely like a boom in escape rooms.
Bobby in the chat says escape room would be a good benchmark for AI. Certainly a humanoid.
No, I mean you could go in there, take pictures and be like, help me solve this, help me solve this, help me solve this.
I know, but I want to see a humanoid run through it.
Let's call 1X. See what they can do.
Call any of them. Hit them up.
Figma Make isn't your average vibe coding tool. It lives in Figma, so outputs look good, feel real, and stay connected to how teams build. Create code-backed prototypes and apps fast. Moving on. Lots of reaction to Claudebot. Very much enjoyed our interview with the creator of Claudebot, now Moltbot, yesterday.
One of... Yeah. Incredibly, he had some wild lines, but incredibly refreshing kind of conversation and viewpoint.
Totally. It's totally counter to the entire philosophy that I feel like a lot of people at least on the West Coast are in the way that they're approaching AI right now and the way that America is approaching AI. He's like, we asked, you know, you think somebody will like, you know, fork what you're doing or clone it and he's like, yeah, I'm sure they will, like I don't care.
Yeah, I'm building this for myself.
Yeah. And he's like, I have enough money. And I'm super...
It's going to be really fun to follow along. I have a feeling that he's just going to keep launching a bunch of random projects because he clearly is just in it for the love of the game, but I do hope that he can get a lot more resources and really scale up.
I don't know that he needs more resources. Like he has more agents and whatnot. Like the interesting thing about Claudebot as a product is you download it from GitHub, it installs and it has all these different integrations and it does something that's very complex and it has, you know, all this safety text and different, there's a website and there's a community page and all of that feels like, okay, yeah, this is like a 10-person startup, they probably worked on this for a year, but it's like, no, it's one person and it's like three months because the guy is, you know, using agents. You would think that he would build, his big complaint was the security, like inbound security researchers asking him stuff.
Yeah. It's like bought it.
I think he will. I think he should. But yeah, he said, he posted December 26, he had his like Codex dashboard up. So he said he's done 250 billion tokens, which is like probably top 10 users only from... So I don't know that he needs way more resources. I mean, he should be able to get donations if he needs them, get credits or something. I don't know, like the financial strain on that business does not seem, it seems like it's more constrained by his ideas, you know, how he's thinking about designing the system, integrating things, rolling it out, buddy-buddy of...
Michael watched the interview and he said that he's had Claudebot set up — he set it up right at the beginning of January and was initially just kind of got a little frustrated using it, but he's got it set up so that it's able to make phone calls on his behalf. Specifically wants to get Hillstone reservations. So he just basically...
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So he's just like going to use it to start getting like reservations at different restaurants.
It's so funny. Google has a product for that that does an AI phone call, but for some reason it just hasn't really rolled out, or it just hasn't gotten to adoption. I don't know. There's some sort of mimetic — I think people seeing the clip where he's like explaining how he's feeling the AGI really, really hit people.
Obviously he has it make him a daily brief that feeds into an RSS like on a podcast. So in the morning he can just listen to like a five-minute podcast on like what his day is like, things that he should be responding to. It seems like you could have...
Worst podcast ever. Your enemy texted you something and you'll be deeply upset when you see what happened. Everyone's praying on your downfall. No, no. Security is important with Claudebot, now Moltbot. CrowdStrike is also important. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches.
A random 10-person team in Paris just dropped what looks like something superior to Claudebot, according to Chubby on X. It's called Twin, the AI company builder.
Yeah, they raised a $10 million seed round. They have over a hundred agents deployed.
So Tyler, give it a spin, check it out. Twin Labs.
There's a community note on here, this is undisclosed advertisement. But Doug over at SemiAnalysis, fabricated knowledge says, 'I think that Claudebot is going to be a moment and yeah, someone's going to do this.' And I'm still wondering about like how quickly a business can actually scale when you're getting constantly hammered with ToS violations from every Mag 7 legal department constantly, like, 'Hey, we noticed that you built a CLI for the web interface on WhatsApp and we don't want you to do that.' And it's one thing if it's like an open-source repo that people are running themselves and can change and can edit and fix and tweak versus like, 'Hey, you're a corporation that we could potentially sue or tie up in litigation or go on a press tour around.' It's just a very different dynamic.
Yeah. And the prompt injection risk as well.
Yeah, totally. It's like, does that liability fall back on the company? And I'm excited to talk to Mark Gurman about how he's processing this with what will happen with Siri, the timelines there, what will be integrated, because Apple and the iOS ecosystem should have a lot of the same functional hooks into these products.
We talked about this Monday. There was a team that built a product which sold to Apple and became Shortcuts, and then they built software applications incorporated in a product called Sky, and they were pre-launch, and OpenAI acquired it. It was focused on integrating AI into the operating system, and so you can imagine OpenAI behind the scenes has been cooking on a lot of stuff like this.
But this isn't the kind of thing that you can just at OpenAI scale just say, 'Hey, we're going to just ship this and see what happens.'
Whereas a startup or an open-source project.
Yeah. Let me tell you about Lambda. Lambda is the superintelligence cloud, building AI supercomputers for training and inference that scale from one GPU to hundreds of thousands. There are a lot of people building stuff on Moltbot, around Moltbot, around the concept. There's actually someone in the chat that's working on a Claudebot for the cloud. He says he has a name. I'm very excited to learn more about his project. I think his name is Jeff in the chat. Brexton says, 'Yes, that was fast.' Yep. Software is cooked because Kayn Y says, 'Introducing Moltbot for Teams. One-click connections to all the apps. Client-side encrypted and builds your team's memory.' Get Your Momo is the product. I wonder, this feels like almost something where if you've been building a product that's like this, you should potentially reintroduce it on the back of all the Moltbot hype. And if you're a multi-entitled agent that can touch a lot of different systems, well, we'll put it in terms that people understand and say, 'Hey, this is Moltbot for the enterprise and it has these functions and these benefits and this security approach.' But clearly a lot of people will be focused on this. Let's click over to re-watching the interview with the Claudebot creator Peter Steinberger, because I want to hear about his AGI moment, the AGI achieved moment. First, I'm going to tell you about Gusto, the unified platform for payroll, benefits, and HR built to evolve with modern small and medium-sized businesses. And then we will play the video from Claudebot Creator. I want to see.
So in November, yeah, I don't know, you know, I wake up every day. I'm like, okay, what do I want to work on now? What would be cool? And then I was like, okay, I want to chat with my computer on WhatsApp because if my agents are running and then I go to the kitchen, I want to check up on them or I want to do little prompts.
So I just hacked together some WhatsApp integration that literally receives a message, calls Claude Code, and then returns what Claude Code returns. One shot.
And it took like one hour and it worked. I was like, 'Well, okay, that's kind of cool.' But I usually use prompts, like a little text and an image, because images often give you so much context and you don't have to type so much.
So I feel like this is like one of the hacks where you can prompt faster, just like make a screenshot. The agents are really good at figuring out what you want. So I hacked together images and then I was on a trip in Marrakesh, like a weekend birthday trip, and I found myself using this way more than I thought, but not for programming. It's more like, hey, there's restaurants, because it had Google in it and it could figure out stuff, and especially when you're on the go, it is super useful. And I wasn't thinking, I was just sending it a voice message, you know, but I didn't build that. There was no support for voice messages in there. So the reading indicator came and I'm like, 'Oh, I'm really curious what's happening now.' And then after 10 seconds, my agent replied as if nothing happened. I'm like, 'How the f did you do that?' And it replied, 'Yeah, you sent me a message, but there was only a link to a file with no file ending. So I looked at the file header. I found out that it's Opus, so I used FFmpeg on your Mac to convert it to WAV. And then I wanted to use Whisper, but didn't have it installed, and there was an install error. But then I looked around and found the OpenAI key in your environment. So I sent it via curl to OpenAI, got the translation back, and then I responded.' And that was like the moment where, like, wow, you know, it's like that's where it clicked. These things are like damn smart, resourceful beasts if you actually give them the power. Beasts.
Apploving.
The ad at the end, I love it. Yeah, people were reacting to this. People are genuinely not ready, says Vittorio. Lots... Well, that's the...
One way, the reason that I feel like that is such a powerful moment and I'm glad that he shared it is if you're talking with a model and you give it a task and then it just hits a dead end, it's just incredibly — that's sort of like people are very used to that right now.
And it's not that it needs to be that way, but it's just kind of like the steady state. Yeah, people are used to like, okay, I know what models can do.
That's effectively the agent having real agency. That makes it an agent. Yeah. It's saying like, well, I didn't know how to do this or I was confused and I tried a number of things until I did what you wanted, right? And that's like what you want out of a team member, right? If you're working with somebody on a project and they have a task, they don't just try one thing and come back or just say like, 'I actually can't handle this because the file type is wrong.' It's like, convert it, figure it out.
What was your reaction, Tyler?
Yeah. I mean, it's like pretty insane. Definitely. It definitely raised my chance of permanent underclass.
You know, it's making me a little worried.
Yeah. Will says, 'It's over. It's over. We need to move.' And there are a lot of people quoting this. G Fodor has the Eleazar Udowkowski meme and lots of people here. Lots of people were noting that he uses Codex here. Run said, 'Codex 5.2 is really amazing, but using it from my personal and not work account over the weekend taught me some user empathy. Lol. It's a bit slow.' And Euchin Jin says, 'Every time I ask my OpenAI friend, when will you beat Claude at coding? They say, we already beat them. I think Sam is realizing speed, not intelligence, is Codex's blocker to a Claude Code moment. Cerebras chips might unlock a Codex moment.' Yeah, that would be very interesting. And that's one of the — the models are so powerful now that there's so many moments where it can deliver because it can work around all these problems. But if you're like, 'I need this done in five minutes, I'll just do it myself.'
Yeah. Like 5.2 Pro is like an incredible model, but it just takes like five, six, 10 minutes every time you prompt it totally because it's kind of like thinking or you know, deep research type model. Yeah. Yeah.
Well, let me tell you about Labelbox. Reinforcement learning environments, voice, robotics, evals, and expert human data. Labelbox is the data factory behind the world's leading AI teams. I like the fireworks.
Do some fireworks for that.
I like the fireworks. What else is in here? So you already mentioned this, Tyler, but Peter's probably in the top 10 users of Codex at the moment. Over 250 billion tokens in a few months is a lot. So how much does that actually cost? That feels like you're up in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Yeah. How much does it say?
That's not much. Wow. Yeah. Usage cost and he has a streak going of 74 days. No days off. Yeah. So $51,000 for this type of result. Pretty remarkable. So where do we move the goalpost now if...
I'm so... what are you unhappy with? I know there's going to be something that you're unhappy with about AI. Like you can't be satisfied.
Permanently dissatisfied.
Well, part of it's a bit...
Oh, yeah. I know. Obviously, but I have to provide like an alternate opinion. But of course, we have the goalpost here. We have been sitting in one place. Yes.
I guess what I'd be interested in is Peter and his team built a hit product, an entire novel experience that has taken the world by storm. And how much did we know they only spent a few months on it? How many people actually worked on it and what was their total spend on tokens, right? Because you sort of see that from the GitHub commits, right? Probably for some sort of average.
Yeah. Yeah. I'm sure you can do that. I mean, just based off that it's like, okay, $51,000 on 250 billion tokens and a lot of those tokens are probably using Claudebot to do things, right? Not just building it, right?
Yeah. I mean, that was over how many months? Like all those tokens were not just on Claudebot. Yeah.
That was just all of his like hundreds of... And he says he talks to Opus 4.5 all the time too. So I wonder what numbers he's putting up there. But still, it's interesting that it's not in the millions. Like it's pretty accessible. I don't know. We need to find a new AGI benchmark.
Okay. So I think maybe it's something like this, right? So I think one of the main takeaways I have from this is just that like big model companies can't really release an equivalent product just because of the integration thing, right? Mag 7 companies are not going to talk to each other. You're not going to get OpenAI in WhatsApp like this. So it really...
But do you think they would go so far as to say we are not going to allow you to navigate our applications using something like...
I mean that's literally happening with like the New York Times does not allow OpenAI to browse it with a bot. Like you can go...
Yeah. But it's different having your local device being effectively used by a computer just using itself.
At the same time, if OpenAI has the Chat app right now, if you go to the ChatGPT website and you say, 'Hey, I'm a subscriber to the New York Times and there's an article in the business section that I want you to summarize for me. Here's a link. Can you open the link and turn it into some bullet points for me?' It'll just say like, 'No, no, no. I can't go over there.' Like they said, 'Don't go. I'm not going.' Right now, if I download the ChatGPT app and it's able to run that and maybe the New York Times can't block it, the New York Times still has the ability to sue OpenAI and be a headache. So then they can say, 'Hey, enforce the same thing.'
I'm talking about a situation where the user, let's say they have a Mac Mini, they're running Moltbot, they on the computer, they've given Moltbot their New York Times login. So it's fully logged in. And they're a paying New York Times subscriber.
I think users would be upset that you're saying if the New York Times says we're not going to allow, we're going to figure out a way to try to... Yeah. Yeah.
I don't even know how you would go about trying to actually stop that activity. But I'm just saying even I can imagine users are basically going to demand — if my data, I don't care if my data is stored in the cloud. I want to be able to access it on any device that I'm logged into even if I'm not physically present with the device. Right. And so I just think it's going to be a really, really, really tough argument for some of these larger companies to say you can only access your data if you are physically moving the mouse yourself.
Yes. I want to get Tyler's response, but first I'm going to tell you about Cognition. They're the makers of Devin, the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. Tyler, what are you thinking?
Okay. Yeah. So I agree. I think basically what you're describing is that all these companies need incredible deal guys, right? This is the whole thesis like the deal guys with open source with this hacker culture you can kind of always get around these rules. Is it maybe breaking terms of service? Like, yes, definitely. These big companies can't do it. They need more deal guys, right? But it's like hard to find these deal guys. You need the AI to become the deal guy. So you need a Claudebot deal guy. That's the new benchmark.
That's the new benchmark.
You're going to be good at making deals.
Okay. Quad AI that can do a deal between two Mag 7 companies. Here we go.
There we go. There we go. Move it to the other side.
I want to see... Tyler, why do you... I kind of want to take this a little bit further just because I don't know, like how do you actually enforce this? Is Google Drive going to say you need to have your camera on and we need to see that you're sitting in front of your computer actually using it?
I mean, you can always do these like bot detection stuff with like whatever it's coming from, the same IP, these things. I think it's like kind of a constant race. But like I think the open source stuff will, if you like really grind it out, you can kind of always get around this stuff. And so like the only real solution is to have like actual deals between these different companies.
Yeah. I think that if you have an app from a big company that enables you to do something like if Chrome started shipping with a torrent browser, something that would allow you to manage torrents, which are not illegal, like that's just software. You can just download torrents that are not piracy. Like I can just be like, 'Hey, I put up a torrent of TBPN content and anyone can download it.' But just by virtue of the fact that it's so prevalently used to pirate media, they would face pressure from media owners like Warner Brothers and Disney and they would get angry letters and they would strike a deal and say, 'Okay, yes, we're not going to enable this.' And so if any of the big tech companies launch an app that enables behavior that other apps don't like, they will have leverage and they all have deals together and they all have legal teams and there's a bunch of different pressures that they can apply and it's this constant negotiation. 'Oh well, maybe we won't renew this deal or this contract. Maybe we'll go with someone else.' If you're the bad actor, you'll get pushed out, right? So I don't know. I think it's going to be a big debate. I would be surprised if any of the big labs just launch something that can actually just go anywhere and do anything because of the pushback.
But do you think this is something that will — why would this just not happen at the OS layer?
I mean then you need Apple to actually lock in.
Yeah. And that's why we're having Mark Gurman on the show to break down Apple's strategy and what they're doing. Anyway, interesting. MongoDB, choose a database built for flexibility and scale with best-in-class embedding models and rerankers. MongoDB has what you need to build what's next. Kimi 2.5 is out and Alex Cheema is running it on his desk. It runs at 24 tokens per second with two M3 Ultra Mac Studios connected via Thunderbolt. He went much bigger than the Mac Mini. And Jo, by the way, apparently Kimi likes to be — refers to itself as Claude. Yeah. What happened here? Tyler, can you break down what's going on with Kimi?
Yeah. I mean, it's always kind of unclear with the Chinese open source models like what they're actually doing to train the models. So there's like... So when you ask the models like 'introduce yourself', it's like 'Hello, I'm Claude.'
So there's probably like two scenarios. One is that they trained on the outputs of like Opus or an Anthropic model, right?
You'd think that they would just find and replace in the training data though, you know, like that would be pretty easy to just be like, okay, we're going to scrape a ton of responses from Claude. Let's make sure we do a find and replace on Claude so that if it says, 'Hi, I'm Claude, I'm a helpful assistant,' it just changes that. That's just like an...
Yeah. I mean, you would expect that Kimi knows that it's going to call itself Claude.
So it's like why would they allow that? Maybe they're just basically like mogging Anthropic like, 'Oh yeah, we have Claude. What are you going to do about it?'
Yeah. Like what are you going to do?
And then there are also some rumors, like very unclear if this is just like completely fake headlines, but like maybe there was some leaked checkpoint that somehow got out to China and then they did a fine-tune on it or something.
Yeah. That would be pretty crazy if...
Yeah, people have said it before for other models. I'm not really sure how reliable they are. Yeah.
But it seems fairly very likely that they just trained on Opus outputs.
Because people said DeepSeek did that originally with ChatGPT. Yeah. I talked to one technologist about what it takes to reverse engineer the GPT-4 API and it's a surprisingly low amount of outputs to sort of interpolate all the weights or something that approximates it. So it's clearly sort of a game back and forth, just like a constant war.
I think it's probably a good sign for US AI labs that the Chinese models are essentially just completely based off the US ones. Like they're not actually training these models from scratch.
They're not doing these incredible training runs for much cheaper like people say. They're actually just basically copying off the US.
Do you think that's because of just chip restrictions or actual architectural hurdles?
Yeah, it's probably all of them. Like it's hard to figure out the architecture. You don't have the chips to try these different science projects, training runs.
Wow. The Chinese models lag by exactly how long it takes to scrape the API basically and do a fine-tune. What a coincidence. That's...
Dean Ball has been on a tear the last 24 hours. He said, 'People significantly underrate the current margins of AI labs. It's yet another way in which pattern matching to the technology and business trends of the 2010s has become a key ingredient in the manufacturing of AI copium.' Copium. And he says this Derek Mohler post was very informative here. 'Just look at the market clearing prices on inference from open source models and you can tell the big labs' pricing has plenty of margin. Deep Infra has GLM 4.7 at 43 cents in, $1.75 out. Sonnet is at $3 in, $15 out. How could anyone think Anthropic isn't printing money per marginal token?' And Dean Ball says the reason they think labs lose money is because 10 years ago some companies in an entirely unrelated part of the economy lost money on office rentals — WeWork — and taxis — Uber — and everyone thought they would go bankrupt because at that time another company that made overhyped blood tests did go bankrupt. That is literally the level of ape-like pattern matching going on here. The machines must look at our chattering classes and feel great appetite.
Yeah. You could also have seen that the margins from the whole OpenCode thing with Anthropic. Oh yeah. Right. Where there was OpenCode. So Anthropic, they have Claude Code right there. You can get the Claude subscription and you get like free Claude Code tokens and then you could use those for OpenCode and they removed that. Yeah. And the whole reason you would want to do that is because the Claude Code tokens versus like actual Claude API, yeah, is like a 10x difference. So there's like a massive markup to the actual API. Mhm.
So you assume that unless Anthropic is losing just insane amounts of money on Claude Code, which maybe they're losing some amounts of money, it's like...
Well, you look back at the — I forget which interview Dario was doing where he was trying to get people to think about like you think of each model as a company where you spend all this money on training which is capex. And then when you're actually running the model, it's very profitable. But if you look at the business as a whole, you have massive, massive losses from training and stock-based comp and hiring 400 of the best engineers in the world. So if you actually look at it company-wide, you have continued scaling, massive losses.
But the important thing is effectively at the product level when they're selling the product they actually are making money. So in the S-1, good to you and to me, it looks like training clearly broken out as capex, solid gross margins above 60%, something like that on inference, and then all of the AI copium can probably subside if OpenAI or Anthropic go out with an S-1 that shows really solid inference margins. And if it comes out that their inference margin is like 10% or something, then people are going to be panicking.
To be clear, I think these will be some of the most special S-1s that have ever graced the financial — the capital markets. Be great. Let me tell you about Sentry. Sentry shows developers what's broken and helps them fix it fast. That's why 150,000 organizations use it to keep their apps working. And without further ado, we have Mark Gurman, the managing editor of Bloomberg, in the Ultradome. Welcome to the show. Thank you so much for taking the time to come on down there.
We'll have this microphone for you. You have a Diet Coke, so you're locked in.
How have you been? How's your new year going so far?
Yeah. My wife and I had a baby at the end of last year.
Gong. I need to get one of those things that you guys make on Twitter. Just me — the card.
We'd be happy to do that. We're happy to do it. We never know. Some people want to be more lowkey about it.
Oh, I am lowkey about it. I just figured, you know...
But how do you rate parenthood? How does it feel being in it versus all the expectations that people have?
Just taking care of this individual and they're being so reliant on us and getting to teach them. But shout out to my wife for being the one really pulling the strings there and taking care. So it's great.
I feel like reporting and parenthood are especially hard to balance in some ways. I would imagine — well, obviously it's completely possible and you're clearly doing fine, but the nature of the work means that a story is happening and you want to be the first to provide the best coverage and sometimes, you know, the baby's crying on you and you might not be able to pick up the phone.
But you get through. You know what? People have been hearing crying babies over the phone for forever. So they'll have to deal with it. I just can't wait till we go on an airplane.
Like I already told my wife like we're gonna get like banned from American Airlines.
No, I've said this on the show before. The funniest thing is growing up I assumed that when a baby was crying on the airplane, it means that the parents were bad parents. Like they were doing something wrong.
And in reality, babies just cry for a million reasons. And it's totally possible that there's no solution. Sometimes they just need a...
Yeah. I saw like an Instagram reel of a mother talking about her kid and the kid was crying in the background. I was like, why would you take advice from her? Like that's such a bad moment.
Yeah, it has nothing to do with it at all. Like now the baby's always crying.
Hungry. They have gas. They don't like the sweater they're wearing.
You know, they didn't like my article. You know, who knows? But anyways, let's talk about Apple.
Let's talk about Apple. I mean, we've been talking about new Siri expectations there. The big news yesterday was Claudebot. Have you been — how have you been processing the Claudebot, now Moltbot story? What's possible there? Expectations around AI assistance feel sky-high in the open source community. Do you think anyone at Apple's updating on Claudebot and Moltbot and what's possible?
Well, let me just take a step back with Apple and AI. So in 2018, they hired John Giannandrea. He was this high flyer at Google. He ran AI and search and Apple thought they had a coup here. Apple thought they would hire this guy and really just hit the ground running and be at the forefront of artificial intelligence. Just seven years earlier they announced Siri in 2011. There was absolutely nothing like it. It was breakthrough.
But then it just became utter junk. Right. Google Assistant lapped it. Alexa lapped it. So they thought they were gonna bring this guy in and it'd be a game changer. Turns out, and maybe this will be Tim Cook's fade to comply, but this was the biggest mistake, this hire, of Tim Cook's tenure. I think it's easy to say Apple is so behind in AI. There's been so much ink spilled on this and so many conversations on this and I've written about and talked about it half a million times. I think you haven't even scratched the surface about how big of a problem this is for Apple, right? They've completely screwed up AI in every which way and it comes down to just hiring the wrong people and entrusting the wrong people.
But is it a do-nothing-win scenario because I think we're seeing a situation now where the Mac Mini might end up selling out, boxing is fine, or is seeing like financial...
The stock, that's the problem, right? When you've had no real negative hit, it's hard to go wartime.
And acknowledge that there is failure because all the numbers are...
The numbers are great. Tomorrow...
They might report their first $135 billion to $140 billion quarter, right? Let's go. Like I don't — you know, the problem is how can you put $140 billion and 'Tim Cook needs to go retire' in the same sentence, right? It doesn't make sense. But when you think about the long term, you think about the future, these things are going to need to get rectified. And I guess the good news is they are on a path to rectifying it to some extent. This Google Gemini deal is a breakthrough for Apple. It's embarrassing. I mean, it's absolutely crazy that you poach their guy and then years later you're paying them billions. He screws you up. Okay, you pay him $25 million a year for eight years, right? And then now you're paying basically 4x that, 8x that, maybe a little bit more in order to get the new good stuff. And so they'll announce a new Siri next month. Mhm. But the thing with this new Siri is basically a replay of everything they announced in June 2024. So it's basically everything they announced two years ago coming very late. Things like using what's on your screen to fulfill Siri queries, being able to control your apps. And then in June is when the good stuff launches. That's when Apple launches its first chatbot.
It's interesting because they've spent the last two years saying nobody likes chatbots. Everyone hates ChatGPT. It's terrible. It's ruining the world. Okay. And then you have ChatGPT with nearly a billion active users. So they're like, 'Okay, we kind of got to do this or we're screwed.'
And it's actually going to run on Google servers, Google Cloud Platform, Google TPUs.
This is great for Google too.
And I think some people at Apple think this is going to be like a short-term thing. You know, we're going to partner with Google till we get our act together. No, I definitely think that this is more of a long-term play unless these models continue to get commoditized, which they will eventually, but this is not a 12, 24, 36-month thing. This is longer term, I think, than people expect.
And Apple can't just go wrap Llama because of the terms of service that Meta has put around that. They said you can't...
I don't think they want to use Llama. I don't think they want to work with open source models. So there aren't that many games in town. Well, let's take a step back here. So they're using Google in the US, right? But they're going to have to do something in China, okay? And so you'll see them use a combination of Alibaba and I think it's Weibo or Tencent or one of those different AIs for different features. And so they'll use them. And just because they're partnering with Google Gemini on Siri in this chatbot doesn't mean they're not using other players. There's a lot of OpenAI in a lot of applications. They launched their Creative Cloud competitor today and a lot of those AI features are powered by ChatGPT, like some image generation stuff.
I still think on an image generation side you're getting a little bit better on OpenAI than you're getting from Google. And then a lot of stuff internally like Apple runs on Anthropic at this point. Anthropic is powering a lot of the stuff Apple's doing internally in terms of product development, a lot of their internal tools. So that's a big one to watch. They have custom versions of Claude running on their own servers internally too, because this Google deal, this just came together a few months ago. They were not going to use Google. Apple actually was going to rebuild Siri around Claude. But Anthropic, they were holding them over a barrel. They wanted a crap ton of money from them, several billion dollars a year, and at a price that doubled on an annual basis as well for the next three years or so from what I understand. At the time, Google was really an afterthought because they were in the middle of the trial with the Department of Justice. And then for some reason, the judge ruled that Apple and Google's deal was kosher, even though everyone knows it's a huge issue and a monopoly and all that. I'm not here to be a judge, which I write, I don't make judgments for legal proceedings, but anyways, Apple and Google get off scot-free. They can do whatever they want now, and they're not being held back at all. And then obviously OpenAI, that is a real firestorm for Apple right now. Like OpenAI, obviously, they're working on these AirPods competitors that ChatGPT built. Sweet Pea is running the show and design there. That's a big freaking deal. Okay. He raided the whole design team. All of the Apple designers that were there under Jony Ive — not all of them, 95% of them are gone. A ton of them are now working at LoveFrom and OpenAI and other companies. Some of them have retired. But the crux of it is like how do you partner with a company that's trying to put you out of business, right? So there's no way that they were going to work with OpenAI no matter how good the...
What do you think about some of the projections that you've seen or kind of estimates around — I forget — was it Foxconn was saying yeah, preparing to be able to produce something like that in the first year? It feels like a massive number but at the same time you have a billion users talking about the OpenAI earbuds. Sweet. You know what's so interesting — and one more thing there. The earbuds, the benefit of them versus some of these other AI hardware is like if you can just take calls and listen to music, already you have some functionality that people are using all day long. So it's not the same as like wearing a pendant or having some other little gadget that like actually...
Serves no real use case, or at least not a powerful use case. If I can just listen to calls—or sorry, take calls, listen to music—at least there's like some base-level functionality, and then you layer on the AI, and maybe it turns into this amazing, you know, super differentiated experience.
I just don't see them selling 45 million units. I just don't see it being a success. The barrier to entry for a new hardware company, as you know, is extremely high. Like, can you even think of one hardware company that just came into being and became an immediate success? Like, I just don't see it. And I also think the reason they're doing earbuds is because it's more low-hanging fruit, to your point, and it's easier to accomplish.
Isn't that what they wanted to do? What OpenAI wanted to do is they wanted to create an iPhone killer. Instead, now they're trying to create an AirPods killer. And I don't think they're going to be able to accomplish that. Will they look nicer than the AirPods? Probably. Will they have better AI than the AirPods? That's an open question, right? What stops Apple from expanding this Gemini deal to its AirPods and just basically adding a bunch of AI functionality to the AirPods? They have very fast processors, very tight iPhone integration. Apple can replicate whatever OpenAI is going to do pretty quickly by relying on Google and Gemini and whatever they can cook up functionality-wise there.
Do you think that AI-specific products—you know, we had the creator of Maltbot on yesterday, and he was saying like there's so many applications, and he was referencing like MyFitnessPal. Do I really need MyFitnessPal if I can just take a picture and just send it in to my agent and it'll track it? And so what I was thinking there is like, does that make the App Store broadly potentially less of a hurdle if OpenAI is launching, eventually launches a new phone and they have a new OS and they don't have an App Store? They don't have an App Store on day one.
The equivalence of apps on the fly.
Well, if you ask me, you know, we're already in territory where iOS and the App Store are legacy features, right? Like the App Store is a legacy world. The iOS user experience, the macOS user experience where you're jumping between applications, where you're going into something to get information, where you're going back to your home screen to launch another app—apps are the past. AI agents are already here, and that's the move forward.
And whenever OpenAI comes out with a phone—and I do eventually anticipate them coming out with a phone—and when I say phone, I'm not talking necessarily about something you put to your ear like a classic phone, like an iPhone. I'm talking about—I feel like people are always going to have some sort of slab in their pocket, right? Because it's convenient. You get the display, you get the sensors, you get the battery, you get the cameras. It's not a replicable experience no matter how many different gadgets you put on your body.
Make a like a banana, like a plastic banana, smart banana. Yeah, that would be fun.
Yeah. So, yeah, AI agents are where the world is going, and I totally expect Apple to move in this direction. This new Siri Campo that they're launching at the end of this year—that is a huge step towards the AI agentification of different features on the phone and being able to, for instance, tell your phone, 'Pull up this photo that I took at the studio. Find photos where I have bottles of water and remove the bottle of water from the photo and email her, text it to Mark,' right? Like the AI agentification of iOS is happening.
Sure. Yeah. And theoretically, Siri should have killed like the weather app a long time ago because I don't like when you think about like if you're just going to navigate to the weather app and you're traveling somewhere and you're like, 'Oh, where is this city? Oh, I don't have it saved. I'm going to search and add it.' And then you're like finally looking at it, and it should just be a prompt. But then when you try and click a level deeper, when in the current Siri experience, you just can't get that.
That is the big problem with Siri, and the big difference from ChatGPT and Gemini is it has the going-a-level-deeper problem. There's no back and forth. It forgets context very easily. It has no memory. It doesn't have that tight integration with applications because the app developers—they know Siri is so terrible.
You know, here's a question. So, what if I told you that you could call an Uber with Siri, right? Like, you guys probably know that, but like, does anyone use it? I don't have the data, but I can tell you that they announced support for that and they actually rolled out support—no, 10 years ago.
Okay. It doesn't work. And no, because nobody uses it because it's too cumbersome.
Okay. Like, I'm very tech-forward, as anyone watching this probably knows. You know, it's right up my alley to have Siri call my Uber for me, but like I've never done it because you know what? I don't freaking trust it.
It's not—I don't think it's going to work, and it's just going to be a time suck.
And people didn't trust ChatGPT with 3.5, but now on 5.2 Pro—
I would trust ChatGPT with ordering. I would trust ChatGPT with my life.
Okay. But Siri—okay, so on the Siri rollout, it seems like there's a couple milestones that we're going to be tracking throughout this year. When do you think I'll be able to go to Siri and just say a general Google question, you know, 'Give me the history of the Roman Empire'? The type of thing that any LLM can just pull up a couple paragraphs on, but current Siri does not have that ability.
Okay, I can't tell you that you're going to be able to do it. I can tell you that you're supposed to be able to do it. How's that? I'll speak. I'll speak.
I just mean—I just mean, is that like, what's the goal?
No, no. I just mean like there's knowledge retrieval end of March, and then there's like agentification, like making interacting with the apps, doing all the things like pulling what's in your camera roll together with your iMessage and all that. And that feels harder for both of those. End of March. They're supposed to be end of March, but the latter in terms of the app manipulation and the AI agent, that's going to be split probably between—
Because that seems harder than just integrate Gemini and just give people the Gemini answers when they ask Siri for a question.
You know, it's so funny. I look back to WWDC 2024, and obviously I made a big deal about all the delays because of course I did. But then you think about it, it's like—was anyone going to use any of these features anyways? Like we're talking about a few features that were delayed, and you look back at the announcement of these features at WWDC 2024. It's like Apple totally downplayed them too. Like they gave a few cool demos, but it's like this is some game-changing stuff if it's marketed correctly.
Yeah. So, not only did they pre-announce it, not only did they delay it, but like they didn't even market what they had in the hand correctly, which I guess in hindsight, like you should have realized that it wasn't that compelling or ready to go if they weren't going to market it. Because I'm telling you, they can market anything.
How do you see search fitting into Siri? Because so much of what people are using LLMs for is search now, and you're seeing more commerce integrations. And I've always thought the lab's like obsession with the browser was interesting because in many ways like I feel like using LLMs, it already feels like you're using a browser. It's just kind of a new experience. And a big question is like, okay, so Google's powering the new Siri. What happens when people start doing searches with high intent in Siri?
Do you Google search anymore?
I don't. I specifically still Google search when doing like product research, shopping, etc.
I still go to Google if it's something that I know is fastest in Google. So today I wanted to know what year the Avengers movie came out, and I know that that's half a millisecond in Google, and I know that that's 5 seconds in any LLM, and so I'll Control-T to go there. But for any level deeper, I also wanted to know about the VFX house that worked on it and what technology they used and when that happened. That was an LLM query.
Yeah. I don't really use Google anymore. I have my action button on my phone set to ChatGPT, and I'm just like living in ChatGPT.
You can't ask it the weather.
Can't ask it to do anything on your phone.
That's I guess the differentiator for what the new Siri is going to be.
They've built a feature called World Knowledge Answers, the internal name, and it's basically a Perplexity ripoff or a web search ripoff in ChatGPT, which is to bullet out summaries and information and give you citations and context.
Is it using Google directly for that or is it some other?
Okay, it's an Apple solution.
But what they've been trying to do now is under the hood change that to the Gemini model. Again, all this stuff was supposed to come out—
Because Gemini is very good at Google search.
Gemini is very good at Google search, but there's no Google services in this new Siri. It's literally a model. It's basically like they hired the Google DeepMind team to develop the model to power its AI in Siri.
Yeah. So, I guess what I'm getting at is, will I ever get—if I'm using Siri to research a product, will I ever get an ad powered by like an Apple ad network because it is a high-intent search, like ever?
I think the endgame for all these guys is to put ads in this stuff.
You know, one thing that I haven't talked about in a while, and I just feel like that's been somewhat under-discussed because people are so obsessed with just make Siri work.
That if it does end up working really well, then you would have effectively a search engine.
If it—well, yeah, if it works, they have all the tools to do a search engine, and if it does work well, yeah, they'll probably eventually put ads in it. A couple things haven't discussed in a while. One is they're, you know, working on a new Safari web browser, and you're going to see AI search at the forefront of that. The other thing is the adsification, the advertising of the Apple operating systems that starts this year.
You're going to see them up the ad slots in the App Store, in search, in search in particular. You're—
Any sponsors we want to give a shout-out to over here? And then—
Don't tempt.
And then you're going to see ads in Apple Maps.
Oh, interesting. You know, that's been one of the main differentiators in the different apps.
You know, it'll be all AI and it'll be targeted based on things that you're searching. Like if you see a sushi restaurant, search for sushi, whatever, you may see some search results get elevated. It's kind of like what Yelp does.
Yeah. Right. By the way, it's so funny on Siri. Like, there's this Japanese restaurant in the Valley I like, and it's named after a city in Japan or province in Japan. And it's like, 'Take me to Chiba.'
Right. And I've been—that's the name of the place. Shout-out to Chiba.
Okay boss, you're going to need to get in a boat.
Oh my god. It's like immediately pops up 7,652 miles away. I'm like, I've been to this place 50 damn times. You should know by now. Talking about the restaurant 20 miles away.
Not the city 8,000 miles away.
Hiring, chartering an aircraft, sir.
Yeah. I got a bunch of other stuff in the Apple ecosystem. First, Starlink is reportedly planning to—Apple's reportedly planning to integrate Starlink connectivity into the iPhone 18 Pro.
I saw this—you saw this stuff on Twitter the last couple days. There's been no reporting on this recently, by the way. This is another—see, this is one of the downsides to AI. People just spew BS on Twitter.
Okay. So, Apple already does work with Starlink, right? You can hook in if you have a T-Mobile iPhone, you can get on to Starlink. So, that already exists.
I've experienced—I experienced, I think, during the fires last year. No, all the cell service was down. If you want satellite on the 17, but it's not what—
You don't want to be on Verizon. I should get off of it, but it's not Starlink. It's the old network.
On which—on the Verizon one you're talking about, on the Apple network.
Yeah. Yeah. Like if I'm in an emergency situation, I can get out like one text message. It's really, really slow and it's clearly going with like, I think via—
The Apple network is just super legacy.
They've got to strip that down and partner and rebuild or something. Anyways, the iPhone 18 is going to have enhanced satellite connectivity, and they'll, you know, obviously work with Starlink and, you know, whoever, whomever. So, that's coming. What else we got on our plate? You want to talk about John Turnis?
Yes. So, I have a bunch of questions. Let's start with like, what is going on behind the scenes of this campaign? It feels like there's potent—it feels like internally politics there could be like people pushing for him, pushing against him. There's this weird quote that keeps going out that people say he's never made a decision in his life.
Everybody keeps making the most underhanded compliments that I've ever seen.
It's like, yeah, he's shipped a lot of products, but—
He's never had to make a hard decision. That's the one.
Just wait for my profile in Bloomberg. Okay. You'll get the real story soon. Not going to give it all away today.
Got to give the shout-out. Stay tuned for the article.
Of course. Subscribe to Power On.
Okay. Turnis. He's 50. Everyone else on the Apple executive team, late 50s through their mid-60s, turning 66 this year in the case of Tim Cook.
You're Apple's board. You like continuity. You like an insider. You like people who know what they're doing, have been there for a while. They know where the bodies are buried.
Okay, these guys all have hundreds of millions of dollars, if not more.
Yeah. At 50, he's the only one who is—if let's say Tim Cook hangs out another three to five years, you're not going to appoint another CEO who's 65, 70 years old.
Apple, they get vast majority of the revenue from hardware. He's the hardware guy.
Have they screwed up any hardware since he's been in charge?
No. He's a steady hand. He knows what he's doing. He's really the only choice. You know, there was this New York Times report a few weeks ago basically saying that could be Greg Joswiak, could be Eddy Cue, could be Deirdre O'Brien, could be Craig Federighi.
It's for sure not going to be Craig.
It's not going to be Deirdre. It's not going to be Eddy. It's not going to be Joz. The only category that makes sense is an operations person. Because you look at the current CEO, Tim obviously comes out of the ops world. You look at the guy who would have been CEO if Tim Cook didn't stay so long—I'm not saying he shouldn't have stayed so long. He's done obviously a fantastic job for shareholders and the employees and what have you. Would have been Jeff Williams. He was the COO.
So Sabih Khan, he was named COO, you know, a few months ago, but he's really been in that job for the last half a decade, I would say.
So anyways, it'll be Turnis or Sabih or someone completely out of left field. I don't think this is imminent. So we'll see what ultimately happens, but all signs are turning towards Turnis.
Everyone has an opinion that Turnis is going to be the next CEO. Fine. I've been shouting this from rooftops for the last two years. But no one has given evidence—like, what is this based on? Right. Has there ever been a baton handoff? Is he getting more responsibility?
Well, they have like a big baton.
They got one of these. You know what you have? You have white smoke coming out of—well, actually, no. There's no smoke.
It's very environmentally friendly.
So, you know, maybe out of the—
Reflection out of the sun, solar panels or something, a glint off the solar panels.
Exactly. So what you want—evidence, you want to hear that he's been getting more responsibility. Okay.
One, a few months ago he took full control of the Apple Watch engineering team that was co-run with the old COO till he retired. Okay, there's something for you. When they started soft-firing the head of AI, the guy we were talking about earlier, they took the robotic stuff away from him. They gave that to Turnis.
And then the real news, as I broke last week, is that even though on paper Tim Cook is running the Apple design teams, it's not. It's Turnis. He took over at the end of last year for a variety of reasons, but you look at who's run design at Apple over the course of history. Well, like Steve Jobs, Tim Cook himself between '15 and '17, Jeff Williams who was the number two in waiting for a long time, and then obviously we all heard of Jony Ive.
Now you add John Turnis to that list. It's a big sign. It's a big indicator because you look at what Apple is known for as a company and it's design, right? That design function, and it's not just hardware, it's hardware and software that he's, you know, overseeing as the manager of both of those teams. So I would say that is your first piece of evidence that he's getting some more material.
What does he have to do, since he's the hardware guy, to communicate that he has a steady hand on the tiller as Apple transitions into the AI age? Like the narrative is that they have delivered on hardware. They have not delivered on AI.
And so, how is he going to communicate that he's forward-thinking and can be the one to keep them on the cutting edge?
Taking a step back, you think about like succession at all of these big tech companies, right? Like who's going to take over Google one day? Who's going to take over Microsoft one day? Who's going to take over Amazon one day, right?
Like it's probably going to be the AI guys at all these companies, right? Apple doesn't really have an AI guy. They're trying to make Craig Federighi the AI guy, but he's not CEO material. He's voiced this himself, so don't get mad at me, Craig.
But yeah, Turnis, can he become the AI guy at Apple? I think it's too early to tell, and I think that is a big question there—like, do you put a hardware person in charge of the AI era?
People have been speculating that Apple would do some big M&A deal to bring some AI-native talent in house.
They wanted to buy Perplexity.
So the origin story—they were really talking about it. Like Eddy Cue was seriously considering. Adrian Perica, the head of corp development, M&A, reports to Tim Cook. They were looking at this pretty closely, then they pulled out. Why were they going to buy Perplexity? To power the search stuff we were talking about earlier. Became less important after the Google deal was allowed to live.
And do you think they would have done it if Perplexity hadn't been marked up to oblivion?
I think they would have done Perplexity at a reasonable price.
Yeah, that's the thing. Low single digit.
I think they would have done it up to five or six billion.
Yeah. But like at this 15, 20—
And then Perplexity started, you know, trying to say they're going to buy Google Chrome if it got divested and all that. So, and I think they would have done it if the Google search deal was torn apart.
In order to bring a search product to market faster. They like to buy companies to—I'm not trying to do Apple corporate speak here, but this is like legit. They buy companies to accelerate their roadmap. You'll hear Tim Cook use those exact words tomorrow.
Okay, by the way, but literally—
Come on. Hey, head in the game.
But is there specifically a deal that he'll be talking about tomorrow? Is that what you think?
No. No. Just in general. Like he will be asked.
I bet he'll mention the Gemini.
Because he was asked that in the last earnings and everyone was like, 'Why haven't you done a mega deal? Why haven't you done deals?' Okay. So he just says it's just going to be more the same.
You know what it is fair to say is their pace of dealmaking has decelerated significantly.
And so he will be—I mean, in the last earnings he was sort of like managing that and saying like, 'Oh, we're still doing deals, but we're selective and we only do it to—'
Well, they also don't care to announce like 95% of—
They're big enough. They have to, you know, like the Golden State Warriors—they want Giannis, but they don't want to make a big trade. They don't want to give up all their draft picks, right? They're like, 'Yeah, this—'
Same with the Lakers. This is like my existential crisis. The Lakers like, 'Yeah, we'll trade the picks if the right guy becomes available.'
Yeah. And they know the right guy's not going to become available, right? Just like Apple knows these companies are always going to be out of the price range they want to pay.
Thing with Apple is like they're very frugal money-wise. Extremely frugal. The other thing is they've been burned countless times with acquisitions. Like that Beats deal—
Terrible process for integrating that company.
Well, and even then I think it was like a 3x revenue multiple. Wasn't Beats doing like a billion dollars?
Oh, from a financial standpoint it was just like a home run. People criticized that deal, but they made it back in months.
Oh, interesting. Made the money, but it was a nightmare from a—but it's worth noting because like even paying for Perplexity at 56 billion, it's monetized that probably—
Yeah, I mean Beats was monetized from day one. Obviously you're selling the headphones, which are terrible, by the way, but everyone loves them. And then Apple Music, they, you know—Beats started the whole subscription services business at Apple. And so if you look at it, Beats is one of the most wildly successful technology acquisitions of all time. And then you compare it to how much criticism it got because it's Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iovine and whatever, whatever, whatever, and the headphones are crap.
You know what? From a financial standpoint, home run.
But integrating into Apple's culture is not easy.
Yeah. Speaking of hardware, what's going on with the robotic arm that will live in your kitchen?
As you said, it's—you got this 9-inch display. It's like an iPad display on a robotic arm. It can float around your desk. It can twirl and turn around. Like, you know what we'll do? In a few years when this thing comes out, you'll have me back on and instead of me actually being here, you'll have this on here and maybe, you know, it'll be my head floating around.
Yeah. I mean, Meta tried to do something like that with the—
Meta tried to do something like that. You know, these things are big in China.
It's a big thing in China right now.
No one really talks about them, but it's a category that has some potential.
Okay. Yeah. But it's years away just because—
Yeah. What about the foldable phone?
Yeah. No, that's decades away. No, no, that's coming out in the fall.
Yeah, that'll be—are you going to buy $2,200 on it now?
Oh, is that going to be—Is it—
It'll be at least—It has to be—
Is it going to be the highest tier, the biggest, the most powerful—
For Apple? Yeah, that's going to—it's going to sit at the top of the lineup.
It's going to sit at the top of the lineup. Okay. New status symbol.
Sorry. What were you like that?
We had Ben Thompson on maybe before the end of the year.
Feel bad for Ben. You know, he's a big Milwaukee Bucks fan and they're about to—
The Milwaukee Bucks. That's a sports team.
I don't know. I do know it's a basketball team and I do know that it's Ben Thompson's favorite team. He was talking about the—
Yesterday we didn't know when the Super Bowl was.
He was talking about the Apple Vision Pro. I wanted to demo the—you know, you can watch the NBA live. You liked it.
Pitch was like, screw the—
Screw the Apple production. Highly produced. You know, they're cutting around all the time. And he's like, just invest the money to set up like the actual hardware in every single stadium—
The cameras so that anybody can just drop in.
So you can just sit there, watch the game like you're—you don't need the announcer because you can just look at the scoreboard, you can listen to what's going on.
So he's saying strip the guys out of it. I mean—
You watched the whole thing?
Yeah. Yeah. Trust me, people at home were not happy that night. You know, you put that thing on, crying baby, crying baby, and then you're completely isolated. I mean, I'm telling you, VR does not work for families.
It's really—yeah, it is one of the major—because then, I mean, the family people have the disposable income more likely. So then they buy it, but they can't use it.
Okay. Here's the problem. Yeah.
It's like once a month. They've got like five games on the calendar. Cool.
And that was Ben's point—is like, just set up the infrastructure and sell me a pass so that I can drop into any game and sit courtside because right now they have to pull up with a production truck. They need editors. They need voiceovers. They need pre—
There's, you know, basically one-time fixed cost of like—he did the math.
All the—Yeah. He said it's like 40 grand. It's like not a huge amount of money.
And you have no incremental costs per show. Oh, you're not dealing with producers and running a live, you know, product.
But they need to decide if this hardware is going to continue to exist before they keep investing in the content strategy, right? It's a chicken-and-the-egg problem, right? How do you sell this thing if there's no content?
But why invest millions in the content if you're not planning to sell this thing anyways and you're pivoting to smart glasses?
Don't forget, they were supposed to come out with the Vision Air in '27, product called N100. I forgot when my article came out. It's a time blur. A few months ago, six months ago. Anyways, they killed that thing.
Shocked the vision team on that, by the way.
The smart glasses—that was that just completely reactionary to Meta.
Oh yeah. They started toying with the smart glasses in terms of like this non-AR smart glasses, right? First of all, AR smart glasses—that has been the vision from day one for a decade plus. But in terms of like this non-AR smart glasses, that is a concept that Meta has really popularized. And you know, when these things started to gain a little bit of steam in '22, '23 is when they started taking a very hard look at it and they're going to do it.
And I think they're going to destroy Meta with them. I'll be honest.
Yeah. Is it the styling, the pricing, the features, the integrations?
Integration. To me, the challenge is if you can't deliver me iMessage—
Yeah.
Apple has the ingredients because of their login to destroy any company in any hardware. It's just about them figuring out how to do it and get it done and not waiting too long. You know, the biggest problem with them is they just take too long and overengineer everything.
Yeah. Like the Vision Pro is the most overengineered device ever, right? They could have got that out three years earlier with a little bit less fit and finish and maybe it would be more successful today.
Yeah. Yeah. It does feel like there was a cycle where the iPhone was ahead of the curve on so many things—touchscreen—and then in that middle decade period, you had the Android folks being like, 'Oh, we've had this Apple feature for a year. We've had this.' Now it's like five years.
There's, you know, many people wouldn't be caught dead with a non-iPhone, you know, like it doesn't matter. But AI changes that equation.
That changes the equation.
Especially if it's a Jony Ive product and it's expensive.
Well, you know, Jony Ive obviously he's done amazing things. And the new headphones or whatever they come out with are going to look amazing and probably work amazing. It's just the barrier to entry on hardware is so high. There's so much risk there.
Yeah. I just—I still wonder if the—like the Claudebot, these like open-source agents, I don't know that everyone's going to adopt those, but something like that that sort of opens up the ecosystem just by brute-forcing it. We were debating this earlier—like, you can't get iMessage notifications on the Meta Ray-Ban displays, which is—
I have them. Do you guys have them?
I've got one at home. We've used the non-displays a bunch and then we demoed the displays and have used them a fair amount and it's just a hard sell if you're an iMessage user.
A hard sell if you're an iMessage user, but the potential is just oozing with potential. Like they've got a solid product there.
Yeah. And like a couple iterations on that, make them a little lighter, get the display resolution up, work better outdoors.
It's compelling. And in a world where you have some sort of agent running on your Mac mini, scraping all your iMessages and then putting them into WhatsApp or something, you know, maybe I'll do that. Maybe you guys will do that.
It's rare. Nobody wants to deal with that. Yeah. You know, nobody wants to deal with that.
