Meta’s Muse Revival, Frontier AI Under Threat, The Rise Of Dopamine Sites

Ranjan Roy from Margins is back for our weekly discussion of the latest tech news. We cover: 1) The rise of Muse 2) Is Meta back? 3) OpenAI's consumer blind spot 4) Meta's butthole marketing 5) What Muse means for ecommerce 6) Meta's Muse Charm, aka; The Muse Buddy or Muse Tamagotchi 7) Meta introduces camera-free smart glasses 8) What Meta Muse says about Frontier AI's weakness 9) Standard models are on the rise vs. frontier 10) The new Dopamine Site phenomenon is... good? --- Enjoying Big Technology Podcast? Please rate us five stars ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ in your podcast app of choice. Want a discount for Big Technology on Substack + Discord? Here’s 25% off for the first year: https://www.bigtechnology.com/subscribe?coupon=0843016b Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Alex Kantrowitz?

  Did Meta pull off AI's biggest comeback now that Muse is atop the App Store? And what does Muse's success say about frontier AI models? Do companies actually need them to win? Finally, we'll talk about dopamine sites. What are they and should we be using them? That's coming up on the Big Technology Podcast Friday Edition, right after this. This episode is brought to you by Genesis. What does it actually take to put a Gentic AI to work across an entire enterprise? I recently spoke with Genesis Chairman and CEO Tony Bates about why orchestration is emerging as a competitive advantage in customer experience and what companies need to get right in the AI era. Then I sat down with Adam Mitchell, Head of Enterprise Business Solutions at Voya Financial,

• 0:43Alex Kantrowitz?

  to go inside a large-scale Agentic CX transformation, including the business decisions, trade-offs, and lessons along the way. You can watch both conversations now on my YouTube channel today.

• 0:56Alex Kantrowitz?

  It's never been more challenging to get frontier compute. How do you know where to look, who to trust, or how much to pay? Akash is an open cloud that provides easy access, flexibility, and peace of mind. That's how companies like Razer were able to cut their inference cost by 15 times. Visit akash.network/alex for a free consultation. That's akash.network/alex for a free consultation. Welcome to Big Technology Podcast Friday Edition, where we break down the news in our traditional cool-headed and nuanced format. We have a great show for you today. We're going to go deep into the success, or is it a success, of Meta's Muse and talk about whether this is something that will end up being the biggest story in AI this year

• 1:40Alex Kantrowitz?

  and whether Meta is actually back. We're also going to talk about whether Meta's ability to build Muse on non-frontier models is a threat to the frontier. And finally, we're going to talk about dopamine sites, which are sites where you basically shop for things, but it's just about the experience. You hit checkout and the items don't come, and it's just for that dopamine hit. Joining us as always on Friday to do it is Ranjan Roy of Margins. Ranjan, great to see you.

• 2:03Speaker 01

  I am so excited that we're not talking about human extinction this week and we're talking about the latest in AI products too, not even models. We'll talk about models a little bit, I believe, at the end, but we're talking about it's all, the product is here, the product is back. And are you muse-pilled, Alex?

• 2:22Alex Kantrowitz?

  I was about to say, you know, we've been big boys, we've been clawed heads, we've been chat chaps, maybe, I don't know. But are we, are we, are we muse-men? Is that what we are? Are we, or musees? I don't know what's muse.

• 2:34Speaker 01

  Muse mates, like Meta mates? No.

• 2:37Alex Kantrowitz?

  No, that's letting them to define the persona too much. I think it's got to be either musees or muse-men. But I'm willing to hear the argument for muse-mates.

• 2:47Speaker 01

  Musees, I like, it's like newsies.

• 2:49Alex Kantrowitz?

  Are we musees?

• 2:51Speaker 01

  Okay, let's definitely get into it. I'm at instinct, I don't even know what word starts with I that would fill that as well, but muse and instinct, the last few weeks have blown my mind and I'm excited to talk about it.

• 3:05Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, okay, so let's talk about, so, so, you know, as the world has been distracted by AI, you know, basically threatening to extinct humanity, there's been a rise of these personal agents and they're actually starting to work well. And Instinct is one of them where you could basically, you know, use AI to go out and do things for you and you communicate it with it via your messaging app. And then, of course, you know, over the past couple of weeks, since the beginning of the month, Meta has released this, this app called Muse, which goes out and takes action for you. And it's a consumer version of a lot of these enterprise tools that we've been seeing, and it's doing pretty well. This is from the Wall Street Journal. Meta Shows AI Agents Aren't Just For Business Anymore. Early signs of success for Meta's new consumer-focused AI agent

• 3:47Alex Kantrowitz?

  are helping prove that AI agents aren't just the hottest thing in business technology. They may finally be gaining steam among consumers too. Just two weeks after Meta released the agent called Muse, the app to access it reached number one in the App Store. And then, over the weekend, X was filled with people, with posts by people praising the new agent. Shares in Meta's stock even jumped 11% on Monday, the biggest one-day gain since April 2025 and its highest close since October. So the success of Muse, where basically like you can go out and you can use it and ask it to do things for you. And it, you know, takes another step than your traditional, you know, Claude, Claude code or ChatGPT codex.

• 4:28Alex Kantrowitz?

  I'll just give one example, and this is kind of how I became a musey this week. You know, my wife was looking for, to book a specialist appointment in New York and she was doing the traditional thing of like, log on to the website and go through all the phone numbers, you know, make phone calls and try to find out, you know, when the next appointment is. And in New York, it's just impossible to get a specialist appointment. So the only appointments she were finding, she was finding were months out. So I was like, all right, this is a job for Muse. I told Muse what our healthcare is and to go find an appointment for this particular specialist in New York, nights and weekends, you know, preferred. So she didn't have to take time off for work. And Muse went out and came back with a list of providers. I asked for their phone numbers into Google Maps

• 5:13Alex Kantrowitz?

  and it came back with a list of their phone numbers in Google Maps. I copied and pasted from the app, dropped it into my wife's WhatsApp, and the next day she had an appointment with the first specialist on the list, you know, that Muse recommended. So it's able to go through and take this arduous work and this sort of the most annoying parts of the internet and actually get stuff done for you. I also had it like unsubscribe this person who'd been getting Bank of America mail for like years in my apartment. And I just didn't have the time to like go to Bank of America and ask them to unsubscribe. And I said, all right, I'm going to just take a photo of the letter, hand it to Muse and see what Muse can do. And Muse was able to figure it out. Now, it's, it's basically, you know, effectively a refined version of OpenClaw, which was all the rage, you know, just a few months ago.

• 5:58Alex Kantrowitz?

  But it seems like Meta has latched on to something here. Your thoughts, Ranjan?

• 6:03Speaker 01

  Okay, I have a lot of thoughts on this one. I think I wanted to start with, as you said, and even as this article is alluding to exactly, this idea that AI agents, the things that we have seen, the things that I get to work on at Writer for Enterprise and ask AI to go do something and have it take multiple steps, not having to specify, these are the exact steps I want you to take, but actually defining the outcome and just letting the AI go do it. So I think, to me, that has been, seeing that in the consumer setting is actually amazing. And more people getting to feel that magic. And I'll tell you my instinct story in just a minute. And actually, let me get into the instinct story.

• 6:47Speaker 01

  I don't know, what instinct influencers, instinct?

• 6:51Alex Kantrowitz?

  I was going to call it, I was going to call it an invertebrate, but I don't think that's very nice.

• 6:55Speaker 01

  That doesn't even work either. That's a tough one, but what it did for me. So I'm going to St. Louis this weekend.

• 7:03Alex Kantrowitz?

  But.

• 7:03Speaker 01

  Invertebrates, okay. Actually, all right, we're going to stick with that one then. Now we're forced to stick instinct invertebrates.

• 7:11Alex Kantrowitz?

  To the agent, I don't know. Okay, well, you tell your story, I'll workshop the.

• 7:17Speaker 01

  Workshop while I'm going, yeah. So, so I am going to St. Louis, actually leaving in a few hours for a family event. I had booked on booking.com a Hilton, Hilton Hotel for the weekend. My uncle, I totally missed the email, sent a fam, email with a family block code in it. Instinct, actually, without me asking it to do this, suddenly it just pops up and is like, texts me, oh, by the way, I just saw your uncle sent a family block. It's actually going to be $80 cheaper. You have 24 hours left to cancel your booking.com booking. And do you want me to go do this? Give me your credit card, which I did.

• 8:00Speaker 01

  And it literally just went, canceled the original booking, created the new one. That proactivity is something that even in most enterprise AI, like, hasn't existed yet. Because, and I think in enterprise, the bar is always going to be higher, where it's actually like, go take the action without me even specifying or asking it. But to me, that was this really magical moment because I have gotten to see for months now, go do multi-step complex work and get a good output. I'm like pretty used to that right now. But this agent going and without me even thinking about it, actually coming back and saying, look, I can save you some money right now. Do you want me to do it?

• 8:44Speaker 01

  And then going and doing it after I say yes, that was big. Like, I have not had that level of experience with AI to date.

• 8:53Alex Kantrowitz?

  And you know, we talked in the past about how travel is a good benchmark because the cost for it getting something wrong is it can be big, but it's usually manageable. Right. It's not going to ruin your life. And so like handing it these tasks is actually really good.

• 9:07Speaker 01

  I know, I know. For longtime listeners, you know, I have often ranted about how everyone, whenever they talk about agentic, uses travel as the kind of benchmark or example. And I've said, I don't like that. And here I am. But you're right. I like your thesis that travel, yeah, there is consequences, but actually relative to other things, it's actually slightly lower. It can always be fixed as necessary. So yeah, here I am, having a magic travel agentic moment.

• 9:40Alex Kantrowitz?

  And once it proves itself on travel, then it can, you know, you sort of start to trust it with other things. Now, you know, we do promise nuance in this show. So I'm going to pour a little bit of cold water over, you know, this idea that, you know, Muse is this overnight success. It's not really used by that many people. And Meta has been doing a full court push to try to get it in the hands of just about all the 3 billion of its, of its users, you know, pushing on WhatsApp, pushing on Instagram, doing the most, most unhinged crazy campaign on X at the hands of Alexander Wang, it's head of AI.

• 10:18Speaker 01

  I don't know if that's a campaign. I think that's just Alexander Wang.

• 10:22Alex Kantrowitz?

  So, so we're gonna put a pin in that because I do have a take.

• 10:25Speaker 01

  All right, all right.

• 10:26Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay, but let's talk about at least usage. And I'm curious what you think about these numbers. Information says Meta's Muse surpassed 500,000 users after first week, after its first week. It has, sorry, Meta's new personal AI agent Muse had more than 500,000 people try it out roughly a week after launch, including more than 250,000 daily active users. Users have also submitted more than 2 million prompts. That doesn't sound like a lot to me, given the scale of Meta. Meta has been pushing this to 3 billion people, or maybe a good section of them. 500,000 people try it and 2 million prompts, that's four prompts per person. Two, you know, 250,000 daily active users feels pretty

• 11:11Alex Kantrowitz?

  small to me. Actually, it makes me kind of surprised that it's at the top of the App Store, given that the App Store, given that it's like, yeah, so many five star reviews, like it looks like people really do love it. So they've built a good product, but it's not taken off in a crazy way. And also that the DAUs, like the daily active users, okay, actually, this is later, more recent data from SimilarWeb, saying that it's reached above 600,000, you know, approaching 800,000, but still under a million. I don't know, maybe I've become so, you know, desensitized to these things that like, I think the numbers should be bigger. But what do you think about this? Is it, basically, my question is, is it a niche use case? Or is this just the very beginning here?

• 11:53Speaker 01

  I, it's, that is the question, right? And I mean, yeah, I don't know. I like, I've really thought about it because I'm sitting here, I'm like freaking out, this is amazing. But is this actually going to catch on? And you're right, like Meta on Instagram, it's showing up right at the top WhatsApp, they're trying to push it. I mean, they, Meta is able to control human behavior at global scale better than any other system or service in the history of mankind. So they should be able to crank out better numbers. But maybe to their, the generous explanation is, they recognize that this is a product under development and that pushing it too hard within their app ecosystem actually

• 12:36Speaker 01

  could be a mistake because if people's first experiences are not good, then it's not going to last, it's not going to stick. That converting people to personal agent, personal agents is a big hurdle. So first, let X take, get Muse pilled, let Alexander Wang go ham, let all these kinds of things happen within us, our listeners probably, but not moving out to like, just my mom and everyone else. I think maybe they are being kind of methodical about it.

• 13:13Alex Kantrowitz?

  Maybe, but it doesn't really seem like it. It seems like they're going all out for it. In fact, that, you know, at Connect this week, which is Meta's developer conference, you know, Mark or their VR conference, they open together. Mark Zuckerberg said it's gonna, Muse will be the centerpiece of the company. So I think they, they really think they have something here, which leads me to this question, which I think we have to reckon with. We've basically written off Meta's AI effort for months now, is Meta back?

• 13:39Speaker 01

  Oh, I mean, I was trying to find the transcript. I think it was in April, we were half joking, but we were like, what we were going through, like, who's on top of the AI world? And I remember we both said, is there this kind of off chance that by the fall, Mark Zuckerberg will be king of the AI world, will be American flag on the hydrofoil Mark Zuckerberg again?

• 14:05Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yes. Yes, those were your words. Exactly.

• 14:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, no, I know. But, but I admit it was a bit sarcastic and in jest. But I think, oh, they are, they are so back. They are, I mean, they are more back than a lot of people, the Amazons of the world have ever even been in the game. So yes, 100%.

• 14:26Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. I mean, he's, he's right on time. Yeah, yeah. Well, I think, you know, it's interesting because, you know, if, if you assume that AI will continue to progress and that there will be continued to be more demand for AI products, then Meta's in kind of a can't lose place. I can't believe I'm actually saying this. If Meta's products fail, Meta is going to have a boatload of data centers, multiple boatloads of data centers to lease out to OpenAI and Anthropic, you know, help them meet their demand. So it can become an infrastructure player. And in fact, you'll, you'll recall before Muse, a lot of people were calling for Meta to basically give up on developing AI products and just become, you know, an AI hyperscaler. And it still has that ability in its back pocket. And that could be a very good business.

• 15:11Alex Kantrowitz?

  And so if this fails, Meta has that to fall back on, good business. So Meta now has an AI business. If this succeeds, Meta has a crazy business. Because if you think about the way that you make money from Muse, oh, boy, it might be one of the best businesses ever created on the internet. First of all, there's subscription, right? So it, for the heavy users, Meta is going to charge them to have extra Muse usage. So you're going to get paid directly by the users. Then there's advertising, right? The intent signals in this thing are off the charts. Like, you're having Muse go out and do stuff for you, right? You, you, for advertisers, you want to get as close to the action as you can.

• 15:50Alex Kantrowitz?

  And Muse is the action. So there's a possibility to charge, you know, pretty high premiums on ad rates. And then finally, you know, there's, there's the fact that Meta, you know, with all, and we'll talk about the connectors, it's connecting to everything. So Meta becomes a demand channel for things like Expedia and Spotify. And you know what it says? All right, you want me to funnel the, you know, the billions of Muse users demand to you? We're going to have to take a little bit of a transaction fee for every time someone completes a purchase on your site. So this is an insane business in the making, if it takes off. But again, just to, you know, caveat, we're far from that. But it's definitely got great potential if it works and if it doesn't work.

• 16:32Speaker 01

  Okay, so I came into this conversation, and I actually do believe this is the beginning of agentic commerce, that kind of everyone has been thinking about or talking about. Again, this is like Square in my world. And it's been this ongoing debate, will people use agents to buy things? Whether it's autonomous, or whether it's helping guide you through the entire shopping process, it's done. Like, it's already, this is the experience already asking it to go search multiple sites, here's what's how something fits me and go find other comparable things. And if I want to give it my credit card, which I have given instinct, I have not given Meta yet, and we'll get into that around connectors and

• 17:14Speaker 01

  trust. But I do think this is the beginning of agentic commerce and like, people shopping in this environment and this, this, this UI more. What I do still wonder about is the advertising, because I agree, this just feels like, oh, my God, like, they are going to advertise the shit out of this platform. And like, you're right, super high intent, they already have the greatest ad infrastructure and ecosystem in the world, like, they're, this is going to be gold. But no one has cracked advertising in chat based UI, AI yet. Like ChatGPT has certainly given little tries here and there, Google.

• 17:59Alex Kantrowitz?

  Wouldn't you trust Meta to be the one that cracks it? Like, if all the companies, wouldn't Meta be the one that has the best opportunity or the best chance?

• 18:07Speaker 01

  Yes. Yeah, 100%. Okay. Actually, it is amazing to me, to their credit, like, everyone I know has completely dissolved the bear, the line between an advertisement and a post on Instagram. Like, there's no, there's zero understanding or care, was this an ad or was this? Because to the credit, it is so on point, personalized, relevant, what you want to see, that everyone's.

• 18:37Alex Kantrowitz?

  And the creative is good.

• 18:38Speaker 01

  And the creative is good. The creative is very good. Okay. So you're, yes, if anyone can crack it, surely it's Meta over ChatGPT, Google. Oh, and I definitely want to get into where the, where is Google on all this? But, but yes.

• 18:53Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yes.

• 18:53Speaker 01

  Okay, you're right. You got me, Meta. I think Meta is poised to crack this. And they're gonna, they can make subscriptions, I don't know.

• 19:01Alex Kantrowitz?

  So there is the free tier. They, there's the power plan, which is $20 per month for 500 million Muse tokens delivered weekly. And then there's the max plan, which is 100 million per month for 3 billion Muse tokens delivered weekly.

• 19:18Speaker 01

  Okay, that's not-

• 19:20Alex Kantrowitz?

  I don't know how that will be adopted or it won't be adopted, but at least it's there.

• 19:24Speaker 01

  Well, actually, and maybe it is almost a check against people. Basically, if they're giving this out completely for free, people just moving over all their work in other systems and just melting tokens within Muse and Meta and having them pay for it. Maybe that's, it's a kind of a hedge against that, but I, I still don't think that's going to be the, the, the main value for Meta in this. I think it might be a nice to have, but I think they have to crack, this is advertising, this is commerce or other actions, lead gen, et cetera. But do you think-

• 20:02Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, look, three spokes, so three different potential businesses. Go ahead.

• 20:07Speaker 01

  Well, actually, no, no, go, go, because then I want to get into the trust and connectors side of it.

• 20:12Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay, so, so I think at this point, the fact that we haven't talked about OpenAI is, is wild, because as much as this is a meta story, this is an OpenAI story. And I thought about you a lot as I've been, you know, trying to figure out what's going on here. How has Meta been able to do this? And, you know, you've said in the past that OpenAI made a mistake by doubling down on enterprise. And what it really should have done is take the fact that it has this consumer product that people really like, which is ChatGPT, which has a billion users, and, you know, keep basically hammering this home and trying to own that consumer experience. And they got beat here by Meta. They did.

• 20:56Alex Kantrowitz?

  Now, I expect them to answer, and I think it'll be a popular answer, and I think people will trust that a lot more. But this is, this is, I think, as much an OpenAI story as it is a meta story.

• 21:07Speaker 01

  Okay, no, no, you're right. Like, they had the moment, and again, I want to get into Google too, because where the hell are you, Google? None of this works without access to Gmail and Google Calendar and stuff like that. But I think, uh, OpenAI, actually, they will respond. They will clearly, I mean, I think there's been a lot of like allusion to the idea that their personal agent that's going to do this kind of thing is going to be coming out soon. But like, you're right, they doubled down on the enterprise. Their chief revenue officer, Denise Dresser, left after seven months. They've had kind of total turmoil on that side. And did they lose the consumer? And again, when Meta comes at the

• 21:52Speaker 01

  consumer, God help whatever company is trying to get in their way. So I think you're right. This is especially ahead of the IPO and kind of coming up with a clear story. This cuts so heavily into any kind of ChatGPT consumer story, that if they're going to fall back on that, this is going to really cut into that.

• 22:16Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. And you would think that since OpenAI has better models, and that's undisputed, that they'd be able to come back in and challenge Meta in, in a serious way and build a better product. But, and I think we're going to get to this in a bit, you know, that is not guaranteed, and this, this release has showed us that. So, so hold that thought for a moment. Because, you know, I think before we move past Meta, we need to talk about the marketing that Alexander Wang, the head of Meta's AI lab, or, or the super intelligence lab that they have over there, you know, in Menlo Park, we need to talk about the marketing he's been doing. And the marketing has been unhinged. And, uh, Mom, if you're listening, probably a good time to, to hit pause and go do something else, because I titled this section butthole

• 22:59Alex Kantrowitz?

  marketing. And, and it kind of all began where somebody created a chart of AI logos that don't look like buttholes. And it has the Grok logo, the Gemini logo, the DeepMind logo, the Microsoft Copilot logo, the Claude logo, and the ChatGPT logo, and all of them get a zero, because in this user's imagination, all these logos do look like buttholes. But Muse is a squiggle, and so it gets a one, because it does not look like one. And, um, and Alexander Wang has really, really run with this. Uh, he's, he's tweeted it and said, uh, first of all, he said, "State of the art motherfuckers." Then, then he tweeted it

• 23:43Alex Kantrowitz?

  and, uh, with the logo and said, "You cannot out anti-butthole me," which is like, this is the leader of a major AI lab. Um, that is interesting. Then it got, it got even more disturbing, shall we say, because, you know, the Muse mascot, which is now beloved on the internet, kind of looks like a fluffy Labubu. I think that's the best way to put it. And what Alexander Wang has done, and encouraged the internet to do, he has sexualized the Labubu, the, the Muse Labubu, as is, as this butthole discourse has taken, taken off. So, for instance, he put a picture up of, you know, the Muse mascot doing that

• 24:24Alex Kantrowitz?

  famous Kim Kardashian, uh, magazine cover where she sprays champagne and it arcs over her and splashes off of her butt. He amplified a picture of himself and Mark Zuckerberg and the Muse mascot, uh, all showing their butts to the camera. Um, and then, Ranjan, you seized on this, uh, they, they announced a partnership with Box with a normal graphic. And Alexander Wang, the head of Meta's AI lab, wrote, "Weird that this is the graphic that the partnership's team told me we were going with." Uh, and it is a picture of, uh, the Muse Labubu leaning

• 25:04Alex Kantrowitz?

  over a Box Box and flirtatiously showing its butt to the camera. And I can't believe I have to do this, but this is an important segment.

• 25:13Speaker 01

  Keep going, keep going. This is butthole discourse, and reporting on butthole discourse is why people come to the Big Technology Podcast.

• 25:19Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay. And so I, in my naive sense, tweeted this and said, "Why are they sexualizing Labubu?" And, um, and I think I have an answer.

• 25:32Speaker 01

  What is your, what is your answer? What is your, what's the, what's the theory here?

• 25:38Alex Kantrowitz?

  This is my, my real investigative reporting moment here on Big Technology Podcast. Think about what's been going on in all the other AI labs, how they've told you, AI is going to take your job, AI is going to kill you, AI is an imminent threat, AI will escape. If you're coming out and trying to position yourself against those labs, what would you want to do? You'd want to have the marketing as hard, as far away from that as possible. And nothing could be farther away from AI may kill you than the Muse Labubu mascot leaning over an enterprise AI logo with heart emojis showing its butt to the camera. And I think

• 26:23Alex Kantrowitz?

  this is what's going on. They are intentionally going as silly and as absurd as they can to show you that they're not going to participate in the end of the world discourse, and there's nothing to fear here. And I think it might actually be effective, uh, sort of anti-consensus marketing.

• 26:43Speaker 01

  Okay, okay. See, I agree overall, and I do think like even the usage of that character, and I, I had actually, before Alexander Wang started going off like that, I'd said something about the character feels unsettling, almost because it's too cute, and like you just feel something's going to be off, and certainly things would, are off. But, okay, I like this idea, and I do think overall, that is the idea of distract and move away from human extinction into just kind of absurd and cute. My thing is, so to Meta's credit, the, one of the more, and even the way Instinct speaks to you, the

• 27:25Speaker 01

  way Muse speaks to you, they really nailed the voice. Like, it's like not Claude, I mean Claude, the last couple of models, just speaks to you like it's like some obnoxious PhD professor. I don't know, like, what is the most like obnoxious type of personality you can actually listen to, and that's the way it speaks to you versus, I mean, Muse, it's literally like, oh yeah, hey, quick heads up, your flight, just got a notification, it might, uh, like, it's literally someone just kind of chatting with you. But to their credit too, I actually was like, oh, how long for me to drive from my house to the, the airport? Um, and it actually was like, I don't, hey, I don't have your address. That's okay, though. Maybe, do you want to just give me your cross streets? And that'll help.

• 28:09Speaker 01

  Like, they know people are, they've built this around people being a little bit leery of giving Facebook your data, your life. And I, I've connected my Gmail to Muse. I've not connected any kind of credit card instinct. I've given credit card info. I'm still like, trying to decide what my comfort level is overall on this. But what I don't get is, they have to build trust. The more you give to these systems, the better they will perform, the more valuable they will be. If the, if they like, how old is Alexander Wang? Twenty-five, six, something like that? Like, if you have a 25-year-old multi-billionaire hyper-sexualizing

• 28:53Speaker 01

  a little Labubu, and then you're looking at it and you're some kind of normie, which and probably they're just not even seeing that, I guess, but like, if that becomes more of a story, this is the person you are going to give your life away to and trust to have AI go do stuff for you? I don't, I, I think that's a bad play. I don't think that's, if that's the distraction from human, human extinction, just keep it cute, the Tamagotchi Muse charm Zuckerberg, that stuff's good, but like, this is a little creepy and like, I don't know. Do you, you don't think it's a little- Does it build trust?

• 29:35Alex Kantrowitz?

  Saying it's gonna work. I'm not saying it's necessarily smart, but I am saying that when you're talking about, you know, you, you said like, all right, you're talking about the end of the world. You're not talking about failing businesses. I think when you're looking at these absurd memes that Wang is tweeting, and by the way, he's 29, you're not looking at, you're not thinking about the existential threat that AI can lead to. It's sort of the, it is the opposite of that. So I think that is the strategy. I don't know if it's gonna work, but I certainly think that in the back of their minds, they're thinking, you know, the more absurd we can be, the more we're sort of poking at this end of the world narrative and, and anti-marketing against it.

• 30:20Speaker 01

  Now that, no, no, the more we're talking about this, even kind of that argument, I, I am asking Meta to kind of try to take a bit of control over this. And I hate traditional corporate PR communications type things, but like, like again, going back to just you are asking for the trust of people. If people, the average person who is not kind of like a shit poster, 20 something male on X is gonna start hearing about or seeing this kind of stuff, it's still, I, I have to imagine that would make people much more uncomfortable. Cause just thinking about like, it, it actually moves a conversation away from agents are

• 31:03Speaker 01

  gonna lead to human extinction back to the much more mundane, but real, oh wait, weird tech people are gonna take all my data and use it to monetize themselves and give away and like steal my privacy, which is the worst conversation Meta ever wants to be in. So you got a good product, let it run, let it run.

• 31:25Alex Kantrowitz?

  You know, we do, we do talk a lot about marketing on this show and maybe just a lot of it is, is bad marketing. So you mentioned the Tamagotchi, we should talk about it because it's not only the agent, there is a device as well. Looks like a Tamagotchi. This is from Bloomberg. Meta debuts dedicated charm device for using Muse AI. Meta Platforms unveiled a palm-sized dedicated gadget for using Muse, the company's popular new artificial intelligence assistant, pushing deeper into the AI devices market with a surprise announcement. The product was born out of the company's new design lab, led by Apple's former interface design chief, Alan Dai and its superintelligence AI group. It's called the Muse Charm. It looks like a Tamagotchi, the digital pet from the 90s.

• 32:07Alex Kantrowitz?

  It has roughly two inch display and runs an operating system designed to bring Muse to life on its own hardware. It's also, it is kind of cute, right? You just kind of hold it and there's like a little Muse avatar there and I guess it can get stuff done for you. I don't know, what's your reaction to this? I, I tweeted about it and I was like, well, what do you, what, well, who's gonna be the brave one in their social circle to break out the Muse, Muse buddy first? And it, it's certainly like, it's some of these devices, like Apple Vision Pro, for instance, you know, they seem cool in the demo and, and they do cool things, but there is a weird social element to it. The same thing that had the Google glasses. I don't know.

• 32:50Alex Kantrowitz?

  If you're sitting at a table and somebody brings out, breaks out the Muse buddy and asks it to like, call it an Uber, I don't know. Are they, are they the cool person in the group or do they not get an invite to dinner the next time? What do you think?

• 33:01Speaker 01

  Well, also, what is the Venn diagram between people who like cute Tamagotchi type stuff and, and early adopters of personal AI agentic hardware? Maybe, maybe it's

• 33:14Alex Kantrowitz?

  We'll find out.

• 33:14Speaker 01

  There's some overlap, we will find out, but, uh, so, okay. In terms of Meta being back, I have to say, so the one, any experimentation on form factors of hardware, I am excited by even the Rabid R1, rest in peace, the humane pin. We talked about all these a lot. Someone is gonna crack a new form factor. Anything that moves us away from just looking at our phones that are rectangular blocks and maybe foldable rectangular blocks, but still I'm excited. So I, I, I love that Meta is trying, but even bigger to me, actually, I think the audio only glasses, this is really interesting. I like, I actually was close to putting in the preorder.

• 33:59Speaker 01

  I might go put it in this weekend. So I have the Meta Ray-Bans, you do too. We've talked about it a lot. They were great for photos and video, especially like on vacation, walking around, walking around New York City. They were pretty good at, they were good at listening to audio, but Meta AI was effectively useless on them. Now the idea, so obviously there's been plenty of backlash in fairness to, even though I do love the camera and I use it responsibly of people being creeped out by the camera. If Muse can translate into an audio only interface well, for how good it is on the phone, I mean, audio only AI glasses become huge.

• 34:43Speaker 01

  Like I, I still can't even start to think about if that becomes a form factor that you're just walking along, again, that proactivity that you're walking along, suddenly it's like, oh wait, American Airlines just sent an email that because of the storms, there might be a delay. That's massive. And to have that directly on your face with no creepiness of a camera. So to me, that's the biggest part of the whole hardware announcement. Separate the VR glasses and stuff we can get into, but I think audio only Ray-Bans is big.

• 35:17Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, I think it is, it is. And they've been called the pervert glasses and I think they need to reverse that narrative. So that's one step to do that. Are you, that's okay. Are you gonna buy that, the camera free glasses? And are you gonna buy a Muse Tamagotchi?

• 35:31Speaker 01

  I will buy the camera free glasses, audio only. I think I, I think I have to. I'm committing to that now. No, I'm not gonna get a Tamagotchi. I'm like, I don't know, that's, that's too much. And, and again, I can never look at that thing the same after what Alexander Wang did to that poor little Loo Boo Boo. It's like, it's weird.

• 35:53Alex Kantrowitz?

  It's still going.

• 35:54Speaker 01

  It's weird. It's like, you can't, it's like, you can't only look at it, but, oh God, just leave it alone, Alexander Wang.

• 36:03Alex Kantrowitz?

  Well, I'm glad, I'm glad we spoke about this.

• 36:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:05Alex Kantrowitz?

  Strong emotions on your, someone tweeted, Tamagot your data. I thought that was funny.

• 36:12Speaker 01

  I mean, they have to, I can't, they have to not fall down that path of like, this is one big data stealing story. That's the only risk they have to leading in this race. Like otherwise they, they're gonna push this to, actually, do you know what this made me think about though? On one hand, their distribution advantage makes me convinced, obviously they're gonna win, they're just gonna push this out to everyone, but it, have you been on Threads recently? Cause that was their last creative product that should be dominant and have you been on Threads at all or?

• 36:54Alex Kantrowitz?

  No, I'm only on Threads when Instagram like basically makes me go there, but the incessant notifications.

• 36:59Speaker 01

  By accident, yeah.

• 37:00Alex Kantrowitz?

  Threads.

• 37:02Speaker 01

  Yeah. No, I, I was wondering like, that actually showed me that you can, will Muse end up like Threads? Where they have a distribution advantage, they're gonna get some number of people who are interested in that kind of, it's the same reason Twitter never actually grew or X in terms of overall user numbers. It's because there's only weirdos like us that love to spend time on it and like, Threads, the TAM was not as big. So yeah, that's what I was definitely wondering what, uh, is that an ominous potential signal for where Muse ends up?

• 37:42Alex Kantrowitz?

  Well, I don't know. I mean, basically the question is the competition, like with Threads, like Threads is bigger than X, but it's also like the, the size of X is not what matters. It's the influence and it's hard to argue that Threads is 1/20th as influential as X. So I'm not a hundred percent sure, but I think we should, you know, the, the interesting thing here for me is that Meta was able to build this Muse product with an inferior model. And what does it mean for OpenAI's ability to compete with it? Even though like OpenAI has better models, you know, are those better models gonna make a difference? And, you know, going back to what we spoke about last week, if you can build good enough

• 38:24Alex Kantrowitz?

  or good AI products with standard models, do you really need the frontier? So we're gonna talk about that when we come back after the break. Before we go to the break. A word of thanks to you, our audience. Last week, we talked a little bit about how the pedants were owning our reviews. And of course, like when we're going out to try to interview somebody like Jeff Hinton or Demis Hassabis and like the, you know, the front page of the show is a bunch of like one-star pedantic complaints, it becomes harder to have, you know, to, to book these interviews. And of course, like the show gets worse. So we knew that there was a lot of people who, who liked the show and just asked you to express it. And boy, did you answer the call last week. And, you know,

• 39:05Alex Kantrowitz?

  it takes about like 30 five-star reviews to wash out one. And, and it looks like we got that and more. So you're the best audience in the world. Really believe that. And just so thrilled that you responded the way you did after we asked for some five-star reviews last week. So thank you. I'll leave it alone for as long as I can. And, and just appreciate you all for doing that. All right, we'll be back right after this. This episode is brought to you by App Point. Everyone's racing to roll out AI right now. Co-pilots, chatbots, agents doing real work. But here's the part nobody loves talking about. All that AI runs on your data. And most teams have no single way to see it, secure it, and prove it's under control. That's exactly what App Point does. For 25 years,

• 39:49Alex Kantrowitz?

  they've been the trusted layer beneath the world's most demanding data, now extended across your entire AI estate. Your data, your cloud, and the agents acting on your behalf. It's how more than 28,000 organizations deploy AI with confidence. So innovation scales without scaling risk. App Point, the unifying trust layer for AI. Head to apppoint.com to see how enterprises deploy AI with confidence. Learn more at avpt.co/bigtechnologypodcast. That's avpt.co/bigtechnologypodcast. Violent threats against executives are growing at an alarming rate. When a company experiences

• 40:33Alex Kantrowitz?

  backlash, executives are the first people blamed. When their address and other personal details are sitting online, this backlash can lead right to their front door. The team at Ironwell knows this better than anyone. They've protected some of the most targeted executives and individuals on the planet for almost two decades. As a white glove enterprise security service, they protect your people with continuous personal data removal, proactive prevention tools, and human-led emergency support. So when someone goes looking for your executives, Ironwell ensures they hit a dead end. So here's what to do. Go to ironwell.com/bigtechnology, fill in the quick form, and request your free risk assessment. Their team will show you just how exposed your executives are, and how to lock it down before a threat reaches

• 41:15Alex Kantrowitz?

  their front door. That's ironwell.com/bigtechnology. Learn how to stop online threats before they become real-world attacks. The link's in the show notes.

• 41:30Speaker 02

  This episode is brought to you by Michelob Ultra. Good times mean competitions between you and your friends, like seeing who can throw some pigskin the farthest, or rush the field the fastest. Winner gets an ultra. Because it's not just a superior-like beer, it's also giving fans superior access to their favorite sporting events. Superior is worth playing for. Visit michelobultra.com/superioraccess to enter. Enjoy responsibly. Copyright 2026 Anheuser-Busch InBev Michelob Ultra Beer, St. Louis, Missouri.

• 41:58Alex Kantrowitz?

  And we're back here on Big Technology Podcast Friday Edition, joined as always by Ranjan Roy of Margins. All right, Ranjan. So, so before we get into the fact that, or maybe, maybe this all connects, right? I was going to say before we get into the fact that Meta was able to build Muse with, you know, an inferior model to what OpenAI has. But, but, and they have. And so we'll talk about the implications there. But one of the interesting things that came through my feed, just to go all harness hive here, was somebody tweeted, it's, it's not the harness, it's the harness that matters, not the model, with the picture of like the guy in the old, old-time meeting trying to stand up and make a point. And

• 42:43Alex Kantrowitz?

  instead of the guy's face, there's the Muse LaBoubou face there, which is G-rated. So we can show it. But, but the thing that's interesting is what Meta did here was they took a good enough model, right? Because we've seen all the benchmarks. We're like, the Meta models and the Grok models were chasing the frontier at a lower cost. And we're like, all right, let's see if that takes on. But what they were able to do is use that model, which was not the frontier model, and then hook it in to all these different services via connectors. And that has in turn made a very useful product without having to use frontier AI intelligence. So you were right, it was all about the harness, and

• 43:27Alex Kantrowitz?

  they're doing work. So talk a little bit about, you know, what you think that says about the future of AI and how important these connectors are.

• 43:35Speaker 01

  I'm glad we are saying this. The only, my only quip with that tweet is, that's kind of the confess your unpopular opinion meme framework. And it's not an unpopular opinion. I've been saying this, others have been saying this. And again, I've seen this firsthand at writer in terms of the, like, our own foundation models that are not at the frontier but are advanced. But the harness and the product and how everything connects to other systems data for a while now. So I think I've, I've had an advantage in terms of why that should work and what we're seeing right now. But maybe to try to be nuanced

• 44:14Speaker 01

  about it, there's two questions right here. Do you need that level of connectivity, tool definition, overall data, how you handle memory, compute, like, to make Muse work? The frontier model argument has always been that still over time, in like frontier models will be, subsume all of that infrastructure and just be able to do it without most of that infrastructure. So I think, I don't know, it's still relatively open, but I'm very glad that like, it is, like, no one is talking about what models it's running on, Muse is running on. And I love that. We're only talking about, not even the harness,

• 44:58Speaker 01

  it's good, it's the product in the end. So I'm, I've always been harness hive team product, and it's finally getting some recognition.

• 45:09Alex Kantrowitz?

  So it's a big win for, for Ranjan's side. Now, I would argue the models have, the models have gotten to the point where this is possible. And therefore, they are able to use these harnesses and connectors. But, you know, we should talk a little bit about the connectors, because basically, you know, they have been tweeting a long list of companies that are going to connect with Muse, things like Best Buy, and Gap, and Fanatics, and Walmart, Sephora, Dick's Sporting Goods, Wayfair, I've mentioned before, Expedia, Shopify has connected with it. So talk a little bit about what added functionality that, that I think T-Mobile, I used it with T-Mobile this week to check on my phone bill. Why are, what are these, what do these connectors do and why are they important?

• 45:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think it is really important on two sides. There's the agentic commerce side. Again, this is where announcing all these like partnerships means, these companies are going to be pushing direct feeds into Muse rather than it having to go use web search slash like computer use to try to log in, to try to get to your, find different items. So I think that's going to be very interesting. Trying to replicate the activity that would take place in a dedicated iOS app, but directly within the Muse app and ecosystem is very interesting. I think there is something to it. It is still clunky. It's gotten a lot better of logging into T-Mobile via some kind of web browser takeover. Now being able

• 46:37Speaker 01

  to do that kind of work, I think that's very interesting. But to me, the most interesting tension here is, and there was a lot of chatter around this this week, it's so much of so many businesses is built around consumer lack of inertia. Like, customer, I mean, T-Mobile, I'm sure, like, do they want to have you be able to go in and be like, actually explain to me that five-page PDF phone bill that I've never quite understood, and never took the time to upload into ChatGPT, and go consume, comparison shop, and tell me how I can save

• 47:17Speaker 01

  money and get, find a better plan? Like, this is going to be, there's a, I mean, this is what a lot of people, Expedia, Expedia does not actually own the inventory. Expedia is a price comparison engine that then will guide, lead out, or and make money off the lead gen to the travel site. So like, does that start to go away? It's actually interesting to me that these companies are jumping into these partnerships, because I actually think this disintermediates a lot of existing businesses. This actually changes a lot of businesses that have been built off people forgetting to unsubscribe, or whatever else. So to me, these partnerships, I get it, you're trying to look cool and...

• 48:01Speaker 01

  Add it to some agentic commerce press earnings call or so, I don't know. But I still think it's not good for a lot of these businesses.

• 48:11Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, and it was interesting because there was initial like joy, you know, when this came out and when these companies were connecting with Muse and the stock market really reacted to it, like they sent Shopify up, they sent, I think Instacart up, they sent Expedia up. And then all these companies, maybe outside of Shopify, gave up their gains like immediately. And there's a chart that's been making way, its way around X called the Muse sell off travel aggregators versus Meta and you've seen Meta up, you know, 20% since August 25th. And who's down? It's Uber, DoorDash, Expedia, TripAdvisor, Instacart, Airbnb, and the list goes on. And it's almost proportional to the gains that Meta has had, the losses

• 48:54Alex Kantrowitz?

  that these companies had. And I think that's actually, you know, I was thinking this week, you know, do you give these companies credit for playing ball with Muse? Because it's going to basically like, even if Muse doesn't take off, this is going to be a thing most likely. And so they're going to make the decisions they make now will, will definitely influence how they operate in the future. So you give them credit or do you say, you know, they're probably toast? And I, I agree with you. I think the rise of, you know, apps like Muse, you know, they become, they become threats to these, these platforms because they basically perform, like an app like Muse will perform the function that something like Expedia did, where Expedia used to be the agent, where it would go to every website, every like travel site and find you the hotel or find you the flight. Now Muse can do that.

• 49:39Alex Kantrowitz?

  So it sort of makes it pointless.

• 49:42Speaker 01

  I, I think this plays out like the death of SaaS where nothing's going to happen immediately or dramatically, but I do think there's a strong parallel between the idea that like enterprise agentic AI is going to kill off SaaS, which I still believe over time. I think this does any kind of like non-inventory owning market play, sorry, not like effectively agent, as you said, is severely under threat because, and if it's not Muse, it could be Instinct, it could be Google releases something, there's like all those services, whoever wins in that race, or if there's multiple players, they do the same work that the Expedia's of

• 50:21Speaker 01

  the world have done. But I mean, yeah, commerce is definitely going to change. I think that's a, that's a fair thing to, to say.

• 50:31Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay. So before we move on from this, I need to ask you, what does this say about frontier labs in general, right? Because if Meta was able to build Muse with a non-frontier model with the harness and connectors, do you need frontier labs to do most things? And it goes back to our discussion from last week about the, the chart we brought up from the Ramp Economics Lab where frontier model usage was 53% of all AI spend, August 2nd. It dropped down to 45% of all AI spend September 6th. Now it's gone up and down, right? And it's had its moments. But the thing that I found most interesting was, this is from Arakas Karazian, who's the chief economist at Ramp. If he says, if you see this chart,

• 51:15Alex Kantrowitz?

  know this is my perspective. The revenue going, the revenue growth path for OpenAI and Anthropic has weakened due to the competition. And that competition is from other US models, not China and open source. So the standard models are doing a good enough job and the standard models are often cheaper.

• 51:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:33Alex Kantrowitz?

  So what do you think this says? It's a trend across multiple data points.

• 51:37Speaker 01

  And it's a massive threat into any kind of IPO story. And I think that's what, I'm not saying directly the human extinction conversation has helped distract from, but it is a massive threat. I firmly believe I've seen this firsthand, like the conversation change. If you want to do 3D world modeling, Astra's your guy. Like, great. If you want to-

• 52:03Alex Kantrowitz?

  Everything else, go to Alexander Wang and the sexualized Labubu.

• 52:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, go to the Labubu. Oh, God.

• 52:10Alex Kantrowitz?

  Sorry.

• 52:11Speaker 01

  I need to just erase that from my mind.

• 52:13Alex Kantrowitz?

  We're gonna have to do explicitly.

• 52:15Speaker 01

  But it's not, it's not forever. The Labubus themselves, I can never have one in my house again. Not that we have, but we don't have any Labubus, but I can never have one.

• 52:25Alex Kantrowitz?

  We have a Labubu. Yeah. Well, I guess we should throw ours out. Yeah, we have a Labubu keychain.

• 52:31Speaker 01

  Get rid of that thing. Or look at it. Look at it and tell me how you feel next time.

• 52:40Speaker 01

  I, I think like this is going to be, to me, actually the single most important conversation of the fall, the next few months. Because why pay for frontier model? Can it, other models do the job? What is the added benefit? Does something about frontier models like subsume all of the harness? And this is the debate, like, and it going into this kind of IPO environment, like, it's a dangerous one for these companies.

• 53:11Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. No, I, I have a story coming out about it on Big Technology. It's called, right now, the working headline, and I'm going to publish it later this afternoon. On Friday, Meta's Muse revival and the AI frontier's unspoken threat. I think it's a big deal.

• 53:25Speaker 01

  No sexualized Labubu images, though. Please.

• 53:27Alex Kantrowitz?

  No, I will not. Only for the people watching YouTube will I put those, those images up. Everybody else, or I guess on our shorts, everybody else is freed from them. All right, before we go, got to talk to you about dopamine sites. And we can do this briefly. There is a phenomenon where people have gotten so much dopamine from like shopping online that there are these new sites called dopamine sites that are meant just to mimic that activity and you don't actually do the activity, right? So this is, this is from one story about it. This week I placed orders for a $44,000 Patek Philippe hand engraved watch, a $12,500

• 54:10Alex Kantrowitz?

  Hermes bag, $9,800 Tiffany diamond ring, and a $7,000 Cartier love bracelet in yellow gold. I don't need any of them. I certainly can't afford them. Thankfully, they'll never arrive. Instead of Amazon, I spent the past week browsing a new breed of websites called dopamine sites, a trend that's emerged in South Korea. It's called like dopamine shop or food never comes, where you order food and shop online. And you just do it for the dopamine hit, not for the actual products themselves. I think we just have to talk about this before we go. What, you, you must have some perspective on these dopamine sites. It's crazy, right?

• 54:48Speaker 01

  So, okay, my, my hot take on this is going to be, I actually think this is great. I think this is, yes. I think, because I was thinking about it, my initial reaction was like, oh my God, this represents the end of humanity. This represents like, this is the most depressing thing ever. But in reality, it's just kind of like a video game at that point. It's just kind of like, and we all do it, like scrolling Zillow and setting alerts on houses that you're not gonna buy, shopping, like you see these, every, I mean, having worked in digital commerce for many years, like so much of the experience is around

• 55:29Speaker 01

  the thrill of the search and the dopamine resulting from that or getting that deal that is entire basis of retail in general. So something that kind of, it's like it turns it into a little bit of a video game. To me, it kind of feels like actually dress up games are quite popular, where you just like buy clothes, any kind of digital good that you're buying. And now you don't even have to buy it. You just go through the shopping itself. So I'm pro dopamine sites. And if it just, if it's not sports betting and other more negative and nefarious dopamine hits, why not, Alex? Why not?

• 56:07Alex Kantrowitz?

  Someone had this amazing idea. They wrote, multi-billion dollar opportunity in combining these dopamine sites with the lottery. So you pay $50 and there's a one in 1,000 chance that that Patek actually arrives. I love that. Could you imagine?

• 56:23Speaker 01

  You, you know, there's like bid up, I think. There are these, all these sites that are really kind of scammy, but basically are built around like you put in like a dollar and you might win something that's like $8,000, but then they only do it when a certain critical mass does it. Like this, I guess this model has definitely, this exists in the scammy corners of the internet forever. And now, but now they're not taking your money. They're just, how, how are they monetizing, do you think? Or they're just like, it's just for the love of the dopamine.

• 56:54Alex Kantrowitz?

  Data to Meta, so they can build these things on Muse.

• 56:58Speaker 01

  Now, you know what? They are doing it for the love of the game, the love of just giving you, we'll, we'll pay for a little bit of compute and you get the dopamine. So I'm pro dopamine sites.

• 57:13Alex Kantrowitz?

  I can't get on board with it. But look, folks, you know, if you don't want to shop on a dopamine site, you could always get your twice weekly hit of dopamine here on Big Technology Podcast. Okay. Won't always be perfect, promise that. But, but we're here and we'll, we'll hand that dopamine over and we won't make you go through a fake sales process.

• 57:34Speaker 01

  No.

• 57:35Alex Kantrowitz?

  Sounds about right?

• 57:35Speaker 01

  Give us your data. You don't have to give us your data.

• 57:38Alex Kantrowitz?

  No, don't give us your data. Absolutely not. We don't need that data.

• 57:43Speaker 01

  I don't even know what I would do with it.

• 57:45Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, me neither. Ranjan, great time as always. Nice to talk about something non-extinction as, as you said.

• 57:52Speaker 01

  Though I don't know, sexualized Labubus. I don't know what wins in the great, the great debate.

• 58:00Alex Kantrowitz?

  Well, if you, if folks, if you've stayed this far, we appreciate you. So thank you for doing that. And I will promise not to have any conversations about sexualized Labubu next week, although that, if that's a promise, that might be broken.

• 58:12Speaker 01

  All right. See you next week.

• 58:14Alex Kantrowitz?

  All right, Ranjan. Thank you again. Thanks, everybody for listening and watching. And we'll see you next time on Big Technology Podcast.