Apple's AI Play — With M.G. Siegler

M. G. Siegler is a venture partner at GV, formerly google ventures, and the author of Spyglass. He joins Big Technology Podcast to discuss what Apple may have cooking for its AI-themed WWDC event in June. We discuss what Apple may do on the consumer front, including how much of iOS it's willing to change in service of AI features. And then we dig into its potential AI play for developers, including on-device processing and its own foundational model. We also talk about its interest in robotics. Tune in for a deep dive into Apple's AI options as it gears up for big announcements in the coming months. ---- Enjoying Big Technology Podcast? Please rate us five stars ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ in your podcast app of choice. For weekly updates on the show, sign up for the pod newsletter on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/6901970121829801984/ Want a discount for Big Technology Premium? Here’s 40% off for the first year: https://tinyurl.com/bigtechnology Questions? Feedback? Write to: [email protected] 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?

  Apple's big AI announcement is fast approaching. So let's look into what may be coming with one of the most insightful Apple watchers in the business. That's coming up right after this. This episode is brought to you by Genesis. What does it actually take to put Agentic 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 to go inside a large scale Agentic CX transformation, including the business decisions, trade offs, and lessons along the way.

• 0:42Alex Kantrowitz?

  You can watch both conversations now on my YouTube channel today. 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, a show for cool headed, nuanced conversation of the tech world and beyond. We have such a good show for you today because we're going to look deep into what's coming with Apple's big forthcoming AI announcement at WWDC.

• 1:27Alex Kantrowitz?

  We don't have the full script, or really any of it, but there's enough smoke out there that we can triangulate what's actually going to come. And we have one of the best in the business here to do it with us. MG Siegler is here. He's a venture partner at GV, formerly Google Ventures, and the author of Spyglass, which is a great, I guess you could call it a tech blog, and you can find it at spyglass.org. MG, welcome to the show.

• 1:50Speaker 01

  Hey, thanks, Alex. Good to be, good to be back.

• 1:52Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, it's great to have you back. I can't believe it. We did a show, you were like guest number four on the podcast. That was in 2020. So four years later, here we are.

• 2:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was in San Francisco at the time. Now I'm in London, so it feels like a whole different world.

• 2:06Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, we were both in San Francisco. And in fact, I think I recorded that show from a ranch outside of LA. I had rented like a room there mid COVID to escape.

• 2:17Speaker 01

  Right, that's right.

• 2:19Alex Kantrowitz?

  And now I live in New York, so crazy times. We spoke last time about how Apple's at a crossroads, and that certainly hasn't changed. I mean, it's been quite a roller coaster ride, perhaps that we couldn't predict since then, right? Which they just sold massive amounts of phones and computers during COVID. And then they had the sort of the after effects over the last couple of months or year plus where they've been, they've seen revenue declines in four of the last five quarters. They'll probably see another one in the quarter that just ended in March. And so rough time for the company, both in terms of sales and then also everybody's kind of scratching their head, what's going on with their AI play? And we're about to find out in June at WWDC, which I'm looking forward to. Hopefully I'll be there.

• 3:03Alex Kantrowitz?

  And there's kind of two aspects with this forthcoming AI announcement with Apple. One is consumer and the other is sort of like the enterprise or the tools that they're going to give developers to build. So we're going to dig into both. But first, let's talk a little bit about consumers. So you've been writing about this extensively and you highlighted some reporting from Bloomberg that, that Mark Gurman has, has unearthed.

• 3:29Speaker 01

  Yep, he gets, he gets most of it, obviously.

• 3:31Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, he is, he is very good. And he says, "Apple's artificial intelligence strategy will include a slew of new proactive features," proactive is a very interesting word there, "to assist users in their daily lives." And the company isn't planning to debut its own generative AI chatbot. Instead, it's holding talks with potential partners like Alphabet, Alphabet's Googles and OpenAI to supply generative AI services. You wrote about this. Read between the lines. What does that mean?

• 3:59Speaker 01

  So again, as you noted, obviously, no one knows for sure and Apple is of course very secretive about it. Gurman has great sources, you know, usually and almost for sure here, I'm sure. It seems like, you know, the, obviously, the, the word out there in the markets is that Apple's behind in this, in this regard, right, in AI. And I don't know if that's like correct in, in that it's still so, so early days, right, for all of this and everything you see launching on a, you know, weekly, if not daily basis, all sorts of new pieces of technology, new companies, you know, new models that are rolling out.

• 4:39Speaker 01

  And so I do think that Apple is, is behind in terms of what they've showcased publicly. Obviously, a lot of the other companies from Google on down have been doing a lot in that regard. But what would Apple actually do here when they ship? Obviously, they're famous for sort of sitting back and waiting for a market sort of to be seeded a little bit beforehand and then coming out. And it seems like there's going to be something similar here, but it's also a different world because a lot of this is obviously software dependent and backend dependent. And so if you, again, read between those lines, it sort of feels like they might take a two-pronged approach here where they basically have their own models that they've been working on and that they would do on device. Obviously,

• 5:23Speaker 01

  Apple has a, an advantage here in that they do their own hardware and they've done their own chips for a long, long time. And, you know, Tim Cook, of course, in more recent times, has been touting how those chips are sort of AI ready. And I'm sure they are, but they're not like Nvidia chips. They're not, you know, necessarily built just for AI purposes. They're usually multi-purpose chips, but they've been building some that seem like they're going to be, you know, used for those purposes. And so, again, I would guess based off of, you know, all the reporting, Gurman and a bunch of others, that they would do the two-pronged approach of having both AI that's going to be on device and they'll talk, they'll tout sort of the privacy aspect of that and also speed and

• 6:05Speaker 01

  some other, you know, advantages that they can take advantage of because they, again, they built the hardware. And then I think they would outsource, and this is where the reporting on, you know, talking to Google, and I have no inside information or no knowledge about what's going on with that. But it does make sense at a high level of like that they would potentially partner with a third party. You look at the early days of the iPhone, right? They partnered with, again, with Google on YouTube and Google on Google Maps and Yahoo on things like stocks and they still partner with Yahoo on things like stocks, right? So I think that they could ease, pretty easily, just slot in there a partner and maybe it's Google, maybe it's OpenAI, maybe it's a combination of all of those for things that they want to do in the cloud, some generative AI,

• 6:47Speaker 01

  you know, capabilities that maybe they can't do or feel like they don't need to do necessarily on-device while on-device is used for different types of services.

• 6:55Alex Kantrowitz?

  And so effectively, the net output of that is going to be two different things. One is going to be product changes that Apple will make and then others will be products that Apple will enable others to build. The changes that Apple is going to make, to me, is really interesting. So they have Siri, of course, so you would imagine, let's talk about for Siri, it would be somewhat souped up. But the other thing is, if you use, like, let's say they're, you know, partnering with these with these other companies to create AI experiences on the phone, that changes the way the operating system works. And last I checked, iOS is a pretty good operating system. I would call it the best operating system of all mobile

• 7:33Alex Kantrowitz?

  operating systems. So how fundamentally does Apple change or potentially how how big of a risk that can they take in changing their operating system? Because that could potentially have them falling behind others in a space that they lead. It almost reminds me a little bit of like the Google dilemma of how much do you want to change search? Do you view it as kind of a similar trade-off question?

• 7:55Speaker 01

  Right. It's sort of standard innovator's dilemma type stuff, right? Because like you, like you say, Apple's in sort of a key position and certainly now, Department of Justice says they're in the key position, you know, with the with high-end smartphones, however you want to define that as they do. But Apple's operating system is a huge part of that, right? And iOS is, you know, considered by many to be sort of the pinnacle of Of smartphone operating systems and maybe all of operating systems. And so to your point, how much do they want to sort of monkey with that, right? And change it? And there's, you know, low level stuff that they obviously will do things that, you know, even Android's done, you know, earlier with things like generative wallpapers. You can imagine

• 8:37Speaker 01

  that being like very low hanging fruit, right? They'll do, I'm sure they'll do something along those lines because it's sort of these table stakes type stuff that you that you need to do now and fun little things for the user experience. But there's much deeper stuff that they can do. And one of the things I actually look to and think about there, and I don't think there's been much reporting on this, maybe German's, you know, said it said something about it in passing, but I actually look to sort of what Microsoft is is at least rumored to be doing. And I know Tom Warren over at The Verge does a lot of reporting on this, which I think is is pretty good. And he seems insightful and to have good sources on this, that basically gearing up for the next version of Windows and Microsoft's going to go all in on AI, which is not surprising, obviously, given their OpenAI partnership and everything else that they've been doing, you know, in recent quarters.

• 9:22Speaker 01

  But so what if Microsoft sort of re constitutes Windows to be predicated around AI? And again, you talk about iOS being in a dominant position, you know, in terms of being a great product. Windows, you could, you know, it's been a long time since I use Windows regularly, but you could say, you know, it's it's sort of long in the tooth. I think it's been, you know, getting better in recent years as it's become more modern. And as Microsoft suggests, less, you know, built the entire company around it now in the Satya Nadella days, which is a good thing. But if they really are going to sort of base the entire entirety of Windows around this, they might do something like, you know, have something running in the background that's always sort of recording. And that sounds sort of nefarious, but you know, it's

• 10:07Speaker 01

  something that a that an operating system can do is like, you know, sort of basically monitoring what you're doing on your computer to be able to recall at a moment's notice if if anything, like web browsing. Word documents, all different sorts of things. So now, take that to the Apple side. Imagine if Apple did that for iOS again. They have an advantage there, maybe because they have such the privacy angle and they've been talking about that nonstop for many years at this point. So what if they basically touted like, look, we can, you know, obviously we, iOS runs the iPhone. We, in a very secure way, on the secure enclave or whatnot, we will record everything that you're doing and need to, if you need to recall anything on a moment's notice, we will be able to do that.

• 10:49Speaker 01

  And they can do that with third-party apps. That will be a little bit complicated. And again, I don't know that they're going to do this, but you can imagine that would be a big, big thing if they did something like that. There've been a few startups who have talked about doing that, but the problem is it's very hard, obviously, again, from a privacy perspective, but also just a technological perspective, to be running fully in the background all the time. But you can do that if you, if you control the OS. And, and the OSs are obviously iOS, Android and Windows, as we're talking about. And so all of those, those players could potentially do something like that. And that's something that would fundamentally change the iPhone, obviously.

• 11:23Alex Kantrowitz?

  Now, here's my perspective, reading between the lines of where they might go. I mean, German talks about how they're going to be proactive. And we just had Jack Clark from Anthropic here talking a little bit about how they are moving from sort of chatbots where like you give a command and you get information back to agents that can sort of start to have dialogue with you and ask you questions. And I wonder if Apple, in its, in this release, will skip the chatbot stage and go right to the agent stage. Because they do have, they have your health data, they have your, you know, basically all the data that a company could want to have on you. And they have this privacy thing going for them, like you mentioned. So maybe they just go straight to agent and their AI play is like, you know, almost like

• 12:06Alex Kantrowitz?

  this super enhanced Siri that will end up like helping. You go about your daily life, like the maybe the vision of like some of these assistants in the past, just born out by Apple. What do you think about that?

• 12:18Speaker 01

  I think that's a really interesting concept. I mean, I do think, you know, zooming back, obviously, since ChatGPT, sort of the chatbot have been, you know, getting a lot of buzz and hype and a lot of it's warranted. Obviously, they're they're super interesting. But I do think I do wonder if we're not in a stage where that's sort of a more temporary thing, basically, to get to a means to an end, right? Like, what are you actually trying to do? So we're talking to the chatbots because it's sort of a known way to interact with a computer that's not necessarily just doing, you know, a search prompt. And it's a it's a more sort of natural way to talk. But eventually, you would imagine that, yeah,

• 13:00Speaker 01

  you use a whole slew of things, including voice, including, you know, images and all different sorts of things again. And so does Apple sort of look at that and say, yeah, the chatbots are are interesting, but we can probably, yeah, just jump ahead of that. And like you said, sort of do a proactive agent that doesn't necessarily need, you know, a one on one pop up chatbot thing, chat box for you to talk to. That said, I do think that they have to have an answer to you brought it up earlier about like what they do with Siri, right? And Siri gets, you know, dragged through the mud a lot. Larry David, you know, famous clip going around in recent weeks about him just screaming

• 13:41Speaker 01

  at it on Curb Your Enthusiasm. But it the reality is like they were a first mover there, which is sort of rare for Apple, right? And and it's been many, many years now. And it's just not where it needs to be in terms of where we are now in our AI world. And so does Apple sort of, you know, come back with a vengeance with some sort of very souped up version of Siri? Do they even still use the name Siri? I mean, probably because it has such, you know, brand awareness now, if not exactly great, you know,

• 14:12Alex Kantrowitz?

  Maybe not the type you want.

• 14:14Speaker 01

  But but I sort of wonder if they don't sort of also do that. So they basically have a version of Siri that's, you know, again, maybe not just chatbot full on like chat GPT, but is sort of a voice based assistant as it is now, but running effectively what is a chatbot behind the scenes, but souped up. And I think that that is super compelling because that's not just potentially phone. I think if they do that on Apple Watch and they do that on AirPods, you know, I think that that becomes really, really interesting.

• 14:42Alex Kantrowitz?

  And now here's my my sort of guess on that front. I think they're going to bring in for the first time other companies' models into Siri. So we talked about like this licensing and I kept thinking like, where could like licensing or partnering with Google Gemini or OpenAI land? Because effectively like, okay, maybe it's part of like an Apple agent, but you know, if they end up like, you know, there's little distinction between like that and an app, unless you bake it into the operating system. And the way to bake it into the operating system is with Siri. Do you see that as a possibility?

• 15:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, for sure. And I think there's also a bonus side effect of that, which I've heard a few people sort of mention in passing, but I do think you could see easily play out this way. Whereas obviously, a lot of these companies, big and small, big companies and startups are getting dinged a lot for, you know, what gets returned from the prompts, right? And what if Apple can basically outsource that and say like, it's not, you know, it's not our data that is being returned to you. And obviously, they need to do some work there because they can't just have it, you know, spitting out things that they deem to be sort of inappropriate, that they think would, only because they would be concerned, obviously, that it would ruin their their brand, you know, and tarnish their brand in some way.

• 16:03Speaker 01

  But again, you could see a world in which they use third parties, integrate third parties to get all of the functionality that sort of people come to expect from it. But at the same time, they can say like, yeah, that, you know, you're sort of using this at your own risk. And you might get some data back that's, you know, not up to the Apple standards, but we're willing to work with third parties here type thing. They'll obviously massage it in a much better way to say that, but along those lines.

• 16:31Alex Kantrowitz?

  You're going to be so excited to access OpenAI's GPT-5 through the Apple AI iPhone.

• 16:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:37Alex Kantrowitz?

  Something like that.

• 16:38Speaker 01

  You can see it. Yep.

• 16:40Alex Kantrowitz?

  So there's also, so let's then talk about, this is obviously happening at a developer event. And that I think will be the main thrust of the news. I think a lot of people will be like, so my series getting smarter? And the answer will probably be yes. But what Apple is really going to want to do is enable developers to build generative AI applications on their phone. This idea of an AI app store has been something that's been circulated and seems like inevitable because what we've been hearing about has been, again, the fact that you brought this up, that Apple has a heck of a lot of compute that they can do on device. And that's going to enable developers to build things that they haven't been able to build before, because a lot of the compute right now is happening on the cloud. And what if they can actually enable developers to build more powerful, faster, smarter AI

• 17:23Alex Kantrowitz?

  applications using some of the compute power on the phone itself? Is that going to be the most important thing that they introduce? And where do you think that's going to go?

• 17:32Speaker 01

  Yeah. Again, I could see a two-pronged approach here where they could basically, you know, maybe strike a deal with with one or many of the, you know, LLM companies and say, you know, you can work with their APIs. We've made it super easy to do that, to build your applications through, you know, our own, you know, development areas. Or we're going to offer our own on-device capabilities for certain types of AI. You know, again, not for everything necessarily, but for, you know, they would lay out for X, Y, and Z. You don't necessarily need to go up to the cloud. It's going to be much faster, much more secure to keep it on device. And you should build, you know, these types of applications

• 18:16Speaker 01

  are the ones we know about. But we we'd love to see what you guys come up with and that type of thing, right? And you can imagine an AI kit and all different sorts of stuff that they launch.

• 18:25Alex Kantrowitz?

  Oh, yeah.

• 18:26Speaker 01

  In order to leverage that.

• 18:28Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, AI kit seems like it will definitely be something that manifests.

• 18:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, for sure.

• 18:34Alex Kantrowitz?

  So talk a little bit about Ferret. You've written about this Ferret research paper that Apple has released.

• 18:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, again, you know, going back to the notion that Apple's obviously super secretive and it doesn't want things out there before the big reveal. AI is an interesting element to this, right? Because in some ways, they've been getting, Apple's been getting dinged because researchers famously want to be able to put their work out there, you know, to work with an open community and let it be known of like what they're doing and being collaborative and Apple's, you know, obviously hesitant to do some of that work. But with AI, because of just the, this is the state, the normal state of being for, for that type of research, they have been putting some stuff out there. And one of it is this, you know, this supposed Ferret project, which they published, I think, a couple of papers

• 19:25Speaker 01

  on now, one of them recently. I forget where through, was it Northwestern or, I think it was Cornell, actually, they published it through. And so basically, you can go in and look at this paper, which is public, and it talks about some of the AI work that's being done internal to Apple, which again, they're publishing in public. And so if you read about this Ferret project, it basically sounds, to boil it down very simply, they've created a system that is able to parse UI, so application, you know, user interface, to be able to deduce what's going on, like what's in the image. And, you know, that sounds sort of obvious, but it's actually, from my understanding, which is a layman's, you know, understanding, it's a pretty complex thing to do. I've known some startups in

• 20:07Speaker 01

  the past that have been trying to work on this type of product, this type of product and problem. And again, it's not as straightforward as you might think it is, because there's all different sorts of screen sizes and various permutations that you can do that change, you know, with, with UI. And so in Apple's system, they, you know, presumably will be able to

• 20:27Speaker 01

  You would say, take a look, but it's obviously all happening behind the scenes. They would be able to know what is going on within the UI. And that's important because you could imagine if they could open this up either to their own applications or eventually to third parties, you could sort of see, just like they do right now with the shortcuts application on every iOS device, they could allow this to, to sort of like in real language to say like, hey, um, send this to Instagram and send it as a direct message, um, you know, to, to my wife. And then they could let the ferret system go in there. And even if Instagram didn't do anything specifically to sort of create, to tap into APIs

• 21:08Speaker 01

  that are already in existence, um, or build new APIs to allow developers to do that. They could potentially, Apple would allow, um, a system to interact with a third party application that they don't really know that much about, just by allowing the machine basically to use AI, sorry, to use the UI as if a regular user would.

• 21:29Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. And just to think back towards the agent thing, I mean, you could totally again, see these proactive notifications. You take a picture. So maybe juiced up Siri says, you know, tell me where you want to send it. You speak into the thing, you know, DM it to my family, post it on Instagram, send it to X with this text and then there you go and it does it.

• 21:48Speaker 01

  Yep. Yep. And again, I think the key to that is you could do some of that now, obviously again, through shortcuts, but that involves APIs that have to be built by someone. And with this type of system, you know, some very one person, you know, shop could build an app and they don't need necessarily to build all these APIs and need all these developers to, to help them out and, and all these new capabilities. They could just give the app over to Apple and just, you know, allow, um, this type of ferret system to be able to, uh, work with the app using AI. It was, it's, you know, it, it sounds like almost too simple, right? It sounds like too obvious, but I think it could be pretty impactful if they're able to get it working. Which sounds like they are.

• 22:33Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. I mean, it is sometimes the simplest things in AI. You just like, it's some of these solutions that we've been throwing like, or the tech industry's been throwing like different techno- technological fixes toward, but they're just too complicated with AI. You can just, you know, just make it more simple and that's sort of the magic of this stuff. The, um, another thing that I've been wondering about Apple and I'm curious if you have some insight into this is. They've, I mean, whether they're behind or not, we're going to talk about that sort of as we end this segment. But they certainly don't seem to ship fast. And you do wonder, I've wondered whether they have the culture that's, you know, sort of been able to build these things. Obviously, they were unsuccessful with the self-driving car. To me, that was a cultural issue.

• 23:16Alex Kantrowitz?

  And I wonder if they have the culture that's going to be able to build, to build these products. Because it requires so much more collaboration, sharing of knowledge. Like you said, publishing papers, which they don't usually do, and now they're doing. So maybe they've shown some signs of adjusting. So there's a culture and then there's also a talent question. Because they haven't really been stacking up the AI engineers the way that OpenAI and Google have in the past. And you, I think, yeah, you mentioned, I'm going to pull it up right here in your writing. The real, the war is for talent more than so for products at the moment. And that's the real risk to Apple. So culture and talent, what do you think about that?

• 23:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, I do think that that's, you know, one of the key areas of downside to focus on with them. For all the reasons that you mentioned, I do think, you know, like we just talked about, they're doing work that's maybe outside of their comfort zone. You know, to necessarily try to attract the talent with regard to publishing papers. And, you know, bending to some of the industry norms in that regard. But yeah, they, you know, for what? I don't know that it's totally fair or unfair, but they're not right now known as one of the players that's attracting all of the top AI talent. Right? I think they've made some acquisitions in order to get some of that talent in-house.

• 24:32Speaker 01

  You know, the reports again indicate that maybe a lot of the, not a lot, but maybe some of the car project people have come over from that. And, you know, there's tangential things, right? Like with computer vision and machine learning in that regard, that obviously a lot of people were working on that on the Apple car project. And now they've come over potentially to work on other AI projects for Apple. So they definitely, obviously, of course, have talent. They're, you know, through almost a $3 trillion company. They're going to be able to hire who they want.

• 24:59Alex Kantrowitz?

  It's a very specific type of talent. Yeah.

• 25:01Speaker 01

  It's a very specific type of talent. Right. And, and there's a lot of other players, big. And startups out there right now who are all vying for that same talent. And so I, I mean, I have not heard what the sales pitch is from Apple, obviously, in terms of trying to bring those, that type of talent over. You could say, I, I can imagine a world though, where they say basically like, look, we have over a billion active devices in people's hands and people's pockets. How many other people can say, how many other companies can say that? Maybe Google, but you know, even then, then it's they're partnering with Android, with Samsung and with, you know, other OEMs, um, you know, not making all of those devices by themselves, whereas Apple does that. And so they have a advantage in that regard.

• 25:43Speaker 01

  And you could see a world in which they basically ship their AI, say with, uh, you know, iOS 18. And again, they ship it to a billion plus devices overnight. And then all of a sudden you have access to camera information, you have access to location information, you have access to videos, you have access to all different sorts of stuff that basically no one else can get to. When we talk about, you know, these, these companies, and I know we're gonna talk a little bit about this, working on hardware, why do they want to do that? I think because there's a wide range of, uh, data input that they would want that's not just text, uh, box based.

• 26:20Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. When Gruber was on, he talked about when Apple has a high priority project, they tend to just swarm it with talent. And it does seem, we were, that he basically said that's, they didn't do that with HomePod, which you and I talked about last time you were on. And like now seems like a distant memory, even though they've revived it in some disappointing way. Uh, but it does seem to be like, this is what they're doing now. They know they have to execute here and they're swarming the talent and really directing it from places that it was somewhat like wasted before, which is the self-driving car project.

• 26:52Speaker 01

  Yeah. And, and to your earlier point, like if, if they can get over the cultural hurdle that they're viewed as, you know, too insular, too, um, too close-minded to work on some of these, you know, new fangled AI projects. If they can get over that hurdle, I think that they can make a pretty compelling sales pitch again to a lot of would be, um, you know, AI experts and researchers to say, no one else can offer you billions of devices sort of, uh, almost overnight, right? Cause so many people will update iOS to the new version when it comes out immediately. And so that's a pretty compelling pitch. Um, if you're an AI researcher who wants to do something that is unique and can be done at a scale that's, uh, no one else can match.

• 27:33Alex Kantrowitz?

  There's one more thing I want to get to. I don't want to miss on this on this conversation, which is that Apple is rumored to be developing its own foundational model called Ajax. Maybe it's not there yet. It seems like no one's really talking about it. And it's interesting that they're doing that in conjunction with bringing in partners. Is that something that just doesn't seem ready for prime time? Or any thoughts about, you know, why that's not the main thrust of this?

• 27:57Speaker 01

  Hard to say. Again, this is all based on reporting, of course. And you're right that it hasn't been, you know, as at the forefront as some of the other reporting about their AI projects, including partnering with, you know, other, other players. And you would think that maybe those two are related in some way. And so that's why it's on the back burner. But Apple, you know, occasionally does surprise, right? Still, and they, and maybe they do have more behind the scenes than they're sort of letting on or have let, you know, got out there in some, in some capacity. And so while this project has been rumored about, it could be as simple as like, maybe it is farther along than we know about, or that's been reported on. And maybe they are ready to go with it. Maybe it's also related to the on-device elements.

• 28:40Speaker 01

  And maybe that's what it, the launch was specifically, as you know, many of these LLM projects, you know, are now splintering off where they have, you know, the premium version, the big version, or they have the smaller on-device, right? That are meant to be on-device versions. So maybe Apple launches with the on-device version of Ajax, you know, as their sort of first foray into LLMs. And maybe they have a bigger version that they're working on, which won't come out now. You could see a bunch of different ways that could go. But again, they might be able to surprise with something at, they'll obviously surprise with something at WWDC, but is it going to be, yeah, that big LLM? We'll see.

• 29:15Alex Kantrowitz?

  So let's just take, before we end the segment, your gut on where Apple is, behind, ahead, sort of with the pack right now? And where do you think they're going to be after WWDC?

• 29:27Speaker 01

  So my general

• 29:28Alex Kantrowitz?

  Question.

• 29:29Speaker 01

  It is, but my general take on this, not with any, you know, just trying to read a bunch of different tea leaves, you know, and bringing them all together to form a point of view is essentially, I don't view, I don't worry so much that Apple is very far behind. Again, we hit on this earlier. I think things are moving so fast, so rapidly with new, new things shipping all the time, including L L M updates, that I'm not so sure that Apple's sort of missing the boat here. If anything, I'm not convinced that it's still not too early to launch some of this stuff, except that I think there's no way that Apple could get away with not launching something. There's obviously benefits to being in public and,

• 30:13Speaker 01

  and having people know what you're doing with regard to AI, because again, for attracting developers and attracting talent to the, to the company again, as we just talked about. But I'm also, again, not convinced that there's, it's still not too early for all of this. And I think that that matters from a, a product perspective. I think we've seen a lot of fun stuff launching, you know, from chat G P, chat G P T on forward. But again, it's all a moving target. And so Apple, as, as we talked about, as you well know, like they like to sort of come into a market that's, that's, you know, sort of been meandering and really firmly establish it. And I'm not sure that that's the case here. I think that it's still going to be meandering for a while, just again, by the nature of how fast things are moving.

• 30:57Speaker 01

  And so again, Apple needs to do something. Certainly Wall Street believes that they need to do something. If you look at Apple's stock prices, Microsoft's stock prices and all that. And so they're going to need to do it right now. But I'm not sure that they absolutely would do it, all things being equal. And I think that what they're want to get out there is ultimately the end product. And what can they do there that's unique compared to what's in the market?

• 31:23Alex Kantrowitz?

  There's so much more Apple that I want to talk about, including a surprising play in robotics, the stock price, which you just mentioned, and declining iPhone sales. So why don't we do that after the break? 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, 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

• 32:08Alex Kantrowitz?

  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 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

• 32:52Alex Kantrowitz?

  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 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.

• 33:35Alex Kantrowitz?

  And we're back here on Big Technology Podcast with MG Siegler, Venture Partner at GV, which is formerly Google Ventures. He also writes Spyglass, which is a great tech site. You can get it at spyglass.org. Very quickly, let's talk about this robotics thing. While I was doing research for this interview, you have been on this, right? There's been a tremendous amount of smoke, shall we say, when it comes to the robotics play that Apple might be getting into. And it sort of breaks down into two different categories. One is like an actual home robot that Apple has been talking about developing. And two is there's like a, almost like a FaceTime robot with a robotic arm that will feel like when you're speaking with somebody,

• 34:19Alex Kantrowitz?

  that it's like kind of moving along with you. And it seems like Apple has a lot of this technology already developed, but isn't quite sure if it's good enough or Apple-y enough or, or going to bring in enough money. But it is interesting that they are so interested in pursuing robotics. We also know that Amazon is interested in pursuing robotics. What's going on there?

• 34:39Speaker 01

  So to me, this is a very obvious extension of Apple searching for the quote unquote, "next big thing," right? We talked about the car project not being shut down. That was at various times over the past decade, going to be their next big thing, right? It's one of the automotive business and car sales are one of the few things at volume that can sort of move and move the needle for a company like Apple, right? Because the iPhone is so massive, such a success, that there's very few products that they can launch, including the most, you know, the recent launch of Vision Pro. You know, no matter how well it does out of the gate, it's not going to be able to move the needle versus, you know, what they, what they ship in terms of revenue with the iPhone. And so, again, the car project now being gone.

• 35:25Speaker 01

  And Vision Pro being out there, they have to move on to see what is next. What what else can they do that moves the needle from a revenue perspective? We're sort of running out of things. There's there's banking, right? And they are doing stuff with with Apple Pay that I think is is going pretty well. But in terms of, again, it's Apple. Their DNA is to ship products, not be financial services. Services business itself is is massive for Apple, and I think that that's sort of interesting. But again, they want to ship products. And so what's the new product that they could do? Robotics would be one sort of more obvious element. Obviously, it's a big, all encompassing type of situation. It could mean a lot of things. You hit on two of them.

• 36:08Speaker 01

  And I do think that in some ways, I had written about this for a long time because I felt like, and this came from, you know, we kicked off talking about when we last spoke in the pandemic. I was thinking about that a lot during the pandemic, that it was weird that Apple didn't have a device in the home that was great for FaceTime, right? You still had to use your phone, which was was great, obviously, and an iPad is is also great. But it just felt like Apple had all of these different elements, including, you know, Apple TV. Back in the day, they had routers, right? Which they've discontinued, but they had like all the pieces in place to build a really great living room device, and that it should have included FaceTime. Now, they've added FaceTime on the software side to Apple TV since then, and you can use it with your your iPhone, and it's pretty well done.

• 36:52Speaker 01

  But you could have just imagined just selling some sort of unit that's basically the quote unquote FacePod, right? Where you basically put a put a device in your living room, and it hooks up to your TV, and it's probably an Apple TV as well. It's, you know, it's a home hub, it's Apple TV, and it has, you know, a small camera, and others, of course, including Amazon, as you mentioned, but even Facebook slash Meta at one point was doing this, right? And and they had some level of success, even though they were probably the least trusted company at the time to be able to launch something like that. I think that they were in the right place, right time for a little bit of time during the pandemic. So that's one element of what they could launch. The other stuff, like a more generalized home robot, some of the reporting, which I,

• 37:35Speaker 01

  again, I think was was Mark Gurman talking about it, it almost sounds more like like Rosie the Robot Jetsons type, you know, housekeeper type thing. Obviously, Amazon tried to buy. I, Robot, the Roomba Maker, and, and, you know, had to, to move on from that after, um, you know, regulatory concerns there. But they're doing other stuff. They have their own robot, uh, in the world. And so you can see a world in which Apple wants to go into this space. I think that they have a lot of, uh, a lot of the pieces, again, sort of, that are, um, not brought together, at least forward-facing for us, uh, right now. But they have a lot of the pieces, including some players from, you know, potentially that car project, again, which could be brought in to do some sort of, uh, home, uh, device. And again, if you just

• 38:20Speaker 01

  think about, you know, 10 years out, what should Apple be doing to move the needle and, and ship, uh, interesting products? I think it's pretty compelling to have the, the idea of some sort of home robot, uh, you know, that, that's running an iOS-like operating system and interacts with all of your other devices, you know, beyond cleaning, doing different sorts of stuff.

• 38:40Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, I'm with you on robots. And I think it's gonna, robots is an area that's gonna get a lot of attention, both from investors and from the tech, big tech companies, maybe especially the big tech companies, because these large language models, uh, they, basically, you know, because you can converse with computers now, and they can, they're multimodal, so they offer better, much better functionality than you could have had previously with a robot. And the big glaring hole for them is that they don't really understand the real world. So it'll be like a research frontier.

• 39:08Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 39:09Alex Kantrowitz?

  That they're gonna, so it's sort of like, both, it will help them get better by being out in the real world, and they're better because they can rely on this technology. And so we see Amazon, and, you know, I'm sure Meta has something, Apple, you know, this is gonna be an area to watch.

• 39:23Speaker 01

  Yes. And, and that sort of speaks to, you know, the, the notion in AI itself, where, uh, you know, there's, there's some school of thought that believes that you would, either you'll never get to AGI, obviously, many people believe that, or that you won't get there until you do some sort of personified or in-the-real-world version of a, a robot like we're talking about, where it's able to not just, again, get data inputs from people inputting stuff manually on a computer, but it's out there in the real world interacting with it in order to learn different types of stuff that you can't do just from, you know, being on a computer.

• 39:56Alex Kantrowitz?

  And we've talked so much today about how the next step for Apple or Apple getting into the next big thing is so crucial for its future prospects. But then you kind of look at the present and you're like, oh, is the house on fire? I mean, that's a little dramatic, but it doesn't seem good in terms of Apple's core businesses. So we were talking just now, you know, when I, there's been a report where Apple's had a 9.6% year-on-year drop in iPhone sales and it's losing ground in China in a big way where there's, you know, ostensible bans or, you know, wink, wink, don't use the iPhone in certain workplaces and Huawei is getting better.

• 40:38Alex Kantrowitz?

  And meanwhile, like you look at the core numbers for Apple and it's not good. I mean, their Mac and iPad are struggling to sell. The iPhone isn't growing. The revenue has been decreasing. And we talked earlier about like, maybe this is like comparisons to COVID, but we're in 2024, like you have to start growing on your 2023 base at this point. And it just seemed rough for the company. So what do you think about the core business of Apple? It's pretty concerning, I would imagine.

• 41:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, so the way I think about this is tied into a lot of what we're seeing with, you know, some of the backlash on the developer side and obviously with the regulatory environment and various different bodies all around the world that are sort of hitting Apple pretty hard right now, right? Because they view them as, you know, both dominant in some capacity, but also not willing to play ball with, you know, the various different regulations that, again, various governments and entities are trying to put in place. And I think to me, a lot of that goes back to exactly what you're sort of talking about in that and what we had talked about previously with the iPhone was such a great business and remains such a great business, one of the best businesses ever from.

• 41:51Speaker 01

  You know, revenue from profit, it might be the best business ever. Um, and how do you top that? The answer increasingly has been that you can't. Um, but instead you have to come up with other ways to sort of grow. Uh, the, the pie grow the business. And I think a lot of that, when I look at Apple these days. The only thing that's been growing the past, you know, several quarters now has been services reliably, I should say. Um, as you note, the other businesses that are big, um, you know, are running into just the law of large numbers where it's very hard to grow. Beyond the, the extreme, uh, end of, of where they are in terms of shipping number of iPhones. And, and again, as you note, the pressure from China and these other areas where they could potentially grow a bit more.

• 42:37Speaker 01

  But there's, there's other types of, um, pressures on that. So when I see Apple pushing back against all this regulation and be, and you know, many of us looking at them just being like, why don't they just like throw a bone to some of these folks, you know, and, and just make some tweaks to the app store that, you know, would, would maybe ding revenue a little bit, but would, you know, garner a lot of goodwill with developers and again with regulatory bodies. But again, they look at, I think they look at services and say, this is the only thing we have. Where it's, it's a unique business because it's sort of compounds versus their other businesses, right? Like as the user base keeps, um, growing, they also are adding things to, uh, the services layer. And so they have all sorts of new things that they can just keep piling on to keep growing.

• 43:22Speaker 01

  And so eventually I would imagine services is, you know, by far their second largest business, uh, after iPhone. And so that's the way that they're growing it now. And then we talked about all the other things that they could potentially do. Banking and, and, you know, growing that more, um, and then robotics and, and different types of devices. But it's going to be, the answer is going to be, it's got to be a bunch of those things together. And yeah, the, uh, doing that while facing all the headwinds against device sales. Um, and it's, it's a big challenge. I mean, uh, yeah, they, the, the Macs, the iPads, they're launching new versions. You know, there was a report about the new M4 chips already, even though we just launched the M3 chips and, you know, trying to get the word out there, but.

• 44:05Speaker 01

  When you look at the way that you have to run as a public company, especially a company like Apple, where the stock is so heavily owned by mutual funds and all of these these big entities, and it's such an important stock for so much of the economy that they need to keep growing. How is Microsoft doing it? They're doing it through their AI narrative and that they're forward thinking, right? That they're a growth company. And the way that Wall Street seems to be looking at Apple right now is that they're not a growth company. They're an old school sort of becoming a dividend, right? Company and just like they're they need to change that narrative. And I think that's why all we're hearing about WWDC is AI, AI, AI, AI. They want to show that they're going to go back into growth mode. And I think that that's a lot easier said than done for all the reasons that we just talked about.

• 44:51Alex Kantrowitz?

  That's right. We have a few minutes left. I want to hit a couple more topics if we can. So first of all, humane pin, we're not going to go, you know, sort of too deep into it. Because at this point, anyone who's listening to this show has probably read the reviews, listened to our Friday show about it, watched Marques Brownlee, you know, rip it a new one on YouTube. But I also want to talk to you about your view about whether the new AI era sort of warrants, and you write this warrants some sort of new hardware paradigm. Do you think that the new, I mean, it's been a lot of chatbots, we're seeing agents. Do we necessarily need new hardware for this AI era? Or is that just something where like people are like, ah, AI hardware? Yes, you know, throw money at it and see what happens.

• 45:38Speaker 01

  I think it's I think it's obvious why various different players are trying to do that, including humane. You know, there's a new one that launched today called Limitless, which seems interesting. $99 pendant type device.

• 45:54Alex Kantrowitz?

  Which you just preordered.

• 45:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, which I just preordered because it does look it looks compelling. It's a good price. Humane's a little expensive, as has been talked about a lot. But then, of course, there's what's rumored with OpenAI with with Sam Altman and Johnny Ive, potentially, you know, teaming up to work on some sort of hardware. My view is that I'm not sure that we're anywhere near the point where we need a new piece of hardware yet. I think that, again, all this stuff is moving so fast. All this new stuff is launching on a weekly basis where it's just, there's too much, too many moving pieces to know exactly what you should be building for. And I think frankly, that's part of what Humane's problem has been, right? They started a long time ago before ChatGPT

• 46:38Speaker 01

  sort of blew up. And so they built like this, the projector, and they built the camera, and they built all this other system when I'm not so sure that what they shouldn't have just built. And obviously, this is easy for me to say in hindsight, but I do think like there's, there's something compelling to be built there. It might just be like a super simple, you know, pin that only does chat interaction and that doesn't try to do all this other stuff. You bring the price down a lot. You, you bring the complexity down a lot. It tethers to your phone. It doesn't need its own cell service. You launch that in the success state when you have, you know, a second or third iteration, you sort of launch that stuff. You get why they launched what they launched with. They come from Apple. They wanted to build an all in, you know, all in one, all encompassing type of device. And it's obviously a noble effort to try to do that. But I just don't think

• 47:21Speaker 01

  that that type of device is going to work out of the gates. I think that, again, everything is moving so fast. I think that what you would see in these early days is if anything takes off, it's going to probably be from one of the larger players, Apple being a prime example of that, right? Again, we talked about this a little bit already, but if they can get these, some of these AI models working on the phone and then eventually working on the AirPods or on the Apple Watch, and they can do that all on device. They have stuff already that's working on device on the Apple Watch right now with Siri. Again, Siri is not very good, but if they eventually launch a better version and different capabilities, you could see where that types, that type of thing gets supercharged by all of this.

• 48:03Speaker 01

  And so, again, I think that there's probably an avenue down the road for new pieces of hardware that are, you know, using AI. But I come at this, again, from that flip side that we had hit on a little bit earlier. But it's like, why are some of these companies trying to do that? I think because they know the advantage that someone like Apple has in having billions of devices out there. When they launch their, their AI products, they're going to have such an advantage in having these in people's pockets at such a scale that no one else can hope to match. And then they have to hope to like, They can work with Apple on some of that, right? And maybe that's why they're they're doing it on their side, right? Because they want something from Apple to be able to work on the device scale that they can that they can offer up.

• 48:42Speaker 01

  But I don't know if any of these may, you know, the rabbit device also is, you know, coming soon, I think. And that got a lot of buzz out of the gate. I have a hard time seeing any of these things taking off in a major way. Early on, again, just because it's so early. So maybe in a few years, we see something that's a compelling use case. But right now it's going to be sort of phone and or watch and or, you know, AirPods dependent, I think.

• 49:08Alex Kantrowitz?

  So when Marissa Meyer was on, I spoke with her about your post about how consumer is basically done. And don't bother trying anything consumer. But it's interesting to hear you talk about the hardware thing. Because it's almost like you say, you view that there's more opportunity to do stuff in hardware than there is like in apps and software. Is that is that accurate? Or is that kind of anyway, you go ahead?

• 49:29Speaker 01

  They're all they're both hard, right? Consumer in general is very hard for the reasons, yeah, as I've talked about, as many people talk about. I mean, it's just like it ultimately boils down to time in a day and we all are so busy. We all have the services that we use already. And so things not only have to replace those, they have to be so much better in order to replace those. And that's why, like, you know, things were sort of interesting in a weird way during COVID times. Because it unlocked new times throughout the day, right? Where people would try new stuff and things like Clubhouse and all of these types of services that that sort of blew up because people had more different pockets of time that they weren't used to having. And so when I, again, going back to the hardware thing, we hear a lot that people are waiting for the new platform, right?

• 50:12Speaker 01

  The next platform and waiting for what what Apple's going to launch. But the reality is that that even with the Apple Watch, which is at a pretty impressive scale. And even with AirPods, like these things and with Alexa, which is at an immense scale. These things have not become platforms for, you know, new services built by third parties to launch on. And again, that to me boils down to just time and, you know, replacing other things that you're already doing in a day.

• 50:39Alex Kantrowitz?

  So you're not an air chatter?

• 50:42Speaker 01

  I have, I do have air chat right now. I've been trying it out.

• 50:45Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah.

• 50:45Speaker 01

  I am, I think there's, there's something compelling about it, but I would be skeptical that it, that it sort of gets to a scale, um, you know, over an extended period of time. Lots of things blow up and are big for, you know, a few weeks. And then they sort of dwindle away, um, for, you know, very obvious and inherent reasons. But it makes consumer both software and hardware very, very, very hard. But I think you're right. Like hardware is compelling to a lot of folks because it does potentially unlock a new time variable if you can get enough people buying it and using it. And there's the sunk cost fallacy where you buy something and so you want to use it, right? And so that's natural.

• 51:24Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay. And then briefly on, on Amazon, you mentioned the Echo device. They, you also wrote about how they're stopping to pay rewards to third party developers. Basically, it seems like they're throwing up the flag on third party apps and skills on the Echo device. Do they have a strategy there anymore? Or is that kind of like remnants of Bezos that is just going to die a slow death over time?

• 51:46Speaker 01

  It's, to me, it's similar to the Syria discussion we were having. I think that they're definitely going to reboot it. There've been reports about that. I think, you know, that's a big question of if it's, if it's Alexa itself, or if it's something new. They have something called Rufus, which is sort of their shopping AI bot that they've, that they've sort of put out there. And so it'll be interesting if they try to do, do something new. Or if they just sort of rejigger Alexa behind the scenes to work. But I think you're right. Like the third party developer ecosystem stuff, as we were just talking about, doesn't seem to have worked, except in certain pockets, gaming. There's some, you know, things that are working there. But in terms of, yeah, just like it being a device where there's going to be multi-billion dollar businesses built on top of.

• 52:31Speaker 01

  That's obviously not the case. And can they get there? Uh, that moment is probably passed them by. Is there something new to be built with AI? And we talked about going back to robots and, and what they're doing there. Like maybe there's, there's something that they can do, um, that's compelling. Sort of bringing all these, these different things together. But yeah, it feels like Alexa as it stands right now, and I don't want to trigger, I may have just triggered.

• 52:56Alex Kantrowitz?

  I always avoid.

• 52:56Speaker 01

  Will be.

• 52:57Alex Kantrowitz?

  It's rough.

• 52:57Speaker 01

  Will be, uh. Will be changed, just like Siri has been. And so it's a question of yeah, how much of it is behind the scenes versus does it require new devices and all of that?

• 53:06Alex Kantrowitz?

  So I want to take a minute to plug Spyglass because I've been enjoying reading your work there. You had 500 ish or 500 words.

• 53:14Speaker 01

  That's what I've heard for a while.

• 53:16Alex Kantrowitz?

  Medium, I think you had your own site. Now you've started something new. So talk a little bit about the impetus there and what it's been like. You're, I mean, you're super high output. I'm looking at your archive and sometimes there's like five, six short posts a day. It's super fun and interesting. What's your thought there?

• 53:31Speaker 01

  Uh, thanks for asking about it. I mean, it's something. So as you know, I come from a world where I was a reporter for a number of years before sort of becoming a VC over a decade ago at this point. And during the intervening time, as you mentioned with 500 ish, you know, a site that I was running on Medium for a long time and is still up, obviously, always have just kept writing in my, you know, bag because it's something that I've just long done and enjoyed doing. But it's also just something that helps me. It helps me sort of formulate my own thoughts, helps me, you know, get obviously thoughts out into the world. But doing Spyglass now for, you know, the past few months, I've

• 54:14Speaker 01

  sort of built it up and talk about it as sort of three things. It's a, it's a pretty standard link blog, linking to a lot of things, as you note, fairly standard sort of newsletter, you know, once a week summarizing what's both been linked to before and also, you know, linking to some new things. And then a column, that is sort of more of a work in progress that I'm still sort of toiling away with behind the scenes a little bit more. But I basically wanted to be those three things. None of them are new, of course. You do them. Everyone does them. But for me, it's just as much about doing it for myself as it has been about sort of doing externally. And I sort of, you know, challenged myself to see if I could come up with a new type of site, type of publication, you know, starting

• 54:58Speaker 01

  from scratch, not wanting to do what I'd been doing for the past several years. And honestly, I'm loving it so far because again, it sort of feels like it's unclogged my brain in ways that I had missed dating back to the reporter days where it's like, all this stuff is just in my head and I'm thinking about it, but it all just jumbles up in there. And it's not till I get down on the page. What I want to say about it, that I really form my own opinion about it. And that's helped a lot in conversations on the VC side and conversations with entrepreneurs, on conversations with other investors, yet just with technologists in general. It's just like in dinner party conversations. It helps because it unlocks, again, my own thinking, which is very helpful. So, yeah.

• 55:40Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yep. And it's always a fun read. And like we spoke about the last time, I like went through your archives when I was writing the Apple chapter of my book and just love the stuff there and love keeping up with your work. So the website is spyglass.org. MG, thanks so much for coming on.

• 55:57Speaker 01

  Thank you for having me. I hope we talk again soon.

• 55:59Alex Kantrowitz?

  Me too. All right, everybody. Thank you so much for listening. We'll be back on Friday to break down the week's headlines and we'll see you next time on Big Technology Podcast.

• 56:08Speaker 02

  Now, more than ever, we need someone on our side. But Rob Whitman? Whitman's votes drove up costs, cut Medicaid and risked 350,000 Virginians' healthcare to pay for tax breaks for himself and his donors. He's not on our side. Shannon Taylor will fight corruption, cut taxes and bring down costs. This November, vote for Shannon Taylor. She's for us. Paid for by HMP, the House Majority PAC dot com. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee.

• 56:38Speaker 03

  In this life, you can't win.

• 56:40Speaker 04

  When the world gets you down.

• 56:41Speaker 03

  No!

• 56:42Speaker 04

  Escape to Pluto TV.

• 56:43Speaker 03

  This is objectively fantastic.

• 56:45Speaker 04

  Relax into the movies and shows you already know and love, all for free.

• 56:49Speaker 03

  Shwing!

• 56:50Speaker 04

  Even our news is uplifting.

• 56:51Alex Kantrowitz?

  You stay classy, San Diego.

• 56:53Speaker 04

  Watch School of Rock, Crazy Ex Girlfriend, Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, The X-Files, Wayne's World and so much more.

• 56:58Speaker 03

  We're not worthy!

• 57:00Speaker 04

  The best things on TV really are free. You just have to know where to look. Escape to Pluto TV. Stream now, pay never.