Did The AI Bubble Just Pop?, Apple Intelligence Beta Arrives, Friend Dot Com

Ranjan Roy from Margins is back for our weekly discussion of the latest tech news. We cover 1) The week's market selloff 2) Consumer spending declines and other negative economic factors 3) Starbucks as a economic barometer 4) Favorite boba 5) AI spending comes under scrutiny 6) Big Tech earnings performance 7) NVIDIA's resilience 8) Apple Intelligence beta arrives 9) Siri is still bad 10) Ranjan depressed about Siri being bad 11) Review of OpenAI's ChatGPT 4o voice edition 12) Friend dot com launch 13) Olympics recap 14) The case of Gianmarco's lost wedding ring --- 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 on Substack? 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?

  Is the AI bubble bursting as the market in tech goes into freefall? Apple Intelligence is here, on my phone. Let's talk about it. And is an imaginary friend company the next big thing? That's coming up 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, to go inside a large-scale Agentic CX transformation, including the business decisions, trade-offs, and lessons along the way.

• 0:45Alex 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.

• 1:17Alex Kantrowitz?

  Welcome to Big Technology Podcast Friday Edition, where we break down the news in our traditional cool-headed and nuanced format. A big show for you today because right now, Wall Street is in freefall. The S and P 500 down 2% today on Friday, after a week where the AI spending numbers came in and they were big. So how much is this connected? We're going to also talk about Apple Intelligence and OpenAI's ChatGPT 4.0 Voice Edition coming out in limited preview, and then of course, friend.com. So it's going to be a fun, very jam-packed show. A lot of information coming your way. I'm joined as always here by Ron John Roy of Margins. Ron John, welcome. How you doing?

• 1:58Speaker 01

  I don't know if I'm going to be able to remain cool headed today as I'm watching the charts on my screen all just collapse in a sea of red, but I'm going to try to stay cool headed.

• 2:08Alex Kantrowitz?

  It's all going down and we're just losing it here on a Friday.

• 2:12Speaker 01

  Sell, sell.

• 2:14Alex Kantrowitz?

  Run to the exits. But what is happening? You've been watching this very closely. We were expecting something different this week. We had big tech earnings. Everything seemed to be okay in the second quarter. The Fed was coming to speak about the fact that we're going to see a rate decrease. So why is everything so red?

• 2:35Speaker 01

  I think there's two main parts of this. First is the macroeconomic news that's come out this week. And then I do think AI tech spending has the AI bubble burst. These are questions that I'm actually excited to discuss today. But first, in terms of the macroeconomic news, the Fed held rates. They said they were going to be a bit more cautious on the outlook. So still giving hope even before the last few days that they will cut rates at the next meeting. But today, Friday, the jobs growth was slower than expected. The U.S. added only 114,000 jobs. Unemployment raised, rose to 4.3%. So it's the highest since October 2021.

• 3:17Speaker 01

  Basically, the economy is slowing and we've been seeing more signs of that. We've been talking about it. That's why everyone's almost been begging the Fed to start cutting now. And there's a lot of talk whether the Fed is actually making a policy error by not cutting and getting ahead of that slowing growth rather than waiting for an actual deceleration of growth. So I think the economy is not in a great place and the Fed might be making an error. And that, from a macroeconomic standpoint, has everyone fairly concerned.

• 3:50Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. And then just on the consumer spending thing, I'm curious if you think is this? So we saw, I think, consumer spending was going from like 3% growth to 2% growth. Do you think consumer spending is down because the Fed's rates are starting to hit people? Or is it just because? And this is something that I've been thinking about is that a lot of people saved up a lot of money through COVID and we're just blowing through it. And now they're finally through it.

• 4:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think it's both. I think it's price. I mean, increased prices certainly are going to have a negative impact. Another area we saw was, and going back to your idea around consumers had saved a lot of money and personal savings have declined dramatically since where they were in 2021, when we were all flush with PPP loans and whatever other stimulus everyone got.

• 4:42Alex Kantrowitz?

  CARES Act.

• 4:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. So I think, I mean, we're even seeing it like from the consumer side. Luxury brands are getting hit very hard right now, and it's the first time in a long time. The luxury customer had been, you know, completely untouchable for years, and now even luxury companies are getting hit. On the low end, McDonald's had their first slowdown in growth in a few years as well. I don't know if you've seen, McDonald's is now trying to, they're going, it got to the point, I think it was like 12 bucks for a value meal. Now they have like a special $5 meal trying to get, so on the lower end as well, people are getting hit. So I think it's, we've seen all of these trends slowly coming for a few

• 5:26Speaker 01

  years now. Everyone has been talking about it, and now it's real at every part of the market.

• 5:32Alex Kantrowitz?

  And it began with Starbucks. I mean, Starbucks was really the canary in the coal mine, where like Starbucks sales slowed dramatically and people were like, it's the in-store experience, it's the, it's lost some of its luster, it's the expense, and maybe that was like the initial signal, like, is Starbucks now our weather vane in terms of where economic activity is going?

• 5:52Speaker 01

  I go back and forth on that one. I think, yes, actually, it's true that like, spending $5 or more on a cup of coffee or some kind of latte drink versus just making something at home is probably like the perfect indicator of whether, how likely people are to spend. But I also have to say, I was in a Starbucks the other day, and they have like, all the advertised drinks are like lavender matcha or like weird lemonades and stuff. It doesn't even feel like a coffee shop anymore.

• 6:24Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right, they're doing bubble tea now.

• 6:25Speaker 01

  They're doing bubble tea?

• 6:26Alex Kantrowitz?

  That's what I've heard. Those are the rumors I've heard.

• 6:29Speaker 01

  I don't know if I, I love bubble tea, and in New York City, there's plenty of great places. I'm gonna have to try it, I think. I'm not, I'm not optimistic, though.

• 6:38Alex Kantrowitz?

  You have a favorite bubble tea place in New York?

• 6:41Speaker 01

  Um.

• 6:42Alex Kantrowitz?

  I'm shouting mine out. I'm a Tiger Sugar guy. It's a chain, but they have this like classic brown, brown sugar tea that is just insanely good. You can get it right at the edge of Koreatown near Penn Station on 32nd or 33rd.

• 6:56Speaker 01

  What's your sugar, what's your sugar percentage?

• 6:59Alex Kantrowitz?

  I go, I go no more than a third if I can help it.

• 7:02Speaker 01

  Okay, for, for non-bubble tea connoisseurs, you're able to specify a third, a half, uh, how much sugar you want. If you ever go full, it's pretty intense, so.

• 7:13Alex Kantrowitz?

  I can't tell if this is gonna make our listeners stick with us even more now that they understand our expertise on this subject, or whether we've lost half the audience. But.

• 7:22Speaker 01

  Or.

• 7:24Speaker 01

  I'm just gonna say, maybe in this economy where we all and watching the market right now, I might go get a bubble tea and get 100% sugar, just to make me feel a little better right now. Just feel something.

• 7:35Alex Kantrowitz?

  You know, Ranjan, maybe it's a good analogy, where you, where has our economy just been on a sugar high of artificial intelligence and drank that up and felt really good and then crashed? Because you in your opening remarks indicated that you think AI spending has something to do with this. And I don't know if that's the case, but go ahead, make the argument.

• 7:53Speaker 01

  That might be my favorite segue Alex has ever made on this show, and he makes a lot of good ones. So yeah, okay, here are this, I am very excited to speak about this, even though it is bad. Because we talked about over the last two weeks, the Goldman report could be that really just questioned the long-term value creation potential of generative AI, could be the tipping point, the inflection point that set off the end of this wave of AI hype. And I think that, I think it happened. And what we're seeing this week is the first time that Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, even Snap,

• 8:33Speaker 01

  all these companies came out and talked about how they're just investing tons and tons of money into AI, into AI infrastructure. Meta is spending, they said up to $40 billion in total capital expenditures, majority of which will be infrastructure related to AI. AI, Microsoft is going to spend fifty six billion dollars next year. Google's projected to spend forty eight billion dollars and forty eight billion for Google is actually seventeen percent of total sales. So these are not small numbers and investments for them. But then on the other side, they're starting to get questions. It's the first time in earnings calls, rather than asking, are you investing?

• 9:15Speaker 01

  Like a UBS analyst was asking the Google, Google's CEO Sundar. You know, when is it going to help revenue generation and create greater value over time versus just cutting costs? A Morgan Stanley analyst in the Microsoft earnings call was saying there's an industry debate raging around these capital expenditure requirements. But what will the monetization actually match that? And we have talked about this a lot. We talked about at the micro level, when it comes to renewals after that first year, you're a big corporate and you signed up for Azure AI or Gemini's on Google Cloud's AI services. Are you actually going to see value enough to keep investing in it?

• 9:56Speaker 01

  And from the big tech companies, they're spending so much money. But even the Microsoft CFO said this, the value could be realized over the next fifteen years and beyond. You never hear public company CFOs talking about massive capital expenditures and giving a fifteen year timeframe to public market investors. So I think this is the Goldman Sachs report kicked it off. Everyone's going to start questioning these expenditures and the big tech companies. They basically this week said, we don't care, we're doing it. So how this plays out, I mean, we're certainly seeing the market's reaction.

• 10:36Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right, but a lot of the big tech stocks are doing okay. And I think it's worth, I mean, except for Amazon, we can talk about Amazon, we can talk about Intel. But I think it's worth noting that like this is not, this slowdown that we're seeing in the market is not driven by AI spending. This is driven by broader economic, macroeconomic factors. Does AI spending help it? Not really, but I don't think this is causing the real issues. And case in point, I mean, Meta, you know, these companies that we talked about Meta basically went out there, delivered great earnings results. They've grown revenue 20% over the last four quarters, which is insane, given how much money that they're making. And the stock didn't drop when they said it, when they raised the buy. It was the bottom of their guidance, right?

• 11:20Alex Kantrowitz?

  Where they said they're gonna, they're gonna raise the amount that they're gonna intend to spend. Microsoft, similar thing. Microsoft actually missed its cloud number, but then it bounced back the next day. When people read the report and Satya Nadella said it's a capacity issue for them to sell, not a demand issue, right? They just didn't have enough hardware. Alphabet, I think, beat expectations, did the first $10 billion quarter in Google Cloud history, although Google did miss on YouTube revenue, but I don't think there's anything to do with AI. I'm trying to think. And then meanwhile, Nvidia just went up because it saw all these numbers hitting. So I would challenge your, your perception here that this is the end of the AI bubble.

• 12:04Speaker 01

  So this week, the market reaction is not just from AI spending. I'll give you that. I think AI, it's not the entire market is in a sea of red because these big tech companies are spending tens of billions of dollars on AI infrastructure. But I do think the narrative that's held up the market during any downturn over the last year, year and a half is there's this, this wave of AI innovation is going to just lead to incredible cost savings for companies. So increasing profit margins, incredible new avenues of growth. The world is going to change.

• 12:43Speaker 01

  That narrative has been so strong that in any kind of potentially, you know, problematic moment that held the market up. And the big, obviously the big seven were driving this. And I mean, they have been a significant segment of the overall market growth anyways. So now that they are getting questioned and now people are starting to worry again, do we trust them to almost think of that? I'd seen one comment around how someone said, you never hear 15 year markets, timeframes from public markets. That's asking us to be a venture investor and I'm not a venture investor. I'm a public markets investor. Like the, the companies are asking us to trust them around this spending.

• 13:28Speaker 01

  And the fact that they're finally getting questioned, and as we've discussed. Over and over again, there probably will be some very short term issues around customer satisfaction and customers like actually realizing value enough to keep investing themselves in generative AI efforts, even though I'm long-term positive and optimistic about it. So I think it's not necessarily today and yesterday that the AI investment is causing the sell-off. But I think over the next couple of weeks and months, it's going to be a problem. And this has been what's held up the market so far, and it's going away.

• 14:06Alex Kantrowitz?

  Let me just make the counterpoint to that. Isn't it a miracle then that if this is such an issue for investors, that these big tech companies aren't selling off more than the rest of the market is? I mean, in some cases they are, but I don't think it's due to AI. If you think about Amazon, for instance, Amazon selling off more than the market. I think they missed their whisper number in terms of the number that people really expect them to do. But they still grew at 19%. Amazon Web Services, they turned in record profits. And then you think about the others like Meta, right? We talked about Meta spending. They're down a percentage and change today, while the S and P 500 is down 2%. Google, right? People so upset about Google spending, if that was what's going to drive them down?

• 14:49Alex Kantrowitz?

  I mean, I know it's hard to take a single day, but Google's only down 2% and change, while the S and P is down 2, and then Apple is up today.

• 14:58Speaker 01

  We have to remember that Google had $24 billion of profit off $85 billion of revenue. Microsoft had $22 billion in profit off $65 billion. Like, these numbers are still insane in terms of how profitable these companies are. So yeah, I agree on a relative basis, that's a problem, but that's what these numbers were good. The reason Meta, and it's still, I think it's only up about 4% since the earnings blow, and it was a blowout. It was like they crushed it. I mean, Mark Zuckerberg wearing two chains. I still, that, for anyone who got Mark Zuckerberg, they sent out this thing around their ability to understand objects within video.

• 15:40Speaker 01

  And in the demo, he wears a second gold chain that I think he actually got from T-Pain, if I remember correctly.

• 15:47Alex Kantrowitz?

  That would track.

• 15:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, which is all ridiculous, but that was that was the sign that we all should have bought Meta before their earnings because no CEO would ever do that unless they knew they were going to crush earnings. But like, again, these companies are still firing on all cylinders at the moment, and they're not up. And that's why like, and it's Meta's up small relative to after hours. It jumped like 11% or 12%. But people are having to question it because the I think this it's going to play out over months right now, but I'm still standing that that Goldman report was the turning point. And I think the entire conversation around generative AI has changed. And it's in a in a good way, things are going to be questioned a little bit more.

• 16:34Alex Kantrowitz?

  I think it would be good if there was more common sense around AI. I just don't know if it's happening. Let me explain. Let me give you one more example. Nvidia, right? Like, they've benefited greatly from what's happening this week. There's a Wall Street Journal story out about Nvidia. Big Tech's AI race has one main winner, Nvidia, and says it's Nvidia's market. Everyone else just lives in it, though not nearly as well. The superstar chipmaker hasn't participated in the latest round of earnings reports. But the most dominant news of those reports is great news for Nvidia as Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Meta have all reported significant jumps in capital spending, and it's mostly going towards data centers and Nvidia's AI systems. And Nvidia has had a bit of a pullback

• 17:19Alex Kantrowitz?

  of late, but it's still a 2.75, 2.79 trillion dollar company with room to run. I mean, it's cheap compared to its earnings. So, you know, I mean, if we're going to think about like the bubble stock, it's Nvidia.

• 17:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, but that's where what's so fascinating about this moment is, and even in that Goldman report that just trash generative AI, like, and honestly, I thought it was I thought it was good that it came out, but I actually thought. That they seem to be missing some very, very clear benefits that everyone is already able to like show. But the funniest part was at the end of the report, they're saying, oh, but you should still buy AI infrastructure companies. Cause even though we're saying this technology is not going to work out, everyone's still going to invest in it. So you might as well buy these companies and it actually makes sense because again, all the big tech companies are saying, we're going to still be investing massively in this.

• 18:16Speaker 01

  So yeah, Nvidia is still the poster child for this. If Nvidia ever starts to have problems, then we know things are changing.

• 18:25Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. What happened to Intel? Have you been following this? Their earnings came out yesterday. I was at the stock exchange for CNBC closing bell. And then of course it went into closing bell overtime. Once all these reports came in, we saw Intel hit and we're just like, holy crap. It was down 26% today. It's laying off 15,000 people. It's going to pull back its dividend. This is disaster for Intel. Have you been watching this at all?

• 18:53Speaker 01

  I mean, I saw the, I saw the price action and I saw the, especially the layoff announcement was interesting because it's been a while since we've heard about mass layoffs at any of the, in tech in general. And this was the first time in a while I heard, I even saw an announcement like that. But I think overall it's just, in a company like Intel should have been a leader in this entire wave of AI investment infrastructure. They haven't been. And I think it's, it's one of those things that it is, stuff is moving so fast that if you are not, and which is Mark Zuckerberg's argument that he made in the earnings call around why they're investing so much is that

• 19:34Speaker 01

  if you don't invest now, or you don't get it right, you will be left so far behind a few years from now that, you know, like these tech companies will become shells of their former selves. And I think Intel has not shown any clear direction of who it's going to be in this overall landscape, whereas Nvidia and everyone, obviously. Everyone knows, or even like the global foundries of the world, or are, you know, all these other companies that are infrastructure players, Intel, no one knows who they're going to be, and the market reacted accordingly.

• 20:08Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, so I'll give my Intel take here, which is quite similar to yours. I mean, we had Pat Gelsinger on the show, and he was pretty impressive. But I think for Intel, the problem is that they're just, and it might be cliched to say it, but they are stuck behind Nvidia. That's where all the money is going in semis right now is into GPUs. And Nvidia just has this advantage between the actual chips themselves, the software that's being used to train, and the networking between the servers, which is actually a key part of their advantage that nobody talks about. And it's just very difficult to dislodge them that way. So Intel's really been able to, unable to compete with them on AI chips. And then you could say, all right, they have these accelerators that you could use, and maybe you could train that way. But this is the other problem for Intel. Where they would

• 20:53Alex Kantrowitz?

  come and substitute, where people are looking for, let's say, cheaper cost, or, you know, some purpose-built technology, the big tech companies are building that themselves. You know, Google has a chip, and all the others have their own chips that they're building, like Microsoft is building its own silicon. And then you're trying to come up against these companies, and there's just no room to sell.

• 21:15Speaker 01

  I think that's a fair read of it.

• 21:17Alex Kantrowitz?

  And foundries take a long time to build. They're trying to do that, too. It's just going to be forever.

• 21:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think, I think that's a fair read, that now their competition isn't just infrastructure, it's the tech companies themselves. And, I mean, getting lost in those multiple battle, fronts of battle is a, is a scary place to be.

• 21:36Alex Kantrowitz?

  Absolutely. All right. So let's, as we wrap up this segment, like it's, we go deep, and now let's take a step back. Where do you think the economy is going from here? Because we talked for a long time about whether there's going to be a soft landing. And for a long time, it seemed like there would be, or even a no landing. And maybe this is just the wheels touching down, right? Inflation's still low. The market, the S and P 500 is still up 12% this year. Every, you know, there's, there's actual innovation and energy in the economy. So where do you think the next few months take us?

• 22:09Speaker 01

  Okay, I don't want to be Jim Cramer-ing here and jinxing everything, but I'm gonna say, I think this is gonna be just a healthy, short-term correction. I think it's been a while, the VIX wasn't above 20 in a couple of years. I think this is the largest sell-off since October 2022. I think there's a need for a bit of a correction. I think it will be okay. I think the underlying story, we've known the consumer is slowing down. If the Fed cuts and reacts accordingly, which all signals are pointing to,

• 22:47Speaker 01

  I think things will stabilize and maybe soft-landing, maybe kind of like just a short-term breather overall. But, I mean, obviously, trying to predict anything, given just how complex the world is right now, is a difficult one, especially over the next few months.

• 23:08Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. And this is, of course, not investment advice and do with this what you will, but when I saw the drops this morning, I moved some money from my checking account into my brokerage account and just bought some exchange traded funds.

• 23:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, this could be the buy-the-dip moment, or this is the beginning of the end, and we're gonna see something.

• 23:31Alex Kantrowitz?

  Saying goodbye to that money.

• 23:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:34Alex Kantrowitz?

  Last for you on this one. So you say, okay, maybe AI is in the moment of a bubble burst? Where do we see AI going then in the next couple of months?

• 23:44Speaker 01

  This is the part within this mini crisis of two days right now. I'm again happy, because I think we've needed some common sense and a bit of a correction in just overall optimism and hype around AI. And I think Again, knowing actually that these tech firms are still going to invest in the infrastructure and even if the that causes some short term pain and overall the market just starts to get a little more sensible around things and actually just starts building. Like, and we talked about this last week with Claude and coding for me, or there's still like, week to week, there's these magical moments with generative AI for me

• 24:27Speaker 01

  that just absolutely blow my mind and just make, you know, unleash like a thousand dreams of what this could do in different ways around business and what kind of products it could create or experiences like, I'm still, again, I think we'll all figure it out and it's actually better for the market and overall innovation around the technology to not have everything just out of control.

• 24:52Alex Kantrowitz?

  Did you just manifest the trough? Is that what you're telling us?

• 24:55Speaker 01

  I'm a trough guy. We've been saying this for weeks. I have the Gartner hype cycle on my wall with the big star around the trough and that's, that's, that's where we do our best.

• 25:07Alex Kantrowitz?

  All I have to say is, if this is the trough, then it's a pretty good sign for AI.

• 25:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. I think if, exactly.

• 25:16Alex Kantrowitz?

  If this is as low as it goes, it's going to be pretty damn good.

• 25:19Speaker 01

  If that's, if it, if even just we relatively stabilize around here over the next few months, I think that'll be a very, very good trough.

• 25:29Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. I got a couple of examples of like, why we still might be at the crazy part of the hype cycle, which is coming up after the break. But, look, before we go to the break, I just want to say that we've gotten a lot of really, really good listener feedback. And when I say that we read your emails, we really do. And we've seen some great feedback on the [email protected] email address. We've seen some great feedback coming at us on X. Always great to have a dialogue with you guys and gals when you have something that you want to talk with us about. So I just want to say thanks. I've definitely learned a lot from our listeners over the past couple of months and appreciate you all reading, writing in and listening. Okay, so take a quick break, come back and

• 26:13Alex Kantrowitz?

  talk about Apple Intelligence, which is on my phone, ChatGPT 4.0, and how it's talking to you. And then my new favorite startup, friend.com. Back right after this. This episode is brought to you by Avpoint. 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 Avpoint 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 behalf.

• 26:57Alex Kantrowitz?

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• 28:24Alex Kantrowitz?

  And we're back here on Big Technology Podcast Friday Edition. Ronchon, you have this big, what's your big smile? You have this big smile you've been sporting for the past, I don't know, 30 seconds.

• 28:34Speaker 01

  That you're about to tell me about Apple Intelligence and longtime listeners know, my dream in life, all other innovation and everything aside, if they just fix Siri and make it good, I will be the happiest consumer in the world. So please tell me that what you have installed starts to help it. Please tell me this, please.

• 28:58Alex Kantrowitz?

  However, much I enjoy making you happy about life, which I do, I very much enjoy that, I'm very, very sorry to say, Ronchon.

• 29:06Speaker 01

  Oh, no.

• 29:07Alex Kantrowitz?

  Siri still sucks. It's terrible. It's so bad. It's so bad.

• 29:14Speaker 01

  All right, please go, tell me what you've learned.

• 29:16Alex Kantrowitz?

  Here's the caveat, and I said this on air yesterday, so I'm going to just say it again for our listeners' perspectives. This is not the final product. Who knows what they've shipped underneath it? I'm on Apple's iOS 18.1 and that gives me access to the beta of Apple Intelligence. And this is not going to really come out till fall, but I can say that they have a long way to go from here to where they're trying to get, because if this is the final product, and we know it isn't, but if this is anything close to the final product, be prepared for extreme disappointment with Apple. And I'll just give you a couple of examples of what Siri, what I try to have Siri do.

• 29:58Alex Kantrowitz?

  I asked it to show pictures of my wife and it showed pictures of a celebrity with the same first name. Okay, that's what it did.

• 30:06Speaker 01

  Wait, that's in Apple Photos?

• 30:08Alex Kantrowitz?

  No, it went to the internet. So it couldn't even navigate through the photos on my phone. It went to the internet and showed me a picture of this celebrity.

• 30:18Speaker 01

  Oh, my God.

• 30:19Alex Kantrowitz?

  And then it would not be, it was not able to process directions. It could not answer basic questions. The one thing I thought was cool was it was, it helped me text somebody, like I had it say, okay, I'm, you know, I was going to get a haircut yesterday, so I had it like pull up my barber's cell phone and I dictated a message to it and hit send, but like.

• 30:43Speaker 01

  Wait, but we could already do that.

• 30:45Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, like if that's intelligence, I don't really know where we're heading. There's also this other cool feature that actually I'm really excited about as a podcaster, where you can record calls and it will transcribe for you. And so I made a call, I hit record, the recording worked, but the transcription did not work. Like it's supposed to transcribe in notes and that wasn't working either.

• 31:05Speaker 01

  Did it even, did it even have any transcription and the transcription was bad?

• 31:11Alex Kantrowitz?

  Or? No.

• 31:11Speaker 01

  It just didn't even.

• 31:12Alex Kantrowitz?

  This isn't working at this time. There was an error. So Apple Intelligence, from my first look, is unintelligent.

• 31:22Speaker 01

  I, I do, I often wonder around how a company like Apple, from a product marketing standpoint, thinks about these beta releases. Because, I mean, maybe it's just us and our listeners who care and like from a larger market perspective, you know, no one is really paying attention. So it actually does help them work out the kinks and get to a better product. But I have to imagine like after the presentations and demos that they did, even the first release, they would understand that it has to be pretty good. So that does have me worried a little bit, but.

• 32:00Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. And look, don't take my word for it because here's Ethan Mollick, the Wharton Professor, an AI expert. He says on Siri, because it's a small model, it also isn't that smart. In fact, it feels like using the old Siri with minor improvements. If I ask, if I ask it, I want to go to dinner and a movie tonight and make sure I can get there by six and home at 10. I would love some spicy Latin food and an action movie. It fails miserably. This is not actually a hard problem for LLMs though. A slightly larger model, Llama 8B, actually does a much better job. And look, this is the, if you want to be hopeful, he says, this is just the start for Apple AI because future update will make it so that Siri on your phone can ask a larger Apple AI in the cloud to help when it can't solve a problem or even pass really hard

• 32:45Alex Kantrowitz?

  questions to ChatGPT and it will be able to interact with apps, triggering, triggering actions and taking in information from multiple sources. The technology will certainly improve. And I think this is the most important thing, he says. He says, AI carries risks. It is unpredictable. It hallucinates. It has the potential for misuse. It's not always private. So, Apple decided to reduce the danger of misuse or error. They have turned Siri into a copilot. You can see these sort of copilots appearing in many products. Very narrow AI systems designed to help with specific tasks. In doing so, they hide the weirder, riskier, and more powerful aspects of large language models. Copilots can be helpful, but they are unlikely to lead to leaps in productivity

• 33:30Alex Kantrowitz?

  or change the way we work because they are constrained. Power trades off with security. Power trades off with security. Yep. I think this is important, right? It's basically like, I think what Malik is saying is, Apple is effectively not quite ready to be weird enough to reap the full benefit of generative AI. And that's why you're seeing these half-measures. And my prediction is if Apple does not get bolder with this technology and leaves it in copilot versus pilot mode, to use Malik's analogy, that we are going to see blowback to them. Because, remember, that Apple Intelligence demo, it blew people away. The stock flew up the next day after it happened.

• 34:13Alex Kantrowitz?

  And people were talking about how Apple has just made the masterful Gen AI play. Ben Thompson had an article about it. If they don't deliver, if their demo and their dream of this technology, which was always going to be good, think about the Vision Pro, doesn't live up to the promise in reality, I think this is going to be a very bad moment for Apple. Because unlike mixed reality, AI is a category that's moving and moving fast and has real, real application already. And you can't swing and miss there.

• 34:44Speaker 01

  Wait, did Malik's post use the phrase like copilot versus pilot? That idea? Or did you just come up with that?

• 34:54Alex Kantrowitz?

  I just, yeah, I just built on what he was doing. But he talked about copilating. Yeah.

• 34:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, no, but I think, ooh, I think this is a, we can run with this one a bit. I think this might require a post here because, because I think... That's a really, really good distinction because again, this idea copilot is something that's been introduced in a smart way to kind of remove the responsibility from the model. And it's fair, like it's especially in a lot of use cases, starting, I mean GitHub branded, it's a coding assistant copilot and really creating this branding and idea that it's something that's there to help you that doesn't make decisions, but actually just is there to add a little bit of assisting, but is not all-knowing and responsible. But the way Apple demoed intelligence was a pilot.

• 35:44Speaker 01

  It was like, and the whole idea of agentic AI is that it actually makes decisions and takes actions using different systems based on just a prompt, just initial prompt. It should be smart enough and have that element of reasoning that will know which system to call and what decision to make. And that's a pilot and that's a much tougher problem to solve. And we talked about this and it always was going to be harder, the way they marketed this. And it's even when Apple advertises, if you say like, what's my flight status without specifying the flight, it goes into your email, looks for a flight, then knows to use that

• 36:27Speaker 01

  information to call flighttracker.com or whatever other API service to actually get that information. Those are actual decisions being made and that's the act of a pilot. And if Apple, and it was always going to be a harder problem to solve. So that, uh, that could be a big worry for them right now.

• 36:46Alex Kantrowitz?

  This is unfair, but I am flying to Ireland on Sunday. So let me see if I can get Siri to.

• 36:53Speaker 01

  Oh, don't even, don't do it on air. I might just slam my computer shut. All right, try it.

• 37:00Alex Kantrowitz?

  See what Siri says.

• 37:01Speaker 01

  Try it.

• 37:02Alex Kantrowitz?

  Hey Siri.

• 37:05Alex Kantrowitz?

  Pull up the flight information for my Sunday flight to Ireland. Oh, okay. It gave me Dublin, it gave me a Google search. Dublin, arrivals and departures, live flight information, and then find your trip on American Airlines. I'm flying JetBlue.

• 37:24Speaker 01

  I, we might have to end this right now and not even get to friend.com.

• 37:30Alex Kantrowitz?

  Two Tiger sugars coming up.

• 37:33Speaker 01

  Hundred percent sugar, please. I mean, that from like a system standpoint should be the easiest problem to solve. My, like you were almost like throwing it a layup with how specific that prompt was. Like my flight on Sunday to Dublin, that, that's like an email search. That's not even a generator, that doesn't require an L L M almost. And it's just not getting it, doesn't know what to do.

• 38:01Alex Kantrowitz?

  So that's disappointing, but they have until, let's say, August or no, they have until, let's say, October to figure it out. So.

• 38:09Speaker 01

  It's two months, two months. You guys got it.

• 38:12Alex Kantrowitz?

  Now, M G Siegler has like some good context. He says that if you think about the Apple approach, it's intentional and Meta is shoving AI into the faces of hundreds of millions, if not billions of users across a range of products. So is Google and other ways and other products. Microsoft is trying to, if anyone will use their products and OpenAI is trying like crazy to build up a user base of such sizes, uh, including with the help of Apple. Okay. As is every other startup in the space, so much so that EU regulators appear to be actively working this summer. So as not to miss an opportunity to mess it all up. And he says, oh, over there, it's Apple just casually laying back on a raft, drink in hand, floating down the AI stream,

• 38:54Alex Kantrowitz?

  ready to launch, stuff people will actually use when it's ready and not before. And that's what Apple does.

• 39:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think, I mean, and that is the product rollout strategy that we have seen. Uh, I mean, even that comment around like, uh, or I mean, right now, this idea of voice as an agent and in our. Doc, me, you had another from Ethan Mollick around the idea that like using voice to now become the interface for generative AI is interesting to me. And again, Siri should have this as a possibility because to me, generative AI, even whether using Claude or ChatGPT or any kind of chat interface, when you start talking to it in a conversational manner is when it gets good. For anyone who's like used these tools a lot, like really, and

• 39:42Speaker 01

  it's funny because even like friends and coworkers, when they see how I'm using chat, sometimes it's almost weird to them and unnatural. And I'm like, oh, that was pretty good, but you got this wrong. Could you actually try to fix this? Or, oh, great answer. Can we do more of this? Can you dig a little bit more into this? It's weird. But in written form to an AI, people do find that weird. But maybe voice, it just becomes much more natural because that's how you, that's how we all talk. So maybe that will be a saving grace and maybe Siri will work.

• 40:15Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. Well, it has some catching up to do because this is the other thing that Ethan Mollick wrote about, which is the OpenAI's ChatGPT 4.0 Voice Edition has come out in limited beta. Now, I haven't gotten access to this, but I have seen some incredible demos on the internet, including someone asking it to count to like 10 as fast as it could. And it goes like, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10. And then it says, okay, now do it louder and faster and count to 50. And it gets to 30 and it goes, 31, 32, 33. And it like takes a breath. It's crazy. And this is what Mollick says about ChatGPT 4.0 Voice Edition. He says, if Siri is about making AI less weird and more predictable,

• 40:57Alex Kantrowitz?

  ChatGPT Voice is the exact opposite. It does not use a small tailored model, tailored model, but rather provides access to the full power of the generalist GPT 4.0. While there has been a kind of voice mode available for ChatGPT for months, this is very different. It engages in natural conversations with interruptions and fast flow. And he says, interacting with chat GPT via voice is just plain weird because it feels so human in pacing, intonation, and even, and here it is, fake breathing. It is capable of a wide range of simulated emotions because it isn't just triggering a recording. Instead, the system is apparently fully multimodal in outputs and in inputs, talking in and producing

• 41:41Alex Kantrowitz?

  sounds in the same way older generations of LLMs took in and produced text. Right now, it appears many of these features are locked behind guardrails, but those are the capabilities that it has. I can't wait to try this thing. And we give OpenAI a hard time here, but I do think that, you know, talking about them being in the hits business, this looks like, looks like it's gonna be another hit.

• 42:03Speaker 01

  No, I, I think, I mean, they had, what was interesting about when they launched voice and the whole Scarlett Johansson brouhaha was, uh, they have had voice available on the chat GPT's iOS app for a long time and it's worked pretty well. And again, the idea before it was more like one prompt of response and a prompt in response, but obviously the demos are showing it, it's even more human-like and more, uh, natural and more con, back and forth conversational that you could even interrupt it and, uh, like it'll know that you're interrupting it and take the new prompt as feedback. So I think it's, yeah, I think the whole voice area, and they, they might get their next hit.

• 42:47Speaker 01

  What it means for their business, we'll find out, especially if the AI bubble is collapsing. I think OpenAI has got some bigger issues than most, but.

• 42:57Alex Kantrowitz?

  Let me ask you this, is this potentially their biggest hit of all time?

• 43:02Speaker 01

  No, I, I don't think OpenAI will ever have a hit in the way that chat GPT was. And then too quickly, even, I think like everyone I talk to now is switching to Claude. It's like in terms of where you-

• 43:18Alex Kantrowitz?

  You started that, by the way.

• 43:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:20Alex Kantrowitz?

  I think you led the Claude revolution. You taught me about it. I became a Claude head.

• 43:24Speaker 01

  Claude heads.

• 43:25Alex Kantrowitz?

  And then the rest of the world became Claude heads.

• 43:26Speaker 01

  Claude heads unite. It's funny, most people I talk to, from an individual consumer standpoint, it's like everyone has a $20 budget. That they will allocate to one chatbot at that moment. So it's like, oh, I'm doing ChatGPT plus, I'm gonna go Claude Pro. Maybe I'm a perplexity pro, but everyone seems to just, I allocate. This is my 20 bucks, I'm gonna choose one that I find to be the best and go there. Which is, again, for these businesses, a reminder of how cutthroat and competitive the consumer part of this whole equation is and how difficult it's gonna be.

• 44:07Alex Kantrowitz?

  Absolutely. So, oh yeah, let's go, let's go, speaking of voice, let's go to friend.com.

• 44:13Speaker 01

  Speaking of difficulty.

• 44:15Alex Kantrowitz?

  Let's go right to friend.com. Friend.com, how do I describe it? Let's just let Wired describe it. It says, "Wear this AI friend around your neck." And so friend is a wearable. And Wired says, "It's a pal, a buddy, but mostly an AI chatbot that lives inside a pendant that's around your neck, or around like a necklace thing around your neck. It always has an opinion to share about what's going on around it, which it communicates using text messages and push notifications on the phone it's paired to. Always listening is one of the main taglines of the yet unreleased AI device. The friend has an onboard microphone that listens to everything happening around the wearer by default.

• 44:58Alex Kantrowitz?

  You can tap and hold it to ask a question, but sometimes it will send messages, commentary about the conversation you just had, for example, unprompted. It's powered, and here we go, by Anthropic AI's Claude 3.5, which can engage in helpful conversation, offer encouragement, or rib you about being that bad at a video game." And this thing like became, I don't even know, I couldn't tell this week, was it an object of mockery or was it an object of true fascination? To me, it seems ridiculous to have an AI friend around your neck that's conversing with you. It just screams like, "I'm a loser." I don't know if you wear it, but I'm curious what you thought about the launch of friend.com?

• 45:40Alex Kantrowitz?

  And is this, is this really, do we call the top on the AI moment now? Or is this just the beginning of something big?

• 45:48Speaker 01

  All right, so friend, well, there's friend.com released this video. And I think the video, sometimes you, I honestly wonder, it was so.

• 46:00Speaker 01

  Cringe worthy and bad that it almost, I mean, you had to watch it. It was so fascinating. Again, it's people in social situations, turning to look down at this pendant around their neck. Even one of them is a girl on a date and the guy is a, is, she tells the guy, they're on a rooftop. And she says, I never bring anyone up here, except for her, and looks down at the pendant around her neck. And then the guy says like, oh, like I, something around, oh, I guess I should be grateful or like, I appreciate that. It's so weird and black mirror-y that I do wonder, are people that out of touch who made this? Or do they just want to go viral and bring attention? Cause otherwise, none of us would have ever had heard of friend.com.

• 46:44Speaker 01

  And it's pure earned media. So from a customer acquisition standpoint, pretty cost effective. Um, so does, it brings attention to it, but my favorite part of this story is to make this more ridiculous. If a AI friend pendant on a necklace around your neck all day long is not weird enough. There was actually two competing like wearable AI startups called Friend. And one of the founders bought friend.com and spent 1.8 out of their 2.5 million dollar seed round on the domain. And, uh, you know, reportedly to kind of secure any kind of copyright potential issues. If you own friend.com, you're going to have more of a claim.

• 47:29Speaker 01

  The other founder responded with a rap video, a rap battle video to the tune of, uh, they not like us from Kendrick.

• 47:38Alex Kantrowitz?

  Of course.

• 47:39Speaker 01

  And, yeah. Yeah. And, uh, it was just, I mean, it looked like an episode of Silicon Valley. It was amazing to watch. It.

• 47:50Speaker 01

  Kind of made me want to get back to common sense and AI and maybe this week the fallout in the market will help on that. But it was, it was a fun week for AI pins everywhere.

• 48:02Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. And we should note that the one that got the friend.com domain is the one with the AI pendant that we were just talking about. Clearly, they're good at marketing. I mean, with the video and the name counts for something. And CEO apparently said, people just don't get consumer. I view this as saving money, much less money needs to be spent on marketing. It's a one time thing. Okay, I'm just doing the math, though, and 2.5 million total raise, 1.8 million on the domain. You're going to get a hardware AI company off the ground for 700 grand.

• 48:35Speaker 01

  I do not understand how that works. The, the thing that's tough about this is I want, and we talked about this with humane as well, like, the idea of creative new hardware form factors that leverage AI, I really want to see. I think that would be cool. I think like hardware innovation is something that we have not seen in a long, long time. And the idea that instead of everything having to live in your phone bundled by Apple or whatever other big tech company to see cool new little hardware devices come up and just create just pretty singular experiences leveraging AI, I really want to see happen.

• 49:17Speaker 01

  I'm excited about and I think would be great. It's just sad that everything seems to be just a complete whiff.

• 49:24Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. No. So for the AI friend pendant, okay, so this is one plausible explanation, which is that they basically raised their series A, hoping to market and raise their series B, and just put all this money into the marketing and they weren't really planning to build a company with that. It's more of like the proof of concept and see if you can raise again. And this is from someone named Andrew Ria, who's an entrepreneur. He was with on deck, one of those guys. He says, his take on the friend.com launch, this was a great go big or go home bet. The product vision is bold, different. Maybe it doesn't work, but it's certainly controversial and controversy is great for marketing. Consumer is so hard. You have to do something this bold to have a shot at breaking through the

• 50:09Alex Kantrowitz?

  noise. The launch was beautifully executed. The 1.8 million domain was a great red herring, clickbait for people that wanted to hate. They will almost certainly raise a large round off of this hype. Obviously, this person has a, the founder has a gift for building movements or moments, which is rare.

• 50:28Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 50:28Alex Kantrowitz?

  Is that the playbook?

• 50:30Speaker 01

  Three things on that. First, if that is the case, and I had made that comment a little while ago, that earned from an earned media standpoint, like any marketing department would actually call it a success. If this is the future of how business works, that is the most depressing thing in the world for me. But second, it is kind of the Kardashian model, if you think about it, like first, and which a lot of other people, first be an influencer, first build the audience and then build the product. So from that standpoint, again, it sadly and depressingly could almost be right and correct. But then, third, the idea, the way he says, like, you know, now they'll definitely raise another round off of this hype.

• 51:16Speaker 01

  I think that's exactly the kind of thing that pre Goldman report would have been a definite thing to happen. In a post Goldman generative AI report world, maybe it's going to be a bit tougher.

• 51:29Alex Kantrowitz?

  For sure. Okay, so as we ran out this episode, I think it's a good moment to talk about the Olympics. Have you been watching the Olympics, following them at all?

• 51:39Speaker 01

  Of course, I'm a huge Olympics guy.

• 51:41Alex Kantrowitz?

  So we just have a couple of minutes left. I think we should just trade some favorite Olympics moments. Do you have any?

• 51:48Speaker 01

  Opening ceremonies, their performance by Gojira, the heavy metal band that started with a headless Marie Antoinette. I, and it was funny because again, controversy is a good thing. It was considered a bit controversial, but it was the most epic thing I think I've like ever seen on TV. They, they took over Il de la Cité, which is like the prison, it was a castle and then the prison during the French Revolution and just. Heavy metal just roaring through an entire castle on the river like it was that from a sport aside, that was my favorite part of the opening ceremonies.

• 52:27Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah.

• 52:27Speaker 01

  Did you watch it or?

• 52:28Alex Kantrowitz?

  I did watch parts of it last week. I also, for me, my favorite moment at this point has been the Turkish marksman.

• 52:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:36Alex Kantrowitz?

  Who just kind of casually strolled up to the target, blasted his way to a silver medal, and then was just like, I don't need equipment. I'm a natural shooter. I thought that was amazing.

• 52:46Speaker 01

  The memes have been incredible, too. It's funny how the the Korean women's shooter with the like eyewear, just looking badass was.

• 52:56Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right.

• 52:56Speaker 01

  Was great.

• 52:57Alex Kantrowitz?

  That event had a couple memes.

• 52:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. But I mean, from the actual sports standpoint, I think swimming is probably my favorite thing to watch at the Olympics. I it's and I like that it feels, I don't know if this is correct, but they're moving more medal events further up before it felt like you always had to wait even for swimming and everything else at least like a week into it. I think they were doing a lot of the qualifiers before the opening ceremony so they could get right into the medals. And I think that was a smart decision.

• 53:29Alex Kantrowitz?

  Can I also say there was another great moment where they had this like regular dude dive into the pool and pick up a swim cap that had fallen into the pool where the swimmers are supposed to swim in. And the memes on that were amazing. This guy is just like in his little speedo. He's like, I'm just as puzzled as you are that I'm about to go in this pool. And people were like, this is VCs showing founders how to operate like.

• 53:56Speaker 01

  I think.

• 53:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, no, I said, I saw, I think, a bunch of versions of that one. And the shooter memes like, I think overall, this is probably the most memed Olympics, I think I can remember at least where and one thing I remember on social media, I think the 2016.

• 54:16Speaker 01

  Like you couldn't, they wouldn't allow video sharing. So like, and anytime anyone shared a clip of a video, you would get, you'd get the copyright owner disabled. No, I mean, as a reminder that like, to make this stuff relevant, like hyper relevant in everyone's mind. Cause I mean, my, all my feeds are just dominated with this stuff. People at work, everyone's just talking and sharing the memes. So.

• 54:41Alex Kantrowitz?

  It's pretty great.

• 54:41Speaker 01

  Again, yeah.

• 54:42Alex Kantrowitz?

  Can I share a couple more?

• 54:43Speaker 01

  Bring the world together for good memes.

• 54:45Alex Kantrowitz?

  I agree. I love that the South Sudan basketball, which is apparently funded by Luol Deng, is just going out there and kicking some ass.

• 54:53Speaker 01

  Oh, I love that story. The.

• 54:55Alex Kantrowitz?

  It's an amazing story. It's like a sweet 16 style story. It's great.

• 54:58Speaker 01

  No, they, they, they did not have an indoor basketball court in South Sudan when they started this effort. And I mean, before the Olympics, I think it was a friendly or was it a qualifier? I think it was a friendly against, against the US.

• 55:12Alex Kantrowitz?

  They almost beat the US.

• 55:13Speaker 01

  Yeah. I was, I saw the notification on my phone. I'm like, what the hell is going on? That's, that is a feel good story. That's like.

• 55:20Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, it's amazing.

• 55:21Speaker 01

  The Olympics story. I think that could be the probably most heartwarming story from the whole thing.

• 55:27Alex Kantrowitz?

  And it's crazy cause so apparently South Sudan and Sudan had a civil war before South Sudan separated and the Olympics played the Sudanese national anthem and you see the players being like, what the?

• 55:40Speaker 01

  Oh, wait, I missed that one.

• 55:41Alex Kantrowitz?

  They since apologized.

• 55:42Speaker 01

  I missed that one.

• 55:44Alex Kantrowitz?

  Trying to think of, okay, so let me just share then finally, my favorite story of the whole Olympics, which is that, did you hear about this? The Italian flag bearer? His name is Gianmarco Tamberry. He was carrying the flag in the opening ceremony and it popped his wedding ring right off his finger and into the Seine River.

• 56:10Speaker 01

  Oh, I remember hearing that. Yeah. Explain explaining that one as you go to the Olympic Village on those cardboard beds is gonna be a tough one for my man.

• 56:19Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yes. So he said that he was trying to carry the flag as high as possible and that his ring will remain forever in the riverbed of the city of love. And then he tells his wife, if you want, we will throw yours into that river so that they will be able to be together forever. And we will have one more excuse to, as you've always asked me, renew our promises and get married again.

• 56:43Speaker 01

  That's what they all say, John. That's what they all say, John Marco. Fell in the sand when I was carrying.

• 56:49Alex Kantrowitz?

  Wrong turn reaction to beautiful story.

• 56:53Alex Kantrowitz?

  You want the trough, man?

• 56:55Speaker 01

  Hey, it fell in the sand when I was carrying the Olympic River. I'm sorry. When I was in Paris at the Olympic Village with all the thousands of other athletes. I'm sorry.

• 57:04Alex Kantrowitz?

  Oh, my God. Well, I will still take it as a heartwarming story into my weekend.

• 57:08Speaker 01

  Shape up, John Marco. Shape up. Come on.

• 57:11Alex Kantrowitz?

  Look at the John Marco is doing all he can carrying the flag. He posted about it, offered to get married again. But yeah.

• 57:19Speaker 01

  Come on. It will remain forever in the riverbed of the city of love. That is a man scrambling right there.

• 57:28Alex Kantrowitz?

  Unbelievable. All right, John.

• 57:30Speaker 01

  You broke my heart about Siri, so I will.

• 57:33Alex Kantrowitz?

  You really got me bad on that one.

• 57:34Speaker 01

  I'll come back at you with.

• 57:35Alex Kantrowitz?

  It's like, you said we weren't going to be cool headed today and you delivered. We were not vicious war between the two of us.

• 57:44Alex Kantrowitz?

  All right. So next week we have Nick Bostrom coming on the show. It's an interview I've teased for a while, but he's the AI doomsday philosopher that said, basically that there's a chance we'll be living in utopia. And we get real weird at the end talking about simulation theory and whether we can merge with AI and rip our way out of whatever simulation, the simulation masters have us doing. So stay tuned for that. And then plenty of other great shows coming up this August. Ron John and I will be back, of course, next Friday breaking down the week's news. Thanks for coming on this week, Ron John. Great speaking with you until that last segment.

• 58:21Speaker 01

  John Marco, shape up.

• 58:22Alex Kantrowitz?

  Unbelievable, John Marco. We'll see you next time on Big Technology Podcast.

• 58:29Speaker 02

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