Apple's Bad iPad Ad, AI Assistant Hype, Netflix's Big Live Ambitions

Ranjan Roy from Margins is back for our weekly discussion of the latest tech news. We cover 1) Apple's bad iPad ad 2) Is the backlash largely due to the creative, of people's feelings about Apple as a company 3) Asking Claude about the reaction to the ad 4) Apple's big moment at WWDC 5) Apple building server-side AI compute 6) Better Siri 7) OpenAI teases GPT-5 8) AI assistant buzz 9) AI as a dating concierge 10) AI news creating a zombie internet 11) Netflix's Tom Brady roast 12) Netflix's big bet on live TV, including the NFL. --- 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 Apple's bad iPad ad just a creative issue or something more? OpenAI is about to launch its own search engine. Meanwhile, the web is filling with zombie AI-driven content. And Netflix is going big on Live as it airs a Tom Brady roast and closes in on a big deal with the NFL. All that and more is 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

• 0:44Alex Kantrowitz?

  Financial, to go inside a large-scale agentic CX transformation, including the business decisions, trade-offs, and lessons along the way. You can watch both conversations now on my YouTube channel today. It's never been more challenging to get frontier compute. How do you know where to look, who to trust, or how much to pay? Akash is an open cloud that provides easy access, flexibility, and peace of mind. That's how companies like Razer were able to cut their inference cost by 15 times. Visit akash.network/alex for a free consultation. That's akash.network/alex for a free consultation. Welcome to Big Technology Podcast Friday Edition, where we break down the news in our

• 1:28Alex Kantrowitz?

  traditional cool-headed and nuanced format. We have a big show today, covering everything from the latest in AI to Apple's very, very bad ad and why Netflix is going big on Live. Thrilled to welcome Ron John Roy back to the show. Ron John, great to see you as always.

• 1:43Speaker 01

  Tim Cook, what are you doing?

• 1:46Alex Kantrowitz?

  So this is an interesting thing. Let's just start talking right away about this ad because... It definitely got panned critically and maybe I'm in the minority, but I had been watching these videos on TikTok where you have these compressors crushing stuff. And it's pretty cool. Like it crushes all these things and you see it ooze out. And it's like, this is the back background for this situation with that Apple had with its ad. Whereas Apple just tried to mimic that by putting all these things in the compressor, a piano, a video game, lenses, buckets of paint to show that, you know, you can do all these things on the iPad. And I will be honest, I watched the ad at first and I was like, oh, pretty cool.

• 2:26Alex Kantrowitz?

  But then the entire internet was just like, look at Apple crushing all these things that you love. And as I started to hear the commentary, I was like, oh no, this is pretty bad. What was your reaction?

• 2:39Speaker 02

  When I saw it, I did not have a positive reaction and I definitely thought, if it was anyone else, it's interesting. Like anything else Apple does, it's visually beautiful and gorgeously filmed. But Apple's entire brand and for, you know, they're the most famous for the 1984 commercial where they break convention and empower humanity. And basically this is saying that everything that is beautiful and human is being crushed into this tiny form factor of an iPad. Not even tiny, just thinner iPad. So to me, both it went against everything Apple has positioned themselves as being for decades now

• 3:23Speaker 02

  and built the most incredible brand in the world around. Also for me, it was a pretty not exciting product launch. Like a thinner iPad is not the most exciting thing. So if you're going to do something that dramatic, at least make it have a product that is new, exciting, interesting, something rather than, okay, your iPad's thinner and we just destroyed a trumpet. Like they're killing the emoji at the end. There's a smiley face emoji that gets crushed and the life sucked out of it. I think all of that, if you were delivering me something a little more exciting, I might've been happy.

• 4:02Alex Kantrowitz?

  I'm just gonna read some of the reaction to the ad that showed up on Twitter because it was brutal. So this is from Josh Delany. He says, "Everything beautiful, charming, and analog will be destroyed by a flat black screen. You must never see a sculpted bust, never hear music from an actual instrument, never feel the texture of real things. A silicon slab and Tim Cook will permanently stand between you and the world." Here's Jed Barnoff. "I'm not sure wanton destruction of all the good and beautiful things in the world was really the vibe you were trying for." And then Paul Graham, he goes, "Steve wouldn't have shipped that ad. It would have paint him too much to watch." So obviously, there's a question of how this ad agency let this get

• 4:46Alex Kantrowitz?

  out the front door. And it's like always in moments like these where I love to imagine like the internal politics of it, but it because for this to come out the door, everybody who's ever run an ad knows that there's so many approvals necessary for these things to run. And for Tim Cook to tweet it, everybody within that company and the creative agencies must have seen it go out the door. And you do wonder like, has Apple lost a little bit of its creative soul? It's such a creative company to have seen this ad end up being released. The deeper question here is, is Apple's business right now and the state of its product development sort of responsible in part for the backlash to this? Let me explain. Apple's had decreasing

• 5:31Alex Kantrowitz?

  revenue for five out of the last six quarters. The Vision Pro, which is that it really did herald as this like next generation product has become a paperweight on the desks of people that have bought it. And maybe that was something that we could have predicted, but it's certainly not taken the path that the company hoped, at least in the outset, and maybe in a few generations, it will. And then finally, the iPad has been struggling. The iPad revenue this past quarter, the most recent quarter that it reported was down 17%. And this was supposed to be a release that turned the iPad's fortunes around and Tim Cook billed it as the most important release since the iPad itself. And honestly, it just looked like another iPad. And so I wonder if part of the backlash here is rooted a little bit

• 6:14Alex Kantrowitz?

  in people's wariness in terms of where the direction of Apple is going.

• 6:19Speaker 02

  That was one of the more concerning parts of this ad. The idea that To have an event to launch a new pencil and a new thinner iPad should not require an event. That should just be on the website, a little bit of customer emailing, a TV commercial, and just call it that. And I think actually it is indicative of the fact that they thought that was important enough to launch in such a big fashion, that people do, that that's certainly part of the backlash and how people are feeling about this. And I think even bigger, going back to the soul of Apple, I do think this is a big issue because as you said, this kind of ad would require going through so many layers of approval.

• 7:02Speaker 02

  It's just someone, somewhere should have at least been able to raise their hand. Maybe this isn't a good idea. Do we really want to do this? Is this really the most Apple-y thing we can do? And the fact that that didn't happen starts to make you think, have they gotten so heavy as an organization and so bureaucratic that those kind of voice, simple voices of, of pushing back against something or saying no, or maybe let's do something a little different? I mean, that's the classic trap that a large corporation will get into. Is that becoming Apple? And I think this definitely raises that question.

• 7:37Alex Kantrowitz?

  One interesting thing that I did with this whole episode was I tried to see if ChatGPT or Claude could write a better ad, and they did write some very boring ads. So I don't think they're in danger of replacing creatives anytime soon. But then I asked Claude whether this idea of a trash compactor or some sort of compressor destroying all the beautiful products in the world would be met with a positive response. And it was quite interesting to see its reaction to the potential advertisement that Apple ended up running. It basically nailed it. It said that the public would say it's insensitive. It might seem like it's promoting excessive consumerism and encouraging people to abandon perfectly functional items for the sake of a newer, more compact device. The imagery

• 8:22Alex Kantrowitz?

  of beloved objects being destroyed could evoke feelings of loss and sadness and confusion. Some viewers might view the metaphor as confusing or unclear, struggling to connect the destruction. Of cherished items with the appeal of the iPad and the appreciation for minimalism. A smaller portion of the audience might appreciate the ad's message of simplifying one's life and embracing the more minimalist approach to technology. So what was interesting is Claude basically got this right before Apple even ran the ad. So my question to you is, are we going to start to see more creative agencies, more companies start to check their work with these AI bots to sort of gauge what the public is going to do in response before it goes out the door?

• 9:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think you are the one that has taught me to feed back in transcripts or other work to Claude, and Claude is definitely the best versus ChatGPT. I think creation of original work is still the part where especially for ad creative, marketing creative, people still are not, or the quality of output is not production worthy in most cases, but coming back with feedback, I honestly think these tools, that's the single most valuable thing they can do for any creative right now is give you smart feedback very quickly and good feedback and feedback that's getting better. So if you are a creative agency that's not incorporating some layer of AI validation,

• 9:49Speaker 01

  I think you should, you should start getting on that.

• 9:53Alex Kantrowitz?

  So my one question here is whether this makes creative agencies end up being too safe, like the AI will always steer you to like the more safe response. And of course, if you ask it to think of like problems, it will, it will deliver them. So I wonder if we end up in service of pleasing the AI, do our creative agencies become so safe to the point of not being willing to piss anybody off with the things that they're saying, because you have to be willing to make some people angry to make great creative, right?

• 10:21Speaker 01

  I'm trying to picture like Nike feeding the Colin Kaepernick ad to Gemini and getting the most trying, attempting to be balanced response in terms of, we know this ad could be offensive to some and empowering to others, and we recognize that we all have a diversity of opinion. But yeah, I think, I think these are the kind of things with the just creativity in general, even we talked about music and audio earlier. It is going to be really interesting how it both changes it, but also how it makes people more creative. I don't know if you saw, there was a This one TikTok video, this where a girl says she's looking for a finance bro.

• 11:03Alex Kantrowitz?

  Oh, my God.

• 11:04Speaker 01

  And

• 11:04Alex Kantrowitz?

  Six, five, blue eyes, trust fund.

• 11:06Speaker 01

  Five, blue eyes, trust fund. Yeah, you got it.

• 11:08Alex Kantrowitz?

  We're gonna turn this into a rap rap video around, John.

• 11:11Speaker 01

  Well, no, I, I, I, that, I watched probably 15 different remixes of that one

• 11:21Speaker 01

  thing that she said that she didn't even make an actual song about it. She just said it.

• 11:25Speaker 03

  I'm looking for a man in finance, trust fund, six, five, blue eyes, finance, trust fund, six, five, blue eyes.

• 11:34Speaker 01

  And then the remixes were amazing. So, so there is a whole new layer of creativity that is being generated by these tools that's different, but it's just as entertaining. And, and honestly, the people who really did a good job with it just is creative to me.

• 11:50Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, definitely. So, okay, let's just put a period on the Apple thing.

• 11:55Alex Kantrowitz?

  The company really needs to deliver at WWDC, wouldn't you say? Like, if you think about this, it's got this run of declining sales, problems in China, a creative snafu. I mean, it's a pretty rough moment for them. If they weren't, if they didn't have the cash to buy back $110 billion in shares like they announced last quarter, it would be, the narrative around Apple would be quite dark. But they do have one big announcement coming in June that they could potentially, I wouldn't say save themselves with, but help get themselves back on the right track, don't you think?

• 12:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, and we talked about this, one strong, powerful, differentiated AI announcement could completely change the conversation. You know, obviously, there's different theories around what it means with on-device computing and where they have a huge advantage with the iPhone, how they improve all of their existing AI systems. And hopefully, for me, Siri gets a little better and that they may be integrating other LLMs into it. Like, they have such a big opportunity, so I hope they have no overly creative attempt of an advertisement for that one. Even one thing, I, I wish they did this stuff live and didn't

• 13:08Speaker 01

  have a pre-recorded stream that's super highly produced. I wish Tim Cook was on stage and they did live demos of them attempting to do the AI, whatever they're going to do. And hopefully it doesn't end up like the Rabbit R1 demos, which if anyone saw them trying to order on DoorDash did not work. But, but I think it would show such, it would be such a statement to the industry that we're back, we're confident, we're innovating versus the pre-recorded ones. It's just, I don't know, they're too highly produced and slick and just not fun to watch.

• 13:41Alex Kantrowitz?

  I mean, that was the magic of the Steve Jobs demos is that the stuff would work most of the times and sometimes it wouldn't and he would yell. And it was like must see TV.

• 13:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. That is a good demo and everyone short of the product totally failing. If a little, a little, a few hiccups is welcome for any of these kinds of things. It makes it real. And I think, uh, yeah, but, but WWDC is going to be a really interesting one for Apple.

• 14:08Alex Kantrowitz?

  I think it will be live. And I will say like, one of my favorite Steve Jobs moments is when he's about to do a demo and he asks everybody in the auditorium, rather annoyed, to turn their wifi off because it was messing with his demo. I don't know if you've seen that one. It's a classic.

• 14:23Speaker 04

  I mean, I'm, I'm not, you know, I think bloggers have a right to blog, but if we want to see the demos, we're not going to be able to do it unless we turn off all these MiFi base stations and laptops, set them on the floor. I've got time.

• 14:40Speaker 01

  Yeah. And it's golden. That's perfect.

• 14:44Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay. One more thing about Apple. This wasn't on our prep sheet, but I want to ask you because it's interesting to me and somewhat new. They have started to potentially build servers with AI chips in them. Do you have any sense as to like what that could be for?

• 15:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think the whole compute discussion. Um, I mean, everyone is investing in it. Everyone is understanding that they need to either start building things for themselves from a Financial and cost perspective over the next decade as these technologies grow. So I think it's almost become for a big technology company. These are it's becoming table stakes that you have to own more of the AI infrastructure layer of your overall organization. And again, it's why Sam Altman is trying to raise, was it one trillion or seven trillion? I can't.

• 15:33Alex Kantrowitz?

  Seven trillion.

• 15:34Speaker 01

  Seven trillion.

• 15:34Alex Kantrowitz?

  It's not fully confirmed, but he didn't necessarily deny it. In fact, his comment, most direct comment on it was to say, why not eight trillion?

• 15:43Speaker 01

  So. Yeah, exactly. So everyone is recognizing at massive scale, you need to do this. And if you think about it, Google and Microsoft and Amazon, all this is part of their business. Mark Zuckerberg and Meta is basically telling investors, we're going to be spending tens of billions of dollars on this to build this kind of infrastructure. So Apple has to do something on this.

• 16:07Alex Kantrowitz?

  So it must mean they have their own chatbot coming.

• 16:11Speaker 01

  Just improve Siri, that's all. Listeners, you know, I say that every week. So if at WWDC, if Tim Cook just walks out and just goes, by the way, Siri's better, I will walk away a happy customer.

• 16:24Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, well, I'm flying out to California. I'm hoping they credential me, so we'll see what happens that week. It should be fun.

• 16:30Speaker 01

  Put in a word with him, please.

• 16:32Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yes. All right. So speaking of Sam Altman, did you hear that OpenAI is going to release its search engine next week, the day before Google's I/O developer conference? So this is from Reuters. OpenAI plans to announce its artificial intelligence powered search engine product on Monday, according to two sources familiar, raising the stakes in its competition with the search king, Google. I love how they call it the search king. I think maybe a couple of months ago, I would read this headline and be like, oh, Google's cooked. Here comes OpenAI. But also we also, we know that the technology hasn't really empowered Bing to the point where it's been able to cut meaningfully into Google's Google's search lead. So maybe if I'm Google, I'm not too worried, but maybe I am. What do you think?

• 17:16Speaker 01

  We never became Bing boys. I'm still, I'm becoming slowly a Gemini guy. And that's because Google. There because search is core to their business, it's it's a it feels like it will be a lot easier to turn a search product into a LLM driven chatbot or generative AI product. And we see Google's generative search is very good. And I'm seeing it on more and more queries. I've heard more and more people bring it up to me that they're seeing it versus going the other way and turning an LLM based chatbot like ChatGPT into a search product. Perplexity from the ground up has built something that is a really interesting hybrid. I use it all the time.

• 17:59Speaker 01

  We talked about it last week while traveling. It informed me nonstop. I was using perplexity over and over again, and it's done a very good job on it. So I think I I actually I'm going to make the call here. I think this is a bad rollout for OpenAI. And it's because to get citation right, which ChatGPT is one of the only platforms that does not do. Even Microsoft's Copilot, Claude, perplexity, certainly that's like one of the core features is citation. Google has built it into Gemini. I think citation is going to be really hard and they're going to roll it out in a very clumsy fashion.

• 18:38Speaker 01

  And and it I think it could be a big deal because, you know, OpenAI's product excellence on ChatGPT and Dolly. We've talked about just it's generally pure UI excellence, product excellence that have made these as powerful as the underlying model. So if they screw this one up, I think it could definitely cut into the the shine that at least lives on the product side, maybe not the corporate side.

• 19:03Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, and it shouldn't be forgotten that Microsoft already has its own chatbot search, which is Copilot or whatever it was Bing beforehand, but now it's Copilot. And now OpenAI is creating it. And I saw Casey Newton, the reporter, do this tweet saying, how angry must the Bing team be about this right now? This was supposed to be Bing's big moment. And now this company that Microsoft has funded is doing it. It's not good. And Dwarshish Patel is going to be on the podcast on Wednesday. I spoke with him this week. It was a great conversation. So I'm going to tease it here, but I'm also going to scoop it a little bit. He said something really interesting, which I I hope people tune in for the discussion. It's one of my, you know, favorite interviews of the year so far.

• 19:47Alex Kantrowitz?

  And what he said was you have Microsoft now effectively dividing its compute resources between.

• 19:55Alex Kantrowitz?

  Its own internal team and OpenAI, whereas Google is just concentrating it all in one place. And that's very bullish for Google. So all of a sudden, maybe like the the old incumbent is starting to see things shift in its favor.

• 20:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that as you're saying it like that, this is going to be a very interesting business school case study a decade from now that Microsoft is essentially taking the kind of diversified platform approach that betting on many horses and distributing distributing your compute across a number of them and seeing who wins versus Google. Clearly, everything is built back into the core cloud products. So I think that'll be an interesting battle. But but I don't think at Microsoft, come on, do you really think the team is threatened or angry by this versus? I feel Microsoft, after all the Sam Altman drama, basically has, even if financially they're still tied,

• 20:52Speaker 01

  at least perceptually, distanced themselves pretty, pretty strongly from OpenAI.

• 20:58Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, I mean, here's the thing. In this world, and Dwarsh makes this point, and he does it better than me. So folks, please tune in on Wednesday. But basically, like, the entire game here at this moment is making these models like larger. Right? And so that's why you want to consolidate and not have a multi-pronged approach. You just want to give everything to one group and say, all right, you know, do it. And so if this is the case that Microsoft is trying to hedge on OpenAI, then why be tied with them at all? And that's where things get really interesting. Remember, right around the time of the Sam Altman ouster and then return, we heard that they were in the process of a fundraise that would put them at some crazy number. What's happened to that fundraise? We haven't really heard anything about it afterwards.

• 21:42Alex Kantrowitz?

  So I think that's very interesting to watch. We're going to see, they might have a financial crisis.

• 21:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think, I mean, to me, that's why this is actually even more fun to watch and be part of versus a year or two ago in generative AI, because, you know, there was a long period of time where a cool new demo would come out and everyone would get excited, or you would use a product and it would be exciting. There, I still have those moments we've talked about on the music side, on the image side, but now it really is, you know, rubber meets the road. Who is going to actually execute on these technologies the best? Who's going to sell them? Who's going to implement them? Who's going to be able to monetize them? Because it is true, like, is that $20 ChatGPT plus subscription really going to scale and fund

• 22:28Speaker 01

  their overall usage of their compute? It's still pretty unclear on this. So, so I think that it's going to get even more exciting, especially in the next few months.

• 22:38Alex Kantrowitz?

  Absolutely, because one thing we haven't talked about yet is GPT-5 and how their next model is going to come out, I think, this year. That's what everybody says. And does that really change things? And it's going to be interesting to see not only the improvement in the model, but also the interaction between people. And this was something that happened at the Bloomberg conference this week, where Brad Lightcap, who's the COO of OpenAI, The Verge had this little item saying, you know, they keep vaguely teasing at GPT-5. Okay, I'm just gonna read it. His answer, his answer hinted that ChatGPT will evolve to act like an agent on your behalf, or the very least, take on more of a persona. And this is what

• 23:17Alex Kantrowitz?

  he said. Will there be such a thing as a prompt engineer in 2026? You don't prompt engineer your friend. So that's clearly what they're building toward. Does that make you excited? Or how do you feel emotionally hearing?

• 23:30Speaker 01

  I saw that, I saw that, yeah, I saw that line, you don't prompt engineer your friend. And that one, I just wish. The the management just spoke a little bit in a more normal way about these things are good, maybe the it will do this, or it will do this other thing for you. But to get into that level of like, how this is going to, how you should feel about these models is just awkward and weird to me versus just talking about what it can do. I do think one thing that's good again, in terms of talking about how things have almost slowed down in a good way, is remember, there was a period where it felt like everyone upgraded

• 24:11Speaker 01

  their foundation model every few weeks or few months, or there there's some major update and everything would change. And again, the fact that we're now at a point where they're teasing GPT five, and we don't really know exactly what it'll do, I think is a reminder that they, you know, how much room is there really for improvement versus making the current technologies actually just reach more people, help them do what they need them to do versus there's going to be some Q star AGI style, totally revolutionary thing.

• 24:47Alex Kantrowitz?

  But we are hearing about a different use case, right? This agent case or friend case like that is definitely the move that they're making. And I think that'll be interesting to see as they sort of roll that out. Imagine that with a better model, all of a sudden, you can be talking about some very interesting applications.

• 25:05Speaker 01

  Like a concierge, perhaps?

• 25:08Alex Kantrowitz?

  So what if you're lonely, just hypothetically, you're on the apps, and you're trying to meet somebody, and all of a sudden, an AI concierge pops up and says, Hey, let me do the hard work for you. All right. So thank you for setting me up there, Ron. John, do you want to introduce this segment?

• 25:30Speaker 01

  Well, I actually, there was a

• 25:34Speaker 01

  Tweet around, so Whitney Wolfe, the founder of Bumble, had talked about the idea that you have an AI concierge essentially managing your dating life for you. In the current world of people swiping and messaging themselves, that you have an AI talking to someone else's AI, and this is matching and filtering and engaging and talking, and then you're kind of monitoring and overseeing this process. And it's such a weird one, because I will say, and having been married a long time and only seeing this via other friends who are single, it is, people do manage online dating like

• 26:15Speaker 01

  some kind of large-scale transactional process where it's, you know, the swiping level, I mean, it's like a funnel. And having some kind of AI improvement in there actually does make a little bit of sense. And a lot of it is not very human in how it's done.

• 26:34Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right.

• 26:34Speaker 01

  It is very fast and volume-based. So it is kind of weird to think, could an AI actually filter better for you? And especially if you're already approaching things in that way, this makes sense to me.

• 26:46Alex Kantrowitz?

  And it was crazy to see this Bumble CEO, Whitney Wolfe, talk about it at this Bloomberg conference, because as she introduces the idea, the audience starts laughing, and then she goes, no, seriously, and she advances it. Let's take a listen.

• 26:59Speaker 05

  Okay, so for example, you could, in the near future, be talking to your AI dating concierge, and you could share your insecurities. I just came out of a breakup. I have commitment issues. And it could help you train yourself into a better way of thinking about yourself. And then it could give you productive tips for communicating with other people. If you want to get really out there, there is a world where your dating concierge could go and date for you with other dating concierge. No, no, truly. And then you don't have to talk to 600 people. It will just scan all of San Francisco for you, and say, these are the three people you really ought to meet.

• 27:37Alex Kantrowitz?

  It sounds useful. I mean, like, you talked about, like, dating today, it's really hard with the apps. And, you know, I'm lucky, I feel also lucky, like, people who are recently married, it feels like they got kind of like the last chopper out of the war, where like... I mean, that's not even original, right? It's just like, it's so, it is, it's become like a job, transactional, it's a disaster. And maybe you're right, maybe if AI can go ahead and speak with other people's AIs and find the right match for you, then that could be a net positive.

• 28:11Speaker 01

  I guess, now that I'm thinking about it, almost tying back to the earlier conversation around, do you play a physical guitar, or do you play a guitar on your iPad? I think things are going to split into the more purely digital AI-driven experiences, and then the more organic human experiences. Because, again, if you're already managing your dating life in some kind of volume-based way, this will definitely help you, and actually is not horrible and antithetical to, you know, any kind of romance. It actually is just making better what you're already doing, versus if you're trying to meet someone at a bar, or, you know, it's just somewhere else in an organic fashion. And the same way that,

• 28:54Speaker 01

  like, you know, playing an instrument versus generating an AI clip of music is a different type of experience, and, you know, it requires a different level of commitment, and it's just a completely different thing. So maybe people, maybe in all these different kind of things that we do in life, we'll have the AI thing, and then the more human thing.

• 29:18Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yep. Did you meet your wife in person?

• 29:20Speaker 01

  I did, at a birthday party, singing karaoke.

• 29:24Alex Kantrowitz?

  Were you the one singing? Is that what sealed the deal?

• 29:27Speaker 01

  I actually, she had chosen the song "American Boy" by Stellan Kanye West, and I randomly happened to know the Kanye West section, where he raps in the middle, and got up and did it. Yeah.

• 29:41Alex Kantrowitz?

  Well done. Yeah. I mean, I tried, I tried online dating for years, and then I ended up meeting my wife in person, so. I don't know, there's still something to be said for it, although it's possible to find love on the apps. Okay, I gotta ask you this one more question, this one question. So there's this guy Sid Verma on Twitter, and he says, "A ruthless self-taught dating machine who weaponizes your biodata to whittle down matches, raising concerns over privacy and consent. Congrats, you've invented the Indian mom." And you said Sid's greatest tweet has just been posted. So I'm curious if you could talk a little bit, like, people are like, is this bringing back arranged marriage? Now, I watched Indian Matchmaking on Netflix

• 30:23Alex Kantrowitz?

  and thought that it was such a great show, but does this kind of resemble it?

• 30:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, so, okay, so Sid Verma is a friend from my Financial Times days, and he has some great Twitter commentary on being Indian. And the idea of kind of leveraging data to create highly transactional arrangements for love and romance in Indian culture, especially more traditionally, I mean, there's a site shadi.com where it, all your biodata, like, not just height, weight, even like, health data, caste, all these kinds of things are fed in. And they definitely have added an AI layer that they call it around improving their matching process to better filter. So this whole idea of using extensive data

• 31:12Speaker 01

  points to, in a very intrusive manner, dictate who you should be seeing is well, very familiar with more traditional Indian folks. And I think it was a good, good recognition of the types of interactions that already exist that now we're weirdly trying to replicate in the digital world. Trust me, you guys don't want that. You don't want that.

• 31:36Alex Kantrowitz?

  Well, maybe you do, because I could be wrong, but don't arranged marriages have a higher percent chance of working out, so.

• 31:43Speaker 01

  All right, so AI will bring us back to the age of arranged marriage.

• 31:48Alex Kantrowitz?

  I'm not, it's so interesting because it's like one of those situations where like statistically, yes, you're likely to be like in a much better position, but you would never want that forced on you. I don't think I wouldn't.

• 31:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. I mean, this is the same way maybe, actually, we obviously don't know yet, but I'm sure we'll start to see data if these AI driven, I mean, I guarantee you, Bumble, one year from now, will present some data about how AI driven meetups are more successful than organic ones. I'm almost positive. They probably will be true and it'll probably work.

• 32:27Alex Kantrowitz?

  And for those who doesn't work, there's always these erotic AIs that you could end up dating and hang out with them in the metaverse. Because there was also a headline this week that OpenAI is like working to develop erotic.

• 32:37Speaker 01

  An erotic AI, yep.

• 32:39Alex Kantrowitz?

  I figured I'd leave that off the agenda this week after our, you know,

• 32:42Speaker 01

  After last week.

• 32:43Alex Kantrowitz?

  Our raunchy conclusion to last week.

• 32:45Speaker 01

  Well, we haven't gotten to the Brady roast yet, so.

• 32:47Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yes, okay, so that's to be continued. Yes. Let's talk briefly about this zombie internet. So there was this great article in Futurism about Advan, which they call the AI powered content monster infecting the media industry. And I think that's a really appropriate headline. It's like one of these situations where the headline actually does justice to how bad this is. And it's basically these AI generated news stories. This is how it works. The, somebody on this, at this Advan company reportedly, according to Futurism, right? So that caveat in there, will type in a headline like best bicycles for kids. And then the AI will generate every single word of the article, right? Like riding a bike is a rite of passage

• 33:32Alex Kantrowitz?

  that every child should experience. And then you just keep clicking generate intro paragraph, generate product awards, and that builds the article. And these articles are terrible. They oftentimes will mismatch the product in the headline with the actual product recommendations that it makes. For instance, asking about microwaves, that it will give four reviews of microwaves, but also like conventional ovens. And it will answer questions that people typically type into the internet, like can you use aluminum foil in your oven? I mean, I read this in the web and I just was like, the web is getting destroyed. And it gets even more embarrassing and depressing when you start to hear the different types of companies that are involved in this.

• 34:15Alex Kantrowitz?

  They found this company's content on places like Hollywood Life, Us Weekly, but, but not only that. The Los Angeles Times had been using it, the Miami Herald had been using it, the Sacramento Bee had been using it. I mean, is nothing sacred? Like I do, I, I was always under the impression that the search engines kind of would have a handle on this. And be able to filter out AI content, but I don't think so anymore after reading this article. And it does just like get to this, this concern that you and John at margins have been bringing up for quite some time. Which is that AI is going to create this zombie internet and, and maybe like, maybe before Google even gets disintermediated by AI.

• 34:58Alex Kantrowitz?

  It gets filled by this junk, which even causes a further impetus to replace it with AI. Like we might see from next week's OpenAI event. How do you read this story?

• 35:09Speaker 01

  So I think, so first, there's bad AI and good AI. Like the, some of the examples of reviewing a microwave oven and then actually making it around a conventional oven is bad AI. Or, you know, the bike review example you gave. So that's one thing that's almost funny to me is Advon clearly could have done a little bit of work on their models and made it a little better. Because you should be able to write a pretty good bike review that actually sounds coherent and is ideally reviewed to make sure it's, uh, it's actually accurate. But I do think this raises a big question around especially product review driven SEO articles,

• 35:51Speaker 01

  which have become a mainstay for publishers and has become one of the biggest monetization engines for publishers. Which is why you see everyone having top 20 of everything. Or when it's Prime Day, here's the 55 best things you can buy for Prime Day. Because everyone is just scraping for any kind of affiliate ad revenue.

• 36:14Speaker 01

  For transacting to for with their readers for these products. And I think that is all going to go away. I genuinely believe, and this is where when and I and I don't think it's a bad thing. There's certain parts of the Internet. We've all talked about recipes, how every recipe starts with a 700 word story of the person's life, so they can stuff a bunch of digital display ads in the middle. So you scroll down and they get paid for them. And everyone is complaining and saying this is going to hurt small publishers. But unfortunately, that was bad content meant to arbitrage the existing display ad ecosystem from 10, 15 years ago. And I think it already destroyed a lot of the web.

• 36:58Speaker 01

  So to me, it's gonna be painful, but I do think moving more towards, especially when we hear OpenAI is going to launch a search engine. I think moving more towards getting just evergreen, good information to users in a way that's clean and simple and easy to access. It's gonna, you don't need 100 different lists of best bikes for kids. You need, you need to get, but but if you do put in the work, and I think Wirecutter from the New York Times, which their quality, I think, has been on a bit of a decline. Like, I think they still are the gold standard of if you really put time and energy into your reviews and make them good and and make them human and connecting to the reader

• 37:43Speaker 01

  and really building that trust, you'll be fine. But if you're churning out these lists of best bikes anyways, I think publishers are going to lose that revenue very, very quickly.

• 37:55Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, and of course, it hurts the display advertising, right? And that sort of ship has sailed for digital publishers. But what it also does is it just increases distrust within the publishing ecosystem. And actually, these bad news sites, these bad news stories will cause damage for everyone. For instance, if you go to the Los Angeles Times, just for an example, right? Because they apparently were working with this company. Apparently, they've stopped. But if you go to the Los Angeles Times and you see a story about whether you could microwave aluminum foil and it gives you the wrong answer. You're just never going to trust these publications anymore. It gives you all the more reason to go to Claude or ChatGPT or Gemini and say, well, you might not be right,

• 38:37Alex Kantrowitz?

  but at least you're going to take a swing at like at accuracy. Whereas these publications literally don't give a shit about what happens on their websites and don't respect me as a user. And unfortunately, everybody does get lumped together. And it kind of goes to our discussion at the start of the episode last week where it's like, the information ecosystem has gotten so bad. What's so wrong with an AI chatbot that will actually like be measured and do its best to get you the accurate information versus publications that just don't respect the reader? I think this stuff is going to come back to bite the media industry pretty badly. And for Google, which enables it in a way, it will also harm Google and potentially put their business at long-term risk.

• 39:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think Google is at that inflection point. We've talked about this a lot between their actual search revenue and whatever model that's created from generative search, which they're doing better at actually outputting the answers, but is going to be a huge, huge threat to their conventional search business that directs you to these sites. And they created this whole model themselves. So I think it's still, it's going to be an existential question. They seem to be doing work, but I don't think, so small publishers certainly. But I'm also curious about what it's going to do to Facebook. And I mean, Facebook, the blue app, because I've gone on Facebook recently.

• 40:00Speaker 01

  And in terms of AI-generated garbage, it's crazy, the stuff you see. I barely use it. So so much of the feed is now like all these kind of just like purely algorithmic efforts to try to engage me in some way. And I get so many of these like random AI-generated images. It's like, have a drink in Capri, Italy. And it's just this image that's so clearly fake. And there's like hundreds of thousands of likes and comments of people being like, nice, good. I love Italy. And that's just the kind of like entry level point. 404 Media had a whole story about how the

• 40:42Speaker 01

  AI-generated images of mutilated children are going viral and people, you know, all saying how horrible it was. So it's just clearly engagement bait. Ryan Broderick at Garbage Day, which is one of my favorite newsletters, had talked about this. And I love what he always does. He like takes like a very investigative approach to the most random weird parts of the internet. So he found this account that creates these AI-generated recipe videos, tied it to some Brazilian company, saw that they also make Facebook pages with AI-generated Jesus photos, which get a lot of engagement. So

• 41:20Speaker 01

  there are these companies that are totally cracking the, this formula. But I think this is also going to be a big threat for Facebook, and I think they're probably ignoring it right now because it's just juicing numbers and it's totally fine for them. It's more content, more engagement. But in terms of, not that whatever it might mean to trust what's on your Facebook feed, but I think this is gonna, the content is just bad. So it's gonna get even worse. And at some point, there's gonna be some big presentation and Mark Zuckerberg talking about how they've fixed your feeds.

• 41:56Alex Kantrowitz?

  Well, here's the deal. Facebook ingested the web. And so the bad stuff on the web now happens on Facebook. It's as simple as that. And it probably spreads further because Facebook's algorithm sort of incentivizes that. And so that's what we're seeing, I would imagine.

• 42:12Speaker 01

  Yep. No, we saw the term zombie internet. And this was from, from Ryan Broderick, to refer to the endless wasteland of algorithmically regurgitated and now AI-generated content filling up meta platforms. And Sundar has talked about this a lot for Google, that like, this flood of AI-generated spammy content that's gonna be coming or is already there. And it's clear these companies are gonna have to get a hold on it. Otherwise, it could, I mean, it can destroy these products. And it could literally, this is a scale that in the past, you know, Macedonian teenagers spreading disinformation, or there's other very manual things that were happening that negatively affected the perception of these

• 42:57Speaker 01

  feeds and the trust around them. But this is, this is a scale that they have not countered this, encountered this kind of thing before. So, so I think these platforms are definitely gonna have to do something about it fast.

• 43:09Alex Kantrowitz?

  Absolutely. All right. Why don't we take a quick break and come back to talk about the Tom Brady roast, Netflix sinking a deal with the NFL. Before we do, I just want to say that if you're in the New York area and you want to hang out with us on Wednesday, the 15th of May, which is coming up next week, we're doing the live event in the Financial District with Aaron Levy, friend of the show, CEO of Box. It's going to be a live podcast. We're going to plant some questions with Ron John, so you now know the strategy. So you can sign up on bigtechnology.com. It's right up there on the homepage, the story for the event with the link. Only caveat is you have to be a big technology paid subscriber, but it's $10 a month and you can cancel at any time. So if you're in the New York area, please come to the event. We hope to see you there. And on the other side of this break, we're going to talk about Tom Brady.

• 43:55Alex Kantrowitz?

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• 44:35Alex Kantrowitz?

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• 45:20Alex Kantrowitz?

  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 ironwall.com slash big technology, 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 ironwall.com slash big technology. Learn how to stop online threats before they become real world attacks. The link's in the show notes. And we're back here on Big Technology Podcast Friday Edition. So on Netflix, there was

• 46:02Alex Kantrowitz?

  a really popular event that happened live, live television on Netflix, this roast of Tom Brady. I didn't know it was coming, but it all of a sudden became this pop culture moment where everybody kept destroying Tom Brady for ruining his relationships. Go eight and nine and the final season in the NFL. And as a Jets fan, I really enjoyed it. I respect Tom Brady, but it was, it was fun to see him get ripped apart. But it also kind of showed you that Netflix is taking this move where it's saying, okay, like our future is going to be live content, right? Live will be where the growth comes from. That was the message I got. What did you think about the roast? And what do you think it means for Netflix?

• 46:45Speaker 01

  All right. So I'll get into what I thought about the roast. And this will be from the perspective of a diehard lifelong Patriots fan. Sorry.

• 46:53Alex Kantrowitz?

  By the way, it just says so much about this show that like, I'm the big Jets fan and you're the big Patriots.

• 46:58Speaker 01

  You can bring it together. You can bring everyone together. Anything is possible. But so, so what was fascinating about this for me is, so I'll never forget my first moment of understanding binge TV or when all episodes are released in the same day. I think it was 2011 or 13. I was at my parents' house, House of Cards had come out. I had watched an episode, watched another, and my mom had walked over. She was like, oh, is this on right now? When did it come out? I'm like, today. And she, you know, she was just totally confused by, what does that mean? It came out today and you're on, been watching it for six hours? And she was like, is it a movie?

• 47:39Speaker 01

  Well, no, but is it a series? Yeah. So then why are you watching it all one after the other? Anyways, it was the first moment I remember vividly thinking, okay, they changed the entire model. Now, this was the first time I'm on Twitter, Sunday evening, I start seeing some people sharing clips. I also had not heard about it or been targeted with it on, when opening Netflix. And I'd kind of let it go. And I'm like, oh, well, it's Netflix. I'll watch it tomorrow or later this week. And within 30 minutes, I got the most extreme case of FOMO and I turned it on. And again, I'll get into, I think it was one of the greatest pieces of content I've seen. Greatest things of media in the last, but, but, but also it created a moment to Netflix.

• 48:24Speaker 01

  I think their biggest weakness to date, which was built into the way they do it is they never had the Sunday night Game of Thrones succession, uh, type of engagement. They, when you release everything at once, and they'd already started experimenting with rolling out seasons more carefully, three episodes to start, like, kind of like Apple TV. And for me, when you watch things like that, I end up on Reddit, reading about the show. I just spend a lot more time getting excited about it, thinking about it. It becomes more of a moment versus when you go and binge a show, you don't real, you just don't pay as much attention. So I think this is a big deal for Netflix.

• 49:08Speaker 01

  And to execute on it, on it well, and they executed on it well because, oh my God, this was for me, again, to see Bill Belichick, to, these are all players, especially football. I feel you're more detached from a player because they have a helmet on and like, they don't really interview them that much, or they're not as much personalities as other sports. And to see the Gronk, certainly a personality already, but like, you don't see these guys and get their humor, know if they have humor and they, the, the, the level of offensiveness of some of the jokes, almost to the point that it was like, Shocking, but amazing where they were going and delivering on them too.

• 49:51Speaker 01

  Tom Brady, I, I think he's the greatest of all time. I never would have thought he could be funny. And I thought he actually almost in an amazing way, delivered some of the darkest humor in a way that I would usually associate with, you know, like some like very experienced standup comic.

• 50:10Alex Kantrowitz?

  I mean, he definitely had writers, but I would say Belichick was the funniest of them all. Belichick is actually hilarious and he's so good at media. He's like surprisingly very good at media, given this like dour personality that he had the entire time he was the coach of the Patriots.

• 50:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, he, I mean, I, I have always sometimes wondered how much of it is a shtick and how much of it is like actually him grumpy and treating the press like that. But, uh, I actually was also, I mean, Gronk, Gronk was so Gronk and comical. He was having trouble reading the teleprompter. He smashed a shot glass that exploded and then like sprayed glass everywhere, which was the most Gronk smash thing to do.

• 50:53Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yes.

• 50:53Speaker 01

  I thought Kevin Hart actually was a very good host. I thought, yeah.

• 50:59Alex Kantrowitz?

  He was hilarious.

• 51:00Speaker 01

  He was hilarious. I, I would love to watch a Gronk, Kevin Hart buddy comedy if any Netflix executives are watching or listening, I would certainly pitch that one, but, but overall.

• 51:11Alex Kantrowitz?

  That'd be hilarious.

• 51:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, I thought, I thought it was a big win for Netflix. I thought Tom Brady, whatever he's going to be doing in this post-football career, he, and it certainly, hopefully is not more crypto. Uh, I think he set himself up pretty well.

• 51:26Alex Kantrowitz?

  They killed him on FTX.

• 51:39Speaker 01

  I mean,

• 51:40Alex Kantrowitz?

  Oh, yeah, that was classic.

• 51:41Speaker 01

  Brady was in FTX. Honestly, out of celebrities, he's by far the deepest in, and Gisele, too.

• 51:48Alex Kantrowitz?

  But he's about, they're about to get their money back. So with interest.

• 51:52Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 51:53Alex Kantrowitz?

  But the broader picture here on Netflix is interesting, right? Because there was another report that came out in Puck that they're about to ink a deal with the NFL for two playoff football games, not playoff, Christmas time football games, which, I don't know, might be even more valuable, right? Where there is going to be this moment around Netflix in the Christmas time and where everybody's going to get their new thin iPads and they're going to need to fill it with content. So they're going to sign up for Netflix. And, um, and this is a moment where Netflix has this advantage over all the other streamers who aren't making money. Netflix is making money. It's adding subscribers because of the password crackdown, and it needs to press that advantage. And the way that it's going to press that advantage is through live television. It's the lowest thinking fruit for it. It's obviously doing a good job, being selective at this point.

• 52:37Alex Kantrowitz?

  But now comes the haymaker. It's going for the NFL. And the question was always, what's going to happen to linear television? Once the NFL goes to streaming and the NFL is going to streaming. And this is going to be a very interesting couple of months or a couple of years for TV, because this is the beginning. And this is sort of where Netflix takes its strength. It takes its, the cards that it has in its hands, and it presses the advantage, not only on the other streamers, but on the medium itself. And it's going to be, it is going to be a fight to remember.

• 53:13Speaker 01

  Well, we will be watching.

• 53:15Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay. And maybe we can host a big technology roast one day where you can make fun of me for this mustache that I wore on our live stream today. But I wasn't fully aware of.

• 53:25Speaker 01

  When I joined on and we are seeing each other on video, I did have to ask Alex, is that a mustache? I can't tell sometimes, you know, it could be a bit of a beard trim with a little extra mustache, but no, it looks like a proper full on mustache. I think he should keep it. Listeners, please chime in, but, uh, he says he might be shaving it soon.

• 53:49Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, it's gone. My wife is going to murder me if she sees this when she gets home. So this is a little midday, midday Friday fun.

• 53:57Speaker 01

  Something more real when you're doing a podcast with a guy with a mustache.

• 54:01Alex Kantrowitz?

  Exactly. It's just, it just loses credibility.

• 54:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:06Alex Kantrowitz?

  All right, everybody. Thank you for listening. Join me on Wednesday with Dwarsh Patel. Great podcast for talking about the future of AI. Otherwise, Ron John and I will be back with you next week. So take care and we'll see you next time on Big Technology Podcast.

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