More on Airbnb, Jack Dorsey's Return to Square, Generative AI News Bonanza

Ranjan Roy from Margins is back for our weekly discussion of the latest tech news. We cover: 1) An update on our Yahoo episode quest 2) A recap and further analysis of Airbnb Brian Chesky's appearance on the podcast 3) Recent tech IPOs falling back to earth 4) The broader market's downturn and the chance of a recession 5) Jack Dorsey's Return to Square 6) The success of Snapchat+ 7) Generative AI announcements from Amazon, Google, and Microsoft 8) Does Generative AI take off in enterprise settings first? 9) The rise of CleanTok. --- 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/ 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?

  We have updates on our Airbnb and Yahoo conversation. There's been a bonanza of generative AI news hitting the wire this week. We're going to talk about that. Jack Dorsey is back at Square, Snapchat's booming and people on TikTok love to clean. All that and more 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,

• 0:45Alex Kantrowitz?

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• 1:19Alex Kantrowitz?

  Welcome to Big Technology Podcast Friday Edition, where we break down the news in our traditional cool-headed and nuanced format. We have a whole heck of a lot of news to break down for you this week. A lot of fun stuff and let's dive right into it. First, joining us as always is Ranjan Roy of Margins. Ranjan, welcome. Good to be here, Alex. Great to have you. So I think we have to really begin with two follow-ups from our conversation last week. First of all, I want to thank Big Technology Podcast Nation for coming out and showing your support for our desire and our push to get a Yahoo episode on the feed. Some amazing reviews came in. Here's one from PD283, the host and his co-host of Great Chemistry. It really is a nuanced conversation.

• 2:04Alex Kantrowitz?

  I really enjoyed the 9:15 episode and yes, would love them to do an episode on Yahoo. We also have someone, I think it's an equation editor. The review is Yahoo, like four O's. And love the nine 15 episode, hoping for that Yahoo episode. Yahoo, then and plenty more. So first of all, thanks to everybody that posted a review. And if you haven't yet, and you want to use the review as a way to get questions. If you put a five star review and ask a question in the review. Here's the thing, Ranjan and I will get to your questions in the next episode. So a little more incentive to post those reviews. Anyway, here's the update. Jim Lanzon, the CEO of Yahoo is going to come on the show. It's going to be a couple of months down the road.

• 2:45Alex Kantrowitz?

  I was texting with him this week, very busy, heads down at the moment, working on everything Yahoo. But we're going to get that episode. You asked, you will receive, and I am so excited to bring it to you. So stay tuned. I'm hoping sometime, you know, maybe later this year or at the very worst, beginning of next year, Yahoo episode coming to the feed.

• 3:06Speaker 01

  I'm telling you, it's one of the most interesting stories in tech right now that no one is talking about. So I am excited for that episode.

• 3:12Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right, and we will, we will be talking about it and I'm excited too. And I know Jim is as well, so can't wait for that. I'll keep you folks updated on when he's going to come on. And again, thank you for all the lovely reviews, means a lot. And helped us also increase our standing in the ratings, the rankings of on Apple Podcasts this week. So thank you for that. Okay, update on our Airbnb conversation. Last week, Ranjan and I were on talking about whether Airbnb is going to do advertising. And he's like, why don't you put it to Airbnb? And of course, Brian Chesky and I were about to sit down a few days later. We did, I asked him about the advertising and his perspective, actually quoting Jeff Bezos, was that he's, he's going after the perishable market first, fixing the main product.

• 3:57Alex Kantrowitz?

  And then it seems like once he gets that down, he's going to go after advertising. Cause when I started reading him, the predictions of how much advertising revenue was going to come in, the predictions from Skift, I mean, folks for, it was only him and I in the room. We weren't able to record it for video, but the guy's eyes started lighting up. Like you could see an instant reaction and he's like, really? Like that's the prediction? Billions of dollars in from advertising, higher margin revenue. So Ranjan, I'm curious what you thought listening to that as we put our question to Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky.

• 4:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, the numbers are certainly astounding. And again, it's this incredibly high margin business. So at every level, it made sense. But I actually have to say, in overall, I mean, honestly, everyone go back and listen to the episode, the entire episode with Brian Chesky, if you have not, because he came off, honestly, as one of the kind of most thoughtful, but also, you know, fired up tech CEOs I've heard in a while, but in a, in a kind of a smart, thoughtful way. Again, on advertising, the whole idea around Jeff Bezos, I loved that idea of go after the perishable opportunities first. What are the opportunities that will not be there if you don't go after them today? And so for them, and we can definitely talk

• 5:13Speaker 01

  about that, and we had fixing the product all, you know, it's become almost a meme, the cleaning fees around Airbnb, and clearly, they, they're answering that. That was, you know, a big part of their overall announcement, how they're tackling that frustration that all their consumers have. So I think, I think it's smart how they're approaching it. But I mean, I will say that the product placement in Airbnb is, I'm still kind of liking this idea. I know that's probably not, the way he talked about it is in the more traditional sense that Uber, DoorDash, Instacart, as we saw, it's pushing them to profitability. The idea of just having advertisement, basically, people paying to push their listings up within

• 5:53Speaker 01

  the conventional product. But I still think Keels should do a collab with Airbnb and have their products in every Airbnb. That's me.

• 6:02Alex Kantrowitz?

  It did seem to me that it's just something that he's chomping at the bit at. And by the way, it takes a little bit of pressure off the broader business and sort of allows you to do things with the broader business that you might not have been able to otherwise. For instance, you want to provide better customer service? Well, one way to do that is have a higher margin business, hire more customer service people, or, you know, potentially, you know, use that to offer more credits. It's the thing, this is the thing. And I think this is why Amazon went out, went after it. By running this high margin business, Amazon is able to run a effectively break even retail business and then keep people locked in because of So that's the one thing that I think we should be thinking about with this is, you know, is advertising actually ancillary to Airbnb?

• 6:46Alex Kantrowitz?

  Is it ancillary to Amazon? Is it ancillary to Instacart right now? Doesn't seem like it is actually, it does seem like it's core. And so like, I agree fixing the product number one. But as you get deeper into it, some, some of this advertising revenue can become core and can enable a service that allows you to compete in a way that you can't without it. And that, that was my takeaway from it.

• 7:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, if, I mean, Amazon's a poster child, a child of this. And again, from an antitrust perspective, that's a, a different topic. But again, AWS, super high margin business. Now their retail network, their advertising business, super high margin, funneled that back in and you said break even. The actual e-commerce and retail business has lost money many quarters, but they can afford to do that because they have these others, you know, cash flow generating machines. So yeah, I think it'll be really interesting to see how Airbnb pushes that opportunity. It was funny, I think, because at one point he was even talking about, you know, like, we won't get into the jet turbine business because that's so out of the scope of, you know,

• 7:51Speaker 01

  the type of things that we're doing, but very clearly saying advertising, you know, makes complete sense.

• 7:57Alex Kantrowitz?

  Ranjan, you also picked up a little bit on the product manager shift. I'm curious if you have a very brief reflection on that and why you thought it was worth paying attention to.

• 8:06Speaker 01

  I know, and I've heard, you know, on hacker news or wherever else, like Airbnb has always had this kind of mystique about it, that they're a design first company, that everything is design driven versus like you think of an Amazon as operational masters. And he really kind of laid out the vision of a large company, and they're a huge company. As he said, they're in the Fortune 500 now. Is the idea that, and like Apple, things are not divisional. It's not that you have an engineering department in AWS in the e-commerce division, like, you know, a company like Amazon, which is divisional. You have one engineering division, you have one UX division that will go across products across the entire company.

• 8:50Speaker 01

  And it was interesting to me because you see. How that ends up, you know, disseminating to the entire company and you see it in the quality of the product and but also you see how something like the cleaning fees or these other issues like how you can how the whole company can come together to tackle something like that and how that energy can come around and really be focused versus, I mean, even a Google especially, I feel they've kind of been the, you know, having the same product name two different things, having like, yeah, basically it creates focus in a way and obviously Apple, you see it in the end product.

• 9:28Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. One other thing that I found interesting and then we'll move on is that he talked about how writing the press release for the product you're building in a way that Amazon does, which I always thought was a terrific way to build products. It takes away, the weakness is that it takes away your ability to iterate and imagine on the way. If you're only building toward that product and that is your north star, then you could end up missing the ability to really build different and big and interesting things that can come up in the middle of the product building process. So.

• 9:59Speaker 01

  Wait, wait. Can you explain for people who aren't familiar, the Amazon press release thing? But and also, I actually, and how did Airbnb do it differently? I can't quite remember, but I remember it was interesting.

• 10:11Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yep. So, so basically when they build a product inside Amazon, they, they start by writing a press release with quote, with fake quotes from customers that talk about how much they love the product. And so Chesky is saying that when you're envisioning a product, you can write that press release. It's all well and good. But the thing is that as you're building and as you're moving toward that north star, if, you know, for instance, your testing leads you elsewhere, your designers leave, lead you elsewhere, your instincts lead you elsewhere, you could potentially miss, you know, the, the, um, the big opportunity by focusing so much on the press release that you wrote in the beginning. So he actually wants a little bit more flexibility in the product process.

• 10:56Alex Kantrowitz?

  And so they don't use those type of documents. And I actually think that, you know, for the first time, it was like an argument against the Amazon process for certain types of business that made a lot of sense to me.

• 11:07Speaker 01

  All right. Yeah. Yeah. No, you can definitely see that. I, I, again, the overall conversation around product management, and this is someone. As myself, not a product manager, but someone who's been part of teams building products, it was really interesting how they approached it.

• 11:24Alex Kantrowitz?

  Let's also go quickly through a story that we also brought up last week, which was the tech IPOs returning. And we had a bit of a debate about whether the pops are meaningful or not, that when the stock goes up on IPO day, you actually have something remarkable that's happening and it's good for the company. Let's leave that debate aside, but I want to talk a little bit about what has actually happened with these tech company IPOs since they went out over the past few weeks. So this is from Aaron Griffith, New York Times reporter. All three of the recent tech IPOs had first day pops that didn't last. ARM, Instacart and Klaviyo are all trading below their first day opening price and are flat to their IPO price. So for listeners, ARM went out at $51, it climbed 25% and now

• 12:09Alex Kantrowitz?

  it's at $50. Instacart went out at $30, that was its IPO price, it climbed 40% and now it's at $30. And 12 cents, so it's returned back to earth. Klaviyo out its IPO price, $30. It jumped 23% and now it's $33, but it's really given up most of that pop. I'm curious, I mean, obviously it's a rough week for the market, right? But what do you make of the fact that these pops are now all gone?

• 12:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was only a week ago, everything was great in the technology industry. And I imagine every investment banker out there was calling up their clients who've been sitting on the sidelines for months or even years now, who've just been chomping at the bit to go public, that maybe the window is open and it's time. But this week is not looking as good. So I think we got to separate it out into two parts. One is the specifics of these companies and then two, the economy itself. Now, Instacart was interesting. Like Corey Weinberg at The Information, we had brought this up last week and he wrote in more detail. And ARM did this a bit. So ARM floated only 10% of the company, actually made it available.

• 13:18Speaker 01

  The other 90% is still owned by SoftBank and Masayoshi Son. Instacart is even less. The entire float was only 6.7% of the company. Now, a typical IPO, 10% is already the very low end. You see typically up to 25% of the overall value of the company being floated and available to sell. So you have a very, very limited supply of stock being issued, which obviously is, you know, helps push the price up just because of the scarcity of what's available. And everyone is interested in this IPO and buying the stock. So, so I think already you saw the pop, you saw the interest. The financial engineering worked until it isn't as much anymore.

• 14:03Speaker 01

  And everything's coming back a little down to earth. But I think then, and we should definitely get into it, the, the economy as a whole, the Fed this week, things are looking a little, a little more reserved, let's say, from the Fed.

• 14:16Alex Kantrowitz?

  I'll take it a step further. I, I felt this was one of the most depressing weeks in the market we've had in a very long time. You have the S and P, this, in the past five days alone, down more than 2%. A lot of the gains that we saw, at least in the second half of the year, have just been completely given up. And it does stem from the Fed signaling to the market what it's going to do. So there were two elements to this, Rontan, and I'm curious if you, if you think I have it right here. The first was that the Fed was, uh, didn't immediately say it was going to lower rates and said it might even raise rates this year. So that was element one. But the second and the more impactful thing is the Fed said, listen, we're going to keep those rates, we're likely going to keep those rates high for longer than we initially expected.

• 15:00Alex Kantrowitz?

  And if the market's trading on the next 12 or 18 months ahead of time, it seemed like we had a pretty good time in the market, not for what's happening now, but for what was going to happen over the next year and a half or so. With the Fed saying it's going to keep those rates high, all of a sudden, the good times the market expected are gone. And now you start to see what really is, you know, a stock market crash. So I guess, for you, two questions. One, is that a proper diagnosis of what's happening? Two, is this still just really confined to assets? Or is the fact that the stock market is going south in a hurry, lead us to a potential area where a recession could now actually be in focus?

• 15:39Speaker 01

  Yep. So I think that's, that's a proper diagnosis. Actually, one of the, the best ways I read it put was so, so basically typically when rates are, you know, there's a hiking cycle. Once that's finished, rates drop quickly that, uh, you know, the Fed psyched, everything is like inflation is headed off. And then in order to kind of like, keep the economy stable, they drop rates quickly. The biggest thing that Jerome Powell and the Fed indicated both through what he said and in the dot plot, which is where they indicate what their forecast for interest rates are. Basically is that rates are not going to drop quickly in the same way. Uh, the, the line I read was, is that rates go up like stairs and drop like an elevator.

• 16:24Speaker 01

  Um, and it captures it. So what they're trying to say is inflation is moving down, but it's still not dropping quickly. So the Fed has to be a little bit conservative, but economic growth has still been resilient. So from their perspective, it actually seems reasonable at this exact moment that they don't need to cut rates yet. They should actually give, because one inflation could, you know, raise its ugly head again, or the economy, if it starts to show signs of weakness. They need to give themselves room to cut. So, so I think again, at this exact moment, the way the Fed communicated, I actually think is, is correct.

• 17:08Speaker 01

  But clearly the market did not take it as such.

• 17:12Alex Kantrowitz?

  And what about the chance of a recession taking hold now? I mean, it's so interesting because every time like I see people predicting a recession, it's always like a year away. And at this point, like, I don't know how you could have any credibility if you keep predicting a six month away or one year away recession and it doesn't materialize. So what do you think about that?

• 17:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, I actually, I would guess the number of pundits that are predicting a recession is probably going to be down because everyone was wrong 12 months ago. So people are going to be hopefully a little bit more reserved. But again, I mean, the economy is in.

• 17:47Speaker 01

  Likely a more precarious situation right now than it was 12 months ago. But, but the, the precarity of it is again, like as you see in the Fed's decision calculus, it's, it's difficult because everything's okay right now. So trying to plan ahead for 18 months from now or 12 months from now. That's the difficult part because inflation is still down. Growth is still pretty good.

• 18:11Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right.

• 18:11Speaker 01

  So where you go from there and how you navigate out of that, it's, it's a very tough thing to do.

• 18:16Alex Kantrowitz?

  It is interesting. I mean, the one theory here has just been that like the main impact of their rates has been on asset markets. Inflation was going to come down anyway because the supply chain was riding it. And the economy will look good until it doesn't. And that's when you might have a problem because this stuff works very slowly. Like it's not like you raise interest rates by 2% and next thing you know, like that's reflected immediately. It takes a while. So speaking by the way of the stock market and good times to bad and then bad times to good. Square or Block, as it's called now, is down 85% since its COVID highs. And, and, and there's a familiar face that's returning to Square. He, he's, his name is Jack Dorsey.

• 19:00Alex Kantrowitz?

  He's the head of, uh, head of Block or they call him the Block Head. So that's the umbrella set of companies that includes Square and Title and some other stuff. Anyway, the CEO of Square is leaving. Dorsey is apparently returning. I'm curious what you make of the fact that Jack is back in the game and, and what it's going to say for, for Square.

• 19:22Speaker 01

  So Jack is back. And what's really interesting about this company is one, it is called Block. Like we, I think people are sometimes forgetting that this was like, in terms of what it made me remember was.

• 19:35Alex Kantrowitz?

  I, I was on their website today. I'm going to let you talk a second, but I was on their website today and I saw like their, like Block.

• 19:40Speaker 01

  Do they still have those?

• 19:41Alex Kantrowitz?

  Like blockchain and their leadership is all like a cube. And it's just amazing like how silly it seems right now. Sorry, go ahead.

• 19:48Speaker 01

  No, no, but exactly that. So that's what was so amazing about this story is I had forgotten it was called Block. I forgot, I mean, if people remember and I, and we've now hit a point in the cycle where like.

• 20:00Speaker 01

  Covid ridiculousness is kind of fun to watch and exactly that. I remember they renamed themselves Block in peak pandemic era, like insanity. They had a corporate site with exactly the leaders are all cubes.

• 20:15Alex Kantrowitz?

  They're cubes. They're like, yeah, their headshots are spread over three dimensional cubes. And it's hilarious because you have like their facial features on one side of the cube, and then the top of the cube is just their foreheads.

• 20:29Speaker 01

  See, see, this happened. This happened to a multi-billion dollar public company. And again, the fact that blockchain was going to be the answer, and they invested in Tidal, which was always kind of interesting. Or they did they buy Tidal, I believe?

• 20:44Alex Kantrowitz?

  Bought it.

• 20:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, so they bought it. So overall, but the core business Square has been having some issues. It had its first, I believe, nationwide outage recently. But actually, I was I was here at a blue bottle, and it was it just didn't work. And there was a line and there was a and then read the headlines later. It's a massive outage for the payment provider, which actually is known as one of the more reliable systems in the market. So it was interesting to me that-

• 21:14Alex Kantrowitz?

  They're just working on Twitter service.

• 21:16Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 21:19Speaker 01

  It's it's so. So I am so intrigued whether does this mean they are now getting back to fundamentals and recognizing, okay, Square is the business. All this block stuff was all kind of a diversion, or maybe not the right approach. And Jack is gonna clean things up and tighten up the old organization and make it all kind of built around the core business of Square? Or are they just having a lot of problems? And the CEO, Alyssa Henry, who was the CEO of Square, is leaving and they're they're gonna have to find someone else?

• 21:57Alex Kantrowitz?

  It would be extremely fascinating if Jack comes back and cleans out all the blockchain stuff, because he's like Mr. Bitcoin and Mr. Blockchain himself.

• 22:04Speaker 01

  Exactly. No, no.

• 22:05Alex Kantrowitz?

  I don't see that happening at all. And so that's going to be a very interesting tension between Jack, who's all up on Bitcoin and blockchain, and maybe what the strategic imperative is is for Square. So speaking

• 22:18Speaker 01

  No, I there there's just very, there's so many of these stories I love like, and we're seeing it all now, September 2023. All just kind of, and as you said, the transmission of effects of high interest rates take time. Where all these things that happened in 2021, we are now seeing the fallout continuously on. And this is another one that just quietly, it's all related to pandemic absurdity.

• 22:44Alex Kantrowitz?

  I was gonna say, have you seen the headlines or the snippets of the lawsuit that FTX has brought against Sam Bankman Fried's parents?

• 22:54Speaker 01

  Oh, my.

• 22:55Alex Kantrowitz?

  He's talking about 2021 insanity coming out now. What did you think about it?

• 23:01Speaker 01

  Uh, I mean, maybe that can be for an entire episode or segment in the future, but I strongly encourage everyone to go read everything they can around how Sam Bankman Fried's parents were very involved with the overall FTX process. And just the the level of like, yeah, absurdity or just things that people thought they could get away with still still blows my mind.

• 23:26Alex Kantrowitz?

  I mean, there was a one snippet of it where the father had been asking, allegedly had been asking Sam for a higher salary. And it was like supposed to be 2 million, but instead it was like $100,000. And he like writes in an email that cited in these court documents that he's gonna go to Sam's mother to have a discussion about this. I mean,

• 23:47Speaker 01

  We're talking to your mom.

• 23:48Alex Kantrowitz?

  Pretty amazing.

• 23:48Speaker 01

  Double my salary right now.

• 23:50Alex Kantrowitz?

  One thing that didn't, that seemed like it might be, you know, short-lived or a bit of hype, but it actually isn't. And it's been sustainable and very interesting in a way that has surprised me and might actually have me rethinking some of my thesis around when people are gonna pay for social media is Snapchat Plus. I mean, the company this week just announced that 5 million people have been paying for subscriptions on Snapchat. And that's stuff that gets you access to new features on Snapchat. Their My AI Bot, which is like sort of a dumbed down ChatGPT. And I'm curious what you think about this. Obviously, it's very impressive success and starting to alleviate some of the business trouble that Snap has had on the advertising front. It's kind of the opposite of the way that we started the discussion today.

• 24:33Alex Kantrowitz?

  But it is fascinating to me that they've been able to grow this product in the way that they have. Especially considering the consumers that they have, which is that they have a lot of young people without much disposable income. And then millions of them are paying them for the premium version of this product. What do you make of it?

• 24:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, this is incredible to me because for the amount of noise and conversation over Twitter's subscription product, which at one estimate has around 550,000 subscribers, Snap quietly has for its Snapchat plus subscription offer, five million subscribers. And that's up from four million in June, three million in mid-April. It's a growing product. And I'll admit, I am not a heavy Snapchat user. I subscribed to it a few months ago just to see what's interesting about it. And this was when it's my AI bot, you know, like was kind of the driving feature of it. All the other ideas like custom app themes and unique app icons or the ability to pin

• 25:34Speaker 01

  your number one BFF. I do not have a number one BFF on Snap. It's all interesting. The AI chatbot, again, it's, I tried to use it to set reminders to see if it could do it. It couldn't even do that. So, but apparently they had numbers around how many billions of queries are actually made to it every day. Even they just added, this was interesting, a feature called Dreams, which is basically Lensa. For anyone who had ever used it, Lensa was kind of this viral app where you take 10, 15 selfies of yourself and then it generates AI, generative AI images in all different types of scenarios. And actually it was cool and it went viral.

• 26:15Speaker 01

  And I paid like 12 bucks for one pack of photos. And if Snapchat, it's another. So, to me, it could be this really interesting sleeper story where you have millions of younger consumers spending money and getting used to and acclimated paying a social media company, which no one has been and everyone has been trying to do. And then you start at, because already I checked the Dreams, the generative AI photo feature. If you're a Snapchat plus subscriber, you get like one or two packs free, but then you could start buying additional ones. So you see how just that habit of creating

• 26:56Speaker 01

  payment and a company that honestly, the one thing they've never figured out advertising well, but creating highly engaging innovative products they're great at. So I think this is a, this is one to watch.

• 27:09Alex Kantrowitz?

  I mean, talk about underrated stories that are gonna really, you know, seem poised to take off. I think put Snapchat in the, in the picture as well.

• 27:16Speaker 01

  Yahoo and Snap.

• 27:17Alex Kantrowitz?

  That should be our, yeah, the theme of our second half of this, this year is Yahoo and Snap, the, the sleeping giants of tech that you've, you underestimated.

• 27:27Speaker 01

  I'm smiling, but I actually, I do believe it.

• 27:30Alex Kantrowitz?

  Look, this is one of the things that we talk about often here. There's hype and then there is actual production. Right? That 5 million user number isn't made up. It's real. If it's made up, it's an SEC violation and people are going to jail. So the point is like, when you have those results, that's when you can start to talk about things and there's real, real results there. Speaking of real results.

• 27:50Speaker 01

  The growth as well, again, 3 million just like five months ago.

• 27:55Alex Kantrowitz?

  It's impressive.

• 27:56Speaker 01

  It's almost doubled. And like, and there's no advertising. There's no, I don't see, I'm not, again, not a Snap demographic necessarily, but like, it's not some giant story that everyone is aware of. It's just, it's happening.

• 28:08Alex Kantrowitz?

  Absolutely. I mean, the growth is amazing and they also grow their users. You know, they grow their users in a way like Snapchat's gonna be a 1 billion user product. It's crazy to say, but it is.

• 28:18Speaker 01

  They've been trying for a while.

• 28:20Alex Kantrowitz?

  It is. No, it adds 70 million a year. So over time, it will get there. All right, let's take a break and come back right after this. Talk a little bit about the generative AI stories. So don't go away. We'll be back right after this, myself and Ron John Roy. This episode is brought to you by App Point. Everyone's racing to roll out AI right now. Co-pilots, chatbots, agents doing real work. But here's the part nobody loves talking about. All that AI runs on your data and most teams have no single way to see it, secure it, and prove it's under control. That's exactly what App Point does. For 25 years, they've been the trusted layer. Beneath the world's most demanding data, now extended across your entire AI estate,

• 29:02Alex Kantrowitz?

  your data, your cloud, and the agents acting on your behalf. It's how more than 28,000 organizations deploy AI with confidence. So innovation scales without scaling risk. AV Point, the unifying trust layer for AI. Head to AVpoint.com to see how enterprises deploy AI with confidence. Learn more at AVPT.co/bigtechnologypodcast. That's AVPT.co/bigtechnologypodcast. Violent threats against executives are growing at an alarming rate. When a company experiences backlash, executives are the first people blamed. When their address and other personal details are sitting online, this backlash can lead right to their front door.

• 29:47Alex Kantrowitz?

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

• 30:28Alex Kantrowitz?

  The link's in the show notes. And we're back here on Big Technology Podcast with Rajan Roy of Margins. You can get the newsletter at readmargins.com. We talk a lot about generative AI on the show, and this week we had a trifecta of big AI announcements coming from Apple, no, sorry, coming from Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, where we saw legitimately impressive or substantial improvements, shall we say, from all three companies. But I also think there's a varying degree of...

• 31:08Alex Kantrowitz?

  Of adoption that they're gonna see. I mean, I think that like you can tell by my intro to this segment that like, you know, there's stuff you want to be psyched about, but then you start looking at it a little bit deeper. And the conclusion I came to was that a lot of this stuff is going to be enterprise specific and very interesting in the workplace and sort of like, maybe it will catch on for the rest of the population. So I was at Microsoft's event in New York City this week where they revealed their copilot, which is going to sit on Windows and Office 365 and inside Bing. Basically everywhere you use Microsoft products, there's going to be a generative AI effectively an assistant there for you. And I got a chance to speak with their head of their consumer chief marketing officer,

• 31:53Alex Kantrowitz?

  Youssef Mehdi, which was interesting. We got like, we had an interesting back and forth talking about whether enterprise is going to drive consumer or consumer is going to drive enterprise. But the thing that I that really struck me is that there is clear, obvious uses in the workplace where the uses elsewhere are like not so obvious. So some of the things that I saw, and I noted in big technology today, is that they ended up, you know, shipping these like really interesting things within within the within, yeah, within copilot, the copilot that exists elsewhere. Okay, I thought I had it pulled up, but I'm just going to recite it from memory. So there's one thing where you can say, catch me up on a bunch of emails that gets that

• 32:38Alex Kantrowitz?

  that a coworker has sent me. So if you have a coworker that sends you a ton of emails, instead of having to read through like 20 of them, you can just have copilot read them to you. You can submit like word documents with long lengthy, you know, details about a project. And when you're ready to launch that project, you can say, here's those documents, write me a blog post about it. You can have it make header images for, you know, any, any posts you need, which everyone who's made a header image knows that it's like the worst thing in the world to have to produce. I don't know why it's so annoying, but it really is. And then the coolest thing to me was that it could sit in on meetings for you and then transcribe the meeting and then you can actually say, show me the relevant points, show me the relevant points for my boss. And then you could just ask it questions about the meeting. Hey, did this come up or did that come up?

• 33:23Alex Kantrowitz?

  And like when your job, when your raise or your promotion or the very state of the ability to work for the company that you work for is in the balance and it will be for folks who have this stuff implemented, like you're going to learn to use these tools, you're going to work on iterating with them, you're going to learn the intricacies, you're going to learn how to prompt them and you're going to have patience with them because that patience will be paid off in like legitimate, concrete ROI where like searching on a Bing or searching on a Bard, for instance, might not because you have Google, right? So I think that like, that was the conclusion I came away from, from like this week's announcements was that enterprise is the most obvious and the most immediate application of generative AI. After about a year of talking about it, it seems like it's going to be a workplace product

• 34:07Alex Kantrowitz?

  and then eventually expand to consumer. I'm curious what you think, Ron.

• 34:11Speaker 01

  That's really interesting because yeah, so much of tech, especially enterprise tech over the last 10 to 15 years has been driven by consumer. Again, the whole freemium SaaS-ish model of like making things super user friendly and starting with, you know, small and medium sized businesses and then working your way up to the enterprise. So that actually would be kind of like a pretty seismic shift if we move towards a world where like generative AI adoption really does go in the exact opposite direction. And I think that makes sense because, and I've talked about this a lot on this podcast, like generative AI, I think one of the biggest and most important things everyone has to understand who works with it is the

• 34:53Speaker 01

  first results are always bad. Like the, like until you know what you're doing, it's almost working through it is part of it. So, so many people give up the first time they make a mid-journey image and it's not that interesting or ChatGPT doesn't give them the perfect answer. So I think that is, that's pretty, I think that makes sense, the idea that. For your job, you're going to go that extra mile. So that's the place that the real adoption and kind of working out how these products work will make sense. But so Google Bard.

• 35:28Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, let's talk about your experience with it. Yeah.

• 35:30Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, and it's interesting, they're taking the opposite approach here where Bard is only available. So Bard extensions were launched and Bard extensions, there's, they're connected to Google Flights, Google Drive. So Google Gmail. So, so again, Google Flights, a couple, and the idea is within Bard, you can ask a natural language query and it will call upon these other services. So I asked, I was like, and again, in theory, really interesting. Hey, I have a family of four, we're going to LA in December. I actually did this search, two small kids, what's something that's, you know, on the more affordable side, but still we'll have luggage. I literally wrote out this whole thing, all the things that go through your mind as you're

• 36:15Speaker 01

  going through an airline search. And that actually gave me very good results. So that was huge. So I'm like, okay, this is really interesting, totally can change the way we search for travel, where you actually ask a question that's on your mind, rather than click through 20 different steps to try to get to the answer. Then I tried to query Gmail, it just got it totally wrong. Like I literally asked, here's an email address of my now wife, we'd started dating in 2011. What's the first email between us? And it showed me stuff from a month ago. So, which is a pretty straightforward query. Now, in, to the New York Times, the director of Bard at Google had said, trial and error

• 37:00Speaker 01

  is still definitely required at this point. The thing about this I kind of like though, is I like that they're still pushing this stuff out there because. If I think it should be even more abundantly clear that it can get it wrong and it often will get it wrong. But these kind of extensions and tools and as they improve on it, I think getting it out there because the, I mean, I'm sure there, I'm sure there's cases of risk here, but the only way these will improve is people asking questions and pushing them, pushing these systems and really trying to get the right answers. So, so I think, I think I'm excited that Google is being a little more aggressive nowadays.

• 37:40Alex Kantrowitz?

  I would say credit for trying, for trying, but it doesn't alleviate how incredibly frustrating and annoying it is to use these experiences at this point. Like, I experimented a little bit with speaking to Bard about my emails and found it to be like a completely like useless search engine. And for every single search that I did, whether it was, you know, on, on Gmail or flights, this is again with the consumer hat on, it's not like tell me what my boss said in the last meeting or whatever. But it's like, you know, yeah, search my Gmail. It was terrible. And every single one of these searches led me to say, you know what? I, I regret asking Bard to do this. I wish I would have just typed this in the

• 38:21Alex Kantrowitz?

  search box inside Gmail or inside Google and then found the flights that way.

• 38:27Speaker 01

  So you're not a Bard boy, only a Bing boy?

• 38:29Alex Kantrowitz?

  I'm not a Bard boy. And frankly, like, let me be honest, like, and I've said this in the past, my usage of Bing and ChatGPT has, has declined. And I think that's in line with the population. It's not that I don't see the potential. It's that like I've experimented a ton. And I know the very specific use cases where these are going to be useful and the specific use cases where they've fallen short. And like, I don't have time to bash my head against the wall and try to get it right just because it's generative AI. So.

• 38:59Speaker 01

  No, but see, I disagree because. My, the average person is not actually using a Bard extension.

• 39:05Alex Kantrowitz?

  Mm hmm.

• 39:06Speaker 01

  Even if they made it publicly available, even the only people who are using Bard extensions right now are you, me, and Kevin Bruce of the New York Times.

• 39:14Alex Kantrowitz?

  Like, yeah.

• 39:15Speaker 01

  I mean, I don't think, anyway, so that's what I like about it. It's, it's publicly available versus so much of generative AI has been demos and promises.

• 39:26Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, that's true.

• 39:26Speaker 01

  I would rather have put out your mediocre, too crappy product. Let me use it because again, most people aren't using this anyways. And then, and then it'll get better. And I agree, like Gmail search has always been shockingly bad to me for a company like Google because again, like it's still better than some competitors, but like having to learn Boolean operators to do before and after dates and stuff like that, to me was always nuts versus saying, pull all emails from this person in February 2021 or something like that. And that's what this will allow you to do. And I think it's going to get there quickly.

• 40:04Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah.

• 40:05Speaker 01

  It's going to, again, look at generative search on Google is good. I'm, I will admit, I'm like getting more and more impressed now every time I click on, and we talked about this last week, now a lot of users are starting to have the option to, when you do Google search up top, there's kind of a different color in a button where you could say, generate me an answer. It's getting good. So, you know, six to 12 months from now, I think we start our Gmail queries, you don't even go near the Gmail search bar. It starts from somewhere centralized, whether, never loved the name Bard, but whether it starts in Bard or where it starts, it's not going to be the Gmail search bar.

• 40:45Alex Kantrowitz?

  I mean, we'll find out. I, listen, I, these are my two ways where I think this is going to go mainstream. One is of course, as I said, the enterprise first, learn how to do this with work and then maybe, so for instance, and it could actually be, we could be in agreement here where someone uses like Gmail for the workplace and they're having to search through their work emails and then they say, okay, I'm going to start speaking with Bard more often. And that's the way it goes. The other way is that these things remember who we are. I think the most annoying thing about all these bots is that there's no context there when you return.

• 41:16Speaker 01

  Well, hold on, have you used custom instructions on ChatGPT?

• 41:20Alex Kantrowitz?

  No.

• 41:21Speaker 01

  All right. So ChatGPT one month ago released custom instructions and it's literally, it's all these different prompts for you to fill out and you can, and again, there's investment of time, who you are, what you do, what kind of company you work for. So you can even say, you know, I run the big technology. I write a newsletter and a podcast, or even just saying, big technology podcast, I'm assuming the system will

• 41:45Alex Kantrowitz?

  It knows.

• 41:46Speaker 01

  Know something about you. So you fill all that in and then every response is now, it's essentially embedded in the prompt. So every, now it actually does solve exactly that.

• 41:57Alex Kantrowitz?

  Maybe it will be personalized.

• 41:58Speaker 01

  So that was only a month ago that they launched this.

• 42:00Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay. So maybe it's personalized to me, but what I really wanted to do is like have a conversation with me and then I come back and it can recall who I am and what that conversation was.

• 42:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:10Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. You know, like I'd love to come back to Bing and have Bing be like, hey, how was your weekend? Did you end up taking that trip?

• 42:18Alex Kantrowitz?

  It might be creepy to some people.

• 42:19Speaker 01

  Is that really what you want?

• 42:21Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, actually it is. It is for sure. You know, or like

• 42:24Speaker 01

  I mean, maybe, actually, hold on, maybe that's what the my AI Snapchat AI thing, that's what it's there for. Cause again, I still don't quite get it because it does, it has no specific purpose, but people are supposed to just chat with it. And apparently people are chatting billions of times a day with it. So I don't know what they're talking to it about, but you know.

• 42:45Alex Kantrowitz?

  We should, all right, let's do this. Next week, let's try to bring on a teen who uses my AI and can kind of talk a little bit about the experience.

• 42:55Speaker 01

  Translate for us, please.

• 42:56Alex Kantrowitz?

  If you're a teen listener and you want to be on to talk a little bit about what's going on, write [email protected] and we'll try to bring you on and talk about it next week. Okay. Let's, let's, oh, sorry. We have to talk about the Alexa event.

• 43:10Speaker 01

  Oh yeah. Let's go to the third technology giant who had an AI event this, this week.

• 43:14Alex Kantrowitz?

  Here's my review of that event. Also bad. I just watched this event where you can converse with Alexa and it was like the most stilted forced conversation. And to me, it's just that the echo is, you know, it's not the form factor that we're going to use for this until it gets way, way, way better. And right now it just doesn't seem like it's in that category.

• 43:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think Amazon and this is someone I switched. One of the drivers of switching from being a longtime Echo user and Amazon, the Amazon ecosystem was not the endless worries about privacy. And I switched to Apple and the HomePod. It was, I got really annoyed with their follow-up. It's called Echo follow-ups.

• 44:01Alex Kantrowitz?

  It's the most annoying thing. It's like, please stop talking to me.

• 44:04Speaker 01

  So you're like, hey, Alexa, what's the weather? It is 58 degrees out. Would you also like me to do X or Y? And that, if that was where the idea of a conversation starts, they have, there's no way they're going to be able to figure it out, in my opinion. And again, they're trying to, the same way with ChatGPT, I will have a back and forth, or any of these other LLM tools. Speaker, that's not what you're trying to do. You're trying to give it a command to do something, or get a very quick individual piece of information. Again, or maybe, maybe in a world, that's just you go home and you just start talking to the, your speaker, and maybe that's where this is all headed.

• 44:46Alex Kantrowitz?

  There was a story, yeah, there was a story this week about how some of these companies that are training the models are like bringing in literary people.

• 44:53Speaker 01

  Poets.

• 44:54Alex Kantrowitz?

  And poets, which I thought was interesting. Here's my perspective. I feel like Amazon should bring a comedian on, and have them design like comedy mode of the Echo. And what I want this comedy mode to do is to like snark you every time you try to talk to it.

• 45:10Speaker 01

  Just talk shit.

• 45:11Alex Kantrowitz?

  Hey, can you, can you order me the same pair of New Balance sneakers that I bought six months ago, and have like the speaker be like, wearing those disgusting shoes again? Have you thought about a Nike? Something like that. To me, that would be fun. I want a snarky robot. I don't want a polite robot or a literary. I mean, could you imagine you talk to these, these things and it tells you poetry? I don't want poetry, I want comedy.

• 45:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, but hold on. Also, imagine the moment, in terms of like the Elon Muskian AI is gonna kill us all, where you You've made a million requests to Alexa in your Amazon Echo over the years. Suddenly it talks back to you.

• 45:51Alex Kantrowitz?

  How could you imagine that moment?

• 45:54Speaker 01

  You would, you would not run for the hills.

• 45:57Alex Kantrowitz?

  It would be hilarious. I think it's a great like potential idea for a screenplay where like these set of comedians, they like, you know, dream up this idea or they'd help train one of these voice assistants. And it becomes like.

• 46:10Speaker 01

  We can, that could be done. I feel that's a, actually it could be, but then it would fall into these graveyard of Alexa skills and the skill store that never really went anywhere.

• 46:20Alex Kantrowitz?

  Exactly. Well, you don't know until you try it, Ron John, you gotta dream big. You don't dream big, you don't win big. That's what I always say.

• 46:27Speaker 01

  10x, 10x.

• 46:29Alex Kantrowitz?

  Speaking of dreaming big, let's just end with this story. Clean talk is apparently the biggest thing going on Tik Tok. And the Wall Street Journal had a story, it's our fun story of the week. Folks, if you're listening for the first time, we try to wrap on something lighthearted or fun. So here we go with this week's story. All right. The Wall Street Journal headline is millions of people see staying home and cleaning as their idea of a good time. And it talks about clean talk, which is this Tik Tok hashtag that has 84 billion views, which is the most viewed hashtag on Tik Tok. And basically the idea is that people enjoy cleaning. I guess this is something they picked up during the pandemic and they like the control that it gives them.

• 47:10Alex Kantrowitz?

  And now they're all over this idea of cleaning and they go on social media to clean, learn how to clean even better. And now brands like Unilever are giving clean talk superstars like massive amounts of money to show their products. Ron John, what's your perspective on clean talk? Are you a clean talker?

• 47:28Speaker 01

  I am not a clean talker, but I regret not being a clean talker because I remember during the pandemic.

• 47:34Alex Kantrowitz?

  This is your, your one big missed opportunity.

• 47:37Speaker 01

  This, this is it. This is in life. When I look back, when I'm, when I'm old and sitting on a rocking chair, I could have been a clean talker because during the pandemic, my, uh, my younger child was one at the time and every meal would just end up everywhere. So I, I literally spent time on Reddit, learning how to clean. Like if you get wet rice in a carpet, you put a, you put baking soda on it and it dries it out. I learned that from Reddit. So, and, and in that time. Like anything else in Reddit, you learn there's a lot of radicalized people about the most random topics.

• 48:15Alex Kantrowitz?

  People on the internet will just go extremist.

• 48:18Speaker 01

  The level of extremism around cleaning, that's where I first saw it. So I can see, again, the idea of watching other people clean, I wonder how much of it is educational and how much of it is actually like cathartic or therapeutic for people, but which it isn't for me.

• 48:35Alex Kantrowitz?

  ASMR maybe type of thing. I, you know, there's, there's a true satisfaction in taking something that's dirty and making it clean. I don't doubt it. Actually, as we start talking through this segment, I think maybe I am a clean talker at heart. First of all, I need to state for the record that even though I started this segment saying it was weird, I am definitely in favor of cleanliness. Okay. I need to make that clear in these public statements. But, you know, actually, now that I think about it, just the, the small little victories in life, taking that rice and getting it out of the carpet, cleaning a table.

• 49:05Speaker 01

  I'm gonna make my bed in the person, make my bed in the morning. I think I, have you ever seen one of those, uh, it's like one of those in TikToks or Instagram reels of like some motivational coach or like ex-Navy SEAL talking about how that you gotta make your bed first thing in the morning?

• 49:23Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah.

• 49:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. But I, I'll admit, that's one of those that you feel better. You feel like, all right, first, uh, task of the day done. So, so I'm, I'm, I'm on board with that.

• 49:33Alex Kantrowitz?

  I'm good. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Well, I know what I'm doing this weekend. It's gonna be me sitting on my phone, watching cleaning, uh, TikToks and trying to sign up for the Snapchat, my AI bot. And then.

• 49:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm not gonna actually clean.

• 49:47Alex Kantrowitz?

  No, watch the talks.

• 49:48Speaker 01

  Other people cleaning.

• 49:49Alex Kantrowitz?

  Ranjan, who knows? Maybe by the end, maybe by Monday, you and I will be, uh, pinned BFFs on Snapchat and all will be right in the world. That would be nice. All right, Ron, John, thank you so much for joining. Pleasure as always.

• 50:02Speaker 01

  Thank you. Have a good weekend.

• 50:04Alex Kantrowitz?

  You too. Thanks, everybody, for listening. Next Wednesday, we will be back with an episode with Taylor Lorenz, here to talk about her book Extremely Online. I'm in the middle of it. I'm gonna have some questions for her about the book, about her online presence itself, and plenty more. So stay tuned for that. If you like the show and want to rate us, we'd love five stars on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. All those are appreciated. Thanks. Thank you to the Big Technology Podcast plus Yahoo Nation, again, who came in strong with the five star ratings. It means a lot to everybody who's a new listener, who's come in after hearing the Brian Chesky interview. I want to say thank you. I want to say welcome. It's great to have you aboard. We do these talks every Friday, covering the news, and then on Wednesday, we do our flagship interviews. So stay tuned for that. That'll do it for

• 50:49Alex Kantrowitz?

  us this week. We will see you next time on Big Technology Podcast.

• 50:57Speaker 02

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• 51:29Speaker 03

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