Musk v. OpenAI, and how can startups compete with Apple Intelligence?

Welcome back to Friday Equity! In today’s episode Equity podcast, Mary Ann, Haje and Becca dug into three very different but all super interesting deals of the week. Haje wanted to discuss Raspberry Pi’s debut on the public market, and we all agreed that what this profitable company has managed to build – a tiny affordable computer that fits into the palm of your hand – is very neat. Mary Ann then wanted to talk about InScope, a fintech which just raised a $4.3 million seed round of funding led by Lightspeed Venture Partners to automate financial reporting. Becca got to riff on Meowtel, a niche – and also profitable – startup focused on cat-sitting that has raised just $1 million in venture capital over its nine-year life. The trio then talked about all the Apple news (largely AI-focused) that came out of WWDC and its potential impact on the startup world. They then turned their attention to Elon Musk’s reaction to Apple’s announcement that it would be integrating ChatGPT into its iOS. While he clearly wasn’t happy about it, we discussed what his true motives for threatening to pull Apple devices from his companies might be. That’s it for this week, but we’ll be back bright and early Monday with more tech and startup news. Talk soon! Equity is TechCrunch’s flagship podcast, produced by Theresa Loconsolo, and posts every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads at @EquityPod. For the full episode transcript, for those who prefer reading over listening, check out our full archive of episodes over at Simplecast. Credits: Equity is produced by Theresa Loconsolo with editing by Kell. Bryce Durbin is our Illustrator. We'd also like to thank the audience development team and Henry Pickavet, who manages TechCrunch audio products. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

• 0:11Speaker 00

  Hello and welcome back to Equity Tech Crunch's flagship podcast about the business of startups. Today is Friday, June 14th. I'm Mary Ann Acevedo and joining me today is TC reporter, Haya Camps. How's it going, Haya?

• 0:24Speaker 01

  You know, I'm just back from a week on holiday and I definitely have very severe holiday brain. So if I speak less fast or make less sense than usual, that'd be why.

• 0:34Speaker 00

  Well, you're allowed. No worries at all. Also joining us today is Senior TC Reporter on The Venture Bee and co-host of our sister podcast, Found, Becca Skutak. How's it going in your world? How are you?

• 0:46Speaker 02

  I am good. I will admit, I'm also dragging a little bit and I don't have a vacation to blame that on. So we will all get through it together.

• 0:54Speaker 00

  Well, you traveled this week, so even though not a vacation, travel does kind of wear you down. So anyway, still glad to have you both here with us today. We'll be going over a bunch of interesting things. Our deals of the week include a mixed bunch. We've got Raspberry Pi, Inkscope, Meowdle, which we had debated on how to say that name before we started. I hope we got it right. We'll also be digging into what Apple Intelligence means for startups and Musk versus OpenAI. So let's kick off the show with Raspberry Pi. Now, I have to say, I had never heard of this company until December, when my teenage son requested one of these for Christmas. And so I was fascinated by it when it arrived. It's tiny and cool.

• 1:38Speaker 00

  Haya, talk to us about Raspberry Pi.

• 1:41Speaker 01

  I love the Raspberry Pi so much. It is basically a tiny little computer, right? Which is meant to be embeddable. So originally it started as like an idea for making an educational computer that kids could use to learn about computing. It's kind of an echo back from the original BBC Micro: Bit, which is like 1981, they launched this computer made by the BBC, which makes no sense as a broadcaster, but then kids loved it. They were like, oh, we can learn about computing. Fast forward to 2006 and Raspberry Pi was like, wait a minute, this would be really cool to have a small computer that's affordable, easy to play with and accessible. So they launched a little tiny computer and it cost $25. And the idea was, well, you can connect it to all sorts of things. You can build robotics

• 2:25Speaker 01

  and all that kind of thing. And it's just been growing ever since. They've done six major revisions of the computer and they went live on the London Stock Exchange earlier this week.

• 2:34Speaker 00

  Yeah, and it was an impressive debut, right? I think on the first day, the shares popped by like 32%.

• 2:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was incredible. They listed and did about $700 million valuation right from out of the gate. And then it popped by about 30%. And the thing that's particularly interesting is that this is done on the London Stock Exchange. And most of the time you see startups listing elsewhere. The article notes that that's because the liquidity is better elsewhere, which is kind of highlighted by the fact that in the early days at the London Stock Exchange, retail investors can't invest. It's kind of only for the big guys. And from the end of the week, that's when you can buy your own Raspberry Pi stock, should you wish to.

• 3:12Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah. I did think that was interesting as well, that I think, I'm sure they were happy about it there in the UK, because so many companies do opt to go public here in the US. I was fascinated by, in general, first of all, how tiny these things are. Like, unless you've seen one, it's hard to visualize or really conceive of it. I mean, this fit literally into the palm of my hand, for those who are not familiar, which is really, really interesting. And the company is just doing very well. I mean, since they've started, they've sold about 60 million units. And in 2023 alone, generated $266 million in revenue. And this is the number that most caught my eye, $66 million in gross profit. Wow.

• 3:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's an incredibly profitable company. And the cool thing is, they started out kind of as an educational project, and then got swallowed up by more and more kind of makeery type people. But eventually, it became a development platform. You can now buy a little subboard that you do your development on a Raspberry Pi. But if you were to want to scale a product, like if you're building a hardware product, you can actually buy a little unit that you slot into a device, which basically means it becomes very quick and easy to do hardware development. And that's, of course, the powerful force behind Raspberry Pi now.

• 4:27Speaker 00

  Yeah, a couple of other things I thought were interesting about it. Raspberry Pi is actually a subsidiary of the Raspberry Pi Foundation, which says its mission is to make it easier for people to learn coding through this low-cost programmable computer. I love that mission, right? I think that's anytime you're opening up accessibility for people so that they can learn to do things like that without having to spend a fortune. I think that's incredible. Also interesting that other shareholders of the company are ARM and Sony, a subsidiary of Sony, rather. So, super interesting there. Just overall, like, all sorts of things I did not know about this company that I learned. But yes, now it's public. We will continue to watch, I guess, and see how it does as a public company.

• 5:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, I was just gonna say, the one thing that stands out to me, and I mean, we've mentioned it, is just that this company is not super big. And I think we, especially 2020, 2021, our ecosystem got really caught on the fact that IPOs needed to be huge. Like, you needed to be over a billion dollars. You needed to have such a high valuation to go public. And I think this is a good reminder that you really don't. I know I've talked to a few people about it over the years, and they've been like, "Well, when you really think about it, there's way more money on the public markets than there are in the private markets." And while it's an exit for your investors, it's not an exit for the company. It's just a way to access more investors, a way to access more potential ways to grow. So, I'm happy to see a company not only go public on the London Stock Exchange,

• 5:52Speaker 02

  but do so at a slightly smaller valuation than you usually see, because I really do think more companies would benefit from this model than they realize.

• 6:00Speaker 00

  I mean, I agree. And also, I have to, again, bring up the fact, I mean, $66 million in gross profit. I mean, so many companies that go public are negative, like, reporting major losses still. So, my humble opinion is it should be less about lofty valuations and more about metrics like this or numbers like this, because that's much more impressive to me than some billion-dollar-plus valuation if you're, like, losing $300 million a year. But that's just

• 6:30Speaker 01

  And it's something that's been happening under the radar for a while now. The London Stock Exchange has got a whole bunch of smaller startups listed on it. And you know, it's a way to access a bunch of money. And it means that it kind of takes away a little bit from the multi-billion dollar exit or bust approach you often find here in Silicon Valley. And of course, it completely shifts the investment strategies too. Like, small exits are objectively bad for investors. But in this particular case, you know, there weren't that many specific investors in the company. I think they've been growing organically most of the way. The Sony connection is particularly interesting to me because they had a factory in Wales that started building raspberry pies in the UK. And yeah, they've built the vast majority of the of the raspberry pies, done the manufacturing in the UK still.

• 7:13Speaker 01

  You know, ARM has a strong base in in the UK. And all the stuff we're doing over here in the US now about building chip resilience and stuff, it's been a lot less present in the UK, as far as I can tell, because of these things that have, they've continued manufacturing domestically.

• 7:29Speaker 00

  That's really interesting. Wow, learned a lot, learned a lot from this story and this conversation. Let's move on to the fintech space. Christine Hall covered a new company that was interesting in a different way called InScope, and Lightspeed Venture Partners led a $4.3 million seed round into this company, female-led, which we always love to see. I thought this was interesting because it's one of those topics where they're tackling an area that's considered boring, but it's hugely important. And so what this company's trying to do is tackle financial reporting and auditing. And basically, they they're trying to build something that will automate financial reporting. And you know, this is a big deal. I mean, we've seen where if you screw up your reporting, that can be very, very bad for a company.

• 8:13Speaker 00

  Like Lyft had some errors in its financial reports earlier this year that prompted shareholder lawsuits. So this is big. They are targeting mid-market and enterprise. And it looks like they they're leveraging machine learning and LLMs to provide these financial reporting and auditing processes. So this was founded last year, launched in beta earlier this year, to customers who use Oracle and NetSuite specifically. They say they're generating revenue already, they're aiming to grow 10x.

• 8:40Speaker 02

  No, I always say like, these are my favorite types of companies. Like you mentioned, Mary Ann, companies that maybe don't have the sexiest title or the sexiest area, but they actually make a difference in people's jobs. And that is kind of where you want tech to be spending time, or you want founders to be building. I know I'm talking, I have a story coming out next week about a company, and they said that they brought just Figma, like markups, like they hadn't even coded the product yet, to the customers they're trying to sell to, and they got five people to sign on right away, like just showing that like, people need this kind of tech. And it's, it doesn't often get as much attention because it isn't as flashy. So it is good to see people, you know, building in these spaces as well as, I mean, Lightspeed

• 9:25Speaker 02

  leading a seed round, like that's a good signal as well. So you'll have to see it.

• 9:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, and also a couple of other interesting things about this, the two co-founders, they did come from accounting backgrounds. They met each other about six years ago while leading the accounting function at Flexport. And also, this company went through the Better Tomorrow Ventures accelerator, I believe it's called Mint, last year. And so it's really, it seems like that it's, it's got a solid base here with founders who've done what they're trying to fix, which I think is really important, because there are sometimes companies you see where founders have this idea to solve this problem. But I feel like it's different when the founders have actually lived the problem, if that makes sense.

• 10:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, expert founder, like founders with huge domain expertise. I feel like there's a risk there, right? Because you might be solving the wrong problem if you have a slightly different context for the market. But in this case, I think it's a really obvious advantage. And it means that a company can go much, much, much faster. So especially in the early days, that's helpful. And it can represent a challenge later in the journey of the company.

• 10:25Speaker 00

  That's a good point. We'll see. Now, Becca, you always have these fun, fun stories with like, unique business models. Meowto, I love saying that, is a cat-sitting startup, and it's profitable. Tell us more about it.

• 10:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, so this one was fun because one of the small investors in it, because they've only taken, they've taken less than 100 million of venture capital, and the company is nine years old, had reached out to me about this, was like, it's kind of funky, but we think the story's really fun. And I am not, I will say, I like cats. I am not a cat owner. I am allergic. I can't touch them. But I appreciate, I appreciate what they're doing. And so I thought me at all was super interesting, especially because I'll admit it, when I went in, I wasn't super sure that cat sitting needed its own platform because a lot of the existing pet sitting platforms like Wag and Rover obviously are for both cats and dogs and other types of pets as well.

• 11:22Speaker 02

  But she kind of laid it out to me in a way that made sense where she was saying that a lot of cats have chronic health issues more so than dogs do, especially in the later parts of their life and cats are, you kind of have to give them medicine in a specific way, which did resonate to me because I have watched my friends' cats and like they did have to make us a video of how to give their cat a pill. Whereas like for my dog, it's like you put it in Trader Joe's Unexpected Cheddar and she would literally eat anything. So there are definitely unique needs for cats, but it's just really interesting learning about how they're building to like, one of the things that really stuck out to me is that when you join as a sitter on the app, of course, securities, privacy are huge things here. People are coming to your house to watch

• 12:07Speaker 02

  your pets. Like you have to make sure they're safe and reputable people. They have like a six step process. She, the founder joked, it was harder to be a sitter than it is to get into Harvard. I love that they have such a thorough vetting process. Yeah. And she was saying that they actually meet on the phone or on Zoom, like every single person to vet them to be a sitter, which they're saying they're the only platform that does that. So while of course, doing a step like that, you know, makes it a little bit harder to scale at the same rate. I definitely like as someone who's always thought about using Rover and then just never have pulled the trigger on it. Hearing her talk about that, I was like, ah, like I probably would feel more comfortable if some of those other platforms did things like

• 12:52Speaker 02

  that. Well, because you are giving someone keys to your apartment, like letting them into your space. And I just thought it was super interesting. And yeah, they're on their ninth year. The founder was previously a sales rep for Philip Morris, which is an interesting career transition. She did say she took the job during the great financial crisis and she says, I know how crazy it sounds to go from selling tobacco to starting a cat startup. But I just thought, I just love these niche stories of people who kind of get overlooked.

• 13:20Speaker 00

  I do too. I feel like her passion really came through. Like she's a founder that didn't do this just as a way to try to make money, but she seems to be very passionate about what she's doing, why she's doing it, how she's doing it, clearly by that thorough vetting process. And it's working, even though it's very niche. I mean, there are cat owners that obviously, you know, are very concerned about what happens to their cats when they're not around. That makes perfect sense. You know, in many cases, pets are like children to some people. The company's profitable and its gross booking volume revenue is growing 50% year over year. It's doing something right. And to clarify, it's raised just under 1 million in venture capital, right?

• 13:57Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 13:58Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 13:58Speaker 02

  So it's largely been bootstrapped. We talked a little bit about the fundraising during the process and she had this really funny statement that I of course do not know if this is true or not, but she was like, venture is too dog centric. She was like, I would talk to VCs and they just weren't cat people, so they didn't get it. But she wanted to pursue venture funding anyway, just because of the business model. It's a marketplace. So it does take like a lot of funding, kind of just to get it off the ground. So they have taken a little bit of funding, some from accelerators, some from angels like Elizabeth Yin at Hustle Fund and Jason Kalkanis. And yeah, so they raised a little bit of money, but once it started kind of making money, I was kind of like, what's the point of raising more?

• 14:38Speaker 00

  Well, good for her.

• 14:39Speaker 01

  I think it's such a beautiful example of when founders really go deep into a particular niche. Like I can kind of imagine a world where somebody says, oh, we'll do it for all pets, right? Cats, dogs, whatever. But cats and dogs are fundamentally different, right? Like the cat really likes to stay, if it's an indoor cat, really doesn't like to go to a kennel, really doesn't like to go to a dog hotel. And most dogs are like, eh, this sucks for the first day. And then they're kind of cool with it. So like really understanding the customer or the cat customer, I guess, makes a massive difference to this type of business model. And I love seeing these types of companies evolve and really grow into their strengths.

• 15:15Speaker 00

  Yeah. All right. Well, that was fun. We've got to go to break now, but after the break, we'll be talking about the top AI features announced at WWDC 2024.

• 15:29Speaker 00

  So yeah, this week, Apple had its huge, huge announcements, of course, that dominated the news, tons of headlines, tons of stuff coming out of WWDC. I have to say, it felt like this was one of the more newsy Apple events that we've had as of late, because I feel like the past few years, they've had them, there's been some things, but this kind of made the biggest splash, from what I could tell. Hiya, what do you think?

• 15:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, a lot of the time, we see a bunch of hardware announcements at WWDC, right? And hardware in the context of Apple means, hey, it's a thing I can buy. This was a lot more nebulous, and I felt like it was kind of a return to the original WWDC days. I mean, WWDC is the Worldwide Developer Conference, right? It was focused on developers and all of this stuff. They're calling it Apple Intelligence, which of course, AI, hilarious, but-

• 16:18Speaker 00

  They're so funny.

• 16:20Speaker 01

  I know, how did they come up with this stuff? It's crazy. But anyway, there was a whole bunch of updates to everything AI, which, you know, about time. Tim Cook got a bit of a grilling at the quarterly sales calls, like, hey, what's Apple doing about AI? And he hinted at WWDC, saying, okay, we've got some stuff in the pipeline. And I am a little bit mixed feelings. I still feel like they've got a lot of catching up to do. Do you guys get the same feeling?

• 16:47Speaker 02

  In some ways, yes, in some ways, no. Mainly because I'm not necessarily the best person to ask this, because like, yes, Google has released a lot of AI features. They're definitely more advanced and sort of the products that I would use as a consumer, like email and search and things like that, but I don't like any of them. So it's like, I kind of liked that stuff like this hadn't made its way to Apple. Like, I've never used Siri, so it's like, I'm not gonna have any, I won't notice the AI change with Siri. But on the other hand, some of the other things they have in here, like the phone call transcriptions and some of the photo editing stuff, like, that's stuff I definitely will use. So that's, especially like the photo editing stuff, I was like, wait, I feel like I see ads for like Samsung phones talking about this, like, literally every day.

• 17:31Speaker 02

  Like, Apple really didn't have that?

• 17:33Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 17:34Speaker 02

  So maybe, yeah.

• 17:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's something that, okay, I- An amateur amateur amateur photographer, a high as an excellent, awesome photographer. But I do take a ton of pictures. It's a running joke in my family. And I have often said, man, I wish there was a way to take this out of the background or, you know, change this. And there really never was because if you tried to use the editing, it was very obvious that you had done something to the photo. And I think it was Google Pixel that has for a while made it very easy to do this sort of thing. So yeah, I think this was that feature in particular as an amateur photographer excited me and is way long overdue.

• 18:12Speaker 01

  And I think the thing that Apple didn't really make a big deal out of, they've been using AI machine learning in the background for a long time for fraud detection, for like all the stuff that kind of lives in in the in the background, like the app review process and all that kind of stuff. Rumors have been for a long time that they've been using a lot of this. The consumer facing stuff have been pretty bad. I mean, back in years that you don't use Siri a lot. I do, and it is so much worse than any other personal assistant out there. So it's got a lot of catching up to do and Apple has some really smart people and they're often pushing in a different direction. Like, hey, we don't think this is how this should be done. Let's do it the way it should be done. And the proofreading and the ability to summarize context and sending notes to emails

• 18:55Speaker 01

  and all the other pieces of new functionality that they've added is the kind of stuff that I can totally imagine me using. And that shows up in a way that's completely transparent to the user.

• 19:05Speaker 00

  I think one thing, though, that really I think is very important to bring up for our listeners is what all this means for the startup world. I was talking to a venture capitalist Vanessa Larko from NEA the other day. And she was saying that every time an incumbent comes out with a large AI related announcement, it's like you can, you can just hear, there's just a bunch of startups that are either like, oh no, they're doing what we're doing and either they have to pivot or in some cases actually shut down. So I'm wondering. Like, how much of that's going to happen as a result of this announcement?

• 19:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's interesting you say that, too, because at the Strictly VC event in DC that we held this week, Lena Kahn, actually, someone asked her about this because they were saying that same thing you just said. Every time one of these legacy AI companies comes out with, well, not legacy AI companies, but legacy companies that builds in these kind of spaces, like your Googles and your Microsofts and Apple, comes out with these kind of features, it's the same, he was saying the exact same thing. He's like, how do you, it's your office and antitrust and stuff and anti-competition and consumer protections? Think about the fact that there are all these companies trying to make it better. And then people like Apple are like, hey, actually, we're doing it on our own. So these companies may not have a market.

• 20:22Speaker 02

  And she was just saying that, I mean, competition is good, monopoly is bad. I mean, that's what it boils down to. So there's definitely, she said her office is definitely keeping an eye on these kind of things.

• 20:32Speaker 00

  Well, yeah, like, because Apple launched a new standalone password manager, right? And the recording and transcription. So, I mean, I can see where this would impact a lot of existing or budding companies.

• 20:45Speaker 01

  Well, these kinds of features are particularly the ones that, you know, you, it's been possible to cobble it together for a long time, right? You mentioned password apps. One password exists, last pass exists, a bunch of other ones exist, too. Voice transcription, like, behind the scenes, we use a bunch of voice transcriptions to be journalists, right? But the thing is, these are often kind of crowdsourced AI features. And if you're able to replace that with a very well-trained data set, which Apple obviously has access to, these could be far, far better. And Apple has the additional benefit of having an international data set, right? Otter, for example, that we use often internally within tech merge is great if you're speaking to somebody who has English as a native language. If you speak to somebody who has a little bit of an accent, it's terrible.

• 21:29Speaker 01

  And I've often been incredibly surprised and delighted by how good Apple's transcription is, even with heavily accented voices and that kind of thing. So Apple could actually be doing a bit of a leapfrog here.

• 21:41Speaker 00

  Well, it's interesting because the term, I guess, and this is a story that one of our reporters wrote is that is Sherlocking.

• 21:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:48Speaker 00

  Which basically because the late 90s, Apple launched a search app named Sherlock that you could use to search the web and files. And so there was already another company that that had this. So anyway, it's just been now that's the term to use anytime Apple kind of comes up with this new feature that is same or similar as to what other apps are doing, but that it's developed or doing on its own. I don't know. I guess we're going to see the long-term impacts of that over time. It's tough, right? What can you do? I mean, who we're talking about what the what is it? One of the top three largest companies in the world now. It's hard for startups to compete, but I applaud those who still keep forging ahead. And one of the other things that came out of the announcements this week is that Apple announced this chat GPT integration, a deal with OpenAI, which,

• 22:32Speaker 00

  you know, was rumored to be happening. We didn't know for sure. They made it official. Well, this really pissed off one person in particular, and that is Elon Musk, who essentially had a temper tantrum on social media and elsewhere about it, saying that he was going to ban Apple devices at his companies because he felt like they couldn't be as secure or trusted. What did you think of that?

• 22:56Speaker 02

  I think Elon Musk just really likes attention because I I know Musk used to obviously, of course, was involved in OpenAI in the early days and has since left. And he's literally making his own competitor. And I'm sure that over at Tesla, they use many different types of technology from many different types of companies who have partnerships of their own and things like that. And it's one of those things where if it was anyone else who said this, I'd be like, well, there's no way they're going to do that because that would be crazy to overhaul all of the tech in your company, which would be costly. Privacy issues come up. It'd be such a pain. But then, you know, Musk does do those things sometimes against the best interests of everyone else. So.

• 23:41Speaker 02

  You never really know with him.

• 23:43Speaker 00

  You never know, but also one article I was reading was saying that he's, and this makes sense, of course, it's kind of obvious that he might just really be upset about this because this might impact his own AI company, XAI, and he's my, maybe doesn't like the fact that now OpenAI is going to have access to Apple's, you know, user base, which is massive. So the implication there is that that's really what has him burned up more so even than the whole issues of privacy or security. We don't know that for sure. We can speculate all day, but I wouldn't be surprised if that's a big factor. And yeah, I don't know if he'd actually ban all of Apple's, Apple devices at his companies. Maybe that's just an empty threat.

• 24:23Speaker 01

  It does bring up a really interesting thing, though. Like, if you get deep integrations into, like, for example, if, if OpenAI suddenly reads all of your text messages because it needs to in order to be able to do XYZ, the question becomes how safe is OpenAI's data set? Right? And so I think that's kind of an ongoing trust thing. Like, all my stuff lives in Google Cloud, so I trust Google. And I trusted Google doesn't let all of its employees look at all of my files and, and, and everything I have stored, right? So that's a trust thing. But if Google plugs their entire system into a third-party system, now I suddenly have to trust this other system too. And, you know, was it a massive temper tantrum? It was a little bit ridiculous? Sure. But there is a core point there that

• 25:05Speaker 01

  is really important to keep in mind. It's like, as we plug all of our files and systems and chat messages and all that kind of stuff into wider systems, like, where does it get stored? Does it get used for training? And all these additional questions actually become pretty important.

• 25:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, I have to admit, I do kind of see some points there. You know, I'm a, I'm a person who just does feel a little weirded out by the thought of potentially, you know, all these people having access to my private stuff, right? So from that perspective, I can kind of see his point, but I still don't know if that's his big motivation here for getting all upset.

• 25:37Speaker 02

  No, I was gonna say something similar because, Hi, you bring up a really good point that hadn't occurred to me, but is totally true, where it's like, if I trust Apple with my stuff, I never said that OpenAI could look at it. And it's like now with these different integrations and not just Apple and OpenAI, but kind of across the different companies that we all interact with as consumers. When they land these partnerships, it's, you don't have a choice. It'd be like if TechCrunch landed a media rights deal with OpenAI or the like, we would have no choice but to let them train off of our stuff because we wouldn't have a say. And so I do think that's an interesting thing to keep in mind because I have never used ChatGPT. I do not use any of those services. I don't use Siri. I don't kind of let data like that of mine touch stuff like that.

• 26:22Speaker 02

  And while it hasn't exactly been for like a privacy and security reason, it's going to become that at some point if it feels like I have no choice, that all of my stuff is just being fed to these different large language models.

• 26:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, it just feels a little bit like a free for all, which is kind of disturbing. But in other Elon Musk and OpenAI news this week, he did drop his suit against the company and Sam Altman. For those who didn't know, you know, he was a co-founder of OpenAI for breach of contract of fiduciary duty. He said that the company started out working on artificial intelligence for the benefit of humanity, but then it had been transformed into this for-profit entity that's largely controlled by Microsoft, which, I mean, I'm sorry, I had to giggle at for the benefit of humanity because, you know, it's so much more than that at this point. But anyway, apparently he did drop the suit earlier this week.

• 27:15Speaker 00

  And experts had said that, you know, it was kind of a shaky foundation anyway legally, because the contract at the heart of the suit was not this like formal written agreement that was signed by all parties involved. So maybe he just realized that he really didn't have much to, you know, really go on to actually win something like this.

• 27:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, he loves a lawsuit, but he also loves to drop a lawsuit. We've, we know Musk well.

• 27:41Speaker 01

  You get the same amount of coverage for both, right? So if it's the headlines he wants, he's, he's got them.

• 27:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, I'm not sure what his point was to begin with, like what he was hoping to gain out of that. So I'm not also entirely shocked that he dropped the suit, but I, I have a feeling these are all going to be the first of many grievances coming from Musk against OpenAI or anything related to what OpenAI is doing. And, you know, we'll just have to see how that goes. Well, we're going to have to leave it there, but Equity will be back on Monday. Until then, you can find us under the handle at EquityPod on X and Threads. Have a great weekend. Bye bye.

• 28:17Speaker 00

  Equity is produced by Teresa Loconsolo with editing by Kel. Bryce Durbin is our illustrator and we'd like to give a big thanks to our audience development team and Henry Pickavet, who manages TechCrunch Audio Products. Thanks so much for listening and we'll talk to you next time.