SED News: Apple Bets on Gemini, Google’s AI Advantage, and the Talent Arms Race

SED News is a monthly podcast from Software Engineering Daily where hosts Gregor Vand and Sean Falconer unpack the biggest stories shaping software engineering, Silicon Valley, and the broader tech industry. In this episode, they cover Starlink https://starlink.com/’s rapid rollout of free, high-speed in-flight internet, Tesla https://www.tesla.com/’s move to deprecate Autopilot in favor of full self-driving, and Apple https://www.apple.com/’s reported decision to power Siri with Google https://www.google.com/’s Gemini models. They also discuss Meta https://business.facebook.com/’s $2B acquisition of Manus https://manus.im/, Waymo https://waymo.com/’s growing pains as autonomous vehicles scale, and the competitive shockwaves triggered by Google’s advances in custom AI hardware. Gregor and Sean then dive deep into the state of the tech job market, examining OpenA https://openai.com/I’s decision to eliminate vesting cliffs, the escalating war for elite AI talent, and what recent layoffs really say about the future of software engineering. They explore how AI coding tools are reshaping the balance between junior and senior engineers, why fundamentals still matter, and what developers should focus on heading into 2026. Finally, they highlight standout threads from Hacker News, including Doom running on wireless earbuds, the enduring appeal of wildly over-engineered side projects, and why hacking for fun still matters in an age of industrial-scale AI. https://i0.wp.com/softwareengineeringdaily.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Gregor-Vand.jpegGregor Vand is a security-focused technologist, having previously been a CTO across cybersecurity, cyber insurance and general software engineering companies. He is based in Singapore and can be found via his profile at vand.hk or on LinkedIn. https://i0.wp.com/softwareengineeringdaily.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/Rectangle-3-2.pngSean’s been an academic, startup founder, and Googler. He has published works covering a wide range of topics from AI to quantum computing. Currently, Sean is an AI Entrepreneur in Residence at Confluent where he works on AI strategy and thought leadership. You can connect with Sean on LinkedIn. Please click here to see the transcript of this episode. http://softwareengineeringdaily.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/SED1904-Gregor-Vand-and-Sean-Falconer.txt Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected] https://cms.megaphone.fm/organizations/619b680e-d813-11ea-9750-e7ecac406436/podcasts/e60108fe-e328-11ea-b2b6-1348249f900a/episodes/3913370a-bc44-11ed-ace6-8b1f96d82bba/[email protected] The post SED News: Apple Bets on Gemini, Google’s AI Advantage, and the Talent Arms Race https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/podcasts/sed-news-apple-bets-on-gemini-googles-ai-advantage-and-the-talent-arms-race/ appeared first on Software Engineering Daily https://softwareengineeringdaily.com.

• 0:12Speaker 00

  Hello and welcome to SED News. We're back after the holidays. I'm Gregor Van. And I'm Sean Faulkner. And this is another one of our slightly different formats of SE Daily, where we take a spin through the tech headlines. We look at a slightly more meaty topic in the middle, and then we tend to round out with some of our favorite highlights from Hacker News. As always, we just like to catch up on what we've been up to. And obviously, we've not actually done an SED News in about eight weeks, given the holidays. So yeah, Sean, how was your holiday season? It was good. You know, I went back to Canada, where I grew up for the first time for the holidays in 14 years. I've been maybe purposely protecting my family from what

• 0:57Speaker 00

  that experience is like. They're California natives, so they had the experience, their first Christmas holiday for winter in Canada. But it was very nice. You know, we had a white holiday, so that's always fun. How about you? Yeah, still in Singapore, so I hadn't accrued enough leave really to take a lot when I started a new role back in October or something. That's just the realities of what happens when you start a role. But it was nice, still nice to be over here. One thing that did occur, though, was I did hop back to the UK just for a week to see some family. And I purposefully picked flights that were Starlink-enabled, or at least I thought they were going to be Starlink-enabled, and they were. And we talked a bit about this in the last SED News. I have

• 1:42Speaker 00

  to say, it was an absolute game changer. So yeah, I did, I think I did send you on the plane a screenshot of the speeds, Sean. Yeah, I saw that. So yeah, it was, it was just mind blowing. Like in terms of the quality of the connection and the speeds and the fact is what's like gate to gate. So you literally get on the plane and you haven't even you just sat in your seat and it's already available. That's great because I find it really frustrating a lot of times when you wanna use wifi on the plane and you have to be in the air for some reason before you can actually enable it. I don't know what the rule is, but so I was in Anaheim this past weekend for my daughter's birthday.

• 2:21Speaker 00

  We went to Disneyland and on the, as I was in the airport at John Wayne in Orange County to fly back to San Francisco. I got a message from United saying that there would be free wifi courtesy of Starlink on the flight back. Oh, nice. Okay. Yeah. So that was, that was pretty cool. Yeah. So my understanding is if Starlink supplies internet to an airline, apparently the contract says they're not allowed to charge consumers for Starlink. So it basically has to be free, which is great. And yeah, just the other bit is just you simply, at least the, I was on Qatar Airways and you just connect to the wifi and that's it. There's no like logins. There's no, you know, signups or anything. It's just, you literally just hit, hey, connect to plane wifi and you're off you go.

• 3:06Speaker 00

  Least amount of friction possible. Exactly. No friction. And I did genuinely get a bunch of work done. Certainly I had two like eight hour flights and the first eight hour flight, I could actually just sit on the laptop and do a whole ton of stuff. So absolute game changer. Definitely would suggest anyone looks out for flights with that in the future. If you plan to want to get some work done, basically. And yeah, I believe some people highlighted this to me at work, but yeah, there's been a bit of an acquisition on your side, Sean. Is that right? Yeah. I mean, the big news back at the beginning of December was Confluent is being acquired by IBM. Now there's of course, a lot of things that have to go on for, for that, a deal of that size and magnitude to go through. But it's kind of shaken up my world a little bit over the last, you know, month and a half or so, but it's been exciting times.

• 3:51Speaker 00

  And we'll see where things go. But at some point, probably this year, I'll be getting paychecks from IBM. Wow. Yeah, that is a bit of a change. On my side, so I, I work for Superbase now. I think some people know that already. And yeah, I was at the Superbase offsite. So, you know, Superbase is a predominantly remote company, but they get everybody together once a year. So this was about 200 people in the same place, at least half of which hadn't ever met each other. So always a fun, fun one. Yeah. A week with just getting to know a ton of people. And definitely worth the effort on everyone's part, you know, when you're growing that fast and almost half the company hasn't met the other face to face. So really eases a lot of communication, I think, as well. Yeah, absolutely.

• 4:34Speaker 00

  So going on to the headlines, we've got quite a lot to cover. We're going to be covering a little bit from almost pre-holiday as well, just so that we haven't missed some of the bigger things that happened and make sure that we dive into them a little bit. One of the more recent things, we'll start with the maybe more recent ones. Yeah, Tesla's killed autopilot. So this, you know, was their driver assistant system. It's not, it was never meant to be self-driving. That was, you know, not allowed to be said exactly. But yeah, I mean, given in the wake of Waymo, especially coming into the, into the fold. This is kind of interesting where something that Tesla kept pushing as like their big differentiator. Yeah, it just killed it. And as, you know, it's been in the vehicle since 2014, I believe.

• 5:17Speaker 00

  So yeah, that's quite an interesting thing. And just sort of riffing off of that, ironically, very recently, I think a couple of weeks ago, someone actually basically had a Tesla drive themselves from LA to New York, completely unassisted by a human, including all highways and charging stops. So it clearly works, but there's something here where Tesla's just decided this is not where they're going to go. Don't they have another self-driving mode? That's not the assisted version, but it's full self-driving mode. Oh, I see. So they're going to be kind of just like deprecating, right? Yeah, I think, I think what they're doing, they had essentially their assisted, and then they also had a full self-driving mode.

• 6:01Speaker 00

  And I believe they're essentially like in the software terms, like deprecating the assisted mode and going a hundred percent into full self-driving mode. Which I think probably makes sense in some, you know, not that I'm an expert in self-driving cars, but I think. Presumably they see that's kind of where the future is going and they want to put most of their resources behind that. And have the people who are driving Teslas start to move towards enabling their vehicles for that move. Nice. Okay. Yeah, that makes that makes more sense. Yeah, there was sort of another couple of things on the mobility front, just that like Waymo is being investigated at the moment. For some infractions, I think of Waymo cars driving past school buses on the wrong side or something like that.

• 6:45Speaker 00

  Again, I don't think this has any real bearing on our self-driving vehicles gonna stick around. I think the answer is yes. I think something at this stage would have to go incredibly wrong for that to not hold up. I think only more cities want to have these vehicles on the roads. I believe in Singapore, they're going to be trialing it pretty soon and I really look forward to hopefully having self-driving cars here. Yeah, I mean, it's it's pretty amazing when you kind of just, you know, pause for a moment and like, think about the fact that we have like, we got like a robot car like driving around and picking people up. And, you know, dropping them off and stuff. It's it's kind of like flying, you know, when you fly, you kind of just.

• 7:24Speaker 00

  It becomes like this normal thing, but it's pretty amazing the fact that you can go in this like, you know, metal vehicle and fly through the air and stuff. Now, and a lot of it actually is, you know, autopilot at this point, too. Of course, there's a pilot there to do a lot of the, you know, takeover necessary and all this sort of stuff. But it's like these technologies, like my kids, when they're adults, self-driving cars are probably not going to be anything special. It'll just be like the normal thing that they grew up around. Yeah, no, you're totally right. Yeah, it's kind of strange actually that we're able to just talk about it so nonchalantly about self-driving cars. And yeah, you're right about the flying. There was a quote that I read recently about flying, which was sort of not that long ago, probably like 70 years ago, which is really not that long ago.

• 8:06Speaker 00

  Apparently there was a quote where a pilot would say a good landing is one where the people are able to. Get out the plane alive and a great landing is where you can actually reuse the plane. So given that we're now at the stage where we're able to reuse the plane on thousands of flights per day. That's just insane. So moving on, Apple, they're going to be actually using Gemini. Reportedly, it's going to be that a Gemini powered Siri will land in February. So this is kind of interesting because as I think most people have caught on. Apple's AI foray has not maybe gone to plan, or maybe it's going exactly to plan, which was just to kind of sit back and do nothing.

• 8:47Speaker 00

  For a while, although Siri was supposed to be that, I think to some degree and clearly has. Or I think in many people's eyes has failed because what Siri promised was actually more like what things like chat GPT ended up. Becoming. And so people could see the stark difference between the quality. But yeah, what's your take on them actually reaching for Gemini at this point? I think it's interesting. Like I think Apple certainly has never had a strong presence when it comes to like AI. And I think when you were back in like when assistants, when you had my Google assistant, you had Alexa, you had Siri. Apple's I think was by far the like least useful and and most frustrating one to use.

• 9:31Speaker 00

  So I think it makes sense for them to perhaps not try to own sort of the model part of it and team up with another company like. Apple's good at user experience or good at, you know, hardware design. So maybe a better move for them is to kind of focus on the form factor around AI. Whereas a company like Google is really good at performance. They're good at AI. And maybe it's not as good at historically at sort of hardware design. So can you bring sort of these two giants together to create something interesting? Yeah, absolutely. I think this is a good move for them. Really, it's just could Apple sort of let their ego not get in the way and actually. Partner with somebody else. I believe they let go or sort of shuffled on a couple of people on their side.

• 10:16Speaker 00

  Sort of senior AI people. I believe the person that was behind Siri in the first place. I think he has gone on to sort of retirement or something else. So yeah, there's clearly a big kind of shift around on their strategy, which is just to yeah, partner now and just get moving with the level of AI that most consumers would expect at this point. Yeah, it's kind of interesting, though, like what you were saying in terms of, you know, I think all those, like whether it was Google Assistant or Alexa or Siri, like Siri, they were sort of this promise of AI that you would interact with all the time and have a conversation with. And I think you're part of it was maybe the technology just wasn't there and they ended up being sort of glorified,

• 11:00Speaker 00

  like timer settings and, you know, give me the weather and set a reminder, like really, really basic stuff. And and maybe part of it too was because they were audio based, or maybe the maybe the killer app for audio just was never sort of broke through. But I think like ChatGPT and that interface eventually is sort of what the original like vision and goal of those products were. It's just that ChatGPT had a couple of things probably going for it. One was, of course, like a much more powerful like AI model. And then they didn't try to go audio first. They actually went with like a typing interface and maybe that form factor is something that just for whatever reason seemed to work better for people having conversations and so forth versus actually having like a an audio based conversation.

• 11:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's a really good point because I think especially with films like Her, where, you know, that was almost 20 years ago at this point and you've got, you know, Joaquin Phoenix being this person who has this voice assistant AI thing, which is basically like a human. And so I think that would maybe everybody's framing of like, oh, this is what the future will be when it comes to AI. And sort of Apple likes to try and wow people. And that's maybe where they're going with this. But yeah, you're completely right then. ChatGPT maybe. And then people had this kind of bad perception of quote chatbots because we had been told that this customer service is an AI chatbot, but actually it was just a bunch of if statements. So so it's sort of a it's a double thing. There were ChatGPT clearly thought, well,

• 12:29Speaker 00

  yeah, voice is not the thing. And actually, if we can show just how well above anything that a human has. Seen so far on the on the chat front, then maybe that's the way forward. So just sort of tracking back, it was John Giannandrea. Apparently it was Apple's AI chief who's just headed out. Yeah, so let's see. So apparently February, we should be able to see some of these updates coming into Siri. And that was reported by Bloomberg and picked up also by TechCrunch. So check out those for any more details on that. Moving on to, this was something that did kind of touch the news before the holidays, but it's kind of an interesting one. And we'll lead a little bit into more of the main topic today, which is just around the hiring environment and

• 13:12Speaker 00

  what a developer might expect today in 2026 to be sort of thinking about when it comes to landing a job or moving jobs in 2026. But yeah, this was Wall Street Journal reporting that OpenAI is ending vesting, like a vesting cliff for employees. So for those not fully understanding of roughly how equity works when you join a company. There are various means of equity, restricted stock units or what are called ESOPs as well. But generally speaking, if you join a company and they offer you equity, there is what's called a vesting cliff, and that is where there is a longer period at the start of your tenure where that

• 13:56Speaker 00

  stock is not really allowed to be yours until after a certain point in time. And usually that's one year. So it's kind of saying, hey, if you manage to stick it past one year, you now have the right to apply to get this stock in your name. There's lots of other complications there, but that's a sort of basic way of putting it. And what OpenAI are saying is you're not going to have to wait one year. You're going to be able to join the company. And I think it's almost like monthly or at worst quarterly, you're going to have these chunks of equity vest, which is just a hugely different way of doing things. Compared to virtually any other tech company out there. So yeah, what did you think of this Sean?

• 14:37Speaker 00

  I mean, you're right amongst the companies in the valley and like this felt like quite a sort of shakeup to how they all operate. I would assume that like OpenAI's approach to this is that they feel like it's going to give them some competitive advantage to attracting top tier talent. And there's such a competition around hiring like the top tier AI talent right now, just like we've covered before with the big you know, OED bonuses that Meta was giving out for various, you know, AI leaders and stuff like that. You know, this is sort of the latest move that OpenAI is making to try to hire the best talent, make it really attractive. And you know, if you can start investing from day one, I guess it reduces some of the

• 15:17Speaker 00

  the fear that you might have with joining a company where maybe you're like, well, what if I really don't like it? And then I'm like stuck there for a year until, or I walk away with nothing for the investment time. And so I get it, you know, maybe that helps them close more candidates, but it does certainly change. I think the nature of how people potentially think about their jobs, right? Like when you join a startup, like I think part of the fun part of joining a startup is trying to kind of be a big part of something, you know, bigger than yourself. You're joining for the mission. Obviously, you know, everybody wants to have some, you know, be rewarded

• 15:58Speaker 00

  for the time that they're putting in and see some financial payout, but it's certainly an early stage. You're you're really like the the chances that that payout actually happening are pretty pretty slim. So you're sort of buying into like, hey, I really believe in the mission. Even if this fails, like, you know, I really want to try to make this happen. And then there's also, of course, like you've learned a lot during that process. And this kind of it changes the nature a little bit, I think. It's almost like you're not getting a bunch of people who necessarily are there for the mission, but you're getting like mercenaries that are. There because they care primarily about the financial outcome. I just wonder how that sort of changes the psychology or does it create certain biases even towards like the type of employee that you're going to attract?

• 16:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, for sure. I'm kind of on the fence here. Apparently, the applications chief Fiji Simo had said that this was to encourage new employees to take risks without fear of being let go before accessing equity, which is what you also touched on, Sean. And yeah, I mean, that that sort of makes sense. But I guess as someone who has built a company in the past, I think I would just feel very uneasy about bringing people into the company. And, you know, within one month, they suddenly have share of the company and they could, in theory, then walk away if they want, and they walk off with that equity. Very different scales here. And I think the speed at which OpenAI has to develop world beating products, I guess

• 17:24Speaker 00

  a year is just maybe not realistic anymore. You know, like, someone maybe can come in and make a huge impact in, say, six months. And actually, that's good enough. And if they can't hold on to them, so be it. But yeah, it's a very sort of interesting way to differentiate and potentially, rather than dangling bonuses that people like Mesa were doing, and well, that didn't at least play out quite so well, a bit of a mess over there in terms of AI hiring and strategy. Well, this is a different way to do it. But then, that said, it's not like this costs them zero. OpenAI is projected to spend $6 billion on stock-based compensation this year, and that's like nearly 50% of entire projected revenue. So I mean, that's just like, it still costs them a lot of money to run this.

• 18:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, they're basically spending $0.50 for every dollar that they earn just to keep the people building the product. But, and we're gonna talk a little bit about the code red scenario and the pressure they're getting from the hyperscalers, in particular at Google. In this like, hyper competitive world of AI, like, people are just full steam ahead, you know, full pressing the ga- on the gas all the time. And you're competing against some of the most well-resourced companies in the world that are also trying to own the same space. Like, it just seems to be a place where, for some period Time, people are just gonna have to burn a lot of money to try to own that space and do as much sort of land grab as possible. It's kind of like, you know, in the early days in the ride sharing wars between like Uber and Lyft, like there was such a,

• 18:53Speaker 00

  you know, both companies were spending a lot of money and in the red massively to try to land grab across the world, all these different spaces and like really roll out globally. And, you know, it'd probably take a long time for them to just rebalance the earnings there. But it's like, if you can dominate that space, then of course there's going to be a return on that investment eventually. Absolutely. So yeah, I look forward to seeing how this plays out. I had a friend that worked at Meta a while back and they also had a more, to my understanding, slightly more generous stock scheme than than most. I think it was something to do with, it was maybe six month cliff and then then it was monthly, something like that.

• 19:35Speaker 00

  And interestingly, that person didn't stick around that long at Meta and I think did quite okay out of out of the shares vested. But then again, they probably contributed a lot. But yeah, I mean, it's sort of like, do you value ICs who come in and do a huge amount, but then maybe get sort of restless more quickly? Or do you value people that are in it for like, quote, the mission and plan to stick around or you're trying to get them to stick around for a longer period of time? I think that sort of remains to be seen. And as you called out, Sean, even though you can have vested stock, the likelihood that you're actually able to benefit from this is a pretty low percentage in the grand scheme of things. So, you know,

• 20:17Speaker 00

  again, for anyone not sort of familiar, you have to have what's called a liquidity event, which basically just means some way that these vested shares can be bought by someone. Is that one of the investors? Is that the company themselves buy you back? Is that the most commonly understood one is IPO, which is these days not unlikely, but is more unlikely than it than it used to be. And some companies are very, I see, very unusual, but are very friendliness. In this way where they allow some portion of your vested stock to be bought back during any funding round, for example. So when you go from like series C to D, actually they set aside some money and they say, hey, like,

• 20:59Speaker 00

  if you've got some vested stock, then let's just say 25% of whatever's vested will will allow you to cash that in. But that's an incredibly friendly approach and does not happen a lot. Yeah, I mean, Databricks is doing that, but Databricks seems to be at least on a path where they're never going to go public. So they need some way of creating essentially a liquidity event for their own employees. And then of course, there's secondary markets too. Yeah, true. But yeah, as I've also seen some of these sort of friendly policies actually explicitly say you cannot use secondary markets. So it's like, hey, you like join a friendly policy, but you can't actually use a secondary market to do that as well. So yeah. The high level here is for anyone thinking of joining a company, and we're going to get onto this maybe slightly more in the main topic.

• 21:43Speaker 00

  But anyone joining a company and equity is part of it. Do you think very hard about what do you think the prospects of this company being? And do you kind of trust the management to make good on what they say they'll achieve? And how they plan to sort of make liquidity happen? Cause often you can be negotiated down on salary quite big time. If you're made to believe that the equity is is sort of more valuable than it really is. So yeah, just. And Shopify famously now allow all employees, they're a public company, so it's a little bit different. But they famously allow employees every year to basically apparently use a literal slider to choose equity and like cash. And you can just choose like how much of your compensation each year.

• 22:27Speaker 00

  And part of the reason they did that was because they had a crazy spike in the share price. They found that over a couple of years where people joined, unfortunately, the equity they were offered, the price they were offered, what's called the strike price was just crazy high. So there was almost like no point in receiving equity. So I think that's very smart where they just say, look, actually, if you look at the numbers and don't think the equity right now makes any sense. Don't take any, that's fine. But going back to something you touched on, Sean, and it was going to be our kind of next final news topic. Actually, no, sorry, penultimate news topic, but what happened before? For the holidays, the OpenAI code read. So this was where OpenAI basically said that they sort of understood

• 23:08Speaker 00

  Google is actually beating them on basically the approach to producing models. And this is boiling down to a TPU versus a GPU. And Google using and having developed what are called TPUs, and we'll get into that in a second. Meanwhile, most other producers use GPUs, like Nvidia is like the most famous producer of those. And I think this sort of turning point was Gemini three, is that right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So this is maybe also linked to this festing piece with OpenAI. They sort of went, oh, shoot. Like, we have to find a way to get people in the door now and not have them like worry about this this one year thing.

• 23:51Speaker 00

  We just need them producing now. But yeah, let's just talk a little bit about, yeah, this whole GPU versus TPU thing. It's obviously been covered quite a bit before the holidays, but I think it's still pertinent to sort of understand like where these two sides are coming from. Yeah, I mean, I think that this is kind of the latest in some of the unfair advantages, I would say, that like Google has over a company like OpenAI when it comes to model development and then also, you know, distributing that model to a number of people. Like, one, they have a lot of data that companies like OpenAI don't have access to because they have a lot of products where people are generating that data. Or through because of Google Search, they also have deals where they're able to index data that typically is behind like paywalls and things like that.

• 24:35Speaker 00

  That other companies don't have those deals for, that they just carved out over 20 years of being like the main search company in the world. So that's, you know, one big advantage. They also have thousands of products in the B to C space that reach billions of customers. So when they come out with a new model, they have so many different surface areas where they can, you know, touch users. They're much wider reach than a company like OpenAI has currently. And then with the GPU TPU thing, it's kind of like another another thing that they have now where, you know, most people are building and running models in GPUs. I think, you know, if you've been paying attention to the market at all or what's going on with Nvidia. Probably have some sense of the importance of GPUs, but they were originally designed for gaming and graphics and they're really great at parallel processing.

• 25:18Speaker 00

  But because they were designed for graphics and gaming, they also have to do other things like render textures and physics and lighting. So they have kind of like in the world of AI, like this architectural baggage that doesn't really help when it comes to running AI processing. So they end up spending energy on other tasks that are independent of the pure AI math that they actually need. Whereas with TPU, which is a tensor processing unit, it's actually a chip built specifically for doing AI math. So what Google did was they stripped away kind of all that baggage. And then they designed it to do one thing only and do it really well, which is massive matrix multiplication, which is essentially what the core thing that you need to do for deep learning.

• 26:00Speaker 00

  They originally did this back in 2013 because they had realized that if every Android user just used voice search for three minutes a day back then, Google would have to double their data centers as a result of that. It wasn't like they envisioned this world or anything like that, but they just had this like this problem like, and they use sort of the fact that they have a lot of really smart engineers and a lot of resources and they're just like, hey, like, I know how we'll solve this problem. We'll design our own chip where we can run this much more efficiently and reduce the costs essentially of scaling these data centers. Cause one of the challenges with AI right now is a lot of times your training models or your running inference

• 26:39Speaker 00

  is the people running, they had to buy those GPUs from Nvidia and Nvidia has like 75% gross margin on their chips. Whereas if Google's building their own TPUs, they avoid that markup entirely where everybody else in the market is essentially paying Nvidia for the chips. So that's a pretty massive advantage that they have, you know, and they've also restructured their company very much because of the existential threat that AI was. Causing the company, you know, a couple of years ago, and now they just have like the whole company is kind of steering in that direction of owning the AI space. And I think as a result, the combination of all those things led to this, you know, code red situation, OpenAI.

• 27:17Speaker 00

  For sure. And I guess it's sort of interesting that maybe OpenAI, they just sort of underestimated the power of this approach. And maybe for good reason, because Gemini one and two were impressive, but nobody was apart from, you know, I think Gemini one, you know, it was like large token window was kind of its biggest. Yeah. Advantage, you know, so people would use it for tasks where that was really the crux of what they needed to get done. Before other kind of technologies came along to like help chunk things up. But Gemini three is actually where people say, you know what, like this is actually producing way better across a bunch of factors.

• 27:56Speaker 00

  I mean, one of them was actually more on the image front, you know, all these sort of infographics sort of floating around before the holidays. We're all Gemini three, basically. Again, Toby Luke K, the Shopify CEO, posted a pretty great one that he, you know, said this is Gemini three, but I'm using this because I want to show. He took one of his talks, I think, from he given to the company and he really wants to kind of capture that in an infographic. And yeah, I think Gemini three did a great job of that. So very interesting. Yeah, I mean, the graphics stuff has come a long way. Like, I encourage you to play around with Nano Banana if you haven't. Exactly. That was it. Nano Banana. Yeah, yeah.

• 28:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. Like, it's amazing because I think a lot of where, at least when I've played around with some of the image generation stuff for the models is, you know, you can get there, but it takes a bunch of prompting. And they tend to spell things wrong a lot. So it takes a bunch of work to kind of get what you need. And then after the latest model came out from Google, it's just one shot and you have something like pretty amazing. It's just really, really obvious jump in sort of the step function of capabilities. For sure. The only downside was, in my opinion, LinkedIn just became an absolute garbage of all these Nano Banana images. I mean, they're impressive, but it seemed like nobody could post a thing without this being part of the post. And yeah, had to kind of shut off LinkedIn for a little while. But yeah, very impressive.

• 29:21Speaker 00

  There hasn't really been a lot reported since, you know, So this code red and then it sort of all died down a bit over the holidays. So yeah, I think this is one to sort of keep on watch and I'm sure we'll be revisiting where these two are at on this front probably later, later in the year. And then finally, just a final sort of headline news point. This was a company called Manus being acquired by Meta. Now I had heard of Manus since I live in Singapore. We're going to get on to why that's significant in a second. But a lot of the world hadn't really heard of Manus. I'm curious, had you heard of Manus before the acquisition show on? No, I hadn't. You know, I saw that you had sort of surfaced this and I did a little bit of, you know, digging in, but I hadn't heard of the company previously.

• 30:02Speaker 00

  That was sort of my impression was that a lot of the world and especially the US market actually hadn't heard of them. And so when this was announced, I mean, two billion, so nothing for Meta. That's maybe a rounding error at this point. But you know, it's still not a bad exit for a company that was maybe struggling to find exactly its product market fit, in my opinion. You know, what, what does Manus do? It's very much consumer facing AI, but they focused more on kind of production of an end product. So, you know, especially things like presentation decks or a full website that can just get spun up and hosted, that kind of thing, as opposed to, you know, chatbot, like helping you understand something.

• 30:45Speaker 00

  It's really like, tell me what you want produced for like work purposes. Basically it was kind of their, their angle. And, you know, that does require more of an agentic approach, various processes going on, putting that thing together. Very expensive though, and I think that was part of the problem. A, they were running out of money. B, consumers, I, I went to a conference last year, I did mention this, one of the SED news where someone actually stood up and sort of asked very publicly to the CTO of Manus, you know, like, I don't understand, I, I spend so much money on Manus and it just runs out every week and I've got to keep applying more credits in like, do you plan to address this? So there's a bit of tension there, clearly, like users say, okay, the outputs are maybe

• 31:27Speaker 00

  helpful, but I really don't understand your billing model and I think I spent too much money with you guys. But they seem to be. Fundraising, that was the sort of murmurs over here. And just to point out, what is Singapore Connection? People refer to them as a Chinese startup, which is true. They started in China, but they did move to Singapore in 2024. And the big reason really for that was de-risking and trying to move that image away from being that they're part of the Chinese ecosystem and they're part, they wanted to be part of the world ecosystem, which seems to have played out in this Meta acquisition, because I think it would have been unlikely that Meta went to try and acquire them if they were still based in China.

• 32:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, that is a challenge for sure. And I think I read that, you know, all ties to China be either been severed or being severed. It's interesting. You said that either running out of money in their fundraising. I guess that's be the case because they were spending a lot on on token costs. But I had read that they were doing a hundred million dollars in revenue. So they certainly were customers and people paying for it. Exactly. People paying for it. I think it was the sort of, I'm curious to know like how much this was actually costing them to run this thing. Like, do they have as good relationships, say with like open, like, or rather, like Nvidia or like, you know, data centers that that OpenAI say have to run these things at a cost that is bearable? I'm not entirely sure.

• 32:49Speaker 00

  The thing that I struggle a little bit with is how does Manus in particular fit into whatever Meta's overall AI strategy is like where? Like, I struggle to see the sort of alignment and even where Meta is going with AI is just not very clear to me. Maybe there are some grand unified plan, but it's lost on me. Yes, there were so few jokes flying around about this at the time. It was something like, you know, one of the jokes was asking the Alexander Wang, who's their chief AI, and it was sort of like message from Mark Zuckerberg to Alex, like, hey, can you get us a Manus? Like, can you buy Manus for us? As in like a subscription? And then Alexander Wang replies, you know, done. How much? Like two billion? Like, you know, so it's like, oh, I just bought the company instead of buying a subscription.

• 33:35Speaker 00

  And yeah, I think that's kind of a lot of people's thoughts here is where is this fitting in and why? And the only real logical explanation at the moment is just The lack of consumer facing AI that Meta seems to have produced. Okay, they they are behind Lama models, but they require developers to kind of really be the ones taking those to a consumer in whichever way they want to do that. But I wouldn't say people, you know, they've tried to integrate Meta AI into WhatsApp, you know, and for a few weeks, people kept sort of, you know, you could say like at AI and, you know, someone would ask a question in a WhatsApp group, for example, and some clever person would say, you know, at AI answer this question. But that just gets very boring very quickly that the whole point of a group chat is to

• 34:19Speaker 00

  have conversation and like, see what the funny answer someone gives is, is not to have some know it all. AI in the in the group chat like correcting everybody. So that didn't work, at least in my opinion. Yeah, I mean, I guess the big question is if Metas stay in their wheelhouse of sort of social network, connecting people. And you can debate the merits of like the value of this connection, but it's always historically been about people connecting in some way. You know, what is the role of AI in that world where it's historically been about people being able to connect over? Like, hey, you and I, we we love Pokemon, like, let's, you know, talk about that or whatever, you know, like, where does AI fit into that beyond being some form of like

• 35:03Speaker 00

  recommendation system or a way to surface other types of connections? Yeah. And one sort of maybe more macro thing here is I was listening to, I think it was Tim Ferriss podcast. He had Bill Gurley on, who's, you know, a very well known investor. He got into things like Uber early and he's been visiting China a few times, which I think is very smart because you really have to kind of go there and understand what's going on. But yeah, he did highlight the fact that actually the the sort of approach of the Chinese government these days is to say to startups like, do not get too big. We need you to kind of all compete with each other. And yeah, there should be no tall poppies, basically.

• 35:45Speaker 00

  And I think that sort of is what's happened here that Manus saw that and was like, well, there's no way we can break out if we. In China, so we're gonna move to Singapore. And I've I've seen this with quite a few startups, at least in the last couple of years. I'm curious to see if some kind of regulatory thing comes up in China that stops this from being possible. You know, if you form it in China, then that's it. You can't move it somewhere. I don't know, but we definitely saw a lot of these moves around 2024. I'm curious to see where this net's out now, because this is a bit of a high profile loss, I would say, for the Chinese sort of startup ecosystem. So as we move on, our main topic today, maybe it'll be a little bit shorter than usual. We had a lot to cover off in the news.

• 36:28Speaker 00

  But it was really just looking ahead to the kind of job market this year. You know, I think last year was a lot of wait and see because people were quite unsure and anxious perhaps about sort of this sort of phrase, you know, AI taking your job and this kind of thing. And, you know, we did see quite a few layoffs through 2025. TechCrunch put together a very comprehensive list of who had been laying off and why. I guess the standout for me, though, on the the layoffs, you can put together a report of layoffs, but actually I don't feel the numbers were that crazy. You know, like each month, we were talking maybe five digit thousand layoffs per month, but like that doesn't feel crazy.

• 37:10Speaker 00

  And actually, a lot of the people laying off, you know, either these were just companies that just weren't quite hitting product market fit. Or even, you know, like Hewlett Packard said, you know, we're gonna cut four to 6,000 jobs by 2028. I mean, I think something like Hewlett Packard surely has room for kind of thinning down, especially with AI being able to do things that probably somebody had to sit and manually or and maybe even enjoyed manually doing. But maybe as we kind of look more at the developer standpoint, I mean, Sean, you did the episode with Stack Overflow that came out last towards the end of last year, the Stack Overflow survey. That's a little bit interesting just to sort of, because they they get the stats kind of on who Moving where or like what kind of technology is being adopted and like,

• 37:55Speaker 00

  how does the job market look for someone at that snapshot in time? And yeah, was there anything else that kind of came out there that might help us see where 2026 might land? One thing I wanted to say before we jump into the Stack Overflow survey too is that I think if you look at the overall metrics for tech employment, they're actually growing. You know, perhaps the skills or the nature of the jobs are changing a little bit. And the roles that tend to contribute to strategic growth, whether that's like AI, ML skills or data skills or something like that, those are definitely in demand. But there are some roles I think that are deemed non-strategic that are perhaps being cut. And I think the other thing is that not all the layoffs are necessarily tied to displacement by AI.

• 38:40Speaker 00

  Like some of the layoffs are due to realigning resources around certain efficiency initiatives. Or even, you know, if you look at Google from a couple of years ago, they had sort of their first like fairly large scale layoffs. But a lot, at least, you know, for my friends that have been there, like a lot of them have actually been hired back into new roles. Like a lot of it was kind of reshuffling of the deck and stuff like that as they needed to react to the market change. So there's definitely some of that going on. And I think that sometimes the headlines are a little bit sensational when it comes to this. But regarding the Stack Overflow survey, I think one of the things that was interesting from there, and I know it's kind of potentially like a macro issue around how we think about the impact on AI and developers and what it might mean to be a developer in the future.

• 39:23Speaker 00

  So if you look at sort of the history of using some of these AI tools for programming, we started out with co-pilots, we're kind of just like a superpowered, you know, code completion. And the general industry reaction, if you look, and also if you go back and look at some of the Stack Overflow surveys from a couple of years ago, was that they were kind of good for junior devs, but not necessarily super helpful for senior engineers. And senior engineers were like, oh, I don't really need this. I know the language inside and out or whatever, and I can just like program this faster myself. But then I think in the last year, there's been a change in that sentiment. And it's also reflected in the survey is that with some of these coding agents. There seems to be the shift about who gets the most value out of them.

• 40:06Speaker 00

  To use them effectively, you kind of need to know how things fit together architecturally. So we're seeing that really strong engineers are becoming even stronger engineers by leveraging some of these essentially really helpful agent interns that they can now depend on. But I think there's some fear that if you're junior and you don't get as much value out of these tools. And if you're always insulated from the details because of the AI, like, how do you ever get to a place where you're senior? So what's that do for, you know, it's great that we're leveling up the senior engineers, but if we never ever build sort of the future of the seniors for the next generation of coders, what happens in the future? And I think part of this might be that we need to just think about

• 40:47Speaker 00

  how this shifts the educational focus for engineering. Like, there's things that we've historically valued with engineers in the workplace, or even from an education standpoint, that maybe now are less valuable, like, like really deep knowledge of a particular language maybe is not as valuable now as having a deeper knowledge of how things like should be architected, for example. And maybe there needs to be more emphasis into that from computer science education and you need to be working, get used to working at a higher level of abstraction sort of immediately. And that could be something that needs to change, but there's still going to be sort of this, you know, even if the answer is education, there's still going to be potentially this risk of a generation of coders who are sort of young in their career.

• 41:29Speaker 00

  And maybe they're not able to take advantage. But I guess the counter argument I've heard to that is that, well, the people who are younger are also more open to using the tools and are able to level up their skills on the tools faster. So they kind of can pick up the work and start contributing immediately. So I don't know the answer, but I think this is kind of just the things I've seen in the survey and some of the conversation that's going on right now in the market. Yeah, I mean, I think my take on this is almost not a lot should change really at that fundamental education level, you know, like spending four years in CS is probably like, and, you know, full disclaimer, I did not do a CS degree, so I was self-taught, probably could have benefited from a CS degree, but just didn't happen to do one.

• 42:13Speaker 00

  And ended up just having to learn slightly the harder way, some of the fundamentals. But those fundamentals have always stood me really well, I think, even though now, especially today, I don't code daily as a job. I don't think either of us do exactly, like, we both dabble probably in code to sort of prove things or just for pure enjoyment as well. But, you know, there are many, many, many more people in super base, well, far more talented than I am at coding. And I'm more useful to the company as, yeah, more of that high level, able to look at how something is architected. Or looking at what the risks are, basically, like de-risking projects. But I have to understand coding as well and be able to converse with engineers about coding.

• 42:57Speaker 00

  And equally, you know, I actually speak to a lot of the engineers and it really is, it's at least, it's no more than 50 50 when it comes to who are actually using any AI tools. And I would say it's the, those that are working on the really low level stuff are not using them. And I think that's fair in terms of using them maybe more for like a sanity check or especially some security checks. I've seen some really interesting progress from us using some AI based security tooling that can really pick out some pretty nuanced. Security flaws, but equally having something generate a bunch of low level code that is gonna probably sit in the code base for years and years and years. The likelihood that that's best generated first by AI is unlikely.

• 43:42Speaker 00

  The place it's, it's still doing very well, like AI does very well is SQL. So, you know, anyone who's just basically putting together complex database statements, that seems to be where it does very well. But yeah, I mean, back to sort of more of the job side of things. I think, again, a CS degree is not as useless as I think as people are making out. And I do think open source is a big driver for, or should be a driver, you know, because that's actually where you can get. Real hands on experience without already having joined a company. And many big libraries, open source projects are basically rejecting pull requests if they have any inkling that it's majority AI generated.

• 44:23Speaker 00

  And for good reason, I think, you know, like they're just getting swamped with what look like AI pull requests. And so this sort of a way to filter out actual engineers applying their brain to this. Problem as opposed to just thinking that they can out prompt somebody else. So I think the super high level here is that it is not as doomsday as maybe the news makes out and there is a lot of opportunity for engineers. Yeah, I think it's still like very early days. I think we're still figuring out a lot of stuff and if things are moving incredibly fast as well. So things might seem a certain way right now, but it could be in six months, things change dramatically as well.

• 45:00Speaker 00

  But ultimately it comes down to, I think people who have solid fundamentals and a breadth of knowledge tend to have a place in tech, like in the work world. There's kind of always like sort of value behind people who can wear many hats and kind of flex across a bunch of different roles and understand a bunch of sort of the core fundamentals of how technology works. Yeah. So we're going to leave it there today that we may touch on this a little bit more, you know, later in the year as well, just as we see how sort of hiring is going. And I think this is just an ongoing topic, you know, how our engineers faring with AI. I mean, we're still only really in maybe the start of year three of sort of coding with AI proper. So

• 45:41Speaker 00

  we've only seen two years of this so far, and this is still going to be a very pivotal year, I think, for how this plays out. As always, we like to just wrap up with a fun thing of looking at hacker news. I think this is an interesting one this week where Sean, you and I both landed on the same suggestion. Do you want to introduce it? Yeah, sure. So it's Doom has been ported to an earbud, doomsbuds.com. I think when I saw that, I was like, this is the kind of ridiculous stuff that we always like to talk about and highlight on these episodes, just people doing, you know, fun stuff in engineering, whether it makes sense or not. Sometimes it's like these like super over engineered pet projects that people have and it's just fun to talk about and it's fun to see how people

• 46:23Speaker 00

  apply their sort of creativity and innovation to different projects. And this one's like, you know, fits that goal for sure, to be able to run essentially Doom through the earbud. So I wasn't surprised also that you grabbed it too, because it's the kind of thing that you and I both seem to gravitate towards. Absolutely. Yeah. I had been sort of swayed by another one a little bit, a couple of weeks ago, that was another one of these disposable vape things. But then, you know, we've already covered. And this was just, I think that one going even deeper. This, this definitely was like, wow, you know, and they say it only works on what's called the PineBuds Pro, which is a, it's earbuds that have open source firmware, basically. But, you know, again, like, you know, I just looked at the specs of these earbuds and I was like, okay, well, I mean, like,

• 47:06Speaker 00

  these days, you know, they've got dual core, 300 MHz ARM processors, they've got four megabytes of flash memory, three microphones. Yeah, I mean, earbuds are pretty advanced these days. And Doom is this sort of recurring theme, right? Of where can you run Doom? We actually had an episode out, I think at the end of last year, which was running Doom in TypeScript types, like not even just in TypeScript, but TypeScript types. So if that piques your interest, go check that episode out. That was with one of our other presenters. But yeah, I love this Doom on an earbud. And it's sort of like, I'm not sure if it's actually still up at the moment, but it was sort of, you were able to like jump into Twitch or something and like get on a queue and then

• 47:49Speaker 00

  control Doom being hosted on this earbud. But yeah, it's doombuds.com if you're interested. And we thank Aaron-S, the user on Hacker News for posting that. Yeah, unfortunately, that's all we've got time for today. But do join us again next month. We'll be hitting all the news highlights and probably a bit more of Hacker News than we did today. So yeah, hope to see you there. Thanks, everyone. Cheers.