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

0:00Is Apple's bad iPad ad just a creative issue or something more? OpenAI is about to launch its own search engine. Meanwhile, the web is filling with zombie AI-driven content. And Netflix is going big on live as it airs a Tom Brady roast and closes in on a big deal with the NFL. All that and more is coming up right after this. Welcome to Big Technology Podcast Friday edition, where we break down the news in our traditional cool-headed and nuanced format. We have a big show today covering everything from the latest in AI to Apple's very, very bad ad and why Netflix is going big on live. Thrilled to welcome Ranjan Roy back to the show.

0:37Ranjan, great to see you as always. Tim Cook, what are you doing? So this is an interesting thing. Let's just start talking right away about this ad because it definitely got panned critically. And maybe I'm in the minority, but I had been watching these videos on TikTok where you have these compressors crushing stuff. and it's pretty cool like it crushes all these things and you see it ooze out and it's like this is the back uh background for this situation with that apple had with its ad whereas apple just tried to mimic that by putting all these things in the compressor a piano a video game lenses buckets of paint to show that you know you can do all these things on the ipad and i will be honest i watched the ad at first and i was like oh pretty cool but then the entire internet was just like look at Apple crushing all these things that you love.

1:29And as I started to hear the commentary, I was like, oh no, this is pretty bad. What was your reaction? When I saw it, I did not have a positive reaction. And I definitely thought if it was anyone else, it's interesting. Like anything else Apple does, it's visually beautiful and gorgeously filmed. But Apple's entire brand, and they're the most famous for the 1984 commercial where they break convention and empower humanity. And basically, this is saying that everything that is beautiful and human is being crushed into this tiny form factor of an iPad. Not even tiny, just thinner iPad. So to me, both it went against everything Apple has positioned themselves as being for decades now and built the most incredible brand in the world around.

2:22Also for me, it was a pretty not exciting product launch. Like a thinner iPad is not the most exciting thing. So if you're going to do something that dramatic, at least make it have a product that is new, exciting, interesting, something rather than, okay, your iPad's thinner and we just destroyed a trumpet. Like they're killing the emoji at the end. There's a smiley face emoji that gets crushed and the life sucked out of it. I think all of that, if you were delivering me something a little more exciting, I might have been happy. I'm just going to read some of the reaction to the ad that showed up on Twitter because it was brutal.

3:05So this is from Josh Delany. He says, everything beautiful, charming, and analog will be destroyed by a flat black screen. You must never see a sculpted bust. Never hear music from an actual instrument. Never feel the texture of real things. A silicon slab and Tim Cook will permanently stand between you and the world. Here's Jed Barnoff. I'm not sure wanton destruction of all the good and beautiful things in the world was really the vibe you were trying for. And then Paul Graham, he goes, Steve wouldn't have shipped that ad. It would have pained him too much to watch. So obviously there's a question of how this ad agency let this get out the front door.

3:44And it's like always in moments like these where I love to imagine like the internal politics of it. but it because for this to come out the door everybody who's ever run an ad knows that there's so many approvals necessary for these things to run and for tim cook to tweet it everybody within that company and the creative agencies must have seen it go out the door and you do wonder like has apple lost a little bit of its creative soul it's such a creative company to have seen this ad end up being released. The deeper question here is, is Apple's business right now and the state of its product development sort of responsible in part for the backlash to this?

4:25Let me explain. Apple's had decreasing revenue for five out of the last six quarters. The Vision Pro, which is that it really did herald as this like next generation product has become a paperweight on the desks of people that have bought it. And maybe that was something that we could have predicted, but it's certainly not taken the path that the company hoped, at least in the outset, maybe in a few generations, it will. And then finally, the iPad has been struggling. The iPad revenue this past quarter, the most recent quarter that it reported was down 17%. And this was supposed to be a release that turned the iPad's fortunes around and Tim Cook billed it as the most important release since the iPad itself.

5:05And honestly, it just looked like another iPad. And so I wonder if part of the backlash here is rooted a little bit in people's wariness in terms of where the direction of Apple is going. That was one of the more concerning parts of this ad. The idea that to have an event to launch a new pencil and a new thinner iPad should not require an event. That should just be on the website, a little bit of customer emailing, a TV commercial, and just call it that. And I think actually it is indicative of the fact that they thought that was important enough to launch in such a big fashion that people do.

5:42That's certainly part of the backlash and how people are feeling about this. And I think even bigger, going back to the soul of Apple, I do think this is a big issue because, as you said, this kind of ad would require going through so many layers of approval. It's just someone somewhere should have at least been able to raise their hand. Maybe this isn't a good idea. Do we really want to do this? Is this really the most affoly thing we can do? And the fact that that didn't happen starts to make you think, have they gotten so heavy as an organization and so bureaucratic that those kind of simple voices of pushing back against something or saying no, or maybe let's do something a little different.

6:25I mean, that's the classic trap that a large corporation will get into. Is that becoming Apple? And I think this definitely raises that question. One interesting thing that I did with this whole episode was I tried to see if ChatGPT or Claude could write a better ad. And they did write some very boring ads. So I don't think they're in danger of replacing creatives anytime soon. But then I asked Claude whether this idea of a trash compactor or some sort of compressor destroying all the beautiful products in the world would be met with a positive response. And it was quite interesting to see its reaction to the potential advertisement that Apple ended up running.

7:05It basically nailed it. It said that the public would say it's insensitive. It might seem like it's promoting excessive consumerism and encouraging people to abandon perfectly functional items for the sake of a newer, more compact device. The imagery of beloved objects being destroyed could evoke feelings of loss and sadness. and confusion. Some viewers might view the metaphor as confusing or unclear, struggling to connect the destruction of cherished items with the appeal of the iPad and the appreciation for minimalism. A smaller portion of the audience might appreciate the ad's message of simplifying one's life and embracing the more minimalist approach to technology.

7:42So what was interesting is Claude basically got this right before Apple even ran the ad. So my question to you is, are we going to start to see more creative agencies, more companies start to check their work with these AI bots to sort of gauge what the public is going to do in response before it goes out the door. Yeah, I think you are the one that has taught me to feed back in transcripts or other work to Claude. And Claude is definitely the best versus ChatGPT. I think creation of original work is still the part where, especially for ad creative, marketing creative people still are not or the quality of output is not production worthy in most cases but coming back with feedback i honestly think these tools that's the single most valuable thing they can do for any creative right now is give you smart feedback very quickly and good feedback and feedback that's getting better so if you are a creative agency that's not incorporating some layer of uh ai validation i think uh you should you should start getting on that so my one question here is whether this makes creative agencies end up being too safe like the ai will always steer you to like the more safe response and of course if you ask it to think of like problems it will it will deliver them so i wonder if we end up in service of pleasing the ai do our creative agencies become so safe to the point of not being willing to piss anybody off with the things that they're saying, because you have to be willing to make some people angry to make great creative, right?

9:17I'm trying to picture like Nike feeding the Colin Kaepernick ad to Gemini and getting the most trying, attempting to be balanced response in terms of, we know this ad could be offensive to some and empowering to others. And we recognize that we all have a diversity of opinion, but yeah, I think, I think these are the kinds of things with the just creativity in general even we talked about music and audio earlier it is going to be really interesting how it both changes it but also how it makes people more creative i don't know if you saw there was uh this one tiktok video this where a girl says she's looking for a finance bro oh my god and six five blue eyes trust fund blue eyes trust fund yeah you're gonna turn this into a rap video around John.

10:07Well no, I watched probably 15 different remixes of that one thing that she said that she didn't even make us actual song about it. She just said it.

10:30And then the remixes were amazing. So there is a whole new layer of creativity that is being generated by these tools that's different, but it's just as entertaining. And honestly, the people who really did a good job with it just as creative to me. Yeah, definitely. So, okay, let's just put a period on the Apple thing. The company really needs to deliver at WWDC, wouldn't you say? Like, if you think about this, it's got this run of declining sales problems in China, a creative snafu. I mean, it's a pretty rough moment for them. If they didn't have the cash to buy back$110 billion in shares like they announced last quarter, the narrative around Apple would be quite dark.

11:13But they do have one big announcement coming in June that they could potentially, I wouldn't say save themselves with, but help get themselves back on the right track. Don't you think? Yeah. And we've talked about this one strong, powerful, differentiated AI announcement could completely change the conversation. You know, there's different theories around what it means with on-device computing and where they have a huge advantage with the iPhone, how they improve all of their existing AI systems. And hopefully for me, Siri gets a little better and that they may be integrating other LLMs into it.

11:50Like they have such a big opportunity. So I hope they have no overly creative attempt of an advertisement for that one. Even one thing, I wish they did this stuff live and didn't have a prerecorded stream that's super highly produced. I wish Tim Cook was on stage and they did live demos of them attempting to do the AI, whatever they're going to do. And hopefully it doesn't end up like the Rabbit R1 demos, which if anyone saw them trying to order on DoorDash did not work. But I think it would show such, it would be such a statement to the industry that we're back, we're confident, we're innovating versus the prerecorded ones.

12:32It's just, I don't know, they're too highly produced and slick and just not fun to watch. I mean, that was the magic of the Steve Jobs demos is that the stuff would work most of the times and sometimes it wouldn't and he would yell and it was like must see TV. Yeah, exactly. That is a good demo and everyone short of the product totally failing. if a little a little a few hiccups is welcome for any of these kind of things it makes it real and i think uh yeah but but wwdc is going to be a really interesting one for apple i think it will be live and i will say like one of my favorite steve jobs moments is when he's about to do a demo and he asks everybody in the auditorium rather annoyed to turn their wi-fi off because it was messing with his demo oh yeah have you seen that one it's classic i mean i'm i'm not I think bloggers have a right to blog, but if we want to see the demos, we're not going to be able to do it unless we turn off all these MiFi base stations and laptops, set them on the floor.

13:32I've got time.

13:37Yeah, and that's golden. That's perfect. Okay, one more thing about Apple. This wasn't on our prep sheet, but I want to ask you because it's interesting to me and somewhat new. they have started to potentially build servers with AI chips in them? Do you have any sense as to like what that could be for? Yeah, I think the whole compute discussion, I mean, everyone is investing in it. Everyone is understanding that they need to either start building things for themselves from a financial and cost perspective over the next decade as these technologies grow. So I think it's almost become for a big technology company, it's becoming table stakes that you have to own more of the AI infrastructure layer of your overall organization.

14:25And again, it's why Sam Altman's trying to raise, was it 1 trillion or 7 trillion? I can't remember. 7 trillion. 7 trillion. It was not fully confirmed, but he didn't necessarily deny it. In fact, his comment, most direct comment on it was to say, why not 8 trillion? Yeah, exactly. So everyone is recognizing at massive scale, you need to do this. And if you think about it, Google and Microsoft and Amazon, this is part of their business. Mark Zuckerberg and Meta is basically telling investors, we're going to be spending tens of billions of dollars on this to build this kind of infrastructure. So Apple has to do something on this.

15:04So it must mean they have their own chatbot coming. Just improve Siri. That's all. that's listeners you know i say that every week so if at wwdc if tim cook just walks out and just goes by the way series better i will walk away a happy customer yeah well i'm flying out to california i'm hoping they credential me so we'll see what happens that week it should be fun put in a word with him please yes uh all right so speaking of sam altman did you hear that open ai is going to release its search engine next week. The day before Google's IO developer conference. So this is from Reuters. OpenAI plans to announce its artificial intelligence powered search engine product on Monday, according to two sources familiar, raising the stakes in its competition with the search king Google.

15:51I love how they call it the search king. I think maybe a couple months ago, I would read this headline and be like, oh, Google's cooked. Here comes OpenAI. But also we know that the technology hasn't really empowered Bing to the point where it's been able to cut meaningfully into Google's Google search lead. So maybe if I'm Google, I'm not too worried, but maybe I am. What do you think? We never became Bing boys. I'm still, I'm becoming slowly a Gemini guy. And that's because Google there because search is core to their business. It's a, it feels like it will be a lot easier to turn a search product into a LLM-driven chatbot or generative AI product.

16:33And we see Google's generative search is very good. And I'm seeing it on more and more queries. I've heard more and more people bring it up to me that they are seeing it versus going the other way and turning an LLM-based chatbot like ChatGPT into a search product. Perplexity from the ground up has built something that is a really interesting hybrid. it. I use it all the time. We talked about it last week while traveling. It informed me nonstop. I was using perplexity over and over again, and it's done a very good job on it. So I think, I actually, I'm going to make the call here. I think this is a bad rollout for OpenAI.

17:12And it's because to get Citation right, which ChatGPT is one of the only platforms that does not do. Even Microsoft's co-pilot, Claude, perplexity, certainly that's like one of the core features is Citation. Google has built it into Gemini. I think Citation is going to be really hard and they're going to roll it out in a very clumsy fashion. And I think it could be a big deal because, you know, OpenAI's product excellence on ChatGPT and Dolly, we've talked about, which is it's generally pure ui excellence product excellence that have made these as powerful as the underlying model so if they screw this one up i think it could definitely cut into the uh the shine that at least lives on the product side maybe not the corporate side yeah and it shouldn't be forgotten that microsoft already has its own chatbot search which is co-pilot or whatever it was bing beforehand but now it's co-pilot and now open ai is creating it And I saw Casey Newton, the reporter, do this tweet saying how angry must the Bing team be about this right now?

18:20This was supposed to be Bing's big moment. And now this company that Microsoft has funded is doing it. It's not good. And Dworkish Patel is going to be on the podcast on Wednesday. I spoke with him this week. It was a great conversation. So I'm going to tease it here, but I'm also going to scoop it a little bit. He said something really interesting, which I hope people tune in for the discussion. It's one of my favorite interviews of the year so far. And what he said was you have Microsoft now effectively dividing its compute resources between its own internal team and OpenAI, whereas Google is just concentrating it all in one place.

18:58And that's very bullish for Google. So all of a sudden, maybe like the old incumbent is starting to see things shift in its favor. Yeah, I think that as you're saying it like that, this is going to be a very interesting business school case study a decade from now that Microsoft is essentially taking the kind of diversified platform approach that betting on many horses and distributing your compute across a number of them and seeing who wins versus Google. clearly everything is built back into the core cloud products so i think that'll be an interesting battle but but i don't think at microsoft come on do you really think the team is threatened or angry by this versus i feel microsoft after all the sam altman drama basically has even if financially they're still tied at least perceptually distance themselves pretty pretty strongly from open AI.

19:54Yeah. I mean, here's the thing. In this world, and Dworkish makes this point, and he does it better than me. So folks, please tune in on Wednesday. But basically, like the entire game here at this moment is making these models like larger, right? And so that's why you want to consolidate and not have a multi-pronged approach. You just want to give everything to one group and say, all right, you know, do it. And so if this is the case that Microsoft is trying to hedge on open AI, then why be tied with them at all? And that's where things get really interesting. Remember, right around the time of the Sam Altman ouster and then return, we heard that they were in the process of a fundraise that would put them at some crazy number.

20:35What's happened to that fundraise? We haven't really heard anything about it afterwards. So I think that's very interesting to watch. We're going to see. They might have a financial crisis. Yeah, I think, I mean, to me, that's why this is actually even more fun to watch and be part of versus a year or two ago in generative AI because you know there was a long period of time where a cool new demo would come out and everyone would get excited or you would use a product and it would be exciting there I still have those moments we've talked about on the music side on the image side but now it really is you know rubber meets the road who is going to actually execute on these technologies the best who's going to sell them, who's going to implement them, who's going to be able to monetize them.

21:18Because it is true. Is that$20 chat GPT plus subscription really going to scale and fund their overall usage of their compute? It's still pretty unclear on this. So I think it's going to get even more exciting, especially in the next few months. Absolutely. Because one thing we haven't talked about yet is GPT-5 and how their next model is going to come out, I think, this year. That's what everybody says. and does that really change things? And it's going to be interesting to see not only the improvement in the model, but also the interaction between people. And this was something that happened at the Bloomberg conference this week where Brad Lightcap, who's the COO of OpenAI, The Verge had this little item saying, you know, they keep vaguely teasing at GPT-5.

22:03Okay, I'm just going to read it. His answer hinted that ChatGPT will evolve to act like an agent on your behalf or at the very least take on more of a persona. And this is what he said. Will there be such a thing as a prompt engineer in 2026? You don't prompt engineer your friend. So that's clearly what they're building toward. Does that make you excited or how do you feel emotionally hearing? I saw that line, you don't prompt engineer your friend. And that one, I just wish the management just spoke a little bit in a more normal way about these things are good maybe the it will do this or it will do this other thing for you but to get into that level of like how this is going to how you should feel about these models is just awkward and weird to me versus just talking about what it can do I do think one thing that's good again in terms of talking about how things have almost slowed down in a good way is remember there was a period where it felt like everyone upgraded their foundation model every few weeks or a few months or there's a major update and everything would change.

23:15And again, the fact that we're now at a point where they're teasing GPT-5 and we don't really know exactly what it'll do, I think is a reminder that, you know, how much room is there really for improvement versus making the current technologies actually just reach more people, help them do what they need them to do versus there's going to be some Q-star AGI style totally revolutionary thing. But we are hearing about a different use case, right? This agent case or a friend case, like that is definitely the move that they're making. And I think that'll be interesting to see as they sort of roll that out.

23:56Imagine that with a better model, all of a sudden you can be talking about some very interesting applications. Like a concierge, perhaps? apps so what if you're lonely just hypothetically you're on the apps and you're trying to meet somebody and all of a sudden an ai concierge pops up and says hey let me do the hard work for you all right so thank you for setting me up there ron john do you want to introduce this segment um well i actually there was a uh tweet around it was so whitney wolf the founder of bumble had talked about the idea that you have an ai concierge essentially managing your dating life for you in the current world of people swiping and messaging themselves that you have an ai talking to someone else's AI and this is matching and filtering and engaging and talking and then you're kind of monitoring and overseeing this process and it's such a weird one because I will say and having been married a long time and only seeing this via other friends who are single um it is people do manage online dating like some kind of large-scale transactional process where where it's, you know, the swiping level.

25:19I mean, it's like a funnel. And having some kind of AI improvement in there actually does make a little bit of sense. And a lot of it is not very human in how it's done. It is very fast and volume-based. So it is kind of weird to think, could an AI actually filter better for you? And especially if you're already approaching things in that way, this makes sense to me. And it was crazy to see this Bumble CEO, Whitney Wolf, talk about it at this Bloomberg conference, because as she introduces the idea, the audience starts laughing and then she goes, no, seriously, and she advances it. Let's take a listen.

25:56OK, so for example, you could in the near future be talking to your AI dating concierge and you could share your insecurities. I just came out of a breakup. I have commitment issues. and it could help you train yourself into a better way of thinking about yourself and then it could give you productive tips for communicating with other people if you want to get really out there there is a world where your dating concierge could go and date for you with other dating concierge no no truly and then you don't have to talk to 600 people and all of san francisco for you say these are the three people you really ought to meet it sounds useful i mean like you talked about like dating today it's really hard uh with the apps and you know i'm i'm lucky i feel also lucky like people who are recently married it feels like they got kind of like the last chopper out of the war where like i mean that's not even original right it's just like it's so it is it's become like a job transactional it's a disaster and maybe you're right maybe if um ai can go ahead and speak with other people's AIs and find the right match for you, then that could be a net positive.

27:07I guess now that I'm thinking about it, almost tying back to the earlier conversation around, do you play a physical guitar or do you play a guitar on your iPad? I think things are going to split into the more purely digital AI driven experiences and then the more organic human experiences. Because again, if you're already managing your dating life in some kind of volume based way, this will definitely help you and actually is not horrible and antithetical to you know any kind of romance it actually is just making better what you're already doing versus if you're trying to meet someone at a bar or you know it's just somewhere else in an organic fashion and the same way that like you know playing an instrument versus generating an ai clip of uh music is a different type of experience and you know it requires a different level of commitment and it's just a completely different thing so maybe people maybe in all these different kind of things that we do in life we'll have the ai thing and then the more human thing yeah did you meet your wife in person i did at a birthday party singing karaoke were you the one singing is that what sealed the deal?

28:24I actually, she had chosen the song American Boy by Stella and Kanye West. And I randomly happened to know the Kanye West section where he raps in the middle and got up and did it. Yeah, I see. Well done. Yeah. I mean, I tried online dating for years and then I ended up meeting my wife in person. So I don't know. There's still something to be said for it. Although it's possible to find love on the apps. Okay, I got to ask you this one more question. This one question. So there's this guy, Sid Verma on Twitter, and he says, a ruthless self-taught dating machine who weaponizes your bio data to whittle down matches, raising concerns over privacy and consent.

29:05Congrats. You've invented the Indian mom. And you said Sid's greatest tweet has just been posted. So I'm curious if you could talk a little bit like people are like, is this bringing back arranged marriage? Now, I watched Indian matchmaking on Netflix and thought that it was such a great show. but does this kind of resemble it? Yeah. So, okay. So Sid Burma is a friend from my Financial Times days, and he has some great Twitter commentary on being Indian. And the idea of kind of leveraging data to create highly transactional arrangements for love and romance in Indian culture, especially more traditionally, I mean, there's a site shadi.com where all your bio data, like not just height, weight, even like health data, cast, all these kind of things are fed in.

29:59And they definitely have added an AI layer that they call it around improving their matching process to better filter. So this whole idea of using extensive data points to, in a very intrusive manner, dictate who you should be seeing is very familiar with more traditional Indian folks. And I think it was a good recognition of the types of interactions that already exist that now we're weirdly trying to replicate in the digital world. Trust me, you guys don't want that. You don't want that. Well, maybe you do because I could be wrong, but don't arranged marriages have a higher percent chance of working out?

30:39All right. So AI will bring us back to the age of arranged marriage. That's the takeaway today. It's so interesting because it's like one of those situations where like statistically, yes, you're likely to be like in a much better position, but you would never want that forced on you. I don't think. I wouldn't. Yeah, exactly. I mean, this is the same way maybe actually we obviously don't know yet, but I'm sure we'll start to see data if these AI driven, I mean, I guarantee you Bumble one year from now will present some data about how ai driven uh meetups are more successful than uh organic ones i'm almost positive they probably will be true and it'll probably work and for those who doesn't work there's always these erotic ais that you could end up dating and hang out with them in the metaverse because there was also a headline this week that open ai is like working to develop erotic and erotic yeah i figured i'd leave that off the agenda this week after our you know after last week.