Did Google Just Fall Behind Again?, iPhone Fold Cometh, Anthropic Files To Go Public

22:13M.G. Siegler:And now, obviously, they've pulled back from video, but Google is not. And what they showed off at I.O. also seemed a little lackluster with regard to the Omni model. But it was also clear that it wasn't everything that they wanted to show, but that's all that sort of they had, I guess, ready to roll right now. And that clearly Demis views this as like the quote unquote world model for them and that they're working hard on this sort of behind the scenes, but they don't have enough sort of to showcase yet. But that's sort of the next step of, yeah, where this goes. It's like text, voice, and then Omni, I guess, for everything else.

22:48Right.

22:48Big Technology Podcast Host:And so whether it's chat or whether it's voice, you know, to see more and more computing happening within like the, let's call it chat GPT interface, no matter how, which format or form you use to access it. You know, I think what you said is actually really important. You have to get to the point where you trust it. Right. And I don't think these things are extremely trustable yet. I think maybe I'm just kind of a psycho that likes to press these products to the limit for the service of the audience, of course. But, you know, you could see so much of computing happening there. I mean, you think about it and it's like the chatbot is going to be the place where you're going to want to direct most of your interactions with the web, with the internet, with information online, with computing.

23:35Big Technology Podcast Host:For instance, like when you connect it with your Gmail, instead of searching Gmail for like your flight data, you just go into ChatCPT. Give me my flight information, my confirmation number and it spits it right out.

23:46M.G. Siegler:Yeah. Go ahead. So my one use case that I use right now on a daily basis is basically I use Claude to check in on my Gmail. So I don't go to the Gmail interface anymore. But I basically just say, give me all the situations where I've written about X topic before. And Claude provides a much better interface than Gmail for that, right? Because it will give you like a natural language spit out of like, oh, yeah, in this newsletter on X date, you wrote this about X topic. And here's a link to that. And versus obviously Gmail right now is full on just old school search paradigm. Now they have Gemini baked into Gmail, but it's not nearly as seamless and as good as it is on these other services that are much more predicated around the agentic use case.

24:35M.G. Siegler:So again, that's on Google being behind in that, which is weird because they own Gmail. Like you would think that they would have like the single best place. They should have the single best place to do any sort of agentic email workflow, whether it's sending emails or searching emails or doing anything with email. They should own that. And they don't own that right now. They just own the layer behind it that all these other services are latching onto. I don't know a single person who uses sort of AI and agentic workflows that doesn't have it connected to their Gmail. That's like the first thing that they do.

25:08M.G. Siegler:And so it's wild that it's not Google that's like owning that right now.

25:13Big Technology Podcast Host:Yeah, it's amazing how searching Gmail through ChatGPT is better than searching Gmail with the Gemini baked in within the Gmail window. It doesn't make any sense. And I think that like as you go through different experiences, like you will see that this is sort of just like talking out what the bull case might be. In many cases, it will be a better experience to use ChatGPT to do things on other websites. For instance, like think about Booking.com. Booking.com has a chat bot in Booking.com if you're looking to book a hotel. You can ask it for things. It has all the booking data. But you can ask ChatGPT similar questions about hotels and it can scan everything, right?

25:54Big Technology Podcast Host:So you're going to want to use that. And then, of course, like are you – even if the booking API is unavailable to ChatGPT because booking wants to keep their own experience theirs, you can just tell, let's say Codex, go and open booking.com, log in for me and book the one that you just suggested. And so this is my core question. I mean, of course, there's a question for Google, right? what happens to Google. But the bigger question is, does this mean that power, like the power of, I don't know how you put it, like the power of the web or the power of controlling the interface to the web will reside with the open AIs and the anthropics if Google doesn't get to that?

26:37Big Technology Podcast Host:And then what are the implications of that?

26:40M.G. Siegler:So super interesting. I've actually was thinking about this earlier today in a totally different context, but it's analogous, I think, which is that one of the still very annoying things about trying to use, especially in the current age where cable has been totally taken over by streaming, and now we all have, you know, five to 10 different streaming services. And we were all and we've all been longing for, I think, this like UI to unify all of them together, right? And Apple has some of it. Amazon has some of it. But no one can work with it fully because Netflix, the biggest one, refuses to play ball and give their, you know, content out to others to sort of be able to surface all of this.

27:19M.G. Siegler:And why do they do that? Because they want to control the interface, of course, and they want to control that relationship. And so when you think about that in the context of what you're talking about with these, with these, you know, AI tools, like, you can easily see a world in which a lot of different players think it was like basically a mistake to allow, you know, Google search to become the interface by which, you know, that's the main way you found your way to a lot of sites. Obviously, many would already say that, right? Because if you fast forward to where we are now, they're losing search traffic and stuff because of the changes that are happening.

27:53M.G. Siegler:And in the entertainment world, right, a lot of people went on to say like that they regretted giving over their interface to iTunes, right? And because again, they were giving up yielding control to Apple, even though you could argue Apple like save them from themselves by, you know, what they did with iTunes, but still, you understand the argument of why these companies sort of make that decision. And I worry that we're already in this world, certainly with agentic shopping that you're seeing with Amazon, right? Like not being able to fully play ball with certain other, you know, shopping agents and vice versa, others not wanting to play ball necessarily, you know, so Amazon owns the relationship, which obviously a lot of people also regret that, you know, in our in our web day and age of allowing just everything to be outsourced to Amazon.

28:43M.G. Siegler:And so, yeah, I worry that we're going to not get a seamless move into like a one single place where we can do all of this, like the sort of the pie in the sky version that you're talking about, where there's one tool, but instead we have to use like three or four different AI tools in order to get full coverage of whatever task we want to do, because certain ones just refuse to play ball. And certainly as, as the big players, the big tech players are all doing this right now. We're not going to be able to – do you really believe that we're going to be able to do Amazon purchasing through Gemini as seamless as you could through Amazon's own tools and Alexa?

29:22M.G. Siegler:It certainly doesn't seem like it anytime soon. And so that's a world that I think is going to be potentially painful for this transition. Right.

29:31Big Technology Podcast Host:Right. Okay. So here's where I think it could be different, which is like, and you can sort of gut check me on this one if I'm going too far here. The agentic tools may not need the permission of the sites that they're working with because what they're doing is instead of having a plugin, they are not relying on, let's say, the data plugin from booking. they're taking over your browser they're taking over your computer and they're acting as you going into those sites and they'll be able to move faster they'll be able to browse faster and like maybe there's some blocking that these companies can try to do on their end to like sort of like not not let you non-human traffic crawl right um that's very difficult so i i think that they might be able to get around these these walls yeah and i mean that battle is sort of

30:20M.G. Siegler:playing out right now, right? Like there's certain sites and services that use the different, you know, MCP and all the different sort of layers that you can that are effectively API layers to be able to call up certain things within the services themselves. And then as you're noting, there is the sort of fallback plan to just have computer usage and yeah, just use the web. And so it would really take shutting down the web or cutting off crawlers, I guess, you know, maybe they could do it in some ways, like so that, yeah, say like, Amazon started to say that Gemini's crawler can't do it. That's complicated, as we've seen already play out, because Google's crawler is also tied to Google search.

31:01M.G. Siegler:And so if you're turning off the crawler for Gemini, you're potentially turning off Google search, which basically no one is willing to do at this point, and gives Google, you know, a huge leverage point in any such negotiation there. And Amazon is a similar thing probably with, you know, just with Amazon shopping. Like, are you going to cut off access to that if you say, like, I don't want Alexa to have access to this. Therefore, you know, like Amazon might say, OK, then you can't be a part of Amazon shopping. And that's going to be, I'm sure, litigated, you know, to know when those types of deals and arrangements.

31:36M.G. Siegler:There's one other thing that this brings to mind, which we haven't talked about or hasn't been in the news a lot recently, but was starting to play out this way, specifically from Amazon, because they struck a deal with New York Times to do content, right? And then New York Times famously, I think in almost every article, has to say that they're being sued – sorry, they're suing OpenAI for content infringement and whatnot. And so we have this world in the content side, which you see oddly in different places. The other day I was trying out Atlas again, which is OpenAI's browser. And if you go to a New York Times story in Atlas and you say within the Atlas native chat GPT that's baked into it, if you say like summarize this page, it refuses to do it because they don't have an agreement on the content.

32:24M.G. Siegler:And that's wild to me because, again, it's the web. Like I can see it with my own two eyes and I'm telling the agent that I have access to to do it, but the agent doesn't have access to that content. So they won't do it. Now, why can't they just scrape my screen and see what I'm looking at to do it? And I can get around it by basically copying and pasting everything that's in that article that I want to read and putting it into the chatbot. But these are like the silly things and these silly edge cases that I feel that I fear we're going to increasingly run into. So I hear your points about that, yes, there will be fallback to the web, but I already feel like there's these ways that we're seeing that break at the edges.

33:04Big Technology Podcast Host:Right, right. Yeah, it'll be a very, I mean, there's going to be some serious fights here. So, okay, let me ask two questions, then we'll move on. Yeah. Two big picture questions. We've talked about these, you know, anthropic and open AI valuations and, you know, their addressable market, largely in terms of coding and enterprise, right? That's sort of been the thing that people think is going to take them to the promised land, not necessarily consumer. If this works though, maybe – again, because they would ingest so much of the experience online, those have to be massive, massive businesses.

33:42Big Technology Podcast Host:And so maybe this sort of super app style way to access the web, if it works, becomes the core business over time. Like it's almost the analog to the SaaS apocalypse just in consumer.

33:56M.G. Siegler:Yeah. And again, when I hear you talk about that, my mind naturally just goes to, I think that they need to do, they need to get that part in order because if, and when they try to do their own devices, like, and if those devices aren't screen predicated, how you're going to be able to do that is mostly through voice and, or I guess glasses in some capacity. but they need to basically have everything sort of teed up to perfection in order to do these workflows because the second that any of that stuff starts to fail or you have to say like oh just you're gonna have to wait till you get back to your computer like it just feels like it's gonna be too big of a hassle for a consumer for an end user to do it and they're just gonna stop sort of doing those types of use cases and I think this is just like you know basically what we saw play out with the first instantiations of Alexa and HomePod to some degrees and Google Home and everything else, Google Assistant, I guess, where because you couldn't do everything that you wanted to do, they basically just fell back to these really rudimentary use cases.

34:58M.G. Siegler:And the fear with these new devices coming out would be like, if they're just like really expensive, newfangled music players or weathermen and these other sort of very rudimentary, simple use cases, versus all this agentic stuff that we're talking about, which is obviously what they aspire for them to be. You know, you you're out and out on a walk and you just say like, yeah, send send an email to Rick and tell him that I'm going to be 10 minutes late. And it knows to follow up on the email that you had going back and forth to set up the appointment and whatnot. And if you can't trust that agent to do that without a screen, I feel like, yeah, that's where this all breaks down.

35:37Big Technology Podcast Host:Yeah, no, I love the way that you're thinking about it. We have Greg Brockman round three coming up at the big technology AI summit later this month. And I'm just kind of, I don't know, I'm gearing up to be like, where do we want to take this conversation? And I think it has to go in this area, especially, you know, what the plan is. I love what you're saying that if you can't get everybody to participate, you know, do you end up having, you need a network effect basically for this stuff to work. Otherwise, you know, it's just not, you're right. It might be just another fancy, fancy alarm clock.

36:08Big Technology Podcast Host:All right, here's my second big picture question. Going back to the Google example, we started with Google. Let's end the segment with Google. Yeah. Don't they need to get – they need to do this, right? Don't they need to get involved here? Like to me, sitting this out and letting the other companies try their hand at this experience and not putting all the effort into it just as like a recipe for disaster or am I being too inflammatory? No.

36:35M.G. Siegler:I mean I think that they do and I think that they probably recognize that. Again, I view this, this IO was super awkward because everything as we kicked off talking about was just like coming this summer or coming later this year, coming in a few weeks, coming to ultra users, coming to, and it's like, nothing is just like ready to go. And I feel like the whole reason they did the timing of it is because that historically this was when they've done it. And, you know, now in the age of AI, they didn't have the time. They didn't have the timing lined up for all these different things that they want to do and that they want to talk about.

37:07M.G. Siegler:and yeah, it's your big question, like shouldn't they be doing exactly sort of what everyone else is going for? I think that they know that they have to do that. I just don't, I think that because of the way that they have sort of aligned around doing, getting the search stuff out of the way, they sort of focused on their strengths and figured out like, we're the only ones who do this and this is our core business. So we have to get this nailed down. And then I do think that the Demas Hassabis team is probably behind the scenes working on all these crazy models and crazy health and life science ideas that they want to work on.

37:38M.G. Siegler:And so it's not to say that those things are a distraction, but it's just a matter of focus. It's what you want to focus on. And Google famously goes through these cycles where they're doing too much and then they have to pull back, right? And fewer wood behind fewer arrows and all that sort of stuff. And so I feel like they know that they need to do exactly what you're talking about. And I do think that they will get there at some point, but it's a matter of like, is there yeah is there like a first mover advantage much like there has been for cloud code right where it's like all of a sudden because uh even though by all accounts like codex is good but it's just not like cloud code was there and just hoovering up all of these users and so like if one of these players gets to that quote-unquote super app stage and yeah hoovers up all the users like is anyone else going to be willing to switch um especially with memory and everything else you know, that that's integrated into this.

38:35Yeah.

38:36Big Technology Podcast Host:Now I'm not a hundred percent on this, but this is one of the reasons why I think this is difficult for Google is that, so Google famously, when they built this great Gemini model, they sort of centralized it in something they called the engine room. Right. And they put some of their best people on it. And what they did was they then farmed it out in a way, or they worked, they collaborated, shall we say, with the many product areas within the company to integrate it, right? So Google has these famously sort of walled off product areas, not walled off, but like, you know, they're fiefdoms in a way, not in like the same nature as Apple, but they have their, you know, politics.

39:13Big Technology Podcast Host:And they built this engine room with AI and they sort of work together with the centralized group, work together with these product areas to integrate the AI in all the products. So that was sort of from the core pushing out. The tough part here, I think, is if you're going to get this right, you need to almost reverse that, right? You need the product areas working to centralize in a way, which will require some ego subsetting and some prioritization that some might not like. And that is sort of where you might end up hitting some sort of build-out wall where you're not able to work as fast as an OpenAI and Anthrop because they just don't have that legacy stuff to work through.

39:58M.G. Siegler:I think that's a very good point. I had not thought of it from that perspective, but you're right. It's basically Google's immense size and capabilities become a hindrance in the building out of this, right? Because imagine that they feel like they have to answer for OpenAI's super app, ChatGPT's super app coming out. And it has, you know, from what's been reported, it has ChatGPT baked in, it has Codex built in, and it has Atlas built in. So if Google feels like they have to answer that with something with Gemini, Chrome, and Anti-Gravity, and those are three totally disparate, huge teams working on these things, certainly Chrome, which has not been, you know, historically like LinkedIn, because LinkedIn to the AI group.

40:43M.G. Siegler:I know, again, we talked about it earlier, they have Gemini baked into it. But even now, it sort of feels tacked on. It feels like it's not an AI native product. And if they have to sort of make it an AI native product in order to meet the moment with regard to the super app question, like, can they really do that? And it's way harder than it will be for any of those much smaller, more nimble teams to do it, or who are more oriented it in the way that sort of Apple is or some other companies. I do think that it's going to be very, very hard for Google to do that. And that's a good reason for hope for how you compete.

41:19M.G. Siegler:Because again, like when you take a step back and you're open AI and you're looking at that landscape and you see Google and Google is a$4 trillion plus company and they have hundreds of thousands of employees and they have all of the cloud engineering, all the cloud capacity and TPUs and everything that they need. Like you look at that and say, like, how can I possibly compete with this? I'm a startup. I've raised more money than anyone's ever raised in history. But how am I going to compete with a$4 trillion company that already has all these inherent advantages? And that's how you do it. You use their strengths against them as a weakness, whereas like they can't integrate as well and as quickly as you can because they have all this legacy stuff.

41:57M.G. Siegler:And that's how, you know, Microsoft's of the world get disrupted and yada, yada.

42:01Big Technology Podcast Host:Just to go back to the Gmail example, if you are, let's say you're a super app, Right. And so with ChatGPT, Codex and Atlas together, let's say you had let's say OpenAI had Gmail. Let's say Gmail was one of their products. For this to work the best, you want Gmail to almost fall by the wayside, to disappear into the background and for these messages to be surfaced in ChatGPT. And if you are – let's say you are responsible for the Gmail product area, that is very hard for you. You want me to disappear myself for the greater good? It's very difficult. In a corporation, that is tough.

42:48M.G. Siegler:And I think you're exactly right because when I think of like the future of email, to use your example exactly, it's like i believe that the success state of the future of email in ai is that we're not going to have to use it all the time obviously and instead it becomes like our agents basically emailing each other and us getting these like to-do list app right things like where it's like uh yeah uh mg and alex uh emailed uh their agents emailed one another and uh we're setting up a time to coordinate you know, the next, the next podcast. And, um, you know, do you want X, Y, or Z time and just hit a button and, and select that.

43:24M.G. Siegler:And then it does the emails behind the scenes and you and I never opened Gmail again. And again, to your point, the PM for Gmail, like what are they doing in that world? Yeah. Uh, that doesn't seem to do great. Uh, and so, you know, and they're rolling out this new, one of the things that's not, that's supposedly coming, but again, not quite ready is this, you know, agentic version of Gmail where it's like a, from the screenshots that they've shared and whatnot, it looks like, you know, yeah, the high level, like to do's and things like that. And so they're trying to accommodate for that world that we're talking about.

43:56M.G. Siegler:But again, the real ultimate answer is again, not to open Gmail itself. And they, there's a, there's a tension there for sure.

44:04Big Technology Podcast Host:That's right. Yeah. When you were saying, oh, they're trying to do these to do's it's like, I'm thinking, but it just doesn't belong there. it belongs in Gemini let's take a break and come back and talk about the iPhone Fold and what's going on at Meta right after this summer always changes how I get dressed I want pieces that feel lighter and more comfortable but still put together that's where Kintz comes in they focus on well made essentials and breathable linen and soft organic cotton the kind of basics you will keep coming back to everything at Kintz is priced 50 to 80 percent less than similar brands because they work directly with ethical factories, cutting out the middlemen, so you're paying for quality, not brand markup.

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47:02Big Technology Podcast Host:The kind of visibility that used to take months, now it's just always on. If you're ready to stop guessing and start seeing, visit scribe.how slash bigtech. That's S-C-R-I-B-E dot how slash bigtech. And we're back here on Big Technology Podcast with M.G. Siegler of Spyglass. You can go to spyglass.org, sign up for the newsletter, highly recommend it. One of my favorite reads in the tech world. And I'm sure we're going to all be glued to Spyglass for the WWDC coming up this month. It's kind of funny, the way that you're, you know, obviously, I wonder the big news will be Siri. They may preview the iPhone fold.

47:41Big Technology Podcast Host:They may preview the glasses. It's sort of up in the air. We're going to have a new CEO that's incoming, right, that we're going to probably hear from a lot or a little. Maybe it's Tim Cook's last hurrah. Maybe it's the Turner Show. So many variables around WWDC. But anyway, let's talk about the iPhone fold because That to me is the thing that I'm most excited for. You call it the iPhone's BlackBerry moment in that it's kind of be – so for folks, if you're thinking about this and if you're on audio, the way that we need to describe this fold is it's not a phone that sort of folds out from a vertical axis, right?

48:16Big Technology Podcast Host:It's a phone that folds horizontally, kind of like an old flip phone. And that might make it easier to type because you won't have to hold it. So uniquely to make sure it doesn't fall over, which is what you pointed out in your story, MG. If that's the way that it looks like, I'll be honest. I'm a little bit stunned. The folding out on the vertical axis to me is always the benefit here. So you can watch things with a bigger screen. But Apple doesn't seem to be going that way. Talk through the fold.

48:50M.G. Siegler:So there's a few things in there. First, I wouldn't be shocked if it's still sort of marketed that it folds out horizontally, not vertically. So it's not like a flip phone. It's more like a fold. The weirdness that you're alluding to is basically because it's so short relative to the current foldable phone. So I have a pixel fold, which is, yeah, just when it's folded together, it looks like sort of the regular size of a regular, you know, smartphone that you would normally see like the iPhone looks right now. This new fold by all the mocks that we've seen coming out of Asia and everything else and all the leaks, it seems like it will be this short and squat, you know, little thing that looks like it should flip open like an old Razr and whatnot.

49:40M.G. Siegler:And obviously there is a Razer that does that now. And I think Samsung makes a version that does that. But I do think Apple will probably still align it around folding out more book style, even though it's short and fat, even though it might be awkward. But that's like that's the biggest thing about this, right? It seems like they have a good moment to sort of try to own these new sort of use cases for this new type of device that's not simply making a smaller screen and making it a bigger screen. if there's actual like ways to use the device when it's folded. And this is what I talk about in my piece, where it feels like it's actually a great typing device because it's a little bit fatter than what the current phone is, which is maybe a little bit too thin for people who are used to sort of thumb typing.

50:29M.G. Siegler:You know, and again, I allude back to the old BlackBerry days where those were a little bit fatter, for lack of a better phrase, a little bit wider. And so they were a little bit more conducive to that thumb typing, which obviously became a thing and Crackberry Thumb and all that sort of stuff. And so like there's a world in which we maybe go back to that because this device is a little bit better for typing when it's folded up like that. And then you unfold it to either do like you're talking about watch videos and do other sort of gaming and other content that way. And maybe it's for quote unquote real work if you want to have like two apps side by side and things of that nature.

51:03M.G. Siegler:But it's a very big question of like how they get this working. I think some of the reports are talking about that when it's unfolded, it will look a little bit more like maybe an iPad mini interface, but it won't be exactly iPad OS. But it will be a souped up version of iOS in terms of what it can showcase when it's like that. And I would imagine that's sort of like widgets and other things that are more than just the typical laid out apps on a screen because that would be sort of boring. And that just brings me back to the notion of like, I think if Apple is going to do this, and obviously they're doing it, I think that they would only do it or at least frame it that they would only do it if they can really do something different with it that's not just another form, the same iPhone, but another form factor of it.

51:49M.G. Siegler:I think that they want it to be sort of a newer type of device, a different style of iPhone where it brings different use cases with it. Now, if they can pull that off, who knows? I mean, again, no one's actually seen this. We've seen dummy units of it. We've seen what it looks like. I do not think we're going to see it at WWDC. I think that they will wait for the fall to do it. I think that, yeah, WWDC, they'll have their hands full with making sure Siri is right this time.

52:14Big Technology Podcast Host:So, okay. So that's sort of getting to WWDC. You know, neither of us expect the preview of the fold. I think there's just like that's the product with the most excitement in the Apple lineup. But we might see a Siri rollout. we might see do you think we'll see a preview of airpods with cameras do you think we'll see a preview of glasses i mean is this going to be so so there's a lot of pressure for them to deliver this updated siri this time but part of it also feels like there is a chance that it can just be like another transitional year of wwdc where like maybe siri is not completely ready there have been delays on that front there's going to be the ceo transfer is it just like a celebration of you know of the, you know, Apple's history and not much on the product front?

53:05M.G. Siegler:My guess would be that it's more, that you would, that talking about it now, you would feel underwhelmed. I think that it will be pretty straightforward. I think that they'll, you know, show off the new Siri. It's curious how they'll talk about it. A lot of reports suggested that they won't want to play up the Google element and the Gemini element too much, but you would presume that they sort of want to play it up so that people trust that, you know, they're going to do it right this time. So how they brand that will be interesting. I would be shocked if they show off any sort of newfangled hardware.

53:39M.G. Siegler:I think that there's a chance that they show off maybe like a new HomePod that's capable of doing it. There's reports that those have been in the works for a while and been ready for a while. They've just been waiting on AI, you know, the AI to sort of catch up. And so maybe there's ways that they do that. But I think that they'll probably show off the new use cases just on an iPhone and show off things like visual intelligence, which they've had for some time, but sort of a version that's actually working well this time and showing off Genmoji that looks better this time and whatever and image playgrounds that look better this time.

54:11M.G. Siegler:And again, the famous getting mom home from the airport, like will they actually be able to get her home this time and pull it off? Oh, my God.

54:18Big Technology Podcast Host:They're going to get trashed if they come out and they give you Genmoji and getting mom back from the airport again two years later.

54:26M.G. Siegler:I just – I have a hard time – they're not going to show off anything that's like – they're not going to show off the new glasses. They're not going to show off the Fold. The AirPods are maybe the closest thing that we have to an AI device that's likely more ready to roll. I'd just be shocked if they do that. I think that they're going to keep it pretty straightforward and say, like, hey, this is sort of our do-over AI event, and this time we got it right. And therefore, you should be happy, like, to use all these things and get excited. And maybe they'll say – maybe they'll throw out a bone and say, like, hey, it's going to be ready sooner than you're expecting.

55:00M.G. Siegler:Like, you don't necessarily have to wait for the fall. We'll have it in beta in the late summer so all of you guys can test it out. Because by a lot of accounts like Gurman in particular, this version of iOS is not going to be totally different and not a big sweeping change, right? It will largely be predicated around Siri again. And so maybe it will be ready to roll a little bit early. Maybe that's a surprise or something like that.

55:25Big Technology Podcast Host:I mean like the pitch is Siri that almost works now more almost than ever?

55:33M.G. Siegler:I think they'll have something a little more elegant than that. But yeah, I mean, I wouldn't be shocked if you and I are catching up in a month and sort of we're talking about like similarly to Google's, right? Because, again, it's sort of the same idea of do these big events, showcase events, make sense in the age of AI, right? Because AI just rolls at a different cadence than what product announcements do. And to Apple's credit, WWDC was always meant to be a developer conference. It sort of has morphed into this more consumer-facing thing over time. But it's not the iPhone event. It's not meant to be fully consumer-oriented.

56:13M.G. Siegler:It's going to be about APIs. It's going to be about all these different things. I mean the big thing, here's a big wild card. What if they did something like this? What if with the transition that you're talking about is we're moving away from the Cook era and into the Ternus era, and he wants to set the stage and Cook wants to set him up well, what if they make a big announcement around the app store and changing the fee structure? Like that would bring down the house, right? Like if they were able to actually finally change, you know, tear down those walls as it were and change the, you know, the cuts, change it from say, you know, 70, 30 to 80-20 or, you know, 85-15 even.

56:52M.G. Siegler:And, you know, make that sort of get ahead of some of these legal battles that they're in right now, right? It's not like fully magnanimous that they would be doing this. There's other reasons why they would do it. But I feel like something like that could be perceived, at least make the perception of such a conference good, even if they don't have that much to talk about from an AI perspective, let alone a new device perspective.

57:15Big Technology Podcast Host:Yeah, I wonder what the stock market would do, because that would take a hit. Directly from the services business. Yeah.

57:22M.G. Siegler:But again, think back to when Satya Nadella took over at Microsoft, right? One of the first things he did, introduced Office for iPad. There was talk that that had been the worst for a while under Balmer, but it was Nadella's moment to make it, put it out there and sort of set the tenor of how his administration, for lack of a better phrase, would go from there. And so what if Cook handing off to Ternus, setting a new stage for the next 10, 15 years of Apple?

57:50Big Technology Podcast Host:Yeah, that'll be – we'll have so much to talk about next month because we can recap it. But clearly like a big moment. It will be a transitional WWDC. The question is how big the transition will be. Of course, Cook to Ternus but also home-built Siri to Gemini Siri. It'll be really interesting. All right. Before we go, let's talk a little bit about what's going on at Meta where like the word mess has been associated with many things that they're doing from branding, which you pointed out. Let's just read it, folks. If you want to do a meta subscription, you can subscribe to WhatsApp Plus for$2.99, Facebook Plus for$3.99, Instagram Plus for$3.99, Meta One Plus for$7.99, Meta One Essential for$14.99, Meta One Premium for$19.99, and Meta One Advanced for$49.99.

58:45Big Technology Podcast Host:That's marketing in particular. You call this out. And Spyglass, MG. I mean it does – this is where I wanted to take our discussion about meta. You wrote, we're not quite in Microsoftian territory, but we're close. Maybe meta should just stick with ads. And between sort of the uninspired product direction and now subscriptions, which you say, okay, this is what you do when you're late stage and you need to melt the profit out of your users. And these layoffs where people have – within the company, the morale is terrible. State of meta looks kind of rough right now. It does.

59:24M.G. Siegler:And, you know, also not helped by the fact that every time there's some sort of negative story, certainly culturally, you know, a negative report, they are so adamant about pushing back against it that it just feels disingenuous, right? Like, obviously, things are not, it's a big company, things are not always going to be hunky dory. There's going to be, you know, turf disputes, like we talked about earlier, between big factions of companies that are sort of moving in different directions and maybe have different priorities. And so not to acknowledge that and pretend like everything's going fine and sort of a little bit gaslighting, that doesn't help their whole, I think, vibe going on right now.

1:00:01M.G. Siegler:And look, they released the first new models, early versions of them. They're first to admit that they're not quite at the frontier yet. And so sort of like Google, they're going to promise those down the road, right? And how long does it take them to get there? We'll see. And do they get there with coding? We'll see. It seems like they're behind there as well to our earlier discussion. But yeah, like this whole pricing thing, you brought up just the various different levels of the tiers. But the fact that you named all of those and almost all those things do different things. It's not like they're all just for different AI tiers.

1:00:39M.G. Siegler:They're all just for different product tiers. It's so confusing in terms of what each tier offers you that I don't really understand why they would roll it out that way. Other than to, you know, earlier point, like, I do think that they are under some pressure to certainly from the highest level to move towards a sort of more sustainable model for their business, which is not right now, I think it's still 98 % predicate around ads. And if you believe that we're sort of at like at the top, and everyone famously has always predicted, like, you know, we're at the top of Facebook, and we're at the top of all these services, and then they just keep growing.

1:01:16M.G. Siegler:But the reality is like, they're not really growing anymore in Western markets, maybe they're growing in some, you know, some pockets of different parts of the world. But they're not growing in the place that, you know, that they feel like they can monetize as effectively with the ad product that they've been doing. And so that plus all the spend famous CapEx spend that they're doing, all the spend that they obviously spent on the metaverse, which may or may not end up, you know, coming, coming to anything. It feels like that they're, They're probably under some pressure to figure out these new models.

1:01:46M.G. Siegler:Zuckerberg, even this week or this past week, was in the news again saying, like basically acknowledging that with all the CapEx spend, if they need to, they can roll out a cloud, right? They can roll out a cloud that other businesses can use. And I think that's a direct result of what we saw with Elon Musk and SpaceX of leading up to the SpaceX IPO. It's all of a sudden, oh, they're a neocloud. That's great. Like, don't worry about this, how much money XAI is losing because it's just a neocloud now for Anthropic and and for Cursor. And this is great. Like these are great growth businesses now.

1:02:18M.G. Siegler:And so can you imagine Meta becomes like a neocloud business based off of all the CapEx spend that they're doing? And like we I could joke about that, but I don't I wouldn't put it fully past them if they need to. And say a year from now, you know, suggest to Wall Street, like, look, we're being a little bit more prudent with how we're trying to do the spend. And we want to bring money in beyond just the advertising layer, which, again, AI is helpful with, but it's not the same return that the other peer group is seeing with their CapEx spend. Okay.

1:02:53Big Technology Podcast Host:One more thing before we go. Do you have like another minute or two? Yeah, yeah.

1:02:56M.G. Siegler:Keep going. Okay.

1:02:57Big Technology Podcast Host:Love it when news breaks while we're recording. News just broke. Oh, what is it? Anthropic has filed to go public. Really? Wow. Today, Anthropic confidentially submitted a draft registration statement on Form S-1 to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for a proposed initial public offering of our common stock. So they have now – it looks like they've jumped the gun on OpenAI. I was going to say.

1:03:21M.G. Siegler:So there was the report last week, right, that – and it was right ahead of SpaceX filing their S-1. It seemed very not coincidental that OpenAI let it perhaps leak out that they would be filing soon. In one of the reports, it suggested that it would be last Friday. As far as we know, that didn't happen, or at least it never leaked out. Obviously, they would file confidentially too. So either they filed and no one found out about it, or Anthropic just pulled a quick one on them and got out ahead of them, which would be wild. Because we've talked about this before. Or if OpenAI goes out, if Anthropic goes out before OpenAI does, OpenAI is in a lot of trouble from a public listing perspective, just because we even talked about this when it was still just the notion that they would have a better bottom line, right?

1:04:12Like that they wouldn't be burning money for as long as OpenAI would and they would get to profitability quicker.

1:04:18M.G. Siegler:Now the reports are that Anthropic has already turned in some – at least at some level perhaps dipped into profitability because of just the crazy growth that they're seeing. And if they're now growing faster at the top line and have a higher valuation, like this is going to be a narrative nightmare for OpenAI to go – to try to also go public in.

1:04:43Big Technology Podcast Host:This almost reminds me of like the book publishing games where if you have a book that's somewhat similar to someone else's, you might announce your publication date to sort of clear the deck. But they also might keep theirs secret until they're ready. And I wouldn't be totally stunned if OpenAI has also filed and is trying to move in silence.

1:05:08M.G. Siegler:And now they would have to, of course, put it out there. Don't worry. We filed on Friday. We're ahead of them by two days or whatever. The silly thing about this is, of course, like by filing, you know, this is filing confidentially. You don't necessarily have to go out. You're just like you're basically putting the wheels in motion so that if you want to, you can have that optionality. And when I saw that leak last week about OpenAI doing that, I thought it was both for optics because obviously they would take any chance they can get against going after Elon, their foil, you know, to try to take some, steal some momentum or just some buzz out of that, out of those sales.

1:05:43M.G. Siegler:but it also gives them the optionality to go out if they feel like they needed to against Anthropic. That doesn't necessarily mean that they would. And I feel like Anthropic doing it now, though, puts so much pressure on them to actually have to do it because now they're going to just be afraid that if they don't go out, Anthropic could go out at any moment. And then, like, again, that's a big, big problem for them.

1:06:05Big Technology Podcast Host:Yeah, talk briefly again, and then we'll head out. Why is it important for OpenAI to go before Anthropic?

1:06:12M.G. Siegler:So much of this, to your book publishing point, is around the narratives and around drumming up investor interest in these stocks. And while SpaceX and OpenAI are interesting because obviously SpaceX has XAI now, which is directly analogous in ways to OpenAI's business, they're very different businesses. Obviously, OpenAI doesn't have a rocket launching arm, nor do they have Twitter, probably for better in that case. And so they don't have a lot of overlap. And so there's going to be comps that are done, like market comparables done between the two companies on their AI businesses, but they're not direct.

1:06:53M.G. Siegler:Anthropic and OpenAI would be much more viewed as direct, obviously, competitors between the two. Now, their businesses, as we've been talking about, are different in ways. But as we've also spent a lot of this conversation about, they're converging, right? Because OpenAI feels like they have to go after what Anthropic's been able to tap into with developers. And yeah, leaning into coding and then eventually agentic work. And so they are converging. And the comps between Anthropic and OpenAI that we're seeing with these most recent fundraisers just increasingly do not look good for OpenAI. And so when public investors see that, they are going to say, OK, we're going to invest in one of these or the other.

1:07:37M.G. Siegler:Which one are we going to invest in? Previously, when you said ChatGPT was by far and away the leader in top line revenue, and yeah, they might be behind in bottom line because they're spending so much on servers. and they want to grow into a bigger market opportunity than what Anthropic could do. That's the narrative they would have projected with that. But now the fact that, again, they're converging businesses and that Anthropic has sort of zoomed ahead on the top line, too, is a real, real big problem. Now, I would assume that OpenAI would try to counter by saying, look, we still have 900 million MAUs, which is also slightly problematic because that number has not shifted in a while.

1:08:18M.G. Siegler:And clearly they've wanted it to shift above a billion so that they can announce that. And it seems like the IO point, Sundar was on stage announcing that Gemini is also at 900 million MAU. So that's not, but still they would probably say, look, we have a lot more regular and consumer usage than what Anthropic has. And so that's going to be our narrative. But I don't, I, again, when you're, when you're talking to and out there pitching investors and they're going to look for comps. And those two are the, you know, the most direct comps to one another. And one of them is just overtaking the other one.

1:08:52M.G. Siegler:And so unless in the next six months, you know, before they were to go out, unless OpenAI has a way to zoom back ahead, heavily relying or pushing codecs, you would assume like that's going to be a big problem. Now, one other thing I would just add, this is highly controversial, you know, in the past like few months, and it's playing out right now as SpaceX gears up to go. any day now. There have been changes to the indice rules where apparently SpaceX, when they list, are going to be included in maybe not the S &P 500 right away, but they're also trying to change the rules for inclusion into that so that they no longer have a holding period.

1:09:32M.G. Siegler:And so what that means for both OpenAI and Anthropic potentially is that they're big enough where all of them plus SpaceX would all go into these industries. And that just means that the bunch of different mutual funds and all sorts of big funds automatically have to rebalance and buy into these. And so you can see a world in which maybe the comps and all the numbers don't matter so much because these basically these they're going to be included in these indices and these mutual funds are going to have to buy in in major ways regardless. And so maybe that's an argument for going out now, I guess.

1:10:08M.G. Siegler:But again, I'm trying to paint like the most like roundabout picture of how like how you can make an argument for open AI going out at the same time as Anthropic. Maybe open AI just waits as a public company for longer. But would they they need to raise money still? And so are they able to do that?

1:10:26Big Technology Podcast Host:Or maybe they do. Right. That's sort of the one thing that sort of remains hanging for me is Anthropic just raised sixty five billion dollars. They announced it last week. I know. It's opening. I just raised one hundred twenty two billion. Is the burn that great that they have to go public to keep funding it? And remember, I don't know, you know, what's left after the public market. Right. In terms of fundraising.

1:10:46M.G. Siegler:Well, they just have easier access to raise debt, you know, if they're public and they'll be able to use their stock sort of in a more liquid way. You know, and there's other more granular reasons that I'm not well versed enough in to know exactly why they would do it. I would imagine, though, at the highest level, they're doing it because the window's open, right? And if and when it changes, they could be stuck if they don't go out when the window is open, knowing that they need to continually be fundraising. Now, to your point of do they need to keep fundraising? I would say, yeah, Anthropix seems like in a good spot, given that talk of profitability and whatnot.

1:11:21M.G. Siegler:But remember, they're also in a bit of a tricky spot, which OpenAI has played up, certainly, in that they haven't had the capacity to meet the demand. And so now they're striking these deals with SpaceX, as we talked about, and with other neoclouds. And those deals are not cheap. And those cost billions and billions of dollars. What's the report that they're paying like$15 billion potentially a year to SpaceX to lease the Colossus Data Center? And so like, yeah, I mean, you can burn a lot of your money that you just raised quickly if you're all of a sudden spending it right back to these neoclouds to meet capacity.

1:11:54M.G. Siegler:And so, you know, how that plays out, it's June now. Do they go out before the end of the year? I don't. I mean, there's so many variables in between now and then. I feel like I'm a broken record on this, like that. Yes. A lot could change in between now and the time that they would go out. But SpaceX is going to go public, you know, this week, the end of this week or early next. And so or maybe the 11th, you know, the latest or whatnot. And so they're going to be out there and they're going to test that public appetite. And they're also going to test the fences of what we were just talking about with regard to these indices buying in and what that will look like.

1:12:28M.G. Siegler:Like there's a world in which SpaceX's stock market cap just zooms way past two trillion, like in an instant because of this automatic buying that happens, which is wild.

1:12:39Big Technology Podcast Host:Definitely. Anthropic made its announcement about the confidential filing to go public. Two paragraphs on his blog post did not pre-brief any news publications. So talk about a micro.

1:12:51M.G. Siegler:Your move, OpenAI, your move.

1:12:54Big Technology Podcast Host:MD, great to see you. It's always fun to talk about breaking news live. So thank you again for coming on.

1:13:00M.G. Siegler:Likewise. And you totally hit me with that blind, Alex. I didn't even get a push notification about it. So wow.

1:13:05Big Technology Podcast Host:Oh, yeah. I emailed in my inbox about 10 minutes ago. But it's good that we were able to address it. All right. Thanks again. All right, everybody. Thank you so much for listening and watching. Go check out Spyglass, spyglass.org. Highly recommend you sign up. And we'll see you next time on Big Technology Podcast. You can't reason with the sun. Trust us. We've tried. This summer, it's time to put that angry ball of fire on mute. Columbia's OmniShade technology is engineered to protect you from the sun's harsh rays that can burn and damage your skin. The sun is relentless, but so is our gear. Level up your summer at Columbia.com to spend more time outside and less time slathering on aloe lotion.

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