More OpenAI Executive Drama, Is Siri Seriously Broken?, Meta’s Elusive Next Hit

21:44M.G. Siegler:It seems like it's a fast-growing business codex for them. But it's still not nearly as big as Cloud Code is. And they've got Cursor out there and they've got – and myriad other would-be competitors. And so these next few months are going to be even more fascinating than they always are for OpenAI. The fact that these past few years have been, this has been arguably the most interesting company in the world to watch. And now these next few months seem like they're going to be absolutely vital to watch. mg let me ask you is this wise the fact that open ai is going to build this super app that will have a computer use or browser use chat cpt and codex all together and anthropic also has their own version of this super app which is you know claude and co-work and claude code all together do you think that this is the right use case to be running after basically this AI code jockey that can just basically go do everything for you, even if you're not technical?

22:51M.G. Siegler:I mean, I go back and forth a little bit on this. And as I think the companies do, right, it's like the famous bundling and unbundling quote, right? The Jim Barksdale back in the day, it's just like companies always do this from meta. Meta famously has done this multiple times now, right, where they have all these products inside of back in the day, Facebook, and then they start to unbundle them into their own sort of disparate products. And then later they've realized like, oh, actually we should bring them all back in together. And so companies just bundle and unbundle. And OpenAI, again, is just doing it a little bit faster, it feels like, than sort of historically has been the case.

23:25M.G. Siegler:Do I think it's a good strategy? I think it's probably the right thing to do right now for them because, again, they have this massive user base with ChatGPT. They have what they feel like is a good competitive product in Codex. If they're able to bring the two of them together, I think that it makes sense in a world. If you truly believe that Codex is not just going to be coding for developers, if you believe it's going to be the future of sort of agentic software, that it's going to be meant for consumers as well as enterprise and everything sort of all in one, then I think it makes sense to do that.

24:05M.G. Siegler:and I think that Claude right now sort of already has that baked in. They're all part of the same at least Mac app payload right now. I think there's other variables at play with regard to mobile like how you make this all work on mobile and what that might look like. But at least for now, I think it probably makes sense and I think it's sound strategy to do it. There is a risk though obviously that both like your app just becomes this bloated mess of, you know, Microsoft Office and you've got dropdowns and you've got dropdowns of dropdowns. And, and, and, uh, uh, chat TPT has had this problem in the past, right.

24:42M.G. Siegler:With the model picker and they had to simplify things. And so when you're bringing in two products together and potentially three, as we mentioned with, with Atlas in the, in the mix as well, like, does it just become the sort of thing that, that consumers all of a sudden don't like because it's, it's just like this, this, uh, Frankenstein of a product, Frankenstein's monster of a product. And so there's risk to it. But again, I think that their strategy is to basically leverage that ChatGPT massive user base in order to, again, get out ahead or try to stop the growth of Anthropik that they're seeing.

25:14Right. And it is interesting because there used to be like OpenAI was going after consumer, Anthropik was going after enterprise. Now they're going after the same thing. And it really does take the experience to a different level, right? It goes from AI being a chatbot to AI being this like personalized agent for you that can help you with work or your personal life. And so I guess what I'm asking is, do you believe in that vision? Like, do you think that is appealing enough to pivot the entire company toward? And if it is, I mean, you're basically going to see OpenAI versus Anthropik head to head.

25:50So who do you think wins?

25:52M.G. Siegler:So first, I do think that it is, again, I think it's directionally the right bet. I think we've seen enough now of the early signs. And I think it was, frankly, I'm not sure how much it was clawed code that drove this decision as much as it's clawed co-work, right? The offshoot that sort of goes after the more, again, computer use, agentic use cases that are more meant for regular day, everyday usage of, quote unquote, regular people, not just developers coding. Where OpenAI must have looked at that mixed with what's been going on with OpenClaw and just been like, look, we need to be the one go to shop for everyone to do this.

26:34M.G. Siegler:We already have ChatGPT, which has sort of become the Kleenex of, you know, the ubiquitous brand within AI. And we have a risk of losing that if we're not there with these sort of agentic coding and agentic services. And again, it feels like it's early, even now, like with all the momentum and all the hype around these things, it still feels like it's too early for these things to really take off in a meaningful way on the mainstream. but I think that you're seeing everyone sort of go after little pieces of it. Again, we talked about OpenClaw. It felt like there's a movement behind that, but at the same time it's sort of too obtuse, I think, for sort of everyday regular people to wrap their heads around.

27:19M.G. Siegler:Claude Code comes in and others' perplexity and even Microsoft and some others are now trying to make it more regular user, consumer friendly. these general ideas about using agents on your behalf, on your computer, and letting them sort of roam free and sort of trying to sequester them or put them in their own little sandbox to make it a little bit safer so people aren't doing all the bad things that you can easily go down the path of. And so you ask, do I think that OpenAI or Anthropic has a better shot of sort of doing this. Again, OpenAI, thanks to just ChatGPT, has a huge, huge advantage in terms of just installed user base.

28:06M.G. Siegler:And when they're shoving this new product, this new super app in everyone's face, presumably in the next couple of months, they're going to have the opportunity to overtake certainly the momentum that Anthropic has. That said, Anthropic made the absolute right bet here, whereas OpenAI seemingly did not, at least for where we stand right now. And everything they've done over the past few months has just been insanely impressive of how they've angled what seemed to be this enterprise-oriented company and product towards being able to do some things which may or may not be the future of AI, at least in the relative short term.

28:44M.G. Siegler:So I gave you a non-answer, but yeah, I mean... A lot of it is TVD. Yeah. Right now, I would bet, honestly, on Anthropic doing it first, doing it better. But it really comes down to the timing of when OpenAI gets this super app out there. And if the world is ready for sort of, yeah, all this agentic workflows that come in. And I still think it's early. And so I think that they'll have some time to be able to sort of catch up to all the work that Anthropic's been doing. Which, by the way, just going back to the numbers for a second, when I looked at the published charts, whilst your journal published those charts, it's sort of incredible that Anthropic is where they are given the relatively much smaller spend on compute versus OpenAI, right?

29:38M.G. Siegler:And that's still going to be the case from these projections going forward. And it's not like, you know, in some cases, of course, you could argue OpenAI's models are a little bit better. But by all accounts, Claude is near the top of most things, most of the leaderboards for most use cases. And again, they've done that without nearly the amount of spend, it seems like, from OpenAI. But that's going to hurt Anthropic because it seems already like the demand for their services is outpacing what they're willing to invest in from a compute standpoint. That's just the sense I get from seeing the developers react.

30:11They just did this thing where they pulled back some of the cloud code from OpenClaw type instances. And it is interesting because Anthropics, like we are going to build with caution and OpenAI is like we're going to build because we see the demand going this way, which is probably what's causing those issues with the CFO in the beginning. But if you get to the point where the demand is outstripping your ability to deliver the service and you're delivering the same service as OpenAI, people are going to go to OpenAI.

30:39M.G. Siegler:Yeah, and that's true. And we're seeing that right now, right? I think even today sort of Anthropic had a bit of downtime. And I think that they're probably just getting stretched in ways that are very unnatural to them. And again, before when we were talking about when these two companies were going down separate paths, like that was basically, yeah, I wrote about that angle a little bit. Like the two roads diverged because it did feel like basically Anthropic was totally fine with letting OpenAI take on that CapEx spend, that insane CapEx spend, while they sort of, yeah, just sort of focused on their meat and potatoes and what they needed and sort of they were just going to spend for what they needed.

31:16M.G. Siegler:But yes, to your point, the flip side of that is that now OpenAI may be in a relatively better position from a pure capacity standpoint, right? But again, I'm sort of talking more about the way that they've been able to not spend as much and still do the model training has been insanely impressive. It's out of doubt. But you're right. If capacity ends up mattering far more, what is Anthropics' story there? Because again, this is a company also trying to go public. And if they all of a sudden realize we are badly, badly server constrained. We need to start cutting deals left and right with all of the Neo clouds, with all of the big tech partners.

32:03M.G. Siegler:The reality is like just everyone's constrained right now. So how are they going to be able to do that? By the way, every time that does happen, like OpenAI had this issue at the end of last year where the demand outstripped their ability to deliver to the compute. They did go out and they made those deals, but you're kind of over a barrel then and your margin goes down because you're paying so much for the data centers. Yes. And that was the story of sort of the end of last year. And I think it's mentioned in one of those stories today, right? Like their margins are not going the wrong way. They've been going the wrong way.

32:31M.G. Siegler:And that's, it's largely sounds like it's just the under, under appreciation for how inference costs would, would sort of go through the roof. And that's, yeah, again, that's demand and utilization of these things. Can I share like one perspective of the way I think this will go? So, you know how like the, these GPT-5 series models, they'll give you an answer. And I think they've gotten a little bit better at this, but like basically every question you've had, they've tried to do something useful for you. So they've been like, let me build you a PDF of that or give you a five step plan and I'll make that an image.

33:09Or, you know, why don't I take that idea that you had for a business and then flesh it out and deliver it to you in a doc? I think as all this stuff merges that will end up being either a let me build you an app that will be able to you know sort of handle some of these things that you want to do like for instance let's just take the fitness example you know okay you have some your key coming to back to me with these fitness ideas I think I can build you an app that will sort of you know help you accomplish those goals or even take it a step further let's say you're asking I'm just gonna use an example from my world, let's say you're asking it for help about like how to break a video into chapters.

33:47And this is something I spoke with Greg Brockman about last week. You know, instead of just taking the transcript and breaking it into chapters, this thing will now want to go into Adobe Premiere and start the edit for you. It's going to just take that one step further because it knows what you're trying to do. It knows your interests and having the ability to code and go out and get stuff done. It can become proactive about suggesting these things and then do more than just give you that PDF or the business plan.

34:12M.G. Siegler:That's interesting. When you're talking about that, my mind goes to the, you know, the teaching a man to fish, you know, idea. And like, basically, AI is saying, like, we know what you're trying to do. So we're just going to go ahead and do that. So you can do this and you don't have to keep coming back over here. And you know, doing it step by step and slowly. One other thing that that jogged in my head while hearing you talk through that, I do wonder if there's a way, and this is sort of delicate given privacy and whatnot, but like you think about how back in the day when YouTube and Netflix and just the sort of other services along those lines had to scale.

34:53M.G. Siegler:and they sort of realized like rather than, you know, sort of doing the same thing over and over again, they were able to sort of save up some of the content that they knew would be sort of pulled by, was going to be asked for by multiple people. And instead they would just serve, they've had one version of that and then they would distribute it out, right, to whoever asked for it. Like, is there a way in which AI for some of these, you know, for some of these ideas and queries that are just getting asked over and over again. And maybe they're already doing this to some degree, but they can stop sort of trying to do everything on the fly and instead sort of go back to their own sort of broader memory of things that have been asked in the past and sort of reference that up just as a way for like a, you know, they would never frame it this way, but it's like a good cost-saving mechanism, right?

35:40M.G. Siegler:Like when you don't have to do the same sort of queries over, or sorry, you don't have to run basically the models and do the inference over and over again because you already have a corpus of data that have people that have asked for this. I mean, considering that I would imagine the vast majority of users have the default toggle on to allow the AIs to train on my conversations. I mean, basically, wittingly or not, most of us are giving these things permission to do this. Exactly what you said. Yeah, we'll see. We'll see. Yeah, it's going to get, like you said, I agree with you. can get very interesting very quickly, especially over the next few months as we see this all play out.

36:23You know, IPO notwithstanding, although that will add a new wrinkle to it and we'll be able to see even more data on the revenue numbers.

36:30M.G. Siegler:Yeah, and I guess so if, so as talked about, SpaceX has confidentially filed. It sounds like they're targeting June. So if OpenAI and Anthropic really want to go out and they're both said they're targeting Q4, at least those are the reports. They haven't said that, but those are the, you know, the internal reports say that. you know we're looking at the end of you know summer early fall when they would have to sort of file and and um so those are the targets that we're going to be looking for and seeing what how their businesses look at that point okay i was gonna say they should both wait but they won't but do you think they should wait maybe they should just go out now um i just raise get get out there raise that money.

37:12M.G. Siegler:I mean, well, I mean, that is the, that is the unstated thing here, which is that we can go back and forth about whether they should or not. But the reality is like, given these numbers, open AI is going to need to go public. Like they need the capital and an anthropic as well. Like they basically have tapped into all of the possible, uh, you know, private, uh, capital. I'm sure there's some other things out there. There'll be other little like strategic things that come in. And I say little, I mean, billions of dollars, of course. Do you think the Gulf money is still in play given what's going on in Iran right now?

37:45That's a good question. And actually, because I thought that they were the next one, the final boss, then UIPO, but we haven't heard that mention at all.

37:52M.G. Siegler:Some of it in there, right? MGX. Right. That's true. So there is already quite a bit of money in there, but yeah, I mean, Sam Altman and Dario have been spending time over there for reasons, right? They're establishing these relationships. So yes, That would be sort of the one final thing. But as you noted, given all the turmoil in the region right now, it's a little bit tricky. But at the same time, there's other reports like there was headlines about today just about the debt that the Mideast wealth funds are putting into the Warner Brothers deal, which we previously talked about, right, for Paramount and Warner Brothers.

38:26M.G. Siegler:And so they're still apparently active doing that. And so it seems like they're still open for business. But still, at the end of the day, at some point, OpenAI and Anthropic are going to have to go public in order to just access the amount, the sheer amount of capital and not meaning in one big slug. Because, again, they're already raising rounds that are bigger than any IPO. But it's just like all different sort of instruments that you have access to when you have, you know, when you're a fully liquid public company and the different mechanisms you can use. because remember again, like open AI in particular has had a really hard time.

39:01M.G. Siegler:And this was in some of the reporting today as well, like with regard to trying to build their own data centers, because they just, they don't have profits. Like what, how are they, you typically do that with debt and they're having a hell of a time raising debt because of the financials of the company. And so, you know, if, and when they go public, while they might not be profitable for some time, at the very least, they'll have more avenues and more levers to pull in order to put some of those wheels in motion. All right, let's go to a break because we have plenty more to talk about, including what's going on with Siri and then the latest that we have on Meta's attempt to diversify its business beyond advertising.

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42:46Definitely recommend you go check it out and sign up. All right, M.G. So, you know, I kind of titled this section is Siri, seriously still broken because it does seem like we keep getting more and more big plans from Apple about what Siri can be. But yes, here we are in April 2026. Nearly it's going to be, I mean, a couple of months away from four years after ChatJPT has launched and the thing is still terrible. So let's just talk about the latest and then we can kind of riff on what the vision year is and whether they'll be able to accomplish it. You highlighted some reporting from Mark Gurman at Bloomberg where Gurman said that Apple is testing a dedicated Siri app for the iPhone.

43:32The app's main interface will display prior conversations in either a list or a grid of rounded rectangles with text previews. Users can pin favorite chats, save older conversations, search across interactions and start new chats. The conversation view resembles a thread in Apple's Messages app. You also, sorry, Gurman also highlighted that one new design in testing places for Siri is at the top of the screen within the dynamic island. There are also some reports that it's going to use the action button on the phone. So it is interesting. It seems like Apple is basically kind of warming to the idea that it's going to bake a chatbot app or Siri, the chatbot app built on top of Google directly into the operating system, whether that's above the dynamic island in its own app, using an action button or a combination of all of the above.

44:27But yet again, you know, Siri is not really ready to do that. So what do you think this is all about? What do you think this means? Where do you think it's going? And do you think Apple is capable of pulling it off?

44:39M.G. Siegler:I think this is a good sign, the fact that they're going to do a standalone app, you know, per German's reporting. I actually had written about this last year that it seemed wild to me that they weren't going to do it right, because the previous reporting had said that Siri was going to sort of remain as it has been over the past 15 years, where it's sort of in the background and you invoke it by either saying, you know, hey, so and so, which I don't want to do because I'll trigger all of my devices right now, or using some sort of software or button or whatnot. But now if they have an app, it felt like they needed to do that because that is basically the standard, thanks to ChatGPT, that everyone is used to now.

45:19M.G. Siegler:Like you go to, you say like, Like, oh, I'm going to use AI to do this. And you either, you know, at the very least, you're loading up then a website to do it. But on a phone, you're definitely loading an app. You're not talking to Siri in the background. And so it felt like this was the type of thing that historically Apple would learn the hard way, meaning like they'd roll it out. They wouldn't have the app. People would be confused and not understand like where Siri's app is. And then they would eventually launch the app. But instead, it feels like they're getting ahead of it by doing that and sort of recognizing like this is the reality of the market, even though they've historically said they've just historically by many reports now, you know, in the past have disparaged the idea of a chatbot and an app, right, for those things.

46:04M.G. Siegler:They thought that AI would be some bigger, more grandiose thing where it's, again, running in the background and a part of every app and doesn't need to be its own standalone thing. But that's not the reality of the market right now. The reality is like people are going to want this chat app and they're going to want a repository to see what they've asked before. And they had no way to do that without building an app. And so I think it's a good sign. You know, yes, everything continues to be delayed, but it's obvious now that they're just waiting for WWDC coming up. They announced the dates of it coming up next June, which will be the two year anniversary of when they last announced, you know, everything that was coming before famously, infamously having to pull back all the things that they could just couldn't ship on time.

46:46M.G. Siegler:And so I'm getting more optimistic as time is going on that I think that they're going to do it right this time, that they have obviously the deal in place with Google to use Gemini and Gemini is going to underpin the Siri models. And now the new reports that they're going to allow other third parties potentially to come in there, including obviously they've already had ChatGPT as a part of it. I think it's way too buried for what it's been right now. It's way too buried within Siri. But if they make it more of a first-class citizen and along with Claude, if you wanted Claude, if you wanted Perplexity, if you wanted any number of other sort of apps, they'll just allow them to plug right into it on top of their baseline Siri powered by Gemini.

47:29M.G. Siegler:I think that's the right approach, and I'm getting optimistic. I know this sounds foolish given the 15 years, given we've been fooled every single year for those 15 years. But I think that they're starting to sort of come into focus on what this should look like for them. interestingly their perspective of yeah it's got to be a chatbot app kind of is now changing places with the others which are like it should be an ai that is sort of magical and baked into all programming hey it's baby steps this is apple like they're always going to be you know late to the game and and that's the real risk with ai right even even at a bigger level like the ai moves so fast relative to other technology and apple historically has come into uh markets later than competitors and sort of, quote unquote, done it right, done it correctly.

48:16M.G. Siegler:And so that might be the case here where they make the most beautiful, the best sort of AI chat app that anyone's ever done. And it makes the others sort of look much worse, more childish or whatnot. And then everyone else, though, has moved on to these agentic full on service suites of AI. And Apple then has to sort of go back to the drawing board and try to hustle to come up with that as quickly as possible. Right. I mean, it is interesting. Like Apple still hasn't gotten chatbot right. And opening I and Anthropic are already on to the next thing. And you sort of highlight this in your story.

48:54You talk about the biggest issue or the bigger issue remains that by outsourcing the core work to Google, Apple might never be able to catch up from a pure technology standpoint. And this encumbers the true what's next shift in hardware. And I think this kind of points we've been having these like debates back and forth on the show for a little bit about whether Apple was actually right and not making these big investments in AI development and sort of what does it lose if it just implements like Google's technology into its products and doesn't have to do all that big R &D spend. But I think the answer really is that if you don't do the R &D spend, you're working in a technology world that's going to be passing you by.

49:33And by the time you catch up on step one, your competitors can be at step three or four. And it's basically at their whims as to whether you're even able to participate in that game. That's the problem.

49:47M.G. Siegler:Yeah. And sort of, so I think that that's all correct. And there's also the sort of the second order effect of that, which is that, look, they may or may not be behind on the product side and with the models. But what if even just by not sort of competing in that space, while it may make a lot of sense financially, they run the real risk that they just never get the right DNA within the company and the right mentality to really be able to compete in AI. And if you believe that it's the future technology that sort of permeates everything, there's a real risk that they just don't have, again, that right mindset.

50:25M.G. Siegler:And they are constantly, as you know, running a step behind and or they don't quite have all the right people in place to be able to execute on this. And as we just talked about, this is technology that's moving faster than any other technology that's come before it. And so it's not just being behind. It's that they will fall increasingly further and further and further behind. And I do think that that's a real risk. And it's also like it goes back to the notion that, you know, Apple has long sort of adhered to, which is that like, you know, if the whole mentality of if you want to, you know, prove yourself in computing and in hardware, you've got to sorry, in software, you've got to make hardware.

51:09M.G. Siegler:And it's like, what if in order to prove yourself in this next phase of computing, like you also have to sort of make your own AI like that's a part of it. And Apple is sort of seeding that to Google right now. And you'd hope like they have their own projects, obviously, that they've been working on internally. You'd hope that this is just a stopgap measure. But at the same time, what if they can never bridge that gap because they're just, you know, going and seeding that work right now? And this is almost the perfect setup for what we had planned to speak about next, which is should they acquire Anthropic?

51:42Now, it's been floated in the discourse, shall we say, that maybe Apple should try to acquire Anthropic. And you wrote about it a little bit over the past month. We never really spoke about it too much in depth on the show just because it seemed like Dario just I couldn't imagine Dario selling that company to Tim Cook and being a subsidiary of Apple. And now also the finances might just be unworkable for Apple's a$3.8 trillion company. and Anthropic is probably going to go public at a trillion. So, you know, maybe more than a fourth of Apple would have to go towards buying Anthropic. But let's throw that aside, throw that skepticism aside and just give you the floor here to talk about what an acquisition like this could look like.

52:29M.G. Siegler:Yeah. And this was, to be clear, like more of a thought experiment. I couched it, right? Like that. I don't think this is going to happen, but I did think my jumping off point was the, you know, as we've talked about in previous episodes, the Anthropic and DOD situation, right? Like that to me made a unique moment in time potential here, right? Where Anthropic was under attack from the government and still is. And so would they, you know, be potentially more amenable to doing a type of acquisition, meaning getting acquired by one of the big tech companies in order to protect them and ensure that they can continue to do what their mission is.

53:10M.G. Siegler:And if you look around the landscape, who's the only real of the big tech companies that would fully buy into maybe that vision? It does seem like Apple and Anthropic are the most aligned, which is sort of ironic because Apple's the one company that I think is not an investor now of the big tech companies in Anthropic because they're not an investor in any of them. They famously went down the path with OpenAI but didn't end up doing it. And so it does feel like there's some real natural alignments there. Now, would Daria work there? Would he dare sell a company that's potentially going to go public at a trillion-dollar valuation?

53:48M.G. Siegler:Again, it's a unique moment in time given the risk that they face right now. And on the flip side for Apple, everything we just talked about, yeah, that's exactly it. It feels like they need to do something. There's a world in which they need to do something that's a true game change deal. And it's not, you know, making these hundred million dollar purchases here and there, which they do from time to time of talent. And those are good. And obviously Apple has run that game plan as well as anyone over the past couple of decades. But this would be more like, you know, I hate to invoke the idea of buying next and bringing Steve Jobs on, which was a much smaller deal relative to what this would be, of course.

54:30M.G. Siegler:But it's still that was a game change deal that really changed the DNA of the company. Right. And this is this hypothetical theoretical deal would be along those lines in that I think it would be about much more than than bringing on a great product and, you know, a great potential business. it would be about changing the DNA of the company and really getting them geared up for the next phase of, of whatever the AI future is. And right now it's hard to see for everything we just talked about how they do that without some sort of real mentality shift, um, and, and something that totally changes the culture to do that.

55:07So that's my argument. You know, I was going to say, I couldn't really imagine Dario as a product manager at Apple, but then again, we know they've been looking for a successor to Tim Cook? I don't know.

55:22M.G. Siegler:He would, he would be the head of AI, obviously. You know, he'd be the John G. Chief AI officer. But would he still be okay with that? I don't know. I mean, again, you would have Apple's unlimited resources. They would never have to worry about fundraising. Well, presumably if they, if they struck the right deal with Apple, they would never have to worry about that. Like Apple has more profits that they could funnel into this. And again, if you believe like Google's got deep mind, Microsoft had open AI, now they have their own, you know, version that they're working on internally, the my stuff and their own super intelligent stuff.

55:58M.G. Siegler:Amazon's obviously working on their own internal super intelligent stuff internally. And so Apple, can they really afford to just partner? Like, yes, literally, they can afford it. That's why it's a great, great deal in that they're not spending all the money on CapEx that all of their rivals are. But there's still a real risk of that. And everyone points to like, oh, Apple's going to get the last laugh here. But there's a real, real longer term risk for the company by not going down this path. Totally agree. All right, before we go, we should definitely spend a couple minutes on Meta. They just haven't been able to put together the next hit.

56:34And we can talk about reality labs. Clearly, whatever's happening on AI within that company. I mean, maybe there's, you know, sometimes you can have delayed progress where you need a couple of years of research to put something together. They don't have a competitive LLM. And again, it's the same problem as Apple. They're now, you know, not one, but two generations behind what the cutting edge is. And so what do you think the state of, what do you think that says about where Meta is today, where it says what it says about Zuckerberg, the fact that they are unable to come up with that next hit and certainly have not been able to diversify.

57:10away from advertising.

57:12M.G. Siegler:Yeah, I've swung around a little bit here because when they first sort of announced the scale deal that sort of was the effective end of the Lama strategy and their new path going forward, I wrote a post just saying can Meta buy the future of AI and my thesis was no, that I felt like they were basically buying up mercenaries and it would require a team of true believers in the mold of sort of anthropic, I think was the main example I used to be able to, to actually do this. And then, you know, all this stuff happened, a lot happened obviously in the subsequent months, but like certainly with, with Elon spinning up XAI and, and how we got that data center up so quickly.

57:55M.G. Siegler:And basically it felt like maybe, maybe you could just throw money at the problem, right. And you could basically get up to speed quickly. Fast forward, you know, a couple months ago, There's new reporting that, well, actually, it looks like XAI for all that money spent and the models, by all accounts, are good. But it's not good enough. It doesn't matter, right? Like what's the point? Like what's XAI doing? And Meta, all that money spent, the billions spent, and now they have to delay. They delayed potentially their new work, and it seems like that work definitely feels like it's being couched in the public comments about it.

58:29M.G. Siegler:It's like, oh, it's going to be a good first step, but it's not going to be competitive with the Gemini's of the world and the cutting edge models. And so there's also a world now, it seems like, in which all of that money, you could spend all the money in the world and you still can't catch up to what the leading edge is. and or even being at the leading edge, it doesn't matter because the chat GBT's of the world and now with Claude Code, they have the mindshare advantage where they're just going to be locked into these cycles where they just keep improving and it's sort of the self-improvement stuff just makes them better and better, faster and faster, just like Google leveraged back in the day with Search Engine, where they were able to just out-compete the bings of the world and the yahoos of the world because again, it just was self-fulfilling in a way.

59:19M.G. Siegler:And so it feels sort of like that we're into that. And now meta, you know, is, yeah, there's all these reports about these little new sub super intelligence projects that they're spinning up and these new groups and all this other sort of stuff. And, and again, the reports, you know, that they say on the record, everything is great and we're, and we're making progress and yada, yada. But like the posts that you're sort of alluding to that I wrote about where they weren't, you know, they just, they don't have a good track record over the past decade plus of launching new things, obviously with the metaverse being, you know, the prime example, but several other projects, they had a crypto project DM and, and, you know, they've had many, many other things that just have gone nowhere.

1:00:02M.G. Siegler:And, and of course, they had their Zuckerberg's big initiative of going after encryption. And that was going to be the future of social networking. And that was going to be the future of the company. And now they're pulling back on that. Because again, they don't get, they don't seem to get traction unless they acquire something. And we're in the tricky position where who are they going to acquire besides scale? And that's a seems like, you know, maybe a problematic, problematic deal that they did there. Yeah, I don't think that worked. You know, it's interesting because I was thinking back to like the old developer conferences that Meta used to hold and Zuckerberg put like a 10-year roadmap and i remember being in the audience in 2016 specifically and he was basically right on the roadmap that there was going to be some technology development and then ai was sort of at the end of the tunnel and here we are uh and yet they don't have they also like apple don't have much to show for it and not only that uh super intelligence labs like has already seen some departures we don't know what alexander wang is really doing within the company you know from The chatter I've heard, you know, there's definitely been some disputes with him and M at a leadership about the product, you know, the path forward.

1:01:15And what are you going to do to him? He just paid, you know, billions of dollars to bring him and some of his team on board. And now, and this is, again, just according to reports, but the company might be staring down the barrel of a massive layoff that could be en route, you know, between now and the next time we speak. and you put it all together and you're just like, they got maybe a couple more shots at the AI, getting this AI thing right. Other than that, they look kind of like a potential Yahoo, right? Where they got advertising right and it's the one thing they do right and they're going to live off it for a while.

1:01:54But anything we know about Mark Zuckerberg, that has effectively been his greatest nightmare. mirror.

1:02:00M.G. Siegler:Yeah, that's an interesting analogy. I hadn't thought about that, but I could see why you draw that. The difference would be that Zuckerberg is there. And while Jerry Yang tried to come back, as you'll recall, to Yahoo, and they almost sold to Microsoft for 40-some billion dollars back in the day with Steve Ballmer days, Zuckerberg has total control of the company, right? From the stock on down, he is in control. And so it's, it's a, it's a strength and probably a weakness in ways, right? Where like they do as he goes, so, so goes meta. And so he leads them down the metaverse path and maybe he, maybe he was wayward in that, right?

1:02:42M.G. Siegler:And maybe he was distracted to your point of like, they, he had the roadmap for knowing AI was coming. So did Google, by the way. And Sundar has been talking about that for, for a decade plus, right? The difference is Google actually executed upon it and Meta so far has not, even though they brought in Jan Lacoon. And even though, you know, they tried to buy DeepMind back in the day and sort of failed at it. And again, that led to Jan Lacoon coming in potentially and, and sort of, they had the right pieces in place, but they have not been able to sort of whatever, for whatever reason, zero in on it.

1:03:14M.G. Siegler:And some of me, part of me just wonders again, going back to that post, it's like, they're good at, they're great at acquisitions. They're one of the best companies ever at acquisitions. But when they're not making acquisitions, like they're not that great. Like they've been, they've been good in sort of copying a snap and stuff like that. Right. Even in a way you could call that an acquisition, an acquisition of another idea here. They have not been able to, uh, both acquire, you know, potentially the game changing company that gets them into the AI race in a meaningful way and or clone as they're obviously trying to do now, the game plan of others.

1:03:49M.G. Siegler:And so what changes that now Zuck and everyone else at Meta would probably say it's it's the glasses, right? Like that they have a foothold in in the early part of, you know, the next paradigm shift in terms of new devices like we'll see. I mean, they're they're certainly successful right now, but it's super small compared to a lot of certainly compared to the iPhone and it still relies upon the iPhone. And so like, what else are they going to come out with? You know, it sounds like a wrist device, you know, they've been working on and several other, I'm sure, skunk work projects that they have right now.

1:04:24M.G. Siegler:And that's going to be the hope for it. Because otherwise, they're just competing, again, with all of these sort of already more established players in AI. And so they need to come up with something that actually changes the game. And they're not just chasing, and they're actually leading. And again, the glasses are probably the best place they have right now, but we'll see what happens when Google and Apple and everyone else comes out with their competing products. Like that's going to be fascinating because beyond even the technology angle of it, like remember Apple has a retail footprint all around the world.

1:04:56M.G. Siegler:They're going to be able to move any sort of product that they put out there. And if it's fairly priced, if it's not the vision pro pricing strategy, um, they're going to have an advantage over meta in a number of ways. And it really becomes, you know, trying sort of a foot race as to like, what's the better strategy in terms of, you know, getting these newfangled devices out there. I know we're over time, but I just want to end on this. Sebastian Maliby has this book about Demis Asabas, the head of Google DeepMind coming out. And there was this excerpt published in the Wall Street Journal. And it just made me you made me think about it when you talked about how good Meta has been at buying and about how Zuckerberg has sort of been all over the place in his bets.

1:05:39And this anecdote just brings it together perfectly. So Demis Hassabis was on the West Coast when he when DeepMind was still independent to have lunch with Larry Page from Google. And Zuckerberg heard about it and invited him to dinner. This is from the excerpt. Arise arriving at Zuckerberg's Palo Alto home. Hassabis administered a subtle test on him. The two men discussed the potential of AI, and Zuckerberg expressed appropriate excitement. But then, as the dinner continued, Hassabis brought up other hot technologies. Virtual reality, augmented reality, 3D printing. Zuckerberg sounded equally excited about all of them, but told me what I needed to know.

1:06:18Hassabis said later, Facebook offered more money, but I wanted somebody who really understood why AI would be bigger than all those things. And then he sold to Google.

1:06:27M.G. Siegler:oof that's that's painful that is an expensive dinner in what he didn't get to spend on potentially acquiring the future of his company uh and it of course harkens exactly right to the future where by the reporting uh the founder of open claw uh you know wanted mark zuckerberg wanted to bring him on board as well and and maybe offered more money as well and he went to open AI. And again, history repeats itself. So yeah, not a great look. Website is spyglass.org. MG Siegler, of course, is our guest. First Monday of every month. MG, great to see you. Thanks for coming back on. Thanks, Alex. Talk soon.

1:07:08All right. Speak with you soon. Thank you, everybody, for listening and watching. And we'll see you next time on Big Technology Podcast. From Geico Subconscious News, I'm Tammy Racing Thoughts. Tonight, you just left for work and had a non-specific feeling that something was happening to your place and it wasn't good. Dan?

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