Who Wins The AI Superapp Battle?, Apple’s Consumer AI Victory, World Cup Automation Mistake

21:52M.G. Siegler:Microsoft, I have even less faith in for obvious reasons regarding product. And again, this is talking about from a consumer standpoint. I do think that there's an interesting argument and compelling sort of back and forth to be had about. And I wrote a little bit about this, like it, what if it's sort of similar, the way that this plays out is similar to sort of the quote unquote, bring your own device strategy at work, right? So what are we going to have like a bring your own AI strategy at work? Like basically, are you going to bring your consumer AI that you use, whichever one, because it's probably not going to be multiple for regular users.

22:27M.G. Siegler:You know, us crazy people use multiple ones, but it's probably going to be one that you pick and do you end up using that at work too because that's the one you use at home or is it bifurcated and you basically don't want to use the one that you use at work because you want to

22:39Big Technology Podcast Host:separate work and play yeah I'm smiling because that is going to be a fascinating discussion over the next couple years about whether you bring your own or whether you use the work one I cannot see big companies most companies allowing you to take your own AI and use it because these AIs the memory is going to build up. I know, but that's the flip side of it.

23:02M.G. Siegler:Like if you don't have your memory with you, you'll be frustrated, right? That you, you just added all this stuff to do and then you go to work and it's like stupid. It doesn't remember anything of how you operate.

23:12Big Technology Podcast Host:I know, but it's going to be, I agree. It'll be, there will be a case to be able to bring your personal AI into your work setting. But again, like let's say I'm at company A and my competitor company B is breathing down my neck and now my star employee brings their AI to me. Yeah, that's interesting. They're in my systems and then company B, now company B is really trying to figure out what's the best way to compete. What company B could then do is make the godfather offer to that employee who not only will they get them.

23:44M.G. Siegler:Literal institutional knowledge in their...

23:46Big Technology Podcast Host:Absolutely. They're going to get them and their AI with the memory of how to do what things work and what things don't work.

23:52M.G. Siegler:There's going to be all sorts of new IP law and things like that about what can transfer and what you can keep. That's a good argument against why why you can't cross those streams, basically.

24:01Big Technology Podcast Host:But then it will be very interesting also because it will separate capital and labor in a very interesting way when you have companies that, for instance, I mean, Meta's doing a version of this, right? You have your employees come in, they use the business AIs, and I'm an employee. Like when I, well, part of what I do at a job is I, you know, obviously give my time in exchange for money, but I also give my time in exchange for knowledge accumulation, training, understanding things. And now the corporations, if they're using company-specific AI, will actually own that part of it. Like, of course, I'll get better at myself, but if I'm reliant on AIs, I won't get that much better because a lot of that knowledge and training and up-leveling will happen within the AI.

24:48Big Technology Podcast Host:And so then if I go, you know, to another company without that, I'm now worth less than whether I would have transferred previously in a non-AI world.

24:58M.G. Siegler:Yeah, I'm having the Don Draper. That's what the money's for. I'm going in my head like there's going to be new versions of that going forward. Yeah, so that's that's all super fascinating. And again, like you said, it's going to be a major debate that's had over the next several years, it feels like. because, again, there was some level of debate about that, though, with bring your own device, right? Because obviously corporations are worried about security. They're worried about people having their own devices on premise and using them for confidential information and proprietary information.

25:31M.G. Siegler:But at the end of the day, at a lot of places, it won out because of convenience. And so does it also lead to a world that's bifurcated by big companies that are savvy in this stuff know to lock down the employees, you know, AI usage to, you know, be only their their own proprietary stuff. Whereas smaller companies, especially if people are bringing their own and paying for their own AI, they're fine with people bringing their own AI to the workplace. Right. And what if that leads to these weird competitive dynamics, you know, in big company versus small company, too?

26:05Big Technology Podcast Host:Yeah, might enable small companies to catch up faster. Yeah. But then if they come to technology and yeah, more nimble.

26:11M.G. Siegler:Yeah.

26:12Big Technology Podcast Host:Yes. They can catch up faster, but then big companies can sort of rebound more quickly when they,

26:17M.G. Siegler:when they poach the person over and their, and their little AI memory with them. Yeah.

26:23Big Technology Podcast Host:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. This is fascinating. So just to go,

26:26M.G. Siegler:just to riff off of the last thing you said, cause I feel bad. We haven't even really brought up meta, but they are in the equation. You mentioned them. And can they do something interesting? Obviously, they're the kings when it comes to making wide usage consumer products. And so it would seem like it would be silly folly to write them off in terms of what they can do. And you saw all the recent interviews with Alexander Wang and stuff talking about how it sounds like they're closing in on what they believe to be frontier-like versions of their models.

27:02Big Technology Podcast Host:I'll believe that when I see it.

27:04M.G. Siegler:Yeah, exactly. but what do they do from a product standpoint? How do they roll it out? Like meta AI right now has an app. It's very weird cause it's tied to the Ray-Ban, you know, glasses thing. Cause that's obviously their sort of toehold in, in the general space and, and a differentiator that they have right now. But what do they end up rolling out? Like they've tried something that was sort of like Sora, but they did all fake, you know, fake stuff, Sora. And then, you know, they've tried a few other angles at, at AI before and, and making it work, but it hasn't taken off to that degree. So they're in the conversation because they have to be because they have billions and billions of users across their products, but they're not anywhere right now.

27:45Big Technology Podcast Host:Yeah, just to put a bow on this, it's going to be a very, and I spoke with Sam Altman about this at the end of the year, and for whatever reason, it stuck with me. It's going to be a very interesting competition between the AI native companies like the Open AIs and Anthropics and the AI bolt-on companies like the Google, where like Google has shown it can catch up in terms of capabilities of models. It will inevitably catch up again to whatever Fable is and GPT 5.6 is. The question is, and this is the point you made, whether it will have the courage to, it did it with AI mode in search. Will it have the courage to take Chrome and turn that into an AI first type of experience?

28:25Big Technology Podcast Host:And I think it inevitably, it will be pushed into that. It will have to.

28:30M.G. Siegler:It will. It will. Because if OpenAI, in fact, does roll out Atlas, their browser, as part of the super app, like, then I think Google says, like, look, regulators won't like this, but we're trying to compete here. And they've got a browser that's AI, you know, first enabled and whatnot. And so we're going to leverage Chrome and try to do that. And, you know, that's it's good. There's going to be fireworks about that because meta will be behind the scenes, you know, whispering that they shouldn't be allowed to do that. What will Apple say about that, you know, behind the scenes and all that sort of stuff?

29:00Big Technology Podcast Host:Yeah, definitely. All right. Big battle coming up ahead. And now we're going to go to break. But when we come back, we can talk about, I don't even know if you can call them a dark horse anymore. We could talk about the horse, the stallion, apple, and its chances to factor in this battle. Right. We'll do that right after this. Save big money in your next painting project now at Menards. From your kitchen and bath to doors and trim and even your ceilings, Dutch Boy has the perfect finish for your painting projects. Dutch Boy's Dura-Fighter is a tough paint and primer that provides great scrub resistance and durability.

29:34Big Technology Podcast Host:Save big on Dutch Boy Paints. Plus, view our weekly flyer on Menards.com and get your painting project started today.

29:43M.G. Siegler:Save big money at Menards.

30:15M.G. Siegler:Still waiting in line?

30:17Big Technology Podcast Host:And we're back here on Big Technology Podcast with M.G. Siegler of Spyglass. You can find Spyglass at spyglass.org. Highly recommend it. Obviously, when M.G. comes on, we talk through all the Spyglass stories. And one of my favorite over the past month from Spyglass has been about whether Apple will win consumer AI by default. In fact, I'm hedging as I read it, but M.G. was not hedging as he wrote it. There is no question mark there. Here's what you wrote, M.G. Apple is set to win AI, at least from a consumer perspective. Apple seems on the verge of doing what they always do, watching new products and services come about, and then jumping in later with a better user experience to win the day.

30:56Big Technology Podcast Host:And that, of course, is going to be with Siri. So not only did Apple present a more realistic and compelling version for Siri at WWDC, which was sort of, I think it happened the week we spoke. We gave a nice preview the last time. They've debuted it. Not only did the vision make more sense, but the demos have looked good. I'll admit, I personally have not gone through the process to get it on my phone because the last time I put Apple Intelligence on my phone, it became unusable. Like multiple apps just stopped working. So I've decided to wait a little bit. But the videos that you see and the reports that you see of what the new Siri can do are actually quite compelling.

31:36Big Technology Podcast Host:So before we get into why Apple may end up winning consumer AI by default, can you talk a little bit, MG, about what this new Siri will do when people get it on their phones and whether you've experimented with it, what you're looking forward to?

31:50M.G. Siegler:Yeah. So this was my take after watching WWDC. And yeah, it was a bit controversial simply because of the past, right? That Apple has promised this dating back two years ago and then famously whiffed on it. And then last year sort of had nothing to say while they were behind the scenes trying to gather, you know, regather themselves and come back at it. And from everything I saw in this presentation, and just my gut instinct, having watched Apple for, you know, so many years, couple decades, and covering them, and now, you know, just being deeply ingrained in that ecosystem, I feel like I saw what I needed to see from them, which is that, just as you noted, like, they're running their playbook, they watch to see how others have had success in a certain field.

32:38M.G. Siegler:and they say like we think we can do this better from a product perspective and so they zoom in there and just from those those product demos which were still we should say they were still recorded but by all accounts they were actually done in real time because they they made an emphasis to have pauses and you know it wasn't just like you know these these canned um canned demos like they were two years ago so when i was watching those those demos during wwdc it was like I see what they're going to do now because it's basically they obviously leverage the iPhone in terms of it being pre-installed.

33:12M.G. Siegler:They have a button on the iPhone, of course, that you can use to invoke the Siri itself. And so you just saw Mike Rockwell, the executive who took over that group and sort of rebuilt it, just doing these demos where it's as simple as holding down the button and speaking to your iPhone and it being talking to a chat bot, just as you would with chat GPT or just as you would with Claude, except that again, this is built into every single iPhone and iPad and Mac OS and every other device, Siri in your AirPods, it's all going to be there. And so, you know, you hate to call it sort of winning by default, but I think it's, it's, it's almost like this is a negative, also a sort of a negative framing of it, like being table stakes, but that's all they needed to do.

33:59M.G. Siegler:because again, not you and I, not a lot of people who are probably out there listening right now, but for the masses who are going to be introduced to these things, this is going to be their introduction to it for the first time to the parents of the world and to the kids of the world. And I do think that Apple has done enough. And you ask, like, have I downloaded it? Is there something else I can help with? I just triggered. Have I done enough to, or sorry, have I actually played around with it? Yeah. So I have it installed on a backup iPad right now. And I'm actually using very dangerously a computer that's running the Mac OS beta right now, but they're pretty solid.

34:34M.G. Siegler:Like, cause they've said it's like a quote unquote Snow Leopard release. Yeah.

34:38Big Technology Podcast Host:Just give some examples of what it can do and what you've done with it.

34:41M.G. Siegler:so I've just been putting it through the paces in that I now bake it into my routine. You know, previously I was using, um, chat, DBT, uh, Gemini and Claude. I would just rotate all the, almost for every query I do. I would like, you know, just sort of bake off against them all. Now I rope in Syria in there as well, just to see how well it can stand up. And so it's everything from simple queries, you know, factual based queries, which Siri famously could not do previously, right? Like there's the famous example of like who won the Superbowls and it just didn't know it, even though that's like one of the most obvious, easy sort of things to pull from a database, and they just couldn't do it previously.

35:18M.G. Siegler:Everything that I've tried, for the most part, there's certain things where it breaks sort of phrase on the edges. But everything that I've tried has worked from a query perspective. Now, the more interesting stuff will be as it starts to get into the agentic workflows, a lot of that stuff is not live yet. But that's the other major, major advantage that Apple has. Because again, baked into the device, they're going to be able to, for example, the big one, see what's on your screen and see what you're doing and being able to say like, hey, you know, what is that up in the corner of, you know, this website that I'm browsing or whatnot.

35:50M.G. Siegler:And it'll be able to look at that, whereas the other services and applications either will require like very, you know, explicit permissions and pop ups to do that beyond sort of the download of their service. And we'll see what Apple restricts and what they don't.

36:04Big Technology Podcast Host:to me one of the things that i've actually really enjoyed using chat chat chapt for or with or to do recently has been um it's kind of a weird use case or a basic use case but just gmail search yeah it's amazing and the nice thing about it is you can just say like who is that pr guy on that email chain and it will be like i think it's this person and then give you a link to that email that is so useful especially because i mean sorry unfortunately going back to gmail but like a lot of these default searches are not good. No. And so it's coming from a search company. They should be good, but that's beside the point.

36:39Big Technology Podcast Host:But the cool thing to me is with these Siri demos, being able to put that type of semantic search on top of all your apps, right? Because it will have email, it will have text messages and have that work. That's crazy. And that's really where the added value comes in to me. And that's why I'm excited about this.

36:59M.G. Siegler:And so a lot of that stuff has started to work now. You talk about the pain it was when you first installed the original versions of Apple Intelligence. It takes a long time to index again. When you first install it in this new version, it basically has to re-index your entire phone. And if you have a lot of photos, as I do, like 80 ,000 or something, maybe even more, it takes a long, long time for it to be ready. You can use it while it's sort of doing that, but there's stuff going on in the background. It's going to be a little bit more slow. Sometimes the phone gets hot. or the device gets hot.

37:34M.G. Siegler:But it takes just a long time to do that. I think it took several days for it to be totally complete, you know, by the time it was all done. But now all of a sudden, you can query, yeah, old photos that you have in your library. And it's all this individual stuff, which again, is the stuff that was promised two years ago, they had the ad with Bella Ramsey, that was like, exactly your use case of like, who is that person that I met at this thing, and so and so. And you can do that now. And Google, of course, is promising the same thing, because they have Gmail is noted and, you know, several other things.

38:07M.G. Siegler:And so that's like a battle between the two of them. The difference to me there is that pixel while, you know, impressive, I have a pixel fold, I like it, but it's just not at the same scale as iPhone. And so there's no real competition there. You could say like all the Android ecosystem together, but they're, they're so split between Samsung has their own AI and, you know, all these other services, you know, they partner with perplexity. And so it's all going to be split, whereas Apple's is all going to be dialed into their product, Siri AI. So it's got a slightly new name. But it's, you know, it's solid so far.

38:42M.G. Siegler:And I think that every indication you hear from people who are also using it out and about is that it's solid and it's only going to get better from here. And yeah, And so then it just becomes a question of if there is some sort of new breakthrough in AI or if there's some new way of doing things, if super apps unlock some sort of new capabilities, does that move the goalpost out and then put Apple behind again? I wouldn't be shocked if that happens, right? And so then it just becomes like the thing that we've talked about previously where it's like, does Apple, are they able to get in line and have the right cadence for the AI age to be able to release things, not waiting for the big marquee event a year from now if they need to like, you know, step up and sort of do something new to meet the capabilities out there in the field?

39:27M.G. Siegler:or conversely, do they feel like the frontier is still the Wild West and we don't need to necessarily be playing in that field? Let the open AIs and let the anthropics. And by the way, you can use those products on an iPhone still. So if you want that cutting edge stuff, you can go and use those products. But for the real useful AI, trying to think of how they would frame it, we will have it on our device basically. Yeah.

39:54Big Technology Podcast Host:I mean, I really liked how you put it. I I really agree with this completely. Just as we learned about cameras when the iPhone launched nearly 20 years ago, the best AI device is going to be the one that you have on you. And at least for the foreseeable future, that's the iPhone, right? So it's sort of like we're talking through all these different use cases. And I totally agree with you. All Apple really needed to do was build that table stakes version, which is still impressive technology. Attach it to the iPhone and away you go. Like that example I gave with ChatCPT of like, I'm now very happily typing into ChatCPT to find me stuff about my emails, which is then using a Gmail connector to find Gmail and populating it back into chat, which I'm on in either an app on my phone or on the browser.

40:39Big Technology Podcast Host:It doesn't need to be that difficult. It shouldn't be that difficult. What should happen is I just literally press an action button on my phone and say, who is that PR person on that email thread? And then it just spits it out and I'm good.

40:51M.G. Siegler:And so two other things I would mention. One, we sort of already talked about the demo where Mike Rockwell is holding down the button. I think that that becomes like a normalized thing. It seems weird now, but I wouldn't be shocked that we see people walking down the street sort of hitting that button to talk to Siri AI and just querying all sorts of things on the fly. He was probably using AirPods, obviously, to talk out and about. And, you know, you could say, hey, Siri, I'm sure I triggered her again, just as you do right now. But hitting that button, it's such a simple sort of mechanism that I think will become like a thing that you see people out there in the world doing.

41:27M.G. Siegler:And then it looks weird at first, but then all of a sudden you realize, oh, what they're doing. The other thing that I think will be big – oh, my little daughter is smiling and waving at me through the window. Sorry. And the other thing that I think will be big is visual intelligence. So this has been around since Apple launched Apple Intelligence itself two years ago. And it's actually fairly good. It was good because it was actually using OpenAI and Google previously. And so now it's being fully baked into the camera. And I do think that this could be something that, again, all these services sort of have levels of this right now.

42:01M.G. Siegler:But because it's baked into the iPhone by default, I think that you're going to see a lot of people out there either holding up their phones, looking like they're taking a picture. And what they're doing is just querying and using AI to look at the world around them and figure out different things. And I think that that will be key for future devices, obviously glasses and then AirPods, potentially with cameras and whatnot. And so all that stuff, again, Apple is so well positioned to be able to take advantage of that all because of the iPhone.

42:29Big Technology Podcast Host:Right. And so one note that I made as I read your piece was this is the biggest indictment to me on the value of foundational models that Apple was able to get Google reportedly for what was it? It's a billion dollars a year, reportedly, to help them build a functional app or a functional operating system effectively with this technology built in. And why would Google do that? It's not in Google's interest necessarily to help like its number one handset competitor to build a better experience, AI experience than they have, which is what this might be. but as you point out in your in your piece it becomes it's becoming commoditized right it's if google doesn't do it open ai would do it or anthropic would do it or who knows would do it and and so like you get to this point where you're like well what is this what is the value of foundational models and and before the break i said they want it to be like a laptop for you where you can use business and personal uses great what's the one parallel they don't want with the laptop.

43:37Big Technology Podcast Host:The fact that the laptop effectively commoditized and up until this recent memory crunch, which is, you know, ironically is being spurred by AI, the prices dropped through the floor. And so why wouldn't the same happen here?

43:50M.G. Siegler:Yeah. And so Apple was so adamant talking about how, you know, they mentioned Google. Some people thought they wouldn't mention Google at all, right? But they did mention Google and they were fairly straightforward about it. But they mentioned them in like that they were partnering with them, but so explicit that they did all of the heavy lifting themselves. They basically got, you know, the underlying Gemini technology and didn't use the word. I don't think they use the word distillation because I think that it's like something that they would assume the audience wouldn't care about or know about necessarily.

44:20M.G. Siegler:But basically it sounds like what they did.

44:22Big Technology Podcast Host:Or they'd be embarrassed to admit. And embarrassed.

44:25M.G. Siegler:Yeah, sure. Right. To admit like Elon had to on, you know, in the courtroom, right. that they basically were using other models to distill to get Grok to work. And so Apple, you know, is doing that with Google. But also it's part of their just whole mantra and messaging to say like, this is not just Gemini re-skinned. We built this from the ground up with Google technology to build like effectively a new version of Gemini that we're not calling Gemini, that we're calling Siri AI and Apple intelligence. And it will have new different capabilities than what sort of Gemini focuses on and what Google is focused on.

45:02M.G. Siegler:And so they went over this, they hit this over, over and over again, including after the keynote, they had a separate event to just really talk through these details. And so, yeah, Google, I think, you know, they're, obviously, they have the existing search partnership in place, which is super, you know, lucrative, I think, for both sides. And I think, you know, once everything sort of played out over those past two years, you know, were they willing to just go down this path again and sort of re-up the partnership and sort of do it for this new age? Sounds like it. And then it becomes a question of does Apple ever get to the point where they would sort of have all the technology in-house that they need?

45:40M.G. Siegler:And to your point, do they feel like, do they ever want to do that, right? Because it's so expensive to train these frontier models. Does Apple ever want to play in that world? I I mean, I think there's a lot of variables in there, including like with their own, you know, silicon and chip expertise. Like if they felt like they could build, you know, specific chips where they could do it much cheaper and all of that, like maybe there's a world in which they do that. And obviously they're working on their own models. But again, do they want to play in the frontier? And certainly not right now. And I think it's an open ended question of if they ever do.

46:14M.G. Siegler:But that's not a very Apple historical Apple stance, right? Because they the Tim Cook doctrine, they want to own and operate everything. you know, that they want to be in control of. And this dates before a cook to the jobs days when he felt like Apple was getting, you know, screwed over by Adobe and whatnot. And so anyway, where does Apple go from here? And where do they? And I think the answer is like the honest, sort of boring, funny in ways answer is like, they're just sitting back and waiting and seeing where it plays out. Right. And right now they feel, I think they feel pretty good that they didn't spend, they haven't spent hundreds of billions of dollars and they're going to be out there in the world with Siri AI.

46:52Big Technology Podcast Host:Well, let me put it this way. If you could spend$1 billion and get a product that works this way, and again, caveats, we haven't fully seen it rolled out to the way that it's supposed to, so TBD, but it looks like it's on that track. If you could spend $1 billion on this product, doesn't it make you question the$700 billion that are going to be spent on this technology this year?

47:18M.G. Siegler:Yeah. I mean, it's almost like the Dr. Evil meme, right? It's like you're spending$1 billion and it's like everyone else would laugh at you. You're spending a billion dollars. Everyone else is spending hundreds of billions of dollars. What do you mean$1 billion? And that's all they needed to spend to get, you know, a year to get basically Google's Gemini technology in the door. And again, we'll see how it plays out from here. But yeah, you would definitely take that bet. And I think, you know, in some ways it sounds like Microsoft is sort of, you know, backing into some of this as well, like with their most recent talking points of Satya Nadella just talking about like, yeah, you know, they want to be sort of more agnostic and they'll have they have their frontier models, but they're almost downplaying them even before they're fully up to snuff where it's just like, I think, you know, everyone's starting to recognize that there might be a world in which like you don't want to have the frontier models because you're in charge of the cost of that and the returns are going to be more and more diminishing over time.

48:12M.G. Siegler:Now, we famously have talked about this for multiple years at this point. And that hasn't really been the case as the frontier is still the frontier, but it's ultimately going to come to what we kicked off talking about. Like, what are the use cases of these things? And, you know, what use do people get out of them? And what are they willing to pay for them? You know, as cost is becoming more and more of an issue.

48:33Big Technology Podcast Host:Yeah, I don't want to kick a horse while it's down, so to speak. But I personally cannot understand i've said this on the friday show i can't get what what microsoft is is doing right now they are they have gone i've never seen a company go from confident and leading to like behind and flailing in what was it two years like satya nadella was making sundar dance like five minutes ago and now satya nadella is like what is he doing it's an interesting you know foil against against what basically Apple has done, right?

49:12M.G. Siegler:Because Apple has basically sat back and everyone ragged on them that they were falling behind in AI, that they weren't there. Microsoft was the opposite, right? They were the geniuses. They had the open AI relationship, like one of the best investments of all time and look at them. And so, you know, they were in the sort of opposite position and fast forward those two years and the tables really have turned. And again, Microsoft to me, it just feels like they've shifted strategy so many times now that I'm not sure that they know exactly what they should be doing. Again, to go to Satya Dandela's current talking points, he's writing his own little blog post about these notions.

49:50M.G. Siegler:I think what he's doing is basically trying to read the room and take the pulse of where things are going and saying, again, enterprises, he sees all the headlines and knows certainly from Azure and everything that Microsoft itself is selling, that companies are wary about the spend getting out of control, right? And so what does he want to do? If he can get more open source models, including DeepSeek, which if you remember, like at one point, Microsoft was going after them for potentially distilling their big investment in open AI, right? Like, and how that played out. And so now they're talking about, you know, bringing them on board and, you know, them being, that being one of the key models that they offer up, you know, on their services and again, bringing down costs.

50:31M.G. Siegler:And I think that they want to be the place that's a one-stop shop, and they'll have their frontier models, and they'll have everything on down to the open source, and let users decide, let enterprises decide what they want to pay for. And if you believe that, you know, also that things are going to start to move more on device, and obviously they have their current new strategy with NVIDIA, with the new, you know, PCs that they're building, these newfangled second go-around of AI PCs, like, are things going to move more towards the edge? and also for cost reasons, but also for speed reasons and whatnot.

51:06And so, again, I'm with you.

51:09M.G. Siegler:I think that their strategy is still being formed, I think, again, because I think that they've shifted it so many times right now. But that would be my read of what they're trying to do. Yeah.

51:19Big Technology Podcast Host:I mean, one thing I've learned is this stuff moves so fast. Don't crown anyone and don't bury anyone, pretty much. Yeah. It could shift again quickly. Okay, before we go, I want to talk about the World Cup, like we previewed at the beginning of our conversation. So I have, you know, coming off the summit, I will admit, I have definitely needed some downtime to unwind. And the way I've done that is I've just watched, you know, basically as many of these knockout rounds as I can. And I was watching the Croatia-Portugal match. And of course, the World Cup has all this different technology involved, technology that I didn't even know existed.

51:57Big Technology Podcast Host:So for instance, to see if somebody's offsides, they've pinpointed it now and they'll show it on the screen. So even if they get like a pinky in front of a defender, they'll call it back. And they have this new technology or this technology. I'll admit, I'm not as up to speed as I should be on it. It's called video assisted referee. And they're employing it for that type of stuff. So here, let me read this little section from the Honest Broker, and we can discuss it because there is a downside here. So the story is VAR has gone too far. Last night, a thrilling end to the Croatia versus Portugal match was interrupted by the video-assisted referee.

52:36Big Technology Podcast Host:Croatia's seeming miracle goal in the dying seconds of the match was disallowed after a VAR review. A cross into the box bounced around before it poked home in dramatic fashion, offering all of us neutrals a chance for 30 more minutes of this engrossing match. I'll just jump in. What happened was Portugal was up by a goal and this Croatia goal went in. Okay, so then it would have gone into extra time in like the last second. So it would have gone into maybe 30 more minutes of extra time. Instead, VAR concluded that the ball on its way into the box had slightly touched the hair of a Croatian defender, putting his teammate as you can see in the top box above i guess they added the illustration offside the touch was so light that the on-field refs did not spot it and even with high def 4k 75 inch tv in my dc airbnb i could not detect any change in the trajectory of the ball the evidence for the touch came from a sensor in the ball with the evidence of the grays in the graph inset in the image above technically to be correct sure good for the game i think not So basically what happened here is they called the goal scorer offside because the ball wasn't redirected by one of his teammates, wasn't hit by one of its teammates, grazed the hair of the teammate in a way that the naked eye couldn't see, in the way that you can't even see on the video review.

53:56Big Technology Podcast Host:You can only see by a sensor in the ball that says it apparently touched this defender's hair. The goal was called back. Croatia lost the match and the World Cup was robbed of what would have been a classic finish. And so what I think this tells us is that, you know, we have become in our society so reliant on AI, automation and the robots that even when it's bad for us, we can't help ourselves and we still want to employ it and we still want to trust it. And it's time for a reckoning where we say, maybe we've gone too far.

54:29M.G. Siegler:So I appreciate the technology angle you've got here for this. And it is good. I mean, because it's not just soccer slash football, as they call it here in the UK. It is, you know, baseball has this issue. Tennis has it to some degree now. You know, all of the different things are getting sort of automated away. But this specifically, so VAR has also been, you know, live and controversial in the Premier League here in the UK for a while. And yeah, like people get annoyed because like, it's just takes some of the majesty out of the game, right? Because it basically takes it up to the cloud and, you know, looking at where, you know, little things that the human eye cannot detect.

55:13M.G. Siegler:And so I do wonder, like hearing you talk through it, it's like maybe there should be a way, you know, like within a World Cup, within like, say, the final, I don't know, five minutes, maybe two, maybe as little as two minutes where it's like VAR is off. Right. And it just basically going down to the to the refs having to do their jobs and and sort of everyone in the stadium, you know, like the vibe, like sort of, you know, playing out like, do we believe that this was actually a penalty? I'm sure they've debated that and things like that before. Baseball has some degree of that debate always, like how much balls and strikes should be, you know, relied upon the umpires versus the systems, the automated systems.

55:51M.G. Siegler:And, you know, baseball had the issue because, like, games were just getting way too long. So they needed to, like, come up with the pitch clock and ways to basically speed things up. But that's not the situation here. this is yeah just using are the over leveraging technology and taking again the majesty some of the fun and then just the competitiveness out of the game because it's it's uh you know it's it's something that they can pick up because it's basically the the old like we we can do it we have the technology and yes we have the technology yes we can do it but should we do it jeff goldblum you know jurassic park style like they didn't stop to think if they should i keep mixing all my pop culture analogies here, but you get it.

56:29M.G. Siegler:Like it is one of those things, like we didn't stop to think if we should, because it's just like, at the end of the day, this is entertainment, right? Like, and is it more entertaining to have a game tied and, you know, going into extra time and, and, and, you know, and going into potential shootout versus having it called on like this depressingly, uh, you know, again, human-eyed, not being able to see technical issue. Um, and I think obviously I'm leading it in a direction that I would answer there, and you would too, of course, as well. But they feel like it's probably too slippery of a slope to only do it, to have these rules in place to use it sometimes and not other times.

57:07Right.

57:08Big Technology Podcast Host:And I just wonder if there's a parallel for us in like, if we think about the business world where we have similar options, do we leave it with the people or do we go to robot judgment? And I mean, everybody right now is racing to deploy this technology. And I think my main takeaway watching this in action is, man, we just can't help ourselves. And I guess that's good for the bottom lines of the open AIs and Anthropic and the cloud providers. But it is going to lead to a pretty interesting world where we're going to over-rely on this stuff. And I guess in business, it's less about your feelings in a way.

57:47Big Technology Podcast Host:So maybe it will lead to better businesses. But it is, I think, a sad commentary a little bit on the state of humanity that we are rushing to hand the things that we do over to the robots at such a swift pace.

58:01M.G. Siegler:I'll give you one other example that's been in the news lately of in law where it's the second order effect stuff. It's like, yeah, you want obviously you want like the law to work and everyone to be able to take advantage of it. But so many courts now are getting flooded with lawsuits, basically, that they weren't previously because of little technicalities that these services are able to offer up as like, well, can you technically sue for that? Yeah, you can. Here's what you would say. And here's the way to file your lawsuit. And it's like, again, would you begrudge anyone who's filing a lawsuit that they previously wouldn't have because they didn't realize it?

58:40M.G. Siegler:No. but there's second order effects of it. Right. And it's going to bog down the court system. And maybe the court can't hear like a very important case, you know, in some other angle that they would have heard it previously because they can't scale as they have. So again, to your point, like, yeah, well, this is sort of an example in entertainment and sports that seems silly. Like it does. All of these things have second order effects that are playing out in the real world in real time that we're just seeing now.

59:05Big Technology Podcast Host:So I guess my solution for football or soccer as our listeners may call it is I think they should revert the offside rule back to where instead of if any part of your body was in front of the the defender you're offside I think as long as you have some part of your body behind the defender you should be good and that would sort of make if you're going to do VAR you can live with that as opposed to the other way around because that feels more fair in terms of like what's left for humanity. And I think they have to end this sensor on the ball that can feel the hair graze. I don't think hair should count as a body part.

59:47Big Technology Podcast Host:That's just me. Sorry to all the, maybe that's, I'm saying this from, you know, biased from my experience with follicles, but that's sort of my perspective here.

59:55M.G. Siegler:I like this. We're going from is AI alive to is hair alive is the new debate.

1:00:01Big Technology Podcast Host:Technically. Well, I don't know. You don't feel any pain when they cut it off. It's true. At least not physical, maybe emotional. Who knows? Okay. Why don't we leave it there? We got the US, Norway, and England still in it.

1:00:14M.G. Siegler:I'm very conflicted, but I'm excited. I'm excited to watch these.

1:00:18Big Technology Podcast Host:Love it. Great games. Great speaking with you as always, MG. Folks, go find MG's writing at spyglass.org. Sign up for the newsletter. Become a member. You won't regret it. So MG, thanks again. Great to have you on as always.

1:00:29M.G. Siegler:Thanks, Alan.

1:00:31Big Technology Podcast Host:Everybody, thank you so much for listening and watching. and we'll see you next time on Big Technology Podcast.