Bluesky’s Big Bet + Are Deals Dead in Silicon Valley?

23:37It's not that they just don't want to see that stuff on their feeds. It's that they don't think that anyone should be able to spread that stuff online. So that's an issue for decentralized social media, isn't it? You can't actually stop people from being able to do that. Well, the internet kind of has different layers of governance. Like you have sites that set their own rules, and then you have backend infrastructure like Cloudflare that takes down some of the most serious stuff. And that's sort of how this ecosystem works as well. So you have sort of escalating layers of severity up the infrastructure stack.

24:08And so the things that I think are more like infrastructure require more social consensus in order to do content moderation on. Like it's much harder to get something taken off Cloudflare than it is to get something, you know, taken off a social site. And that's how this works as well. Yeah. I mean, the Blue Sky approach is really not all that different from something like Reddit, where Blue Sky sets a floor, but then individual users can raise the ceiling for moderation, they sometimes describe it this way, where you can sort of add your own rules on top of it. Like, hey, I don't want to see a lot of curse words.

24:38I don't want to see a lot of nudity, whatever. And what I think is interesting about this approach is that for the past, you know, seven or eight years, we've been having this very unproductive discussion about, like, what should the parameters of online speech be? Should we take way more of it down? Should we leave way more of it up? And the idea in Blue Sky is sort of like, well, why don't we just let users decide what they want to see? If you want to have a really intense environment where people are flinging mud and calling each other names, like, you can have it. And if you want something where everyone is like being super polite and no curse words are allowed, you can have that too.

25:11That is an experiment that I'm very interested to see how that goes. Yeah. I mean, I think I and a lot of other people, we sort of choose social networking apps based less on kind of technical features and more on vibes. Like, what does it feel like to use this thing? Are the people on there funny and interesting? Are they telling me, you know, are they making me laugh? Are they informing me? Am I having a good experience? So talk a little bit about the vibe side of Blue Sky and how you've tried to sort of cultivate the right community there. And kind of what do you think it's going to take to get more people interested?

25:42Is it celebrities moving over? Is it, you know, is it comedians? Is it sort of developing sort of niche interests like that? Like, what are the keys to cultivating a good vibe on a new social app? Yeah, I mean, I think all of the above goes into adoption. But so far, it's been really fun. And it's quite chaotic, I think, because a lot of people coming on were coming through invite codes passed around on other social apps. Everyone was posting heavily. And so lots of back and forth, very casual posting, a lot of shit posting. And just this has made it, I think, a very active culture. Yeah, the platform attracted early shit posters like Casey Newton.

26:22Truly demented stuff going over and going over. on over at your account. Drill comes in to comment on every big news day. Yeah, I think he had one of the most popular. Drill, of course, the sort of former king of weird Twitter, D-R-I-L, the pseudonymous poster. And yeah, he had one of the most popular posts. In fact, maybe it's even worth reading this because it sort of suggested to me that he wanted a response. And what he said was, I do not fucking recall them asking the Blue Sky Elders permission to open registration to commoners. So Jay, I guess, how would you respond to the idea that you didn't have permission to open up the network that you're building?

27:02Well, you know, it's, if we wanted to keep it a secret, we had to keep it a secret because it's hard to keep a secret with 3 billion users, but we couldn't, you know, tell them. But it was also very funny because Blue Sky Elders has been a meme for a while and it's like Drill knows the deep lore of what happened on Blue Sky over the last year. I don't even know. It's been very funny to get to a place where there's a very active poster culture when people are coming on, because often when people come onto a new social network, it's kind of a ghost town, and then people have to figure out what the norms are, and people have gotten creative.

27:37They've really taken it and turned it into something that they want. And also the fact that the app is open source means that users that came on who are developers who are like, why can't I look at videos? Someone went in and just added a way to do YouTube embeds because they got frustrated with not having that in the app. And that's one of the great things about open source social is anyone can come in and modify it. Yeah, I was on Twitter a long time ago. I was on Twitter before this sort of notorious four quadrants post, which is when the company came in to an ecosystem that had a lot of different developers building their own clients.

28:12It really was a sort of very decentralized world. and Twitter came along and said, actually, you have to stop building your own clients. We're going to build our own client because we want to centralize this. We want to be able to show ads. The only way we can do it is that way. And I think in a very real way, that marked the beginning of Twitter's decline. They stopped innovation dead in its tracks when developers and users had been giving them so many good ideas and actually been building good ideas for them. So it's possible that I'm getting carried away, but when I look at Blue Sky today, I think we are getting a second chance to run the experiment.

28:48We are getting to see what would happen if Twitter had actually just let a thousand flowers bloom, see what happens, see what people build, see what kind of fun they can have. And while, you know, I do think you got a long road ahead of you, Jay, but I'm at least excited that somebody is trying because we have not had enough experimenting in social networking over the past decade. And so I'm very interested to see what happens now. Yeah, social is to be a playground again. I mean, it's where we spend our time talking. Why is it this thing controlled by one company where we can't play around and try new ideas?

29:18People give me new ideas for how they think social should be better or have some like fun, quirky idea for a new thing to do all the time. And I just want a world where people can freely build that and play with it. And we'll see this profusion of all sorts of new experiences come about. Yeah, I think that's pretty good. Anything else that you would point out or something that we didn't ask about or feedback on any of Kevin's posts? I've only made like three Blue Sky posts. Well, that would be good to give a few. You had your viral sandwich. It's true. I did have a sandwich post and it performed very well.

29:48But then I was so intimidated. I knew I could never live up to the sandwich post. Jay Garber, thank you for joining us. Thank you. When we come back, Aaron Griffith from The New York Times tells us how regulators are screwing up the life cycle of Silicon Valley.

30:21So Casey, what do you know about design? I mean, I know that it's something I hire other people to do for me. It's really not my forte. Well, there is an app in the design world called Figma. Ah, yes. Which is sort of like, it's like an app that, you know, people who build apps and services use to sort of design them. And the analogy I've heard used is that Figma is to Photoshop as Google Docs is to Microsoft Word. It's kind of like a more collaborative online way of doing designs, especially with a team. Yeah, when it first came out, people started calling it multiplayer Photoshop, because in addition to running in a browser, which was like a cool enough party trick on its own, multiple people could work on the same file at the same time, which at the time was really a revolution.

31:04Yeah, it was a fast-growing product. designers really loved it. And then something happened, which was that in 2022, Adobe announced that it was going to buy Figma for$20 billion. Making it one of the biggest acquisitions of that year. Yeah. So Adobe is this sort of giant in the world of design. They make Photoshop and Premiere and all these other tools that designers and film editors and other people use for work. And this deal was a big deal in Silicon Valley. And it also caught the attention of regulators who said, wait a minute, this sort of looks like a big company kind of acquiring a company that might potentially compete with it.

31:39And maybe that's going to harm competition and innovation in this market. And so the companies sort of pulled back from the deal and it fell through. Yeah. And at that point, you might say that the deal for Adobe was just a Figma of its imagination. That's pretty good. So why are we talking about this story now? Well, Well, I've been sort of fascinated with this whole Figma story because one of the biggest changes in the tech world in the past few years is not actually what's happening in Silicon Valley. It's been what's been happening in Washington. You know, we've talked on this show with Lena Kahn, the chair of the FTC, and Jonathan Cantor, the assistant attorney general who's sort of in charge of their antitrust enforcement.

32:23And both of them have sort of made the point that one of the things that harms innovation and competition in the tech industry is this pattern of small startups growing very quickly and then getting acquired by these big tech companies who are sort of afraid of competition. Effectively knocking pieces off the chessboard to ensure that they will always win. Exactly. And so their point is that, well, if you want to increase competition in the tech industry, you have to actually make it harder for these big tech companies to acquire smaller startups. especially when there's sort of a direct competitive threat to the bigger company.

32:57And so this Adobe Figma deal, I would say, sort of one of the first major test cases for what happens if you actually just tighten the rules on these kinds of acquisitions and make it harder for big tech companies to acquire small, promising startups? And how does that sort of ripple throughout the tech industry? And so that's what I wanted to ask my colleague Erin Griffith about today. Erin covers startups and venture capital, and she just wrote a big story about this Figma-Adobe deal falling through and what it sort of means for Silicon Valley as a whole. Let's bring her in here. Erin Griffith, welcome back to Hard Fork.

33:32Thanks for having me. So this deal between Adobe and Figma fell through in December. You've just written a story about sort of what happened at Figma after this deal collapsed. Just tell us what you found in your reporting. Yeah, so I talked to just about everyone that I could, employees, former employees, soon-to-be former employees, investors, kind of people from all sides of the spectrum. And the main thing is that there's just relief that the deal is over. It's been a year and a half or more of just kind of being in limbo, which for a startup is so hard. You know, momentum is so important.

34:08You have to be constantly growing. And like, there are a bunch of employees that are potentially millionaires that don't actually know if they're going to see those millions or not. And so there's a little bit of relief that It's just over. But there's also, you know, these questions of like, OK, well, when will I see those millions or will I? You know, the company's in kind of a weird place right now. They kind of had this like really rough year and a half where now they're kind of picking up the pieces. Right. So it's obviously been a rough time at Figma. There are a lot of people who thought they were going to be rich this year who are either going to be rich potentially a long time from now or maybe even never.

34:45But your story also goes into a different kind of shockwave that this sent through Silicon Valley, which is that acquisitions are a big part of how this town works, right? And that acquisitions are how money and talent get recycled into the ecosystem. It provides sort of a launching pad for all the next generation of startups. So how has Silicon Valley reacted in general to this news? I mean, I'm actually kind of surprised by the reaction a little bit. I've been asking investors about this for like five years. You know, I don't know if you guys remember. Wait, you knew that the Figma acquisition wasn't going to go through?

35:18Yes. And people are confused. And yeah, no. So I don't know if you guys remember, like Harry's, the Razor company sold that, but that deal got kind of broken up. Plaid, the payments company, we're supposed to sell the Visa. That got broken up. Both of those companies were able to raise money later, but they still haven't exited. So the investors are painting an optimistic picture, but like it could be a really long time before they exit. And most of the investors I talk to, they don't seem that concerned. And they're like, oh, well, yeah, Apple, Amazon, the big tech companies that are under antitrust scrutiny, they're on the sidelines, but there are other buyers.

35:49And I kind of think it's a bigger deal than that because, I mean, just to take one step that I found, like 90 % of exits in 2019, which was a big year for IPOs, were acquisitions, not IPOs. And like the IPOs are where the big money exits come from, but like the vast majority of startups end up selling. I think this is a point that we should sort of take a beat on because I think this is something that may not be obvious outside the tech industry. When venture capitalists put money into a startup, there are kind of two things that they're going for. One is that the company becomes huge and goes public, right?

36:24And then they can pull money. Then their shares get converted into shares of the public company and they get to sell and they get a return from that. The other, and what you're saying, the sort of more frequent outcome for a venture-backed startup is that it would get acquired. And then the investors who supported the startup from the beginning get paid as part of that acquisition. So those are kind of the classic exits in venture capital. And it sounds like beyond just this Figma case, it sounds like the exit strategy of let's sell this startup to a bigger company is becoming much more challenging.

36:58Totally, yeah. Yeah, and like that is the way this industry works. You know, the venture capitalists get that money back and then they use that to raise their next fund because their investors are happy and they want to give them more money. Angel investors, who are kind of the first people who put money into startups, they use that and they like invest in their friends' companies. And it's all like kind of incestuous, but it's like a circle of life that perpetuates the new creation of startups. You know, I talked to one investor in the story, Adam Nash. He used his earnings from the startups he worked at, like LinkedIn, to invest in more than 130 of his friends' startups.

37:31And, like, that's how this works. And so all these Figma employees that would have now become angel investors are not. And, you know, a lot of these venture investors, they kind of, like, made their reputations. Like, Figma, I got this big winner. I got this$20 billion exit. And, like, that's not the case anymore. I mean, I talked to one investor. He was set to get paid on Figma's exit from six different entities. So that's how incestuous this is, and that's actually just what makes it work here. And so if those acquisitions dry up, that can have a really big chilling effect on an industry that's already outside of AI struggling.

38:05So let's talk about why. What change that these acquisitions are just having a harder time getting through? I mean, regulatory. Yeah. Which regulators? Yeah. So, I mean, obviously there's Lena Kahn and the FTC has been scrutinizing every single deal, including now minority deals. I mean, she just said that she's looking— Minority deals meaning a deal in which an investor would buy a minority stake in the company. Yeah, so Microsoft's investment in OpenAI and Google and Amazon's investments in Anthropic, the AI companies, those are minority stakes, but they're now investigating those for potential antitrust problems.

38:38So that's like going even a step further. But what killed the Adobe Figma deal was the British regulators, the CMA, which is the authority there, they essentially looked at this deal and said, well, Figma and Adobe could potentially have been competitors down the line. Therefore, this deal is, you know, eliminating competition. And we, you know, we think that it's bad and stifling innovation. So they're taking an even, you know, stronger stance against this. So, yeah, it's, as one investor told me, it's raising the bar for even engaging in acquisition talks for a startup because this is a huge risk that the deal might not actually go through.

39:13And, you know, one thing that Figma did that's really smart, it's raising the bar for breakup fees. Figma is getting paid a billion dollars as a breakup fee from Adobe. So that's, you know. Breakup fees are fees that get paid when like a deal doesn't happen. Right. This has always been my dream, by the way, is to get paid one billion dollars for just nothing happening. you should know that the hard fork breakup fee is one billion dollars from from you to me oh no so if if this show breaks up you owe me a billion dollars that was in your contract before i signed it yeah yeah so i think a lot of people listening to this might be saying you know what's the big deal like we have this regulatory regime that's gotten tougher on startups being acquired by tech giants you know so far it seems like from your story the people who are most affected by that are like Figma employees who don't get their, you know, their huge paydays from this deal.

40:01And you have, you know, venture capitalists who are unhappy that maybe they can't as easily sell their portfolio companies to large acquirers and get paid. But why does this matter sort of beyond the world of tech investing? What are the stakes of this new regulatory environment for average users? Yeah, I mean, I guess it impacts the incentives for people who are maybe interested in starting a company and, you know, think that they could follow in the footsteps of many of our most famous and powerful and frankly admired business leaders. And often the way to do that is to build a company and sell it to a larger one.

40:37It impacts the way that this kind of innovation is going to be funded. And I'm not saying it's necessarily a good or a bad thing, but it's definitely going to change the way this system works. And I think we'll be seeing the, you know, ramifications of that playing out for a long time. I can tell you when I started Platformer, It was with the goal of selling it to Adobe for$20 billion. And now I'm like, in this regulatory environment? I don't think so, honey. So that's going to be a challenge. But let me throw a couple of counterexamples in here, Aaron, because while everything that you said is true, at the same time, Microsoft was somehow able to buy Activision Blizzard for almost$69 billion, right?

41:13Which was just a clear case of a giant company getting even more giant. So that seems to me to suggest that at least some window is still open. And I have to say, when I saw that Adobe was acquiring Figma, my first thought was the cost of Photoshop is going to go up. Like Figma is going to get folded into the Adobe Creative Suite and the price is going to go up. And so you don't even have to be a hipster antitrust person to find an excuse to block this deal. You could just say this just kind of seems like maybe we shouldn't allow it. So is the Figma deal maybe an outlier in this whole thing? No, I don't know about that.

41:45But I will agree with your point that there are a lot of Figma customers that were kind of celebrating this. And I think that just in general, even if you're not a Figma user, a lot of people complain about the power of big faceless corporations and how, you know, they kind of are constantly finding new ways to screw customers. So, like, in general, I can see the concerns and, like, why you would prefer that this product that you love that's, like, you know, pretty cheap and not corporate and tries to do right by its customers stays independent. So, like, I think there were a lot of Figma customers that were celebrating this and a lot of people who maybe don't like certain Adobe policies or the way that they sell or package their products.

42:24So, yeah, I can definitely see an argument for that. Do you hear from any founders who are thinking about their sort of exit strategies differently in light of these new regulatory pressures? I mean, one complaint that you'll hear from venture capitalists about the aggressive regulation of tech mergers and acquisitions is that, you know, maybe someday the next Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger don't start Instagram because they know that even if they succeed beyond their wildest dreams, they're not going to be able to sell their company to Facebook for billions of dollars. You might sort of see a drop-off in startup founders deciding to take a risk on something new because one of these two classic avenues for getting rich on a startup is now not closed, but harder.

43:10Totally. And I've heard that argument before, not ever from a founder, though. It's more from like the commentators or VCs. And it's kind of BS in a way because the other thing that they'll turn around and say is like, well, no one aims to sell their company. Their goal is always to go public. And, you know, that's people started with with the sort of the biggest possible dream and maybe selling is like the second best. And I think there's always going to be like people who are wildly ambitious and trying to start new companies and hoping to make it rich that way. So so I don't I don't see it stopping that.

43:42And, you know, investors being always very optimistic about everything. That's kind of like their job. They see a whole world of other potential buyers who maybe aren't as well known as Google, Apple, Amazon that are now taking advantage of this moment, like Salesforce, for example. Companies that are big, have a lot of money, and haven't quite caught the regulatory scrutiny yet that some of the biggest ones have. Yeah. And do we think that there are going to be any kind of new exit strategies for startups? I I mean, if you had the sort of classic model of you either go public or you get acquired as sort of the ways to succeed and get rich during a startup.

44:21Are founders, are people at these companies and investment firms thinking about other ways that they could potentially cash out? I'm glad you asked that, actually, because I've been having this conversation with a lot of people. The secondary market is very hot right now. Explain what that is. And the secondary market is essentially a fancy way of saying it's a private stock market. So startups own shares that are private and only sophisticated investors like venture capital investors can buy them. However, there is a growing market of people who are buying and selling shares in privately held stock.

44:59It's called the secondary market. And it got a lot of attention right before Facebook's IPO because people were trading private Facebook stock before it went public. And over the last decade or so, it has gotten bigger and bigger. And so there is generally a market for people to buy shares in these private startups before they go public. And that is becoming increasingly robust. And so that's a way that some investors are being able to cash out before an IPO can happen. Yep. And of course, Kevin, don't count out that other classic way for a startup founder to make money, crypto scams. And what do you think this means for the tech giants?

45:35Because historically, buying smaller startups has been a way to kind of like extend their relevance. I'm thinking of, you know, Facebook buying Instagram and WhatsApp, which sort of became the next phase of that business's growth. So if you are a Facebook, if you are an Amazon, if you are a Google, are you really worried about it now being tougher to acquire some of these fledgling, promising young startups? Definitely. I mean, that is essentially how these companies stay relevant is they try to build something innovative in-house. They're too clunky and slow-moving and out of good ideas. So they buy something and hope that that infuses them with new life and their stock lives to see another day.

46:16That is not happening at the big tech companies at all. And so I would be nervous if I were them. I mean, Microsoft has obviously found a way around that by investing in open AI without buying it outright. And, you know, being very careful to not own more than 50 percent of the company. But even that's now being scrutinized. So, yeah, it's definitely a signal to big tech companies that they need to start building their most innovative stuff in-house. Yeah, and I should say, like, that is actually what the regulators want to happen, right? That is part of the hypothesis here is that if you force, you know, if you make it harder for tech giants to kind of gobble up smaller potential competitors, then it will actually result in more innovation overall because the big companies will have to stay ahead of the small startups.

47:04And the small startups will sort of be able to flourish independently without sort of getting gobbled up by these larger institutions. Yeah, I mean, that's kind of if you read the CMA's like investigation of Adobe, they had this company or they had this project that was ongoing called Project Spice. And it was other names, too, but they mostly called it Project Spice. I think I saw that on Cinemax when I was a kid. And it was essentially going to compete with Figma. And they canceled it one week before the acquisition of Figma was announced. And they said, you know, in their responses, like, this was never going to compete with Figma.

47:51and it was a failure and we canceled it because it was really bad and we could never compete with Figma. But like that kind of makes the point for the regulators, too. Like you couldn't compete. And so you bought this thing instead. So, yeah, it's like that's that's a perfect example of what you're talking about. Yeah. I mean, as you're describing what happened at Figma, I'm sort of thinking like, isn't this just a case study of how regulation works and how it should work? Like, Because it sounds like what you're describing is a company in Adobe that now has to sort of develop its own independent strategy for competing with Figma, which it can no longer buy.

48:32You're also describing a Figma that now has to think about how to compete with Adobe rather than just being sort of swallowed up by it. So it seems like there is more competition in that particular market than there would have been if this deal had been allowed to go through. So isn't this just kind of proving what regulators have been saying all along? Well, that was very well articulated, but I think I have to step in here and give the company's perspective on that, which would strongly disagree with you. You know, they've obviously fought this every step of the way, and they, you know, expressed their disagreement with the British regulators' findings that they were taking competition out of the market.

49:09You know, they believe that they were not competitive. But yeah, your point is well taken that like, yeah, regulators dug into this, concluded that these two companies would have been competitors had they not decided to merge and said, we want to block this. And then they asked for some really absurd remedies. They were like, OK, well, you guys can merge, I guess, if like Adobe spins off Photoshop or Illustrator or Figma spins off Figma design, which is like essentially all of Figma. And so, of course, the companies were like, no. So, yeah, I mean, essentially, yes, this is regulation working.

49:43I think a lot of people in the tech industry, obviously, including Adobe and Figma, would say it's like an egregious overreach and they don't like the way they're interpreting the law. So, Erin, you've written, among other things, about the culture of Figma, whose employees I believe call themselves Figmaates. How is the culture changing in response to this deal falling apart? I mean, it's probably the same. My understanding of the culture of Figma is very earnest. they like to sing they have a theme song or they had a theme song they had a theme song how does it go? the chorus was Figma I dig ya design used to be such an enigma I'm not gonna sing it and it had a rap verse that referenced Adobe at one point oh I think it said 10 or 15 years from now people are gonna say who the heck's Adobe?

50:35Figma's here to stay wait they made a software diss track? Yeah. Is that? I mean, I don't think it was meant for public consumption. I saw a video of it. But unlike their musical, which they put out in the quarantine, which is on YouTube and is— Required viewing for Park Fork listeners. Wait, there's a Figma musical? Yes. It is very elaborate. It's, like, kind of about the early days of quarantine. I actually had to turn it off because I was, like, having flashbacks to, like, you know, all the jokes that we made about, oh, we're all stuck inside. and how traumatizing that was for everyone. Anyway, so yeah, they're a little dorky.

51:12This is not like the Uber culture of let's be hardcore and step on toes and just like... Yeah, Uber also actually had a musical. I think it was called It's Not a Crime If You Don't Get Caught. Yes. That was the showstopper. It was the big number closing act one.

51:32And FCX actually had a musical. It was called Scamilton. It was a great one. Aaron Griffith, thanks for coming on Hard Fork. Thanks for having me.

51:46When we come back, it's time for our new segment, System Update.

52:08All right, Casey, we got a new segment this week, and it's called System Update. Can we hear the theme?

52:16Kind of sounds like the system just threw up. But I like it. Now, listen, Kevin, every week on the show, we bring you the most fascinating stories from in and around the world of tech and the future. But we don't always return to those stories to tell you what happened after we shut up. Yes, sometimes we do not actually get the last word on a subject. Devastating. Events continue to unfold. And so this is a segment where we take things that we've talked about on the show before and tell you what's happened since we talked about them. That's great. Well, let me ask you a question, Kevin. Remember when we talked about those ancient scrolls?

52:45Yes. Whatever happened to those? God, this is one of my favorite stories from last year. Let's get into it. So, Casey, back in October, we interviewed a man named Brent Seals on the show. Brent, as a reminder, was a scientist who had been working on a project involving some ancient scrolls. And these were scrolls that had been buried and burned in the eruption of Mount Vesuvius roughly 2 ,000 years ago. They were the original doom scrolls. Oh, come on. That's pretty good. You have to read that. That is pretty good. Okay. So Brett told us about this effort that he'd been embarking on to decode these scrolls, basically by using kind of computer vision and AI to be able to read what was inside them without actually opening them, which would destroy them.

53:27and he, in combination with some investors and entrepreneurs in the tech industry, had set up something called the Vesuvius Challenge, which was basically a series of prizes that would be given out for deciphering fragments of these ancient scrolls. Right, and not to be confused with the Vesuvius Challenge on TikTok, which is where you try to escape an erupting volcano. Exactly. So when we talked to him back in October, this contest had produced some intermediate results. There was a college student, Luke Ferretor, who had been able to actually detect one word from the ancient scrolls that translated to the ancient Greek word for the color purple.

54:08Color purple. Great movie. Great book. Yeah. So back in October, they had sort of made this intermediate prize award to this researcher who had come up with this one word. But there was still this idea of a grand prize for someone who could decipher much more of these scrolls. And Brent and his team, they didn't know whether anyone would actually be able to do that. But just this week, the organizers of the Vesuvius Challenge announced that they had, in fact, awarded a grand prize to a team of three individuals. Yousef Nader, who is an Egyptian Ph.D. student in Berlin. Luke Ferretor, who is a 22-year-old college student who actually won that prize that we mentioned the last time we talked about this, discovering the word purple, and Julian Schilliger, who is a Swiss robotics student based in Zurich.

54:57They will share a$700 ,000 prize as a reward for deciphering a much larger fragment of these ancient scrolls. All right. And I would like to know, Kevin, what did the scrolls say? Well, so we still don't know like exactly who wrote these or what they're about in their entirety, but the passages that historians and papyrologists have been able to decipher are basically talking about pleasure. The author of one, I'll just read one of these passages. It says, as to in the case of food, we do not right away believe things that are scarce to be absolutely more pleasant than those which are abundant.

55:37Go off, King. Yeah, so we don't know exactly who wrote this. There are some theories that it might have been Philodemus, who is an ancient Greek philosopher and writer who is associated with the Epicurean movement. Of course. But basically, this is a text, you know, the organizers of the challenge compare it to like a 2 ,000-year-old blog post. So in addition to referring to the color purple, apparently this text also makes some reference to capers, like the thing that you put on like a lox bagel. Not crimes. Yes, not crimes. But basically, these texts are what we know of them so far. They are about pleasure and how to live the good life.

56:13And they appear to be from someone who's sort of sympathetic to or associated with the Epicurean movement, kind of dunking on this other group of philosophers, the Stoics, who believed that virtue was all that mattered. Epicureans were much more into sort of pursuing pleasure as kind of the highest good. And so, you know, some historians who have looked at this text think that this was basically an Epicurean philosopher kind of dunking on Stoics. This was history's answer to the quote tweet, basically, is what we're finding in these scrolls. Exactly. So the challenge has awarded this$700 ,000 prize to this group of three researchers, and they are launching yet another challenge.

56:50The organizers said that in 2024, their goal is to go from deciphering 5 % of one scroll to 90 % of all four scrolls that they have scanned and to lay the foundation to read all 800 scrolls in this collection. And those are their scroll goals. So you now have those. They're scrolls, if you will. Scrolls, if you will. Now, Brent worked on this for 20 years, which is so incredible that you could spend two full decades of your life working on something and then it pays off. Did you get in touch with him? What did he have to say about this? Yeah, so I emailed with Brent this week after this prize was announced, just sort of asking, like, how do you feel that this project that you've been working on for 20-some years has finally sort of paid off?

57:31And he wrote back, he said, I can tell you I've never had a sweeter, more satisfying feeling than knowing we've done it. We've demonstrated we can read Herculaneum scrolls with the right tech, and that my 20-year pursuit will be seen as successful. The fact I waited two decades for this moment almost certainly makes it all the more delicious. That is fantastic. Almost as delicious, I must say, as grapes and capers. Seriously, congratulations to Brent and everyone who solved that challenge, and we look forward to seeing what AI reveals on the rest of these scrolls. Yes. Congrats to the team. It's a huge feat.

58:05I love this story. I think it's one of the most sort of feel-good stories in tech over the past year. And I think it is also just a very clear example of how AI can actually do things that I think we would all agree are pretty good. All right. Let's move on to our second update. Yes. This one is about Bard, the AI chatbot from Google. And without knowing anything about this update, Kevin, I think what I would just say is Bard, one of the great Google brands, and I hope it never goes away. Well, I've got some bad news around for you on that front. Because this week, Google announced that it is ending the use of the Bard name and that Bard, the chatbot, will be rebranded as Gemini, which is also the name of their latest and greatest AI model.

58:46And our mutual Zodiac sign. Yes. So, Kevin, you're telling me that this Bard was not immortal? Oh, come on. Shakespeare is safe. So, Google this week announced that they are rebranding Bard. It will now be known as Gemini. They are also launching Gemini Advanced, which is a paid version of Gemini that will give people access to Gemini Ultra, which is their kind of largest and most capable AI model. Gemini Advanced will be available through the new Google One AI premium plan. Kevin, I just have to ask real quick, are you having a stroke? I might be. So they also announced that Duet AI will become Gemini for Google Workspace and Google Cloud.

59:30None of this is real. This is real? So basically what this boils down to is that they are changing some names. They are also introducing a paid product that will, for$20 a month, give you access to their top-of-the-line AI models. And they are also changing a lot of their different AI products like Google Assistant, which is sort of their version of Siri on Android devices. You can now run Gemini on that, too. So, Casey, I want to tell you what I think is a true sentence. Okay, let's hear it. If you used to use Duet AI for Google Workspace, instead, you will now use Gemini for Workspace and Google Cloud.

1:00:11and if you upgrade your existing Google One subscription to a Google One AI premium subscription, you will now get access to Gemini Advanced, which is powered by Gemini Ultra 1.0.

1:00:27This is one of the richest and most powerful companies in the entire world. They can hire any marketer they want, any brander they want. This is what they came up with. If you work for Google and you worked on any of this, please message us. We won't even use it on the show. I just need to know from my own knowledge how this happens. I'm someone who cares about this so much, and I could not parse even 5 % of what you just said. Yeah, it is truly a hilarious combination of product names and just an absolute chaotic nightmare to try to make sense of it. I went to this briefing where they rolled out these changes, and I was just sitting there taking notes, trying to, like, draw flowcharts of the various names and how they all relate to each other.

1:01:06It would be easier to pass calculus than to just repeat what you just said to me. So yes, all of this is sort of silly because they're just changing the names of a bunch of stuff. But I think what this boils down to is that Google has now built this model that they say is state of the art, and they are trying to roll this model out to as many customers as possible. So they are going to start putting it into things like Google Docs and Google Sheets. If you use Gmail, you will have the option of maybe using this model to write some of your emails or get you started on some of your emails. So this sort of effort by Google to jam generative AI into as many products as possible seems to be picking up pace.

1:01:48And we did talk last year about the fact that this is Google's big swing. This is their effort to catch up to the model that OpenAI has released. And I will say I am really looking forward to putting this, I believe it is called Gemini Ultra, through its paces to see how well it stacks up. Yeah, so it's a little interesting the way they rolled this out. So instead of being a standalone product, you know, this new tier of Gemini that gives you access to Gemini Ultra, it runs through Google One, which if you have ever encountered Google One, it's probably because you ran out of space on your Gmail account and you had to like pay them to upgrade your account.

1:02:25That is what Google One is. So if you need more space in your Gmail, you can buy more space through Google One. And now when you go into Google One, you'll also be able to buy this new AI premium plan that gives you access to their high-end model. That's great. I'm just picturing listeners listening to all this information and then just swerving off the road because their brain completely shuts down. Yeah, and what's most amazing about this is they are pitching this as a simplification of their existing product names. and so I would just say the simplification effort is not complete we're not yeah that's but I'm a little sad because Bard was actually one of my favorite of the like AI chatbot names and I'm just sad to see it go yeah R.I.P.

1:03:11Bard if you miss Bard you can actually play Bard in Baldur's Gate 3 one of the great video games for 2023 that's my advice wow Kevin that was really one of the biggest updates we've ever heard on this show and by biggest I mean most confusing so let's move on Is there a final update? Yes, TikTok. Oh, yes. Kevin, what is happening with TikTok? So we've talked a lot about TikTok on this show. Most recently, we talked with John Herman about TikTok's shopping features and how they are starting to change the platform. You may remember we had recently gone viral on TikTok. Yes. And now there's another big change on TikTok, which is that the Universal Music Group, one of the biggest music labels in the world, has pulled its licenses from TikTok.

1:03:50Now, do they have any of the good artists? So they do. They have many, many artists, including Taylor Swift, Bad Bunny, Drake, and Billie Eilish. And so if you made a video that included a Taylor Swift song or a Drake song in it, that video now has had the music stripped out of it. So you can still watch the video, but now it just is silent in the background. Yeah, we're sort of reinventing silent films just through copyright measures. Yes. So Universal Music Group and TikTok have been renegotiating their contract that allows TikTok to basically use these artists' music in videos. These talks did not go well.

1:04:29And ultimately, Universal Music Group published an open letter saying that TikTok was trying to, quote, build a music-based business without paying fair value for the music. They're also mad that TikTok is allowing its platform to be flooded, they say, with AI-generated recordings. and they're worried about the hate speech, bigotry, bullying, and harassment that UMG artists are met with on the platform. So now this contract has expired and music from Universal Music Group is unavailable on TikTok. So what do you make of this? Well, so this really surprised me because the one thing I can tell you for sure is that TikTok can afford whatever UMG was asking for, right?

1:05:11Like TikTok, which is owned by ByteDance, is doing very well financially. They could afford to pay the rate here. When I first saw this, I thought, okay, this is some hardball negotiating. I do expect that UMG will be back on TikTok in some relatively short period. But at the end, they did say, okay, we're actually going to go to the trouble of pulling the rights. And that did surprise me. What I wonder is, how big a deal is the AI thing? And was that maybe one of the top reasons that this all happened? Or is it really just about dollars and cents? My hunch is that it's mostly about dollars and cents.

1:05:45I mean, TikTok, it's still a huge part of the music industry. We've seen over the past few years, you know, artists like Olivia Rodrigo who blow up on TikTok and then go on to become huge celebrities. We've also seen TikTok sort of bringing songs out of obscurity. You remember the like Fleetwood Mac song that got popular after it was used in a TikTok video? I would say it was repopularized. Repopularized, yeah. Gen Z sort of rediscovered it after it went viral on TikTok. So TikTok and the music industry have been deeply intertwined for years now, and this just seems like maybe a sort of disagreement about how much music is worth on TikTok.

1:06:24Well, hopefully this will all get smoothed over. But in the meantime, Kevin, I'll tell you what I'm hoping for out of this situation, which is that we see a lot more public domain music going viral on TikTok. I would like to see She'll Be Coming Round the Mountain, maybe sort of hit number one on the charts this week. and really send a message that, you know, it's not all copyrighted music all the time and that there's some really beautiful songs that have, you know, recently come out of copyright. Yeah, if you are, you know, a Gregorian chant artist, this is your moment to shine on TikTok. Speak up.

1:06:53Get to chanting. And that's our system update.

1:07:08Hard Fork is produced by Rachel Cohn and Davis Land. We're edited by Jen Poyant. This episode was edited by Paula Schumann. We're fact-checked by Caitlin Love. Today's show was engineered by Alyssa Moxley. Original music by Alicia Baetup, Marion Lozano, Rowan Nemisto, and Dan Powell. Our audience editor is Nell Glogli. Video production by Ryan Manning and Dylan Bergeson. If you haven't already, check us out on YouTube at youtube.com slash hard fork. Special thanks to Puiwing Tam, Kate Leprasti, and Jeffrey Miranda. You can email us, as always, at hardforkatnytimes.com.

1:08:07Thank you.