SED News: Meta’s AI Gambit, Windsurf Shake‑Up, and the UK VPN Surge

0:11Hello and welcome to SED News. I'm Gregor Vand. And I'm Sean Faulkner. And welcome to the August edition. So this is, for just a quick reminder, a slightly different format of SE Daily podcast, where we take a spin through the last month's worth of main headlines. We talk about a kind of bigger, chunkier topic in the middle. We then look at Hacker News, just some fun things that have been going on there. And then we make a few predictions as to what we might be seeing in tech across the following month. So talking of predictions, I believe last time, John, we made one prediction, which was that July was going to be a quiet month.

0:51And I think we've seen that not to be the case. Yeah, I mean, that's in retrospect, quite a bold prediction to make. Yes, it was. Anything right now in tech is going to be like a quiet month. Maybe I haven't run the math on it. Maybe relative to, I don't know, June, it was quiet. but I think relative to probably any other time in technology, there was a ton of stuff going on. Yes. Yeah, absolutely. Which is good for us because if nothing happened, we wouldn't have anything to talk about. Right. Exactly. And the thing is, I think this is where it is summertime in the Northern hemisphere. So a lot of people are kind of like taking their weeks away, but yet there's still so much to catch up on.

1:29It looks like when people get back. Speaking of, how was your July, Sean? It was pretty good. I mean, I went, I think I mentioned I was going on a personal trip, family to Hawaii. Then I spent the July 4th weekend in the United States in a hospital because I was hospitalized for pneumonia, which put a little bit of a damper on things, but I'm fully recovered now and back in full strength. Yeah, back for SED news. That's what we had to hear. Yeah, fantastic. How about you? Yeah, I mean, July over here in Singapore, just speaking of seasons, we don't really have seasons. So it does make for this sort of slightly odd thing where people are talking about summer holidays, but nothing really changes here.

2:05So it's just sort of another month of being hot, etc. But no, I've been just heads down on a bunch of startup stuff. And more importantly, I decided to start rewatching Silicon Valley, the TV show. and it's also my wife's first time watching it. So it's kind of her window into this world. I think what strikes me is that this was made back in like 2014 was the first season. And okay, the tech has all changed, but the storylines are incredibly pertinent, I would say, even here we are 10 years later. So nothing seems to change on that front. Yeah. Well, I mean, I wonder how, if you're redoing Silicon Valley today, it probably would not be a compression algorithm.

2:45Exactly. Yeah, it's going to be some sort of AI model or something like that is the basis of the company. Yeah, but most of the actual sort of storylines in theory, I can see far too many parallels as well, which is kind of interesting and fun. So yeah, let's go into the headlines. Probably the big one was around meta superintelligence labs. So this kind of is, I guess, moving a little bit on from one of the things we touched on last time on the headlines around the scale AI acquisition by Meta. Well, sorry, it wasn't an acquisition. It was a large investment that looked like an acquisition effectively.

3:21And we weren't entirely sure what that was about. However, it's become kind of clear that this is a big mission from Mark Zuckerberg to create Meta super intelligence labs. and Alexander Wang who was the scale AI CEO is now the chief AI officer and leads that initiative and meanwhile they've also recruited Nat Friedman who is the former GitHub CEO and he apparently is partnering with Wang to lead AI products and applied research and then there's Shengjia Zhao I hope I pronounced that correctly who is a former open AI researcher and he's just been named the chief scientist of msl yeah there's quite a lot to unpack there sean yeah i mean i think this kind of goes back to some of the things that we've touched on in a couple episodes of like this i don't know like arms race around talent for ai right now and clearly meta is making some big moves here it's interesting with scale ai they're bringing in the ceo they made the investment yeah and i think one of the kind of funny things when you look back at some of the things that of course like Mark Zuckerberg said over the years, he's talked a lot about how men really invest in sort of the raw talented people.

4:37And it's not about people's experience. And he goes back to his own experience. Essentially, you know, he founded a company and was 19. And it's like, well, if I could do that with zero experience, but I was just talented, clearly talent is, we don't want to over index essentially on experience. But now they're paying massive amounts of money to acquire all this ai talent where it really is i mean obviously these people are talented but they also have core experience that meta wants to take advantage of like there's only a handful of people in the world that have been involved with as a early researcher at open ai and have done some of the things that this pool of talent that they've hired to kind of come in and run this lab yeah it feels like if we sort of again slightly unpack the scale ai investment or pseudo acquisition if you want to call it that it did look like i would say especially after we recorded last months it did very much look like they were doing this a to sort of cut off the data supply to other their competitors open ai and google for example as well as clearly mark zuckerberg has decided that talent is the the other war to be fought here and sort of that's their way of signaling to everyone else like how great they are at all this instead of you know people who i feel talk less about llama sort of in the consumer sense you don't sort of my mom wouldn't be using llama she uses clod so if we look at sort of because we're going to get to this in the main segment around sort of ai search like where does meta go from here so clearly this sort of looks like a way to signal to the world yeah i guess what i'm getting at is it feels not like a vanity project per se but it's a little bit hard to see the substance right now but of course that's i'm sure Mark Zuckerberg has it all figured out.

6:21Yeah. Well, I think a lot of it comes down to, if you look at how Meta monetizes, it's all based on capturing eyeballs, right? You need eyeballs so that you can monetize on ads. And that's been there, how they built up this war chest of this $100 billion revenue generating business. And Google is much the same as through search. And if those eyeballs go away because they're leveraging AI tools or other types of tools, then that devalues your company. So you have to make these sort of protective moves. Clearly, it seems like the future of all these businesses is going to have some core AI component, and it becomes a race to figure out what's our strategy there, who's going to own this, some people are going to succeed, some people are going to be losers in this as well.

7:08And of course, these businesses want to be on the winning side. Yeah. So moving on, the next sort of main headline, these are things that sort of touched the mainstream media in software and tech as much as they might touch Hacker News, for example. But the Windsurf acquisition, I'll call it debacle. So interestingly, my prediction last month was that something to do with the scale AI pseudo acquisition would go wrong. Well, it doesn't look like that went wrong, but Windsurf definitely sort of went wrong. Where back in May, it was announced that OpenAI was going to acquire them for$3 billion. And then something happened.

7:45And suddenly, Google announced actually that they're hiring the CEO of Windsurf, CEO and co-founder, Douglas Chen, and some of the top researchers. And that then very shortly after that, Cognition, who built the product Devon, which I'm sure a lot of people have heard of, they then said, oh, we're excited to share that Cognition has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Winsurf, the agentic IDE. So IE, they're sort of vacuuming up all the tech and the rest of the team. Yes, it says the acquisition includes Winsurf's IP product, trademark, and brand and strong business. So this is just bizarre, or I don't know, what did you make of this one?

8:22Yeah, I mean, it's kind of crazy. Like, I don't know why things fell through with OpenAI. I mean, these deals can fall through for a myriad of reasons. But then Google came along instead of making an acquisition, they basically just like pilfered the talent and the leadership team. You know, I'm sure they threw them a lot of money. Maybe they, you know, ran a calculation. It's like, okay, well, we're interested in these six people. How much is that going to cost versus buying the business or something like that? And then that leaves, unfortunately, Windsurf in a pretty tough situation. Yeah, absolutely.

8:54and i don't know did the terms of the deal with cognition is that public i don't think so i saw who knows what the structure a very nice video of course like it's a almost a topic for another day the level of production on videos that have come out in the last like few months but yeah i don't think the exact terms were disclosed yeah so who knows what that looks like but you know what i read was that cognition has kind of said that windsurf has done a really good job on like go to market. Cognition and Devin have really focused on the engineering side. Now on the Windsor side, a lot of their sort of engineering leadership has left.

9:32So it makes a lot of sense to kind of bring the companies together. That makes sense, of course, from like a public perspective, but I'm sure a lot of it had to do with acquisition and acquiring some of the brands, like some of the things that are stated there, but who knows what the value of that. But I mean, that is a crazy situation though to go through. And it's probably unfortunate for the employees that were left behind at Winsurf. I think that would be tough. I think as somebody who had been an entrepreneur at one point, it's a weird sort of situation to abandon your company. Like, I don't know the ins and outs of everything there.

10:05So I don't want to fault them too much, but it is a bit of a strange on the surface level. It feels like a selfish move to kind of abandon your company because someone throws money at you and then kind of leave behind all the people that you convinced to come and actually work on this vision that you've created yeah exactly and this is it i think i'm sure in time there'll be either books or articles written about sort of what actually went on here but yeah i share that view as well and whatever has happened there's no way that this has been sort of a nice experience for a lot of the team probably at windsurf it's just probably sounded like an incredibly distracting three months of oh we're being acquired by open ai oh now we're not oh now our ceo is leaving oh and by the way you're now going to join this other company so doesn't sound fun either way so yeah okay so moving on from the windsurf acquisition we have seen reports that lyft are indeed trying to get into the autonomous vehicle space so this is interesting and a sort of a headline on the basis that they have fairly recently said that they weren't going to get into this space or at least the CEO was on another podcast fairly recently and when pressed on this point that sort of how are they competing with it was never mentioned that podcasts never said uber but they always just said you know the other guys so you know sort of if you're trying to compete with the other guys how are you doing it and how do you plan to do it and his answer was much more around oh brand and we're the best service we've got the best on time rates and the best pickup percentages and we've got this amazing partnership with doordash and that's going really well and sort of when pressed on autonomous he was very non-committal and he didn't say that they were going to launch their own sort of way mo or anything like that but now it's become reported that they're going to be at least trialing i believe autonomous shuttles so sort of like small kind of bus like vehicles but in partnership with someone else.

12:03So yeah, this was kind of interesting, right? Yeah. So I believe both Lyft and Uber at one point had their own autonomous vehicle labs. And actually at Lyft, pre-IPO, a friend of mine who's the CTO of a company I used to work for was one of the engineering leaders in that lab, came over from Microsoft to basically lead a lot of those efforts and work on autonomous vehicles at Lyft. But I think that some of it was some posturing going on through the process of going IPO to kind of probably help drive up stock value and things like that. And then they eventually abandon the effort. I do think that the strategy they're taking now in terms of let's not sink all this R &D effort and try to build our own thing to compete with all the other self-driving car companies that are out there, and not to mention like Google and Waymo and stuff like that, and doing it through partnerships makes a lot of sense from a strategy standpoint, because it's just like, is that your core competency, the amount of money you'd have to throw at the problem while you're still just trying to create a sort of taxi service that you're competing with Uber on to this day, probably better to focus your resources on that.

13:12Yeah, absolutely. And I think certainly there's a differentiator here, whether this is about shuttles and it's not about individual sort of rides, it looks like, because I think Lyft can probably see that they're even partnering with someone would look probably quite difficult at this stage waymo have already kind of they don't have a great distribution right now you know they've got their own app but it does look like maybe they're gonna have to partner with maybe uber for example to kind of get their distribution better for example but suddenly yeah lyft are taking a slightly different approach which is okay we've got the distribution but we're not gonna then go head-to-head on the exact mode of transport and shuttles is what they're trying so yeah interesting so there was a report i believe in time about chat gpt's impact on our brains what was this about sean yeah so this is pretty interesting my wife actually sent me this which was this study done at mit the research hasn't been peer-reviewed yet but it's been submitted and i think it's the first time that particular research has released something sort of pre being peer-reviewed but they thought it was an important study to get out there at least that's what they shared but they took 54 different subjects, they divided them into three different groups, so it's like 16 per group, and then each group had the right SAT essays.

14:27One group could leverage ChatGPT, another group could use Google for search, and then another group couldn't use anything other than what's in their brain. And they used an EEG to measure and record brain activity while people were writing these essays. Unsurprisingly, ChatGPT leads, you know, leveraging that, you have the lowest brain activity to intend to do this. And essentially the chat GPT cohort got lazier and lazier over time where eventually they weren't even trying to massage the output of the essay. They were just copying, pasting it and putting it in wholesale. So the thing that they really highlight in the article is the potential risk on especially the young children in a developing brain.

15:14Because there's one thing if you've, it's a little bit, I guess, like maybe the closest analogy is like math. If I've already learned how to do math for atoms, subtraction, multiplication, divide, these types of things, and I know those sort of things for first principle, I learned them in school. And then eventually I start using a calculator. Well, I can use that to kind of supplement, but I still have that first principle knowledge. But if I start with a calculator and I never learned those things, then I'm never going to learn how to do that basic functionality and over-reliance on potentially using something like chat GPT or one of these other interfaces, maybe I never learned sort of the basic writing skills.

15:52And I also think it makes a lot of sense, even for someone who's an adult, if you can become over-reliant on these things, it's a little bit like instead of being physically active, you lay around all day, eventually your muscles atrophy. I think it's the same thing with your brain. If you're turning off your brain, you're never ever pushing yourself to think of anything. You're just always just basically prompting something to generate output for you. Then it stands the reason that your brain kind of gets lazier over time too and has some sort of negative impact on you. Yeah, that's very interesting.

16:21I mean, I can totally identify with that in the sense of if I start a day and the day starts with LinkedIn, my brain starts to, I think, atrophy just even in those few minutes, whereas if I start with like a book or something else. So it is very important in terms of what does your brains actually get fed with in the first place. And then exactly in what's being reported here we discussed this on one of the other episodes purely around the coding side you know like what happens if you didn't learn the first principles the fundamentals before you're introduced to tools that can then output what you ask it to do but this feels far more important in the sense that writing is still a skill that most humans should learn and be able to express themselves through writing and obviously communicate with people through writing and this does feel quite not to sound alarmist but a little bit scary actually because we know that adults are not great at the moment or sort of how are they policing the usage of llms and at what age it's almost like parents you know i think sort of say oh have you given your child a phone yet and then maybe we'll start hearing oh do you allow your child to use an llm yet for example yeah it's a tough balance because there are skills that are useful probably in the long term for them to develop with interacting with some of these tools.

17:38And I think also there are learning opportunities with these as well, because you can explore any subject in a very sort of psychologically safe zone where I can ask it anything. I don't have a fear of it, like judging me and I can learn that way. But if I'm really just putting in my homework and having to spin out the output and then copy and pasting it, I'm not really learning in that way. So it's basically, it's such a shortcut that It's not forcing my brain to kind of think through that. And the study showed that people generally had a lot harder time recalling what they wrote when they used those systems as well, because you're just not putting the same sort of level of thought into it.

18:15It's probably not crystallizing the same memory pathways and so forth. And of course, doing this without any tooling had the best recall because you're forcing yourself to do it. And just moving on to one other headline before we go to our main topic. This was reported in the Financial Times, but it also got very high up on Hacker News as well with a lot of commentary from the community. This is that VPN use has surged in the UK as new online safety rules have kicked in. And this is really around that the UK government has implemented some new sort of safety framework that then would require a lot of websites.

18:55obviously for example adult websites but also many other types of websites to make some quite sort of heavy age checks on the users and i believe i was trying to put the pieces together here of like where does a vpn come into all this and i think well it must be that the framework that's been implemented is trying to do some matching on say ip plus what does that person say their ages and so on and all just so basically privacy is just kind of going out the window so So it's very interesting that a lot of teenagers, so this applies to social media as well, things like TikTok, etc. And I think a lot of teenagers have understood very quickly that a VPN will help them at least circumvent a lot of what this is trying to do.

19:35And the article, as well as a lot of commentary, is just talking about how this is what happens when policy is passed. With a sheer lack of understanding of technology, because to circumvent it took all of five minutes for someone. So it's an unfortunate position where the UK government thinks it's trying to do something to protect people. But actually, the reality is it's probably doing more harm than good as implemented. Yeah, I mean, the policy is probably something like websites need to, if you're in a certain class of website, you have to check to see the region, the world that the person is connecting from and then do the age verification.

20:11But that's an easy enough thing to circumvent. You know, I think I worry, you know, even going back to the last thing we were talking about on this or ChatGPT, I could imagine there could be policies that could potentially come into school systems where it's like, hey, we want to teach our kids how to use these AI systems. And then they get incorporated into school without necessarily fully understanding what the impact could be that could lead to these kind of like downstream sort of cascading effects where you're actually negatively impacting people. and i think in general we see this pattern sometimes when it comes to like the policymakers is just a lack of sort of understanding the technical details and then maybe the intention there's good intentions at heart but without really understanding technical details they're impossible to enforce or they actually have a negative consequence yeah i mean the one that sticks out to me that's still in force is all the cookie policy stuff that came in and especially in europe gdpr which relates to this and the implementation of that has just been horrible in the sense that we've all probably daily we all go to a site and the first thing we see is a cookie which ones do you want to pick and then of course the default is still just to press yes to all and then but there's a button that says you know confirm my choices which is kind of a way of saying no it's just such a mess and has just made the internet even less fun unfortunately again well intentioned but like this is again what happens when policy policy doesn't consider ux policy just considers policy and then it's like now you know rest of internet go implement what we've decided which is i remember back in the day having to when gdpr came in and we were working for a very large multinational and just that was just a horrible horrible project for everybody involved having to implement gdpr compliant everything so okay so let's move on to the main topic for today which is we're kind of just terming this like ai search and that is quite a broad term and you'll maybe see why in a second we're kind of looking at okay we've got the main players like open ai or chat tpt claude perplexity but google has gemini but google is obviously the world's still most popular search engine and kind of the window into the rest of the internet for still a majority of people but where are these all crossing over because it wasn't that long ago that you could use say claude or you would be using claude and you would kind of ask a question which would in theory need to go and pull some information from somewhere else.

22:49And Claude would simply say, I can't access websites. So I don't know about that. And maybe some people have even forgotten that that was a thing because like now you can go to Claude and ask something more kind of real time, you know, how is Google approaching this thing? And it will then kind of say, oh, I'm going to go do a bunch of searching and then, oh, I found these 10 links and let me just quickly parse those links and analyze those okay and now here's this a real-time answer so that's a sort of quick history on where we're coming from and where we're going to but the implementation across the different services is quite different so we're going to kind of look at that first and then we're kind of going to look at where are things landing because there's also been a report fairly recently in Wall Street Journal and I just reported generally in earnings that Google's earnings are still from search are still very healthy and people kept predicting that search was going to get killed very fast.

23:42We're not seeing that yet. So we're going to sort of look at that as well. So yeah, so let's maybe Sean, shall we start with just sort of looking at the different platforms and kind of how they have approached this, bringing real time data, if we want to call it that into their platforms. So maybe, I don't know, let's start with GPT and Claude, because Prophexity is an interesting one. It's a little bit different in terms of where they started and where they are now. So let's start with OpenAI, ChatGPT and Anthropic, Claude. Yeah, I think with ChatGPT, they were, I believe, like either the first or one of the first in kind of consumer facing applications to bring in these like external search services where I asked for something that's real time would be generous, but you know, something that's like fairly recently happening because it has to show up on the web at some point in order for the parse it.

24:28But basically, they're doing a web search behind the scenes and then pulling in that additional contextual data so that they can properly contextualize the prompt behind the scenes and generate a response that makes sense. So it's like, you know, tell me about the weather in San Francisco. And it can go and do that web search because it recognizes that it probably doesn't have access to that. And it's, you know, tremendously valuable because you used to get that sort of like, you know, I've only been trained on data up to such and such a day and I can't, you know, comment on these things. or you'd have to go and copy and paste that from somewhere and bring it in.

24:58And I think one of the things that we're seeing is with OpenAI and I think with Gemini and Gemini's direct interface or even with Quad and all the different models is trying to bring more and more functionality directly into the application. It's just like over years, Google has done, even in conventional search, more and more to sort of teach you in the search page rather than delivering you externally. And I think as things, people get so used to like having conversations and sort of just being able to ask for stuff, you know, I think about what does that look like sort of long-term of if you have ChatGPT and suddenly websites, e-commerce sites can all just be tool invocations of some sort, then do I ever need to go to an e-commerce site?

25:48Can I just go to kind of this chat interface and just say like, hey, I'm interested in buying some shoes and this is what it looks like. And here's the amount of money I have available to spend and blah, blah, blah. And then it can go and actually like behind the scenes, converse with that site, pull in the details, render it. And I never actually have to leave the chat interface. It's almost like the way I think about it is like how WeChat has become this like super app in China where it's almost an operating system itself where it has apps within the app and so forth. and you can do everything in terms of your personal financing and everything all within WeChat.

26:23That's a great example because it became clear that super apps, especially yes, in China were leading, I'm going to say their internet because, you know, it is a very, very different way of operating the internet inside China. Meta, at least, were trying to do the whole super app thing, you know, trying to blend Facebook and Instagram and WhatsApp. And I think the vision there was to virtually blend them and of course people basically users push back hard on seeing bits of their data across platform and so at least for now things are still relatively segmented but yeah i think that's a great way to look at it so this morning i don't use gpt as much but i thought i would just go in and just kind of see what it does like today one interesting thing was going in and you know when you start typing the prompt box you can choose you know is this like research or an image or whatever but one of them is actually just web search so i press web search and then more interestingly then like kind of a googly type thing happens where it sort of shows you the last like four trending topics and i was like oh okay this is very searchy and like one of them was cat dealy and i was like oh cat dealy is a tv presenter sure i'll press cat dealy why is she trending and you know and then i get this big like summary around her career and she's trending because she's unfortunately broken up with her husband and i was like okay well to be fair this is a much i think better experience than had i gone and searched kat deely on google however like why am i not doing that here normally it's because the browser and like the browser i use chrome and the first window into chrome is the url bar and that's also search so yeah that was kind of interesting on the Claude side i think yeah i just see it that where i ask questions and it's never clear like when Claude decides it needs to go off and retrieve information because sometimes it will just kind of if the model has the data it will just come back with you know this is shakespeare's last work was this and whatever but if it's something that clearly needs additional context it sort of tells you very fast i'm going off and doing this and then there's the whole research modes which you know both open ai and anthropic have implemented in in their products where it kind of goes off for much longer periods of time pulling lots and lots of data from lots of sources and it tells you where these sources are which is something that to my understanding a simple search right now in google or any other pure search engine just doesn't have the ability to do that yeah and i think the other move that some of these companies are doing as well is at least there's rumors of like open ai is gonna launch a web browser perplexity i believe already has a web browser it's kind of like and it kind of comes back to like what i talked about earlier with meta is like how do you own people's eyeballs so if you own a browser that people like to use it's much easier to make your website the default experience just like you know google's done with chrome or apple was able to do in some capacity with safari and so forth but like how do you keep people basically engage with your software.

29:32And I kind of wonder, you know, if it does become something where most of our interactions are through these kind of chat interfaces, like even going back to the e-commerce one in the future, what's it mean? Will even mean to have a website like do websites in sort of the rendering of HTML, CSS, and these kind of interactive experiences that we've built up, do those go away? And these things all become some sort of more of a tool based interface that's kind of hidden from the users and the way into those are through these kind of chat experiences yeah exactly so perplexity is an interesting case where i believe from kind of their inception or at least inception of a consumer product that they sort of put out publicly they were much more hey we are the ai search engine you know it was like come to us and do your searches here and you get all this like added context and citations of where we got the information from and and it was really i thought it was really nice i'm not quite sure why i didn't use it maybe as much as i thought i would again it's probably just the eyeball argument they gave away like pro subscriptions very early i mean i believe i've still got one that's completely free so what's interesting yeah is that they've come out with perplexity comet which is their browser offering just to kind of give a quick description you know if you go to the comet website it's all very apply i would say it's like very sort of thin serif fonts which i know are very much in vogue right now again everything every all these ai products seem to be using kind of the same font you know and it says like comet is powerful it's professional it's personal it looks like a very nice experience but again like where what's it going to take to get people to kind of fully move over to a browser that's controlled by one of these players and then a company a company that I mentioned briefly last time, Manist.

31:19They're ultimately a Chinese company that have done what quite a lot are doing right now. Chinese companies are moving most of their team and infra to Singapore because they want to be seen as kind of neutral. But they're the same thing. They kind of started with a browser, then they went away from the browser thing. Now they're back with another browser. Browser is kind of now this eyeball solution, I guess, is how they're looking at it. it's probably going to take a while before this can become the one-stop shop for all user interactions. But it does seem to be the direction that a lot of companies are trying to push for.

31:53I know Google, like everyone's excited about like their earnings reports and they've had a big bump in their stock and so forth. But like, I wonder like what's Google's play there just because they have such a long history with monetizing blue links. And I wonder how they're thinking strategically about how do you shift that business model to a new potentially a new business model that allows you to kind of monetize in a different way yeah i don't think we've seen it yet but i think it's fairly understood that at least open ai are going to be finding ways to monetize through chat gpt i believe they hired the head of ads from meta or this person she had at least led the ad side of the business at Meta for a long, long time.

32:39Maybe it wasn't a direct hiring, but that's sort of her background. So why do you hire someone who's got an ad background? Well, you know, it doesn't take too much to figure that one out. And yeah, so Google at the moment, according to Wall Street Journal and their earnings, you know, they're still doing fine when it comes to traffic and, you know, Google itself, just pure Google search, you know, they do a lot of this, like just a summary at the top of the page, which is interesting because that kind of stops people clicking through to links. Whereas it's been reported in TechCrunch, and this was said, according to new data from market intelligence providers, SimilarWeb, AI platforms in June of this year generated over 1.13 billion referrals to a thousand websites globally.

33:19And that's a figure that's up 357 % since about this time last year. And the top places they seem to be sending users to our Reddit, Facebook, GitHub, Microsoft, Canva, Instagram, LinkedIn, Bing. But I was more interested in the second kind of set of referrals. Well, it was referrals by category. By category, we're seeing things like a lot of referrals to things like Zillow, Home Depot, and Kayak. So they caught my eye because as soon as these platforms, ChatGPT, Cloud, etc., as soon as they're making these mass referrals to sites like home depot or kayak that really starts to take a dent out of google's at least market power here and what does that mean that means like ad spend on google potentially is going to go down because if they're saying kayak could say hey but we're not getting the same traffic from you guys anymore so why we're not going to pay the same kind of money yeah and those are a lot of high value search terms like that they make a lot of money off of very competitive.

34:21But I do think that, give Google some credit, they have had a long history of being able to make the right defensive moves. Like they did it with mobile, they did it with the browser, like they have been able to kind of, you know, skirt these challengers in the past. The big question is, can they do it with all these kind of AI competitors and what's happening? One thing I was thinking about, do you think that we will remember this time as kind of a heyday of LLM based like interfaces. And at some point, you know, the chat GPTs of the world are just going to become like polluted with ads. And it's going to be like the same terrible experience that we have now.

34:56Because when Google first started, there was a lot less ads there in the blue links. And then even if you think about like the Netflix's of the world and like streaming services, we had a heyday of streaming. And now essentially, everybody is trying to protect their core IP. And you end up with having to subscribe to like six different streaming services, we're basically back to like cable packages just with a lot more stuff that's on demand we've passed the sort of heyday of streaming we're probably past the heyday of search are we right now living in the moment of the heyday l1 based interfaces and everything's going to get worse from here not to sound yeah sort of fatalist but yeah i think you're probably onto something with that one and uh you know i think the technical term in tech is uh in certification you know i think it's that essay that someone wrote about the in certification of the internet which basically just means that every product that was once good eventually eventually just becomes terrible because they've had to pack it with monetization features so on so on so i mean that's it's a great essay if anyone's not read that just to sort of understand why maybe a lot of us feel that the internet is not kind of what we would like it to be you know for many reasons and yeah i think you're right sean i think we could be seeing this as sort of the heyday like open ai or chat gpt at least was, you know, what the fastest used consumer product in history or something to that effect.

36:16But that was exactly way before it could access sort of outside links. And as we've just mentioned, it looks like they're probably going to start bringing in some kind of indirect monetization, i.e. companies paying them to have potentially their links, you know, pushed more than others when it comes to the responses. And that just kind of kills the whole thing. Because, you know, at the moment, it feels sort of, I don't want to say neutral, but it feels that as neutral as a model can be from i i appreciate you know it's trained on data and there's been arguments around where does that data come from and and who tuned the model and is it just a bunch of white males tuning the model basically so what does that do but at least we think there are no kind of monetary incentives right now for what yeah i mean you could argue that they're when they surface an answer and that's sourced from somewhere they're doing that under the best intentions of creating the best answer possible but as soon as you start building a business model around being able to monetize answers and you can influence answers based on how much money you pay then suddenly you destroy the good intentions that were there originally so yeah maybe let's wrap that one up there i mean i think we've done not too bad a job of kind of trying to cover what is a quite a meaty topic in the sense that it's quite disparate in terms of all the products are trying to do right now and where they might go with this but i think you know the tldr here is Google is still doing not too bad on its search revenue, but for how long?

37:40Meanwhile, all the other LLM products are moving to this kind of, we want your eyeballs, basically stop using Chrome, stop using the URL bar, stop searching in there. How do we get you to use our product for virtually everything? Like how do we become the OS of your internet experience? So yeah, like watch the space. I'm sure we'll come back on this in a few months and there'll be some major developments, no doubt. So let's move on to the highlight of the show, Hacker News Highlights. I might kick off with, I've got a fun one and then a sort of not serious one, but just this is probably more fun per se.