Meta Connect 2026, OpenAI’s Australia ‘Incident,’ Bentley’s New EV | Diet TBPN

0:01John Coogan:Meta Connect yesterday. Zuck likes going late. 4pm Pacific, 7pm Eastern for the keynote. Well, because he wanted to roll straight from the keynote into some beer pong. Oh, that's true. We will get into that big hot debate on the timeline over his beer pong strategy. But really, really tight keynote. Very well organized. Very clear. Didn't overstay its welcome. did three live demos. Last year there was a hiccup with a live demo Wi-Fi and I believe Boz triggered everyone's agents by using the wake word. So this time he deliberately stayed away from using that wake word and used like the name of his agent.

0:41John Coogan:So he didn't cause a lot of chaos in the dome or in the studio, wherever they were. But a bunch of great announcements, really good pacing, really tight one-hour keynote. And it was fun watching Zuck sort of do the live demos and be like one down. It was high stakes. It was clearly high stakes for him. But he got through it all. No mistakes. Yeah, he had a funny line. He was like, and we love live demos here. Yeah. It's funny because he totally could just not do live demos, but he wants to. So he pushes through it. I think you need to. Do you? I think you absolutely need to. People have bought so many random hardware devices that haven't met expectations.

1:22Yeah. And I guess there was that. If you want people to buy it, you have to do a live demo.

1:26John Coogan:Yeah. There was a demo of a Gemini model running like two years ago that was like sped up in post. And that faced a lot of criticism. And so I think, yeah, just demoing things as they are available in the real world is very valuable. And I think in general, like the thesis for the products was like meet people where they are delivering tomorrow's technology with today's constraints. And that's just what I kept seeing as a theme was like, what do people want? And of course, the best, it basically created a huge dichotomy between like the crazy super intelligence, RSI, ASI, PDoom, XRisk crew. And then just like Muse, it's a helpful agent.

2:11John Coogan:Neeraj Agarwal summed it up well. Anthropic marketing. We built a God only we can control and gave it a wet lab. Muse marketing. Hey, girl, I know you have dozens of unpaid parking tickets. Let's get that cleaned up. And it's funny because it's actually working. I think that if you went back to a couple months ago, the consensus was like popularity of AI is turning. It's deeply unpopular. you need to just be quiet or not lean in or just like apologize like what a lot of the lab leaders are doing just being like yeah it is bad i'm sorry but meta has taken a very different approach they're not fear-mongering they're just like it's cute it's lovable and uh and they actually are successful i mean the new york times yesterday jensen and ezra duking it out over like x risk and and acceleration do we need to slow down meanwhile the new york times published like a a really positive review of Muse.

3:06John Coogan:They love it. And they're a tough cookie to win over, basically. So success there. And it's interesting because there's been a few strikes for meta over the past two years. The vertical AI slop app vibes quickly disappeared. I don't even know if it's available anymore. It might have been quietly shuttered or tucked behind a couple different tabs. The core MetaChat app that was sort of just like a Gemini, a ChatGPT clone, I don't think that ever really took off. Over the last year, you have massive spending, clearly massive focus for Meta, but the strategy was at most times completely incoherent.

3:46It was scattered. It was not legible to the markets. It was not legible to the tech industry. It was do everything. But nothing was really accelerated. Muse code. You had them buying and then having to undo the Manus acquisition. Oh, yeah. The meta vibe, the first thing, and again, this was an unforced error, the first thing that they did post the whole talent raid was release the short form slop video app, which wasn't even... It was mid-journey. Yeah, it was basically a mid-journey rapper, and everyone was like, okay, this doesn't align to what you're putting out, which is this personal super intelligence.

4:26And so, really, yesterday, like everything felt like it came together really nicely, right? Tying in all of the hardware investments, tying in personal, making personal super intelligence feel a bit more real, right? AI that hustles for you. I think that's smart positioning, but it really felt like things came together for the first time. And I wouldn't necessarily go so far as to give them full credit as, like, if you're really going to give them full credit for, like, this was the master plan all along, then there's a bunch of other stuff you wouldn't have done unless you were just trying to confuse the market.

5:04You're trying to just confuse people. Are we doing coding? Are we doing, you know, a knowledge work harness? Are we doing short form slop? And so I think it was really like...

5:14John Coogan:So you're not giving them the benefit of the 4D chess? No. Okay. No, no, no. Tricky. But... Going Occam's Razor. Yeah, Occam's 4D Razor. Total credit to them for figuring out how all the pieces connect together and then putting that in a one-hour presentation that actually makes sense. So what are the pieces that come together? Why does it make sense for Meta's business? Why are they seeing success here when the models haven't jumped to the frontier? The benchmarks have always been a little – there's been a lot of confusion on are they going to sell compute, sell tokens, go after the coding market, desktop agents, all these different things that they were testing.

5:54John Coogan:This seems to be working. And I think there's sort of four key points that come together to make this make sense. So first is like they have scaled and secured systems for years. WhatsApp encryption is a great example. They have a lot of compute. And so they can offer a VM for millions of people that is secure and also well resourced. And they won't be losing sleep over cost because they already have a lot of the compute built out. and the question was like, when will the demand come? Are those GPUs sitting idle? Is that infrastructure getting used efficiently? They're building a lot more of it.

6:31John Coogan:Do they need to? Well, they got to find a product to actually distribute all that through and it seems like they have. Two was they have the distribution to continually educate people about features and benefits of Muse through big ad placements across the family of apps. I think that there is the world where they've been able to funnel what, like half a billion people over to Threads. It's not a particularly differentiated app. Obviously, it's a different community and it's done well, but it's a different challenge because with Threads, you can just show someone a text post. People know what that looks like.

7:04John Coogan:It's more content. They go over there. Job's finished. Once you show someone, all you need to show is that their community exists over there. They're scrolling Instagram, watching basketball highlights, and you say, hey, there's some basketball commentary going on in Threads. You hop over there. With all the AI agent products, the capabilities change so rapidly that you have to re-educate the consumer on what it's capable of. Like, can it actually deal with parking tickets? Like, if it can, you need to confidently tell someone that. And that capability might change. It might not work one week, and then the model updates, and then all of a sudden you can do that the next week.

7:37John Coogan:And so, ChatGPT came out, and it was like, it can answer Google searches. It can do your homework. Then it was like, it can write some code. And there's this constant like reeducation of the community. Obviously the early adopters, the enterprise, the business, the startup community tests everything, but consumers don't. Consumers just, they need to be told the new iPhone has an ultra wide camera. The new iPhone has Memoji. Even though Memoji was not a wildly popular feature, Apple told everyone what it was. We know what it is. Everyone sort of knows that concept because they ran billboard campaigns and meta has the ability to actually go and tell everyone what muse is capable of and run an ad campaign across the whole platform to get people back up to speed on the latest and greatest feature um the third is that uh no one needs their says deal quote deal with parking tickets hack me out of it then we are well well no no so so the thing is is that they are behind on the frontier they're they're they're not dominating all the benchmarks but it actually doesn't matter because no one needs their personal AI agent to solve a Millennium Prize math problem or secure their enterprise infrastructure from cyber attacks.

8:50John Coogan:That's not a requirement. The model is definitely good enough for a lot of this. They obviously will increase the model and the capabilities, but it's not what consumers worry about. Consumers don't care about benchmarks. They don't understand them. The benchmarks are often hacked or not indicative of the feel of using a model. And so it leans into the capabilities. They have near fear, near frontier intelligence. They have good enough intelligence. And so if it's good enough to do this, you just roll out the capability and the harness is what matters. The integration, the distribution, that's what matters.

9:25John Coogan:So they actually didn't launch watermelon. They've been teasing that for a while. There's been some leaks. It totally could have happened here, but they made the decision to either not rush it because maybe it does just need more time, But also, even if it was ready, I don't think they should have launched it here because MetaConnect's not for that audience. They don't care. The watermelon might scare people. Yeah, you probably don't want it to be too powerful. And then fourth, they, of course, already have a business model that's heavily aligned with this type of use case advertising. We've talked about this idea that brands would love to sponsor agentic workflows.

10:02You open up a personal AI agent and it says, hey, you know, the new Nathan Fielder movie is coming out in a couple months.

10:09John Coogan:I saw that you were scrolling reels. You seem to be a fan of this. You shared the movie trailer with your friend. Do you want me to get tickets, text some of your friends, share it on WhatsApp, share it in your Instagram DMs, and actually make that happen? Send a calendar invite. Do everything necessary to take care of that. And I think movie studios are just one example of a business that would happily pay for placement, for extra attention around that particular workflow that they can monetize through the traditional pathway. And then, of course, like small businesses will buy pixels anywhere.

10:44John Coogan:So, you know, if you open it up and there's a full bleed ad, like that's fine. People will pay for that. Yeah, the other kind of examples that get pretty crazy is your personal agent, for example, knows that you have home insurance that's set to renew in three months. And it's like, do you want me to go get three competing bids before we renew? And it's like, yes, right? And that's like an opportunity for some type of paid placement as well. For sure. So the vibes, not the app, but the actual vibes at Meta internally, how are the employees feeling? I feel like this is a turning point. I feel like if you're at Meta, you're like, okay, finally, there's a thing to align around.

11:20John Coogan:We have a strategy. As long as I do something that's in support of Muse and what's going on with the personal super intelligence mission, that the CEO and founder has laid out. I'm good, even if I'm on Facebook Marketplace team, and I feel like I'm going to get steamrolled because of the Nikita Beer take that everyone's going to be negotiating and low-balling on Facebook Marketplace. Well, the Facebook Marketplace team, they can say, okay, well, now we're going to build tools for sellers to make that not annoying. And so there's more work to be done, and it's more aligned with the overall mission.

11:52John Coogan:The vibe should be good. At the same time, The Verge ran a story that said the vibes are internally way off still at meta, that people are upset about the scattershot nature of the approach, that they're still reeling from the metaverse misadventures. But I feel like that was the last hit piece you could write about meta. And I think things will turn around. It's hard to be feeling that bad when the stock's up 38 % in the last month. Yeah. And so I think it's pretty easy to align all the efforts across what's happening, personal superintelligence. And even if you were on the glasses team, there's a whole narrative of, well, you were trying to build VR.

12:29John Coogan:You were in the division that was building the cool Oculus stuff. It's evolved. And now it's kind of just a GoPro on your face. There's been some negative, oh, these are just for people to spy on each other, blah, blah, blah. But now they even have a version without cameras. And it's very aligned to what the users want. And so the top line hero initiative, even if you're just on the glasses team and you're like, oh, they're building a data center and that's not really anything to do with me. Or they're working on a coding model and that's not really relevant to getting more people to wear the Oakleys or the Meta Ray-Bans.

13:04John Coogan:Well, now you are aligned. Now you are on the same team. You're rowing in the same direction. And so I would expect the vibes to get better, I think. And yeah, this is all good news, super reflected in the timeline. But I'm even more excited about the VR glasses. That was the highlight for me. It was the one more thing. I was hoping that we'd get a new VR headset last year. We didn't. And no one was speculating that this would drop this year, but it did. And it's very, very cool. So the headline is$1 ,300 VR glasses. It's 100 grams, which is the weight of a pack of deck of cards. If you go back, John Carmack was the CTO of Oculus, working with Palmer Luckey.

13:52John Coogan:He came into Meta through the acquisition. He's the creator of Doom, legendary computer scientist, now running Keen, working on AI. He wound up leaving. Very, very disappointing to not have him realize his vision there at the company. And he had been pounding the table at Meta. and actually there were some leaks and there was like, oh, this is like a source of frustration because his goal and his mission was to get to 100 grams for the headset, very light, at$100. He said it needs to be cheap and light and then it can go everywhere. Then you can see mass adoption and then you'll get the developer ecosystem, et cetera.

14:30John Coogan:Obviously,$1 ,300 is not$100. There's been a lot of inflation, but not that much inflation. But it is half the price of the Apple Vision Pro, basically. you're in a more accessible territory. Half the price of specs. Oh yeah. It's half the price of specs. And it's, uh, I think it's less than 1 % the price of a Ferrari Luce. So there's that. If you're, if you're in the market, you can just put that on and imagine that you're driving a electric Ferrari. Glasses in the car sound the same. Oh yeah. They're both very quiet, but he, but he pitched it as three key things. It's a cinema, it's a workstation and it's a gaming console you can play vr head vr games on it i almost felt like they were listening or just like same uh line of thought as um ben thompson because they're rolling out a bunch of like a hundred experiences it sounds like a year yeah where you're going to be able to get some entertainment live entertainment value from your headset and specifically sports sports sports sit anywhere in the stadium yes yes yes and you can pick your seat and i don't think they will be doing the crazy frenetic editing or the cutdowns.

15:32John Coogan:They have a great deal with UFC. Obviously, Dana White's on the board. But it seems like they also rolled out partnerships with so many other leagues to get that there. They also put the compute and the battery pack on a puck that you wear on your belt. I love that design. It was very controversial, very un-Apple when Apple Vision Pro did it. And everyone was like, Steve Jobs never would have stood for this. Well, that's the reality of the technology. It doesn't make sense to put a battery on your face and so put it in your pocket. I've never had a problem with the way the Apple Vision Pro works with the Tether.

16:09John Coogan:And they did a good job in the promotional videos of like hiding the puck, like you can't even see it there. So they're clearly aware that you want to forget about it. And I think in the best case, you actually can. So very good there. The other dynamic tabletop typing. So if you have a flat surface in front of you. Bad. Bad. Bad. No one wants to do that. German says it's insane. I don't think it'll... I trust him with my life. Okay, okay. Maybe. I think people will either connect this to a computer and just be using their computer, or they'll just be using voice. I think that that's like a half measure, like the writing.

16:46John Coogan:And I think it won't be... It'll be 99 % of the way there, so in a demo, you'll be like, oh, this is pretty good. but if you're thinking about actually wearing this for work hours a day you'll be like yeah let me get a$20 keyboard it has tactile feedback like you can actually feel the keys the keys move I don't know it's good that they did it like it's clearly cool it's possible and especially if you're in a situation where you can't bring a keyboard or a laptop like that makes a lot of sense that is a glimpse into the future I would be surprised if that has if that's the dominant input, like way people input stuff.

17:24John Coogan:They'll either just talk to it because the voice models are good or they'll be locked in at a computer with an actual keyboard. Good to have. This is an awesome step forward to humanity living inside a world owned and controlled by Mark Zuckerberg. Instead of trying to purely position it as this entirely new thing, metaverse that you live in and VR and everything's immersive and it's full immersion, instead you're like, this can replace your triple monitor display. And you're like, yeah, you know what? I was in the market for a triple monitor display. It was going to be two grand across three monitors.

17:58John Coogan:Why don't I pick up this instead? And if they can deliver on that, I still think this might be V1 and it might be the second one that actually gets the breakout success and really broad adoption. Yeah. He did say, this is a glimpse of the future. And anytime you hear that, you're kind of thinking, okay, like I'm going to get some cool demos and it's not going to be dailying it. Yeah. I mean, it'll take a while for the ecosystem, but it was the same thing with the iPhone. Like the first iPhone didn't have an app store, didn't have 3G, but it kicked off the beginning of a big revolution. And this feels like it could be that.

18:30John Coogan:Also the pixel density, they haven't shared the exact specs. It feels like it might be 5K per eye, which is about 53%, about half as much as the Apple vision pro. So there's a, there's a world where in six months, we're talking about, ah, it's still not that high fidelity to actually do work on for a full day. A lot of people are running 5K for a single monitor that's only, you know, in this much of your vision. You're talking about 5K spread over your full field of vision. Could be a little bit of a setback. But I think that that is something that definitely gets resolved on the next iteration because the display technology is getting better.

19:08What do we think about hologram calling?

19:10John Coogan:I think it's cool. They did legs in VR. It's very difficult to do legs in VR. Boz took the victory lap on that, and I think it blew people away. I think it's cool. I think I did an Apple Vision Pro call with someone who got one the same week. It didn't really, it never really took off because there was never a broad install base. It's all based on, like, do they sell millions and millions of these things? it's always been hard for Facebook to develop like a new network that requires hardware distribution it's much easier to go from a friend in real life to we're texting each other we have each other's emails and then we're also sending Instagram reels to each other on DMs, much harder to be like oh did you get the device oh no I don't have it set up, but of course you can portal into someone with with just WhatsApp or anything else.

20:07Well, there's one thing that is 100 % sure, which is that you will be buying these and I will not.

20:15John Coogan:That is 100 % true. Let's go through the timeline. React to some of the reactions. Mark Gurman loves it. He says they're incredible. Half the price of the Vision Pro, one-sixth the weight external pack. He's stoked on it. What else is going on? They launched in spring 2027. The interface is basically the same as the Vision Pro, but it has an absolutely bonkers tabletop virtual keyboard that blows the Vision Pro keyboard out of the water. Yeah, because the Vision Pro keyboard like hovers there. You're not supposed to really use it. It's a terrible keyboard. What else is in here? I underestimated Zuck's game, Ryan says.

20:52John Coogan:It's a hearing aid. You can't tell me I can't wear my metaglasses anymore or else you'll be going against ADA, the Americans with Disability Act. That is sort of crazy that there's all this backlash to smart glasses. Maybe there will be a next wave of like restaurants and bars that say, no, you can't wear those there. But if you say, no, it's my hearing aid, you can't. That's some 4D chess. Are you giving Mark Zuckerberg the benefit of Occam's 4D razor on this one? No, I just think it's cool. I think it's just cool and independent. I don't think it's actually 4D chess. pair of uh i was meeting meeting with a uh an older friend the other day and his hearing aid setup was like this like you know seemed like kind of clunky and if you could just throw on it he was wearing glasses if you could have just thrown on a pair of glasses and be like cool i'm in business yeah it's been awesome so i think again what many people forget about glasses is that smart glasses are way more appealing if you have a need for them outside of just wanting smart glasses.

21:53So if you just want, you know, if you need help with your vision or you need help with your hearing, I think these are going to have much stronger product market fit.

22:01John Coogan:Don't you think if you're wearing, if you're wearing camera glasses, VR or AR, you know, meta Ray-Bans, and it has a camera there, it should be, it can see your hands, right? It can see your elbow. So if you were playing beer pong, it could tell you, Hey, back up, you're going to lose a point it could go to your agent and and kick off an agentic workflow to schedule you with a professional beer pong coach have them come to your house and do hours and hours of drills so that you never make that mistake so is this vaporware if it didn't happen because we saw mark zuckerberg get caught with his elbow over the line way over the table bill beer uh beer pong I just don't understand why glasses, smart glasses CEOs go out in public without wearing the smart glasses.

22:50Oh, he's not wearing them. And it's like Evan is doing interviews all the time without, you know, wearing, you know, speaking, you know, at places like Sun Valley, not wearing the glasses. Zuck is, you know, all the time out in public doing things, not using the glasses. I mean, they make clear versions of them, right? So if the glasses are, if the product's so good and everyone should buy them, shouldn't you have them on at least half the time that you're out socializing?

23:16John Coogan:I personally think if you see Jensen at a conference, he should be having an NBL 72 in a backpack. He should have a rack and he should be carrying it around. No, I did notice, so he was wearing a very special watch and everyone's obsessed with Mark Zuckerberg's watch collection. He always debuts a new, unique piece every time he's on stage. But I think the watch thing, it's getting a little old. I would like to see him get into cars a little more. And I'd like to see him drive on stage on like, you know, a Gordon Murray T-50. And do a quick burnout. Quick burnout. Yeah, exactly. Something to show that he's not one-dimensional.