Big Technology Podcast - Apple’s Anthropic Flirtation, Can Meta Build Superintelligence?, AI Browser Wars — With M.G. Siegler

Episode Date: July 7, 2025

M.G. Siegler is the author of Spyglass. He joins Big Technology podcast for the first installment of our new monthly discussion about Big Tech strategy and AI! Today, we cover why Apple may want to outsource Siri's brain to Anthropic or OpenAI, the rise of voice Ai, why Anthropic could be the right fit, and the complexity of what working with Apple would mean for Anthropic's business. We also touch on Zuck's superintelligence bet, Elon's new third party, the end of the EV credit, and whether AI browsers are worth it. Tune in for the first in our new series! --- Enjoying Big Technology Podcast? Please rate us five stars ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ in your podcast app of choice. Want a discount for Big Technology on Substack + Discord? Here’s 25% off for the first year: https://www.bigtechnology.com/subscribe?coupon=0843016b Questions? Feedback? Write to: [e-mail]

Apple is thinking about handing Siri's brain to Anthropic. Does meta have what it takes to build superintelligence? And will you soon be using an AI browser? That's coming up right after this. Welcome to Big Technology Podcast, where we're kicking off a new monthly segment, or really monthly episode, with the great MG Siegler of Spyglass,

who's a regular guest with us here. But I thought, you know what, let's amp it up. We'll spend the first Monday of every month speaking with MG about the latest in Big Tech and AI and spend a lot of time speaking about the great reporting and writing that he does within Spyglass. So MG really happy to have you here. Very glad to kick this off. Yeah, thanks for asking me to do it, Alex, and I'm excited to chat with you on a regular basis. Yes, and I've definitely stoked about this. So to kick it off, let's pick up our Apple discussion. And I think just having

this regular cadence is great because we can sort of check in on these companies and say, hey, how have they been doing since our last conversation? Of course, the last time we spoke was the day after WWDC. Basically, no AI. We said, okay, they're going to have to make some dramatic moves, maybe grasp for a perplexity, do some acquisition, or potentially even rewrite Siri itself. And it looks like Apple is starting to consider this seriously with some news that came out over the past week or so, where they are considering taking either Open AI or Anthropics Claudebot and putting it in, basically the lobotomizing Siri and changing the brain around. And Anthropic seems to be the one that is the leader, at least in the clubhouse.

So what do you think about this potential move from Apple and what's the significance of it? I think it's long overdue. You know, I've been writing about this for a while now. And at one point, I think it was around, you remember when several months ago, maybe around the first part of the year, there was a whole meme going around about. how, oh, it was around the time of the Super Bowl, because it was a whole meme around how, you know, Siri couldn't correctly know who had won previous Super Bowl, something as rudimentary as that from like a knowledge graph perspective and they would get all sorts of stuff wrong, thought the chiefs

had won like 50 of them or something like that. And so it seemed like right after that point, I had written sort of what I thought was a little bit more provocative of a piece with, you know, the old Betteridge's headline law of the question mark in it of being like, should Apple replace Siri with basically an LLM with with with with chat GBT and then after that the Super Bowl thing came out it's like I was pushed over the edge it's like they've got to replace Siri with something else whether it be chat GBT or Claude or Google Gemini or one of the other products because this is just really table stake stuff that they should you know they've been working on Siri for 15 plus years you know to their credit as as we've long talked about

they were first mover in that, and I think that hurt them in many ways. But the fact that we're in 2025 or, you know, last year of 2024, and they couldn't get something as simple as that right, while all these other competitive products have no problems doing those things. And again, they're trying to do it in-house. They're trying to do their own systems and stuff. But all of this stuff is out there and the fact that they already had the relationship with Open AI per last year's WWDC in place to do some of the offloading of, you know, the wider knowledge Siri stuff, you know, reaching out to the web. Like, why couldn't they just have slotted that in?

Obviously, it's easier said than done. But still, to this reporting now, they've been thinking about doing it. And obviously, they've been testing it and doing this like bakeoff internally to see which of the products might be better. I did think that it was super interesting that they wound up at least per this report. with Claude rather than Chachy-B-T. Yeah, that was surprising to me, and I definitely want to get into the different decisions

that they're making and why Anthropic is the lead here and what it means for Anthropic. These are all really interesting parts of the stories, parts of the story. And I should also note the Betteridge Law of Headlines is if you put a question mark in the headline, typically the answer is no. But when you asked Chathalie Lumpad of my Siri,

your answer was, I think so. Yeah, yeah. And, you know, again, we'll see. The reporting on it, if I have it right, from Mark German, who else, you know, basically indicates that they wouldn't do this until next year, you know, a 2026 thing. Does that mean that they wait until sort of WWDC, 2026 to announce it as part of iOS, I'm going to bungle it now, iOS 27? Yeah, because it's the future year, right? So it's not, right? So would they announce it as iOS 27 or do they try to get it out ahead of time as a dot release on iOS 27?

something, you know, ahead of that. Again, presumably they could, they could just slowly, you know, behind the scenes just start giving more of the workload over to one of these LLMs that they already have plugged in, as noted, you know, they have Chet BT in there right now. Do they slot in Claw, do they slot in Gemini, and then start to offload that work without making a big deal about it, or do they make a big deal about it? And I could see an argument both ways of wanting to do that. Now, I think you and I are both in favor of this move, and we can make the case for it.

We have on the show numerous times. Maybe we will come back to that in a moment. But I think let's just make the case against because I saw that you sort of grappled with whether this is actually the right move in your post. And the argument that Apple shouldn't do something like this is, look, large language models are going to commoditize at some point. You don't want to rely so much on a third party, a proprietary third parties technology at the very least, you can develop this either in-house or use open source technology. And that

importantly gives you way more control. And what Apple wants in every single one of its product experiences is the control. So is that the argument not to do this? And do you think that, I mean, I sort of have this feeling that Apple will eventually kind of fall back on that. Like, I will just try to control the experience and do it ourselves. So what would be the counterpoint to that? Yeah. And a lot of that was sort of even thinking back to pre last year's WWDC leading up to what they would eventually announce was the partnership with OpenAI. There had been the rumors that they were potentially going to do something with them and what might that look like with regard to Siri. And definitely one of the things that jumps to mind when you first hear that is user privacy, right? And Apple's a big proponent of user privacy and not wanting to send their own user data over to third parties unnecessarily. And so, they obviously have sort of an opt-in mechanism to do that right now. But if they were to actually outsource this in a major way, presumably they would still have some sort of opt-in to begin with,

but would they do it on the ongoing basis, like saying, hopefully not on every query that, you know, you would do that? But do they sort of prompt users like once a month or more often or less often than that in order to ensure that they know what they're sending? And, you know, I think that that's the one argument, the major argument on Apple side on top of the other stuff that you're, you know, talking about where Apple just wants to control that user experience, regardless of sort of the data and user privacy aspect, they want to make sure also that the thing's not going to

hallucinate, right? I think this was the big fear leading up to, again, last WWDC, the LLM products were not as, you know, trustworthy as they maybe are now. I mean, in many cases, they're still not for certain types of queries, right? But obviously, Apple's going to worry about that if, you know, Gemming's. I tells you to eat rocks or put rocks in the pizza or whatever, Apple's not going to want that as a part of their experience. And so do they do something that's more like Image Playground, which has obviously been

very structured and locked down, right? Like they only let you use until recently, up until maybe the new changes that they're rolling out in the new OS26 layers. They basically only allowed you to do very specific types of scenes and using. you know, very guardrailed versions. And so do they do something like that? But again, that's probably not going to make for a good product experience, you know, for a user perspective if they really try to lock it down that much.

Yeah, exactly. As we outline sort of the Apple strategy here and why they may not want to do something like this or why they've dragged their feet to do this, it just seems to me like just all the arguments you can make on the stay closed and don't do a partnership or try to, you know, ride it out. They just don't hold water because they, This stuff is moving so quickly. I'll just give you one example.

I'm on my phone all the time talking with chat GPT. It's like this past weekend, I took it from like deep within the apps that I have on like the, you know, maybe third or fourth screen and I put it into the doc screen. Because whenever I have a question, you know, this thing connects to the web. I'm like always talking with chat GPT.

It's kind of crazy how often I am speaking with these things. And this format of voice is just a thing, I believe that it's driving. a lot of the growth within AI today. And if you wait for, let's say, a Samsung or some other Android to deeply integrate with a competitor and provide this experience while you're just standing still and you don't have this integrated into your operating system, I think you could really end up losing phone sales because of it.

Yeah, I totally agree. And I'm one step further than you. Not only is it in my dock, I use the action button to trigger chat GPT. Really? So I have a map to do that. Yeah, from my iPhone. That's cool. You can do it via shortcuts and it works very well.

Like they have one that's like they have different granularity options. You could do it just to open up the app to chat with it. You can even do it so as an overlay screen so you can chat without having to leave another app. It's it's pretty well done and you can do trigger right into voice. You could trigger right into voice transcription. So yeah, I use it all the time as well. Certainly I'm not going to use Siri all the time. But if it was baked in, you know, like I think then it's an interesting question of, you know,

what the differences would be, because I don't know about you, but I still sort of do these own internal bakeoffs of my own, right, when I'm doing certain types of queries, right? I'll do, I'll use chat GBT, and I'll Gemini open and, you know, sometimes clawed for certain things, coding, of course, specifically, and things like that. And so I do think that Apple runs a real risk without doing something here, because to your point, they're just not moving fast enough to sort of catch up with the current state of the art. And you and I've talked about this before, right? Beyond just even the product integrations, like one of the reasons that I would worry about

Apple going forward is they don't have the right internal mentality about doing this stuff. And you can see it in the sort of products that they've shipped to date, specifically, obviously with Siri, where they're clearly just moving too slowly and don't have the right product cadence in order to do that. And so offloading this will help them in that they would be using a third party to do that. think in the best state, and again, this is something that I argued for in the original piece before this was rumored to be happening, but it's basically like, look, just outsource it for an indefinite amount of time while you work on your own stuff behind the scenes. Take the pressure

off the team that's working on it internally. Again, we don't know the timetable of what that would mean. Does it take a year? Does it take longer than that? But again, if you've fully outsourced it to something like chat GPT or Claude, then you have the breathing room to be able to do that. And then behind the scenes, it's almost the inverse of what we were talking about before. I would just start to slowly roll out the actual Siri version of Syria, the Apple made version of Siri again, with certain types of queries that they feel confident that they can answer now and do a good job with. Obviously, they keep the timers and they keep the, you know, the sort of low-hanging fruit stuff that's sort of simple right now baked into the system. But I mean,

for the world queries and things, if they're building it behind the scenes and they can eventually sort of roll in roll back to you know Siri as they you know build it behind the scenes with this integration by the way it's kind of crazy for me to hear how ingrained AI voices in your life I mean I'll give you kind of an example of what's happened with me I've kind of ping ponged from Siri back to open AI so using chat GPT I'm like typing all these things and I'm asking like it's become my search and then you know I'm expecting AI to be able to do this stuff for me. So when I like need to know the answer to something, like I'll just yell, hey Siri, what's the answer? And then it tends to get that right, I don't know, 10, 20%

of the time. And then I was like, well, this is an experience I want to have, but obviously Siri's not holding it up to me. So that's where Open AI got the promotion and the more and the higher prominence for me. And I'm just like, wow, like this is something that I'm just going to use all the time. I'm curious what type of things are you speaking with Chachipati about that you've given it such a prominent place in your phone? Honestly, it's almost, I mean, it's most of the Google queries that I used to be doing, right? Like, I mean, Google now I predominantly use when I'm on my desktop, if I'm doing research for a post or if I'm trying to look up things to link to, then I will use sort of traditional

Google search, but for pretty much everything else. And yeah, like you, I would use Siri for things like, you know, say we're traveling, and we're walking around a city. I don't want to know the population like of a place, right? I would use Siri for that, like silly, silly things like that. But sort of fun, especially with kids, like, you know, they like those little fun things. But Open AI and Chachyptee have gotten so good at beyond just that, you know, very simple example of giving you, like, my older daughter is obsessed right now with like the London Underground system and like knowing all the different tube lines and like when they came about. and so she's like constantly like thirsting for information about these and obviously i know

you know the high level names of them but i can't go deep on it so previously right we would have done like a google search about that probably on your phone like while you're waiting you know for a tube to come on a certain line but now you can just do you can just chat with chat gbt about it and it's really an incredible experience like being able to go back and forth and and sort of follow answer asking follow up questions and and yeah that's like one example of something that just has totally changed Yeah, it's so good. And one of the things that's really nice about ChatGBTBT was when you're speaking with it in the voice interface, there's almost no latency. Maybe a little latency if it has to go search the web for something. But otherwise, it's spitting these answers back so quickly. And they have a bunch of different voices that you can pick from. And I felt sometimes like when I'm switching the voice, I feel like, I'm murdering that old day. I feel kind of bad for it because it just goes to show you you develop this rapport with your old friend is gone. Yeah. And that actually speaks to how my, you know, my older daughter and I started using it when. And they, you know, the cute, like, gimmicky thing when they rolled out the Santa voice, right?

It was just like, it was such a fun thing to do during the holidays, right? It was like, hey, Maisie, like, come, come listen to this. And, you know, it's like, ho, ho, ho. Hello, there, Maisie. How are you? You can tell, you know, your daughter's name, even though they know you're not talking to it directly. And, yeah, it's all sorts of clever, clever user and action. See, it's one of the more underrated releases from Shipmiss.

Was that sense of this? Yes, exactly. 12 days of Shipmiss. But let's talk about the decision between Open AI and Anthropic, because this, to me, is almost as interesting as the news that they're actually thinking about this. So the report from German, like we mentioned, is that they are thinking about Anthropic over Open AI. Let's just talk about the bakeoff there. Why do you think that is? Because if you just put product to product, Open AI's voice mode is mature and much better than Anthropics.

Anthropic just released the Claude voice mode. So what do you think is going on behind the scenes there? I sort of wonder, when you and I last spoke, we spoke about, you know, the list of companies that Apple could potentially acquire, right, in the space and the one that I had sort of at the top, you know, we talked about perplexity, but the one above that even for me was anthropic, even though I don't think it's possible for them to do that for all sorts of reasons, namely the price at this point. But I do just feel like overall, from everything you hear externally, the mentality that anthropic, that team has, and obviously, They spun out, right, from Open AI famously. You know, some of the team spun out and started Anthropic in that way. Just the mentality is more in line with what I think Apple would want from an AI perspective. And so part of me wonders if it's not that.

That said, I don't think that they would, if it was much worse, I don't think that they would pick that over chat GPT. So obviously they're using it and they do think it's better. I mean, there's been the reports as well that they've been using it for, X code right internally and that that was going to be the thing that they they outsource the Anthropic was going to be the tool that they used on the AI side to outsource vibe coding to and you know there's there's some work it seems like that's underway now within X code that they'll be rolling out along those lines

but at WWC they also on the flip side of that they talked about using open AI more on that side rather than Anthropics so there's all sorts of weird I don't maybe Apple is concerned about going too far deep with one partner and becoming beholden to them right um and they worry that if they go too far down the open a i rabbit hole that yeah they could either get you know screwed one way or another be it um because they feel that they have to use them all the time going forward and and they would rather sort of have these entities play off one another um and again like i would anticipate that in in a final state if they did do a partnership they would probably ideally want to use a few

them. And that was obviously the rumor with Google as well, integrating Gemini. But if they had to pick one, that is surprising that they would go with Claude ahead of chat GPT. So again, I'm just trying to ping pong why they might have gone with them. Or the rumor has it. I think they probably, if they've met with both leadership teams, I think they probably are a company that would absolutely go for Dario's safety branding. Like it's the safety company with the privacy company. versus Open AI, which is kind of like the chaos product company, even though the product's working better. But the terms of the deal to me are also fascinating. So you wrote about this also, that Anthropic is asking for a multi-billion dollar annual fee that increases sharply

every year. Now, Apple's biggest acquisition in history was $3 billion. So it's not exactly a company that is sort of ready to spend $2 billion a year or more on an integration partner. So what do you think is happening in that negotiation? Yeah, I mean, that was maybe the weirdest thing about that entire report was, you know, the notion that both Anthropic might even just be asking for that, because they have to know that Apple, you know, will be super reluctant to do anything for the reasons you're exactly talking about, right? They just, they historically don't spend money, even though they have all the money to

spend. They don't spend money, certainly on acquisitions, but if this, this could be really larger than their largest acquisition, which is wild. I mean, from the flip side, I think Anthropic probably, you know, assuming this is accurate, they're looking at it like, I mean, if we really are the main focal point of Siri going forward, that is going to absolutely blow up our servers to an extent we haven't seen, at least on the sort of user-facing consumer side to date. and, you know, we see what happens or, you know, we hear reports about what happens when sort of these viral integrations happen on the chat TBT side and how that brings down their servers, blows up the cost and everything. And so does Anthropic really want to be in that boat, you know, without any sort of life vest, you know, in the form of payments?

That was always one of the most surprising things to me about the Apple and chat GPT deal was the reporting that it was no money exchanging hands. hands, right? Because it felt like, too, there was a real possibility that if one of those things went viral, that it was the weird situation where Apple would be causing such an influx of usage of ChatGBT, which at the time at least and presumably still mostly is running on Microsoft servers. And so basically Apple would be, you know, causing these huge increases in cost to Open AI and Microsoft by way. of their deal. And if they didn't have any, I was always trying to like think through, there must be a way

that they're going to eventually pay them. And I do think that that's sort of what led down that, you know, at the time, rumored and then rumored to be off, potential investment that Apple was going to do in open AI. To me, that made all the sense in the world because that was a de facto way for them to pay for, you know, that integration, basically. They would just be investing billions of dollars into open AI potentially. And obviously that didn't happen. But I almost wonder if something similar isn't at play here with Anthropic where, look, they might say, we're not going to give you whatever, $2 billion a year, say, to use Claude.

But, you know, you guys always need more money. You're taking investment. We'll happily invest, you know, in the company knowing that their one thing that Anthropic seemingly wants is diversified investors, right? Because they don't just want to have Amazon owning so much and they don't just want to have Google owning so much. most of them own quite a bit right now. But if they could diversify that even further with Apple, I think that they might be interested in that. Another question of if Amazon and Google would be interested in that.

But still, I could see it maybe going down that path, but otherwise it's pretty shocking that they would ask for that from Apple. I think you're totally right about this. And if you are a client of Anthropic, whether you're using Claude off the shelf or whether using the API, one thing you know to be true is there are often lag times. And often if you're trying to tag into the API, it can be down. And I think a lot of people are saying, you know what, this is server capacity.

So now imagine you plug that company in with Apple and then all of a sudden the product is good and demand goes through the roof. It just effectively, you know, destroys Anthropics' ability to deliver its products. So can I ask you this? Like, what do you think it says about Anthropic that this is the biggest opportunity, biggest potential business opportunity? of its lifetime to be like the de facto voice of AI on the iPhone, sort of surpassing that experience that we're both talking about, which had GPT, but they just can't do it. I mean, assuming we're right about this, but they just can't do it because of servers. Yeah, I mean, and right, so I think about that as well too, because basically Apple, again,

assuming that the reporting is accurate here, Apple is handing them the golden ticket, right? Like they for, since the, since the dawn of these LLMs, you know, basically check, GBT has had the crown and has been able to sort of keep going and expanding, you know, their lead, you know, obviously Google and Gemini are giving them a run for their money because they're putting it and baking it directly into search and Android and have incredible skill in Gemini or sorry, in Chrome to some extent right now. And so they're leveraging those, those strengths that they have in order to do that. But still, I think we would all agree that that chat GBT has been sort of the leader in the clubhouse, you know, at least when it becomes when it goes to sort of. consumer-facing versions of this stuff. And basically, Apple, if they were to give this to Anthropic, I mean, would they shoot ahead of chat GBT in terms of actual usage? I don't know if that's the case. I do think that they would shoot ahead of them in like simple queries, like we're talking about, you know, like what's the weather and that type of stuff, assuming that Apple outsource that is a part of that deal. But, you know, we're talking about they would be in the hands of billions

of consumers overnight doing these types of queries. And so to your question of like, what's the reluctance to do that or why are they so reticent to that? I do wonder if part of it is, I think recently they gave some quotes in different interviews talking about how they're sort of okay with seating the chatbot market, right, to chatGBT, and it feels like that's not the path that they want to go down anymore, at least the main primary focus, they want to do coding and they want to focus on their strengths.

So it's almost like if they already feel like they made that decision internally and now Apple's potentially handing them, again, this golden ticket to sort of shoot back into the forefront of consumer, maybe there's some internal reluctance to sort of go down that path a little bit. Yeah. And it just sort of goes to like where you can make money in AI today. And I think there's like two different areas. There's the product side where you have chat chip, And then you have the API side and Anthropic is, is doing quite well there.

I don't know, would you call this like a product or an API play because you're going to give a version of Claude to Apple? I guess it would still be a product play. But I'm curious like what you think about the state of the AI business today because obviously we have like a lot of applications that are out there that are doing well. But the API business to me still seems like a bit of a question mark, even though we've seen Anthropic posts that like they went from like one billion annual recurring revenue, I think to four. in like just a couple months. And it seems like they are mostly APIs. So what do you think is the state of play right now? Yeah.

I mean, that's still, it feels like a pretty risky business, right? Because it's so unlike what OpenAI has done with chat GPT where they have a brand now and like a known entity, the APIs, like those are relatively not necessarily easy, but they're easier to just swap in and out different, you know, different tools and technologies as they become more readily available. And then, yeah, the cost will get. sort of driven down over time you know as that happens is there's more competition in the market so it does feel like that's a bit yeah more

vulnerable of a state to be in and I mean even look at the the vibe coding space that they're in right it's like they if I have it right they are predominantly powering cursor right now right and and some of the and the one as well that open AI is buying which they famously are cutting them off win surf yeah from the newest versions of the models. And the question becomes, how much does cursor, you know, the company Ennisphere, start to build their own stuff? And obviously, they're doing some of that internally. But, you know, that's a real risk point, of course, for anthropic. And so it becomes like a point

where do they really have to more rely on building, you know, Claude code, making sure that that's its own product, and that's the product side again, versus sort of going down the full-on API path. But it's still like so much of the stuff is moving so fast still, and it feels like, you know, we weren't even talking about, quote, unquote, vibe coding tools a year ago. And now, you know, maybe we were a little bit, but now that's all that anyone seemingly wants to talk about, certainly on the business side and the fundraising side. And so there will be something else that comes up in the next six months, some other layer

of AI that everyone wants to talk about is the new. thing from the model perspective. Yeah, and this is a good moment for me to plug the vibe coding episode we have coming up. I'm Jod Masad, the CEO of Replit, is going to be on in a couple weeks. So, folks, stay tuned to that. And now, MG, let me give my galaxy brain idea about where all this anthropic chatter is leading to or where it might be coming from. I'd probably say this is like a 10 or 20% chance that this is why we're hearing so much

about anthropic being like the de facto new brain of Siri. And that is that maybe Apple is in negotiation. with perplexity and they're just trying to drive down the price saying, well, we could just easily bring in these anthropic models. So therefore, you know, you're not worth the 30 billion to us, but maybe we could do 20 billion. Is that crazy? It's not crazy. We, you know, there have been now other reports and you and I again last episode talked quite a bit about, you know, perplexity as an option for Apple and now there's reporting along the lines that they're at least talking about it internally, right? Like not necessarily that they're negotiating with the company,

But to your exact point, maybe they're loosely negotiating with them or maybe they're negotiating in public with them in order to get some sort of deal done because it does from the product side and given what they need, not only as we talked about with AI, but also on the search side, if and when the Google search deal that Apple has changes at the very least, it slots in there in many ways it perplexity does that I think could be really compelling. Not going to be cheap, would definitely be more than any beats acquisition. And, and, you know, perplexity just, one of the things, you know, we had talked about, is it going to be, would that company and the founder be a fit inside of Apple? And I think that that's one debate. But they're also just like, I think that they've done really good job on certain sides of the product, but they're also just like, they're doing a lot. Maybe too much you could argue, you know, like in terms of they want to buy Chrome.

They want to buy TikTok. They're jumping at sort of everything that is out there. They're chaotic. They just want to be in the conference. They're launching a web browser, as I think we'll talk about it in a little bit. But they're just doing a ton. And I'd be a little worried. Like, they've raised a lot, but not a lot compared to some of their peers, right?

I know they're not necessarily building, you know, a foundation model themselves, though they're augmenting others, right? But, you know, they don't have necessarily unlimited runway, I would imagine, to do everything that they're trying to do. And so from their side, as they're talking to these big companies, we talked the last time, it sounds like, you know, they're zeroing. And if they haven't already on a Samsung deal to integrate with those products. And does that help or hurt, you know, sort of the negotiations with would be Apple? But they're just, they're doing a lot right now. And so I like your idea that Apple is potentially.

throwing stuff out there to try to get a better price on if they're if they're actually thinking about going down that path. I'm just saying if I was negotiating with perplexity, the first thing I would do would be to call up some reporters and be like, you know, we might integrate with Anthropic all across the board. I think that would help my negotiating position. So we've spoken about the different ways that you can do business in AI. You can do the product side. You can do the API business. And I think it kind of leaves out one part of it, which is that you could just build AGI and that will be like this new form of value creation that we still haven't found our, wrapped our heads around or even maybe not AGI, maybe you want to build super intelligence. And it seems like with the scale hypothesis starting to level off, I heard recently on a podcast that the trend is the trend until they bend at the end. And we might be at the bend at the end with scaling. You got to basically create better algorithms.

And on the show on Friday, Ranjan and I were talking about how meta is making this very interesting play to try to write better algorithms with this super intelligence team that Mark Zuckerberg is assembling. And you look at some of the names on this team. And they really are, I think, some of the stars at largely open AI, but also some other research houses as well, including Anthropic and Deep Mind. You have someone who is the co-creator of the O series models at OpenAI, which is the reasoning stuff, someone who's the co-creator of GPT-40 voice mode, which we just talked about is so impressive. Another co-creator of GPT-4O's image generation side, I could go on. But, MG, you don't think that this is going to work for Zuckerberg. So I'd love to hear your perspective on whether it's the right bet and why you think this isn't going to pan out.

Yeah, I mean, so look, that's obviously a little bit of, first of all, no one knows, of course. This is like, no one knows, day one of them starting this new team as they announced, you know, last week. And I think it's a little bit of a contrarian statement to say that right now that it might not work. But I also don't think it's crazy. Like, I, you know, I hate to sort of pull on the sports analogies, right? But it is like they're putting together a super team. And I feel like super teams in the sports world, you know, often don't pan out at least the way that was expected. There are a couple maybe counter examples of it.

But for the most part, there's a reason why, like, teams that are gelled and have worked together for a long time and sports as well, right, tend to perform better than people who are thrown together, you know, in sort of piecemeal fashion, even with. all the talents in the world to do something like this. And I do, I think at least directionally agree with the very conflicted point, of course, that he's making, but Sam Altman is making about the mercenary versus missionary point. I think it's a fair thing to bring up the notion that, look, rightly or wrongly, and whether you believe it's actually going to happen, like Open AI has been on this mission to try to to do AGI, which is, I guess, morphed into super intelligence and, you know. Yeah, no one's talking about AGI any more.

It's just not ambitious enough. And Microsoft has muddled that all with that, with their deal and all that sort of stuff. But regardless, you know, Open AI has always been marching towards this general goal, right? Zuckerberg has been saying for, you know, he was saying not even that long ago, 18 months ago maybe, when they were sort of doing, you know, some of the initial work on Lama that he didn't believe in sort of the AI God, right? that he didn't believe that there would be sort of one, one AI to rule them all, and that, you know, a lot of those companies were going down the wrong paths. And, you know, it feels like now he's changing his tune and trying to ramp up this team in order to race open AI and Google to that goal of getting to, again,

super intelligence, AGI and super intelligence. And so why I don't think it will work, I think if I were to place a bet on it, I just feel like, A, of course, they're starting out behind, but B, throwing people together to try to work towards that goal. It depends on where you actually believe we are in the cycle. If you believe it's still really early days, that could work, right? Like that we need new models now and we need some new sort of technologies that are even different maybe than LLMs, you know, that bring about sort of the next wave of breakthroughs with the broader AI space. and then you could sort of make the case that this is the right time to be doing it. If yesterday was the best time, today's the second best time, right?

But if you believe that we're farther along that path and hearing others talk about it, you know, some people think that we're, I know you talked about it with Demis Hasibis and others before, how close we are actually to AGI and or superintelligence. And if we're only a couple years away, do I think that META can win that race? Not if we're a couple years away, I don't think so. if we're longer term, and this is the early innings, then I think they're in a fine position. I would also just say, lastly, I know that I'm being long-winded on this, but I also just think the history of meta is complicated, right, dating back to Facebook with regard to launching new

initiatives. And I do think that they have a very, a big problem with focus when it comes to new things coming out, right? Even just look at the fact that they rename the company meta, they reorientate it. around the metaverse. And now it feels like, I mean, they're never going to say that they're going to abandon the metaverse. They'll instead say that, look, this is all a part of working towards the same thing, right? Like, they'll use the talking point that we need, you know, augmented glasses to be the conduit for AI, and AI's going to power those. And they're not

wrong about that necessarily. But we're not working towards the same metaverse that we were with the, you know, with the Zuck avatar in the Eiffel Tower, his little cartoon avatar, thing. We're not there anymore and we're not going to go down that path anymore, it feels like. So I just worry about focus with meta and that this is, this is the thing right now. And, you know, I do think that spending tens of billions of dollars will force them to sort of focus on this. And I do think that they, they will, but I'm just not sold that they will remain as focused on this as sort of like an open eye where it's existential for them. By the way, just on the technology side, and you note about, you note this in your story,

It looks like raw scale, at least coming from these newcomers who thought they could build up massive data centers and then take the lead in AI. It's not working. You said Elon Musk was able to throw capital at the AI problem to get Grock up to scale fast. Meta was already at scale. This ironically is a people problem. Now, I think believers in the scale hypothesis will be like, look, like the ingredients are not lined up correctly. You don't just build bigger data centers. you need data centers, larger models, and good data to be able to continue to see the gains

with scale. But it is pretty interesting that these companies are like seemingly uniformly, maybe outside of Anthropics, saying, you know what? Scale is important, but it's going to take other breakthroughs. And that's why you see this talent war happening right now. Yeah. Right. I think that that situation is interesting because when Elon went down the path with building Colossus, right, the, his AI giant massive data center thing, basically he made the bet that they could jump ahead of the line in terms of compute and scaling compute and get there. And they were able to do that, you know, incredibly, right? Like they were able to build basically a data center with capacity, with enough capacity

to pump out a model, you know, in the form. of GROC that was at least competitive with the, you know, with the state of the art at the time, even though they were starting so much later than all the others who had done it to date. And Zuckerberg is basically sort of making an opposite end of the spectrum bet in terms of people, right? But in some ways, that's because they already made that bet with Lama, right? Like that they would be able to also scale up a model that was competitive now. There have been a ton of problems, as we all know, with Lama 4, it seems like, as being

reported and that's why they're sort of now moving down this new road to be able to do that but it's interesting that people are like trying to figure out these like hacks to get back into the right to jumping into contention again and and the people thing again if if there's something new that is going to come about uh i do think that it's compelling the team that met is hiring but if it's not and we're already on the path to where we're going, I think it's problematic for them. Yeah. And by the way, Elon also, I think it actually hasn't been as big of a story as it should be that Elon has lost control of GROC.

I don't know if you've been following this, but GROC basically established this like liberal posture. It's talking about how it's using sourcing for media matters and Rolling Stone to document misinformation from cat turd which is one of Elon's favorite accounts and Elon goes like shame on you grok he also said there was going to be a full rewriting uh i think they they rewrote it uh or may have released an update because now it seems like grok is like a step further uh as in terms of like being like i don't know a holocaust denier than you'd even want it to be even if you want it to be

you know quote unquote like an edge lord um and and it just goes to show just like Like, people talk about alignment in AI and you build up these big data centers and you want to try to align it with your values. And Elon, who like say what you want about him, one of the most successful tech entrepreneurs of our time, if not the, completely lost control of his AI. It's crazy. Yeah. And I mean, it sort of speaks to the unknowns of where this is all going, right? like so Elon you know pours as much money as as he possibly can towards building ramping up and building these this new model thinking he can get back into the into the AI race and then there's

just these all these sort of second order effects of what actually happens when when you yeah just roll out something that you don't have full control over and so what happens yeah when meta's team you know is is fully ramped and sort of working on new projects and what if it's you know what if whatever they end up building is you know in some ways sort of going off the rails and and you know does Zuckerberg feel the need to to sort of start from scratch again do they like this is going to go this can go infinite different ways right now and that's why it's so hard to sort of try to extrapolate out like what this race actually looks like in even six months from now totally yeah it's By the way, speaking of Elon, creating things that he can't control, let's just speak for a minute about his new third party and the U.S., the America Party.

After being very close to Trump, he's now, it seems like, in the process of launching a third party. Trump responded to it today. This is from The Guardian. Trump says Musk is off the rails and calls his new political party ridiculous. He says, I am saddened to watch Elon Musk go completely off the rails, essentially becoming a train wreck over the past five. weeks. He even wants to start a third political party despite the fact that they never succeed in the United States. Let me take Elon's side here for a second just on the third party. We do have government in the United States that doesn't reflect the will of the people often.

We just know this. Policy polls totally divorced from each other oftentimes. I think that the campaigns that have been successful over the past, I don't know, 20 years or more have all been about the fact that the government is not working. If Elon creates a third party and says, I'm going to try to be competitive in some, you know, battleground states and try to hold some influence, like let's say he wins a Senate seat and that becomes the deciding vote and something like this big, beautiful bill,

which even the Republican senators were saying was a mess, some of them, like Murkowski from Alaska. You know, as she's talking about voting for it, so this bill's terrible. And I hope it gets revised. It wasn't revised. I don't know. maybe that does some good.

Obviously, that's probably a little too optimistic, but what do you think, M.G? I mean, I'm with you at the highest level. Like, you know, I don't disagree with the notion that the two-party system, you know, could probably use more diversification from just a two-party system. And how you go about doing that. Obviously, many people have tried, you know, from Ross Perot to some level of success to, to you know many others of ralph nader and stuff but um how the the the i guess the issue is that obviously Elon doing this so soon after being so closely aligned with president

trump is you know just beyond self-serving and that's not to say i in some ways like i don't know enough about the the history of you know third party political systems to know that that's not always the case right that there's someone who's like uh you know obviously in some ways disenfranchised by whatever political party they were a part of before. And so they break off into a splinter unit. The thing that I guess would be the take on my take on this would just be like, I'm not so sure how much success, even someone as wealthy with the resources of Elon Musk will have when he, when he's not pouring those resources behind Donald Trump.

I think like, I just think he's, I don't know that he's necessarily underestimated. him, but I think he's downplaying the importance of the Trump part of everything that he did. Oh, yeah. And I feel like if he tries to do it with sort of a, you know, no name. He tried in Wisconsin, right, with backing someone that didn't work out for him. And so I feel like it might play out that way. On the other hand, like, again, he could be looking at his old friend Peter Thiel and seeing what he did with the certain person who is now the vice president of the United States.

and you know figuring out a way to get someone like that placed into a position of future power and maybe there is a way to do that but you know teal tried of course with with others with blake masters and you know some other folks that didn't work out and so um will Elon to our point earlier about you know meta sort of remaining focused will Elon remain focused long enough on these political aspirations does he hate Trump that much you know a year down the road doesn't matter anymore. And once Trump is sort of the lame duck, hopefully, you know, the leaving office because of term limits, then, you know, does he just sort of move on from worrying about this stuff as much? Yeah. I think one of the things that you bring up, and this is the point that he's

one of the least popular political actors in the country right now, you know, so it's going to be hard for him to sort of shift the politics in the country. Seems like he had one play to make. He made it and it didn't work according to his plan. I wonder, actually, we spoke about this a bit on threads. I wonder how much of his support for Trump was to sort of rig government policy in favor of his companies. Now, we kind of went back and forth about this that it could have just been, if you want to be as cynical as possible, he was backing Trump to get Trump to revoke the EV credits for

his competitors, which could put a company like Rivian out of business. But on the other hand, it seems like losing that $700, $7,500 credit for Tesla buyers is going to smart pretty bad, at least in the short term. Yeah, you know, as we sort of went back and forth about my general view on that is I do think like, and this is an original thought. I think many people sort of thought this at the time that when he was, you know, okay at the very least, with losing that credit, that it was sort of a pull up the drawbridge thing where, you know, Tesla's in the cemented as the leader in EVs, therefore not having that credit is much more detrimental to the Rivians of the world and some of the other newcomers and even VWs and all these player, you know, legacy players who are trying to enter the space. But I think that if that's

the case, what he majorly made the mistake with was not recognizing the potential that Tesla itself could fall as a result of his, both his affiliation, you know, with the, with the administration and also just like the, you know, the ever oncoming Chinese EV revolution and sort of all these other plays, which have really hurt Tesla in the market. And so the fact that Tesla is no longer necessarily, you know, the de facto leader that can afford to have that credit go away is a real miscalculation perhaps on his part that he might not have been able to to sort of play out in his in his head at the time it does feel like he you know from everything you've seen and read and even the actions right like he seems like he's fairly freaked out by

the reaction of the the general public to Tesla you know from the obviously all the protests and everything but even just the sales now just the fact that like he's firing the head of sales in Europe and sort of making all these things. It feels like there was a real miscalculation there at various points. Definitely. By the way, Tesla down today, seven percent, at least as the time of that we were recording this and down 22, close to 23 percent on the year. So not a good stretch for Elon. What's the seven percent today? Is it just Trump's tweets or? I think it's probably yep. Yeah, this is it. Tesla shares drop eight percent after Elon Musk says he is launching a political party. This is according to CNBC. So that's probably the cause of the drop. Yeah, not a good,

not a good year for Elon or Tesla. All right, let's close with this. You have been using AI browsers. So can you tell us a little bit about what an AI browser is and why you believe in that? Yeah. So I'm speaking to you now through Dia, which is the AI first browser by a company called the browser company, which if you've heard of them before, it's because, um, uh, uh, uh, They had previously made ARC, which was a sort of a mildly popular third-party browser that was sort of a power user browser. It did things like put tabs on the side of the window so you could have more of them sort of squeezed in and did a whole bunch of other things trying to reconstitute the way people actually use browsers. It was very like, again, power user-centric, a lot of keyboard shortcuts and things of that nature to the point where many people, including myself, loved it. was sad to hear that they were sort of pivoting their focus the company was on this new fango

browser called Dia. But I decided to give it a go, like because they were obviously, the writing was on the wall for our, it's still live, but it's probably, you know, not going to be developed for future features anymore. And so I decided to give this Dia browser a go. And I will say, I really like it now. I was skeptical at first. It's hard to learn, you know, a new browser to change sort of UI elements, to change your workflows. But the main thing, It sounds simple, but it's actually rather profound. I've found when you use it on a daily basis. Basically, it has a chat bot built into the browser framework itself.

So on by default, the left hand, sorry, the right hand side of the window, there is a chat window that's natively integrated into the browser window. So anything that you're scrolling and looking at on the internet, you can basically ask the chat browser about it. And it's using its own sort of flavors of different other LLMs. So I think that they integrate. They don't tell you, by the way, they obfuscate what they're actually using, not to be like sketchy or weird about it. They just don't want the user to have to focus on that, right?

Like it shouldn't matter what the what the LLM is that's powering it. So I think that they use, you know, some from Open AI. I think they use maybe some from Anthropic and some others. and sort of they bake all those and roll them together to sort of pick on their end, which is the best one to use for any given query. And so, again, it sounds like it's a simple thing because, well, why can't you just use the browser version of ChatGBT, you know, have a tab open? But again, it's able to do things like one of the cool things that they tout is the ability

to sort of search all of your open tabs at once to be able to sort of do some data analysis or sort of query different things about different stories that you're reading at the same time. And so the way you would do that right now in a browser tab, if you were using, say, chat, CBT, you could paste in all the links and sort of get that going. But in a more seamless workflow, this basically is just right there on the side, sorry, able to integrate natively within there. And the last thing I would say is that I sort of compare it in writing. it up to the integration that Google's doing with Gemini right into Chrome.

So there's a beta version of Chrome that's live if you download the beta version right now, where basically Gemini is baked into the web browser, which is sort of incredible, given everything Google's going through it from an antitrust per perspective, you know, including that the DOJ wants them, you know, to spin out Chrome, that the fact that they're baking Gemini in sort of is maybe making some of the government's case for it of how, you know, Chrome is problematic going forward in the age of AI. But I would say that integration is not good. It's like very slow.

It's also in the upper right-hand corner, but it's not, it doesn't feel native. It just feels like sort of a pop-over type situation. It just feels like an extension, honestly. And obviously, there are many of those right now that you can use within Chrome and other browsers. But again, it's one of those things that you sort of have to use it and live with it for a bit, meaning DIA, what it actually can be useful for. And I'm using, I would say that I'm querying various web pages a lot more than I was without it. Yeah, that's cool.

I love the idea that you can basically reference all the tabs in the browser to be able to find out what's, you know, if you have a bunch of tabs open and you, I guess you could say like what's the commonality between these stories. It's like a, it sounds like a perfect use case for, I imagine, people like us who have like a gazillion. tabs open and never close any of them. I come back to a computer after. Yeah, go ahead, go ahead. The only other thing I would say on that, because that reminds me, because, yeah, you talk about people like us.

And I think that's honestly the thing that the browser company, and I should say, I'm not affiliated with them at all. I know the founder a bit. I met him way back in the day. And I was an investor in his first company way before. He went on to work at meta. He worked at the White House for a long time. A great guy, Josh, Josh Miller.

But I'm not affiliated with them in any way right now. was just to make that clear, but because I sound sort of like a spokesperson for this thing, but I have no skin in this game. But I do think that the one thing that they're trying to do with Dia, that's the exact opposite of what we talked about earlier that they had done with Arc, it's not meant to be a browser, or at least hopefully not at scale, a browser for you and I doing sort of these like, you know, power user news junkie, you know, workflows.

They instead want this to be as simple as possible, it feels like. And so in many ways, it just feels the same as using Chrome only with, again, a chatbot sort of baked into it natively. And so someone who is say, they rolled this out at first with students, for example. So students with their college email could download it before the general public could. And I think what they were going for there is, you know, similar strategy to others who have rolled out social products and things like that back in the day. But they wanted young people to know, like, how they were actually using AI in their, in their own workflows. So not, again, not power users, but just regular users and what they would find useful about this. So all that is to say that it's just a super simple web browser. It seems like

it's almost like lacking a lot of the bells and whistles that you might expect of Chrome and some of the other more robust browsers now. And I think that that's the feature that they're going for, that they just want it to be simple for people to use. Love it. Well, I'm definitely going to check it out after this. And I'm excited to explore it and, I mean, deep and my AI use even more. And I should say our friends, we often talk about perplexity, are coming out with their own version called Comet,

which I've not tried, so I can't compare the two. People seem to like it. But the people who seem to like it, at least we were talking about it online, seem awfully conflicted about, there's something going on, that they love it a little bit too much for my spider sense.

You think they're getting paid? Something. Or they're just, enthusiast about it, yeah, whatever. But we'll see. We'll see. Should have launched soon in beta. All right. The website is spyglass.org. Really recommend you go check it out. Obviously, we love having MG on and can't wait to do this again in August.

MG, thanks so much for coming on. Thanks, Alex. Talk to you soon. Speak to you then. All right, everybody. Thank you so much for listening. I'm going to switch it up. We had Ed Zittron plan to come on this Wednesday. That episode is still going to run.

We've recorded it. But instead, we're going to run an episode with Ryan Peterson, the CEO, of Flexport about how international trade has changed since the tariffs as the deadlines for these 90-day pauses come up. That's coming Wednesday. And then, of course, we'll be back on Friday with Ron John Roy to break down the week's news. So thank you again for listening. And we'll see you next time on Big Technology Podcast.