Big Technology Podcast - Apple's Bad iPad Ad, AI Assistant Hype, Netflix's Big Live Ambitions

Episode Date: May 10, 2024

Ranjan Roy from Margins is back for our weekly discussion of the latest tech news. We cover 1) Apple's bad iPad ad 2) Is the backlash largely due to the creative, of people's feelings about Apple as a company 3) Asking Claude about the reaction to the ad 4) Apple's big moment at WWDC 5) Apple building server-side AI compute 6) Better Siri 7) OpenAI teases GPT-5 8) AI assistant buzz 9) AI as a dating concierge 10) AI news creating a zombie internet 11) Netflix's Tom Brady roast 12) Netflix's big bet on live TV, including the NFL. --- Enjoying Big Technology Podcast? Please rate us five stars ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ in your podcast app of choice. For weekly updates on the show, sign up for the pod newsletter on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/6901970121829801984/ Want a discount for Big Technology on Substack? Here’s 40% off for the first year: https://tinyurl.com/bigtechnology Questions? Feedback? Write to: [e-mail]

Is Apple's bad iPad ad just a creative issue or something more? OpenAI is about to launch its own search engine. Meanwhile, the web is filling with zombie AI-driven content. And Netflix is going big on live as it airs a Tom Brady roast and closes in on a big deal with the NFL. All that and more is coming up right after this. Welcome to Big Technology Podcast Friday edition where we break down the news in our traditional cool-headed and nuanced format.

We have a big show today covering everything from the latest in AI to Apple's very, very bad ad and why Netflix is going big on live. Thrill to welcome Ron John Roy back to the show, Ron John. Great to see you as always. Tim Cook, what are you doing? So this is an interesting thing. Let's just start talking right away about this ad because it definitely got pan critically and maybe I'm in the minority, but I had been watching these videos on TikTok where you have these compressors crushing stuff and it's pretty cool. Like it crushes all these things and you see it ooze out. And it's like this is the background for this situation that Apple had with its ad, whereas Apple just tried to mimic that by putting all these things

in a compressor, a piano, a video game, lenses, buckets of paint to show that, you know, you can do all these things on the iPad. And I will be honest, I watched the ad at first and I was like, oh, pretty cool. But then the entire internet was just like, look at Apple crushing all these things that you love. And as I started to hear the commentary, I was like, oh, no, this is pretty bad. What was your reaction? When I saw it, I did not have a positive reaction. And I definitely thought, if it was anyone else, it's interesting. Like anything else, Apple does, it's visually beautiful and gorgeously filmed. But Apple's entire brand, and for, you know, they're the most famous for the 1984 commercial where they break convention and empower humanity.

And basically, this is saying that everything that is beautiful and human is being crushed into this tiny form factor of an iPad, not even tiny, just thinner iPad. So to me, both it went against everything Apple has positioned themselves as being for decades now and built the most incredible brand of the world around. Also, for me, It was a pretty not exciting product launch. Like, a thinner iPad is not the most exciting thing. So if you're going to do something that dramatic, at least make it have a product that is new, exciting, interesting,

something rather than, okay, your iPad's thinner and we just destroyed a trumpet. Like, killing the emoji at the end, there's a smiley face emoji that gets crushed and the life sucked out of it. I think all of that, if you are delivering me something a little more exciting, I might have been happy. I'm just going to read some of the reaction to the ad that showed up on Twitter because it was brutal. So this is from Josh Delani. He says, everything beautiful, charming, and analog will be destroyed by a flat black screen. You must never see a sculpted bust, never hear music from an actual instrument, never feel the texture of real things.

A silicon slab and Tim Cook will permanently stand between you and the world. the world. Here's Jed Barnoff. I'm not sure wanton destruction of all the good and beautiful things in the world was really the vibe you were trying for. And then Paul Graham, he goes, Steve wouldn't have shipped that ad. It would have paint him too much to watch. So obviously there's a question of how this ad agency let this get out the front door. And it's like always in moments like these where I love to imagine like the internal politics of it. But it, because for this to come out, everybody who's ever run an ad knows that there's so many approvals necessary for these things to run and for tim cook to tweet it everybody within that company and the creative agencies must have seen it go out the door and you do wonder like has apple lost a little bit of its creative soul it's such a creative company to have seen this ad end up being released the deeper question here is is apple's business right now and the state of its product development sort of of responsible in part for the backlash to this let me explain apples had decreasing revenue for

five out of the last six quarters the vision pro which is that it really did herald as this like next generation product has become a paperweight on the desks of people that have bought it and maybe that was something that we could have predicted but it's certainly not taken the the path that the company hoped at least in the outset maybe in a few generations it will and then finally the ipad has been struggling the ipad revenue this past quarter the most recent quarter the most recent order that it reported was down 17%. And this was supposed to be a release that turned the iPad's fortunes around and Tim Cook built it as the most important release since the iPad itself. And honestly, it just looked like another iPad. And so I wonder if part of the backlash here is rooted a little

bit in people's wariness in terms of where the direction of Apple is going. That was one of the more concerning parts of this ad. The idea that to have an event to launch a new pencil and a new thinner iPad should not require an event. That should just be on the website, a little bit of customer emailing, a TV commercial, and just call it that. And I think actually it is indicative of the fact that they thought that was important enough to launch in such a big fashion that people do, that that's certainly part of the backlash and how people are feeling about this. And I think even bigger, going back to the soul of Apple, I do think this is a big issue because, as you said, this kind of ad would require going through so many layers of approval. It's just someone somewhere

should have at least been able to raise their hand. Maybe this isn't a good idea. Do we really want to do this? Is this really the most apple-y thing we can do? And the fact that that didn't happen starts to make you think, have they gotten so heavy as an organization and so bureaucratic? that those kind of voice, simple voices of pushing back again something or saying no or maybe let's doing something a little different. I mean, that's the classic trap that a large corporation will get into is that becoming Apple. And I think this definitely raises that question. One interesting thing that I did with this whole episode was I tried to see if chat GPT or Claude could write a better ad. And they did write some very boring ads. So I don't think they're in danger

of replacing creatives anytime soon. But then I asked Claude whether this idea of a trash compactor or some sort of compressor destroying all the beautiful products in the world would be met with a positive response. And it was quite interesting to see its reaction to the potential advertisement that Apple ended up running. It basically nailed it. It said that the public would say it's insensitive.

It might seem like it's promoting excessive consumerism and encouraging people to abandon perfectly functional items. for the sake of a new or more compact device. The imagery of beloved objects being destroyed could evoke feelings of loss and sadness. In confusion, some viewers might view the metaphor as confusing or unclear, struggling to connect the destruction of cherished items with the appeal of the iPad

and the appreciation for minimalism. A smaller portion of the audience might appreciate the ad's message of simplifying one's life and embracing the more minimalist approach to technology. So what was interesting is Claude basically got this right, before Apple even ran the ad. So my question to you is,

are we gonna start to see more creative agencies, more companies start to check their work with these AI bots to sort of gauge what the public is gonna do in response before it goes out the door? Yeah, I think you are the one that has taught me to feed back in transcripts or other work to Claude. And Claude is definitely the best versus chat GPT.

I think creation of original work is still the part where, especially for ad creative, marketing creative, people still are not, or the quality of output is not production worthy in most cases. But coming back with feedback, I honestly think these tools, that's the single most valuable thing they can do for any creative right now is give you smart feedback very quickly and good feedback and feedback that's getting better. So if you are a creative agency that's not incorporating some layer of, uh, I think you should start getting on that. So my one question here is whether this makes creative agencies end up being too safe.

Like the AI will always steer you to like the more safe response. And of course, if you ask it to think of like problems, it will deliver them. So I wonder if we end up in service of pleasing the AI, do our creative agencies become so safe to the point of not being willing to piss anybody off with the things that they're saying? Because you have to be willing to make some people angry to make great creative, right? I'm trying to picture like Nike feeding the Colin Kaepernick ad to Gemini and getting the most trying, attempting to be balanced response in terms of we know this ad could be offensive to some and empowering to others. And we recognize that we all have a diversity of opinion. But yeah,

I think, I think these are the kind of things with just creativity in general. Even we talked about music and audio earlier it is going to be really interesting how it both changes it but also how it makes people more creative i don't know if you saw there was uh this one tictog video this where a girl says she's looking for a finance bro oh my god and uh six five blue eyes trust fund yeah you're gonna turn this into a rap rap video ron well no no i i that i watched probably 15 different remixes of that one thing that she said, that she didn't even make a actual song about it, she just said it.

I'm looking for a man in finance, trust fund, six five, blue eyes. Finance, trust fund. Six five, blue eyes. And then the remixes were amazing. So there is a whole new layer of creativity that is being generated by these tools that's different, but it's just as entertaining. and honestly the people who really did a good job with it just as creative to me yeah definitely so okay let's just put a period on the apple thing um company really needs to deliver at w wdc what didn't you say

like if you think about this it's got this run of declining sales problems in china a creative snafu i mean it's a pretty rough moment for them if they weren't if they didn't have the cash to buy back a hundred ten billion dollars and shares like they announced last quarter it would be the narrative around Apple would be quite dark. But they do have one big announcement coming in June that they could potentially, I wouldn't say save themselves with, but help get themselves back on the right track, don't you think? Yeah, and we talked about this. One strong, powerful, differentiated AI announcement could completely change the conversation. You know, there's different theories around what it means with on-device computing and where they have a huge advantage

with the iPhone, how they improve all of their existing AI systems, and hopefully for me, Siri gets a little better and that they may be integrating other LLMs into it. Like, they have such a big opportunity. So I hope they have no overly creative attempt of an advertisement for that one. Even one thing, I wish they did this stuff live and didn't have a pre-recorded stream that's super highly produced. I wish Tim Cook was on stage and they did live demos of them attempting to do the AI whatever they're going to do. And hopefully it doesn't end up like the Rabbit R1 demos, which if anyone saw them trying to order on DoorDash did not work.

But I think it would show such, it would be such a statement to the industry that we're back, we're confident, we're innovating versus the pre-recorded ones. It's just, I don't know, they're too highly produced and slick and just not fun to watch. I mean, that was the magic of the Steve Jobs demos, is that the stuff would work most of the times, and sometimes it wouldn't, and he would yell. And it was like must-see TV. Yeah, exactly. That is a good demo. And everyone, short of the product, totally failing. A little, a little, a few hiccups is welcome for any of these kind of things. It makes it real. And I think, yeah, but WWDC is going to be a really interesting one for Apple. I think it will be live. And I will say, like, one of my favorites, Steve Jobs' moments is when he's about to do a demo, and he asks everybody in the auditorium, rather annoyed, to turn their Wi-Fi off because it was messing with his demo.

I don't have you seen that one. It's classic. I mean, I'm not, you know, I think bloggers have a right to blog, but if we want to see the demos, we're not going to be able to do it unless we turn off all these Mi-Fi base stations and laptops, set them on the floor. I've got time. Yeah. That's golden. That's perfect. Okay, one more thing about Apple. This wasn't on our prep sheet, but I want to ask you because it's interesting to me and somewhat new.

They have started to potentially build servers with AI chips in them. Do you have any sense as to like what that could be for? Yeah, I think the whole compute discussion, I mean, everyone is investing in it. Everyone is understanding that they need to either start building things for themselves, from a financial and cost perspective over the next decade as these technologies grow. So I think it's almost become, for a big technology company,

it's becoming table stakes that you have to own more of the AI infrastructure layer of your overall organization. And again, it's why Sam Altman's trying to raise, was it one trillion or seven trillion? Seven trillion. Seven trillion. It was not fully confirmed, but he didn't necessarily deny it. In fact, his comment, most direct comment on it,

was to say, why not $8 trillion? Yeah, exactly. So everyone is recognizing at massive scale, you need to do this. And if you think about it, Google and Microsoft and Amazon all, this is part of their business. Mark Zuckerberg and Meta is basically telling investors, we're going to be spending tens of billions of dollars

on this to build this kind of infrastructure. So Apple has to do something on this. So it must mean they have their own chatbot coming. Just improve Siri. That's all. Listeners, you know I say that every week. So if at WWDC, if Tim Cook just walks out and just goes, by the way, Siri's better. I will walk away a happy customer. Yeah. Well, I'm flying out to California. I'm hoping they credential me. So we'll see what happens that week. It should be fun. Put in a word with him, please. Yes. All right. So speaking of Sam Altman, did you do hear that Open AI is going to release its search engine next?

week the day before google's i.o developer conference so this is from reuters opening i plans to announce its artificial intelligence powered search engine product on monday according to two sources familiar raising the stakes in its competition with the search king google i love how they call it the search king i think maybe a couple months ago i would read this headline and be like oh google's cooked here comes open a i but also we also we know that the technology hasn't really empowered bing to the point where it's been able to cut in meaningfully into Google's Google search lead so maybe if i'm google i'm not too worried but maybe i am what do you think we we never became Bing boys i'm still i'm becoming slowly a Gemini guy um and that's because

google they're because search is core to their business it's it feels like it will be a lot easier to turn a search product into a LLM driven chatbot or generative AI product and we see Google's generative search is very good, and I'm seeing it on more and more queries. I've heard more and more people bring it up to me that they are seeing it, versus going the other way and turning an LLM-based chatbot like ChatGPT into a search product. Perplexity from the ground up has built something that is a really interesting hybrid. I use it all the time. We talked about it last week while traveling.

It informed me nonstop. I was using perplexity over and over. again and it's done a very good job on it. So I think I actually I'm going to make the call here. I think this is a bad rollout for OpenAI. And it's because to get citation right, which ChatGPT is one of the only platforms that does not do, even Microsoft's co-pilot, Claude, Perplexity, certainly that's like one of the core features is citation. Google has built it into Gemini. I think citation is going to be really hard and they're going to roll it out in a very clumsy fashion. And I think it could be a big deal because, you know, Open AI's product

excellence on ChatGPT and Dolly we've talked about, it's generally pure UI excellence, product excellence that have made these as powerful as the underlying model. So if they screw this one up, I think it could definitely cut into the shine that at least lives on the product side, maybe not the corporate side. Yeah. And it shouldn't be forgotten that Microsoft already has its own chatbot search, which is co-pilot or whatever it was, Bing beforehand, but now it's co-pilot. And now OpenAI is creating it. And I saw Casey Newton, the reporter, do this tweet saying, how angry must the Bing team be

about this right now? This was supposed to be Bing's big moment. And now this company that Microsoft has funded is doing it, it's not good. And Dwarkish Patel is going to be on the podcast on Wednesday. I spoke with him this week. It was a great conversation. So I'm going to tease it here, but I'm also going to scoop it a little bit. He said something really interesting, which I hope people tune in for the discussion.

It's one of my favorite interviews of the years so far. And what he said was you have Microsoft now effectively dividing its compute resources between its own internal team and Open AI, whereas Google is just concentrating it all in one place. And that's very bullish for Google. So all of a sudden, maybe like the old incumbent is. starting to see things shift in its favor. Yeah, I think that as you're saying it like that, this is going to be a very interesting business school case study a decade from now

that Microsoft is essentially taking the kind of diversified platform approach that betting on many horses and distributing your compute across a number of them and seeing who wins versus Google clearly, everything is built back into the core cloud products. So I think that'll be an interesting battle. But I don't think at Microsoft, come on, do you really think the team is threatened or angry by this versus, I feel Microsoft, after all the same ultimate drama, basically has, even if financially they're still tied, at least perceptually, distanced themselves pretty strongly

from Open AI. Yeah. I mean, here's a thing. In this world, and Dwarkish makes this point, and he does it better than me, so folks, please tune in on Wednesday. But basically, like, the entire game here at this moment is making these models like larger, right? And so that's why you want to consolidate and not have a multi-prong approach. You just want to give everything to one group and say, all right, you know, do it.

And so if this is the case that Microsoft is trying to hedge on Open AI, then why be tied with them at all? And that's where things get really interesting. Remember, right around the time of the Sam Altman, ouster, and then return, we heard, that they were in the process of a fundraise that would put them at some crazy number what's happened to that fundraise we haven't really heard anything about it afterwards so i think that's very interesting to watch we're going to see they might have a financial crisis yeah i think i mean to me that's why this is actually even more fun to watch and be part of versus a year or two ago in generative i because you know there is a long period of time where a cool new demo would come out and everyone

would get excited or you would use a product and it would be exciting there I still have those moments we've talked about on the music side, on the image side, but now it really is, you know, rubber meets the road, who is going to actually execute on these technologies the best, who's going to sell them, who's going to implement them, who's going to be able to monetize them? Because it is true. Like, is that $20 chat GPT plus subscription really going to scale and fund their overall usage of their compute? It's still pretty unclear on this. So I think it's going to get even more exciting, especially in the next few months. Absolutely, because one thing we haven't talked about yet is GPT5

and how their next model is going to come out, I think, this year. That's what everybody says. And does that really change things? And it's going to be interesting to see not only the improvement in the model, but also the interaction between people. And this was something that happened at the Bloomberg conference this week, where Brad Lightcap, who's the CEO of OpenAI, The Verge had this little item saying, you know, they keep vaguely teasing at GPT5.

Okay, let me just going to read it. His answer, her his answer hinted that chat GPT will evolve to act like an agent on your behalf, or the very least, take on more of a persona. And this is what he said. Will there be such a thing as a prompt engineer in 2026? You don't prompt engineer your friend. So that's clearly what they're building toward. Does that make you excited or how do you feel emotionally hearing?

I saw that line. You don't prompt engineer your friend. And that one, I just wish the management just spoke a little bit in a more normal way about these things are good. Maybe it will do this or it will do this other thing for you. But to get into that level of like how this is going to, how you should feel about these models is just awkward and weird to me versus just talking about what it can. do. I do think one thing that's good again in terms of talking about how things have almost slowed down in a good way is, remember, there was a period where it felt like everyone upgraded their foundation model every few weeks or few months or there's some major update and everything would change. And again, the fact that we're now at a point where they're teasing GPT5 and we don't really know exactly what it'll do, I think is a reminder that, you know, how much room is there really for improvement versus making the current technologies actually just reach more people, help them, do what they need them to do versus there's going to be some

Q-star AGI style, totally revolutionary thing. But we are hearing about a different use case, right? This agent case or a friend case, like that is definitely the move that they're making. And I think that'll be interesting to see as they sort of roll that out. Imagine that with a better model. All of a sudden, you can be talking about some very interesting applications. Like a concierge, perhaps? So what if you're lonely, just hypothetically, you're on the apps and you're trying to meet somebody.

And all of a sudden, an AI concierge pops up and says, hey, let me do the hard work for you. All right. So thank you for setting me up there, Ron John. Do you want to introduce this segment? Well, actually, there was a tweet around, so Whitney Wolf, the founder of Bumble, had talked about the idea that you have an AI concierge essentially managing your dating life for you. In the current world of people swiping and messaging themselves that you have an AI talking to someone else's AI and this is matching and filtering and engaging and talking. and then you're kind of monitoring and overseeing this process. And it's such a weird one because I will say,

and having been married a long time and only seeing this via other friends who are single, it is, people do manage online dating like some kind of large-scale transactional process where it's, you know, the swiping level. I mean, it's like a funnel. And having some kind of AI improvement in there actually does make a little bit of sense. And a lot of it is not very human in how it's done. It is very fast and volume-based.

So it is kind of weird to think could an AI actually filter better for you? And especially if you're already approaching things in that way, this makes sense to me. And it was crazy to see this Bumble CEO, Whitney Wolf, talk about it at this Bloomberg conference because as she introduces the idea, the audience starts laughing. and then she goes, no, seriously, and she advances it. Let's take a listen. Okay, so for example, you could, in the near future, be talking to your AI dating concierge,

and you could share your insecurities. I just came out of a breakup. I have commitment issues. And it could help you train yourself into a better way of thinking about yourself, and then it could give you productive tips for communicating with other people. If you want to get really out there,

there is a world where your dating concierge, could go and date for you with other dating concierge uh no no totally and then you don't have to talk to 600 people and all of san francisco for you say these are the three people you really ought to meet it sounds useful i mean like you talked about like dating today it's really hard uh with the apps and you know i'm i'm lucky i feel also lucky like people who are recently married it feels like they got kind of like the last chopper out of the war where like i mean that's not even original right it's just like it's so it is it's become like a job transactional just a disaster and maybe you're right maybe if AI can go ahead and speak with other people's AI's and find the right match for you

then that could be a net positive I guess now that I'm thinking about it almost tying back to the earlier conversation around do you play a physical guitar or do you play a guitar on your iPad I think things are going to split into the more purely digital AI-driven experiences and then the more organic human experiences. Because, again, if you're already managing your dating life in some kind of volume-based way, this will definitely help you. And actually is not horrible and antithetical to, you know, any kind of romance. It actually is just making better what you're already doing versus if you're trying to meet someone at a bar or, you know, it's just somewhere else in an organic fashion and the same way that like you know playing an instrument versus generating an

AI clip of music is a different type of experience and you know it requires a different level of commitment and it's just a completely different thing so maybe people maybe in all these different kind of things that we do in life will have the AI thing and then the more human thing yeah did you meet your wife in person? I did at a birthday party singing karaoke. Were you the one singing? Is that what sealed the deal? I actually, she had chosen the song American Boy by Stella and Kanye West. And I randomly happened to know the Kanye West section where he wraps in the middle and got up and did it. Yeah. Well done. Yeah. I mean, I tried, I tried online dating for years and then I ended up meeting my wife in person. So I don't know. There's still something to be said for it,

although it's possible to find love on the apps. Okay, I got to ask you this one more question, this one question. So there's this guy, Sid Verma on Twitter, and he says, a ruthless self-taught dating machine who weaponizes your bio data to whittle down matches, raising concerns over privacy and consent. Congrats. You've invented the Indian mom. And you said, Sid's greatest tweet has just been posted. So I'm curious if you could talk a little bit like people are like is this bringing back arranged marriage now I watched indian matchmaking on on Netflix so you know that it was such a great show but does this kind of resemble it yeah so okay so Sid is a friend from the my financial times days and he has some

great Twitter commentary on being Indian and the idea of kind of leveraging data to create highly transactional arrangements for love and romance in Indian culture, especially more traditionally, I mean, there's a site shadi.com where all your bio data, like not just height weight, even like health data, cast, all these kind of things are fed in. And they definitely have added an AI layer that they call it around improving their matching process to better filter. So this whole idea of using extensive data points to, in a very intrusive manner, dictate who you should be seeing is well, very familiar with a more traditional Indian folks. And I think it was a good, good recognition of the,

the types of interactions that already exist that now we're weirdly trying to replicate in the digital world. Trust me, you guys don't want that. You don't want that. Well, maybe you do because I could be wrong, but don't arrange marriages have a higher percent chance of working out. so all right so AI will bring us back to the age of arranged marriage that's I'm not it's so interesting because it's like one of those situations where like statistically yes you're likely to be like in a much better position but you would never want that forced on you I don't think I wouldn't yeah exactly I mean this is the same way maybe actually we obviously don't know yet but I'm sure we'll start to see data if these AI driven I mean I guarantee you Bumble

one year from now will present some data about how AI-driven meetups are more successful than organic ones. I don't doubt. I don't doubt it. They probably will be true and it probably work. And for those who doesn't work, there's always these erotic AIs that you could end up dating and hang out with them in the Metaverse. There was also a headline this week that Open AI is like working to develop erotic generative. I figured to leave that off the agenda this week after our, you know, after last week. Our raunchy conclusion to last week. Well, we haven't gotten to the Brady roast yet, so.

Yes. Okay. So that's to be continued. Hold out people. Yes. Let's talk briefly about this zombie internet. So there was this great article in futurism about Advon, which it calls the AI powered content monster infecting the media industry.

And I think that's a really appropriate headline. It's like one of these situations where the headline actually does justice to how bad this is. And it's basically these AI-powered. AI generated news stories. This is how it works. Somebody at this ad von company reportedly according to futurism, right? So that caveat in there.

We'll type in a headline like best bicycles for kids. And then the AI will generate every single word of the article, right? Like writing a bike is a right of passage that every child should experience. And then you just keep clicking, generate intro paragraph, generate product awards. And that builds the article. And these articles are terrible. They oftentimes will mismatch the product in the headline with the actual product recommendations that it makes.

For instance, asking about microwaves, that it will give four reviews of microwaves, but also like conventional ovens. And it will answer questions that people typically type into the internet. Like, can you use aluminum foil in your oven? I mean, I read this in the way, and I just was like the web is getting destroyed. And it gets even more embarrassing.

depressing when you start to hear the different types of companies that are involved in this. They found this company's content on places like Hollywood Life, Us Weekly, but not only that, the Los Angeles Times had been using it, the Miami Herald had been using it, the Sacramento B had been using it. I mean, is nothing sacred? Like I do, I was always under the impression that the search engines kind of would have a handle on this and be able to filter out AI content, but I don't think so anymore after reading this article. And it does just get to this concern that you and John at margins have been bringing up for quite some time,

which is that AI is going to create this zombie internet. And maybe before Google even gets disintermediated by AI, it gets filled by this junk, which even causes a further impetus to replace it with AI like we might see from next week's Open AI event. How do you read this story? So I think, so first, there's bad AI and good AI. Like some of the examples of reviewing a microwave oven and then actually making it around a conventional oven is bad AI or, you know, the bike review example you gave.

So that's one thing that's almost funny to me is Advon clearly could have done a little bit of work on their models and made it a little better because you should be able to write a pretty good bike review that actually sounds coherent. and is ideally reviewed to make sure it's actually accurate. But I do think this raises a big question around, especially product review driven SEO articles, which have become a mainstay for publishers and has become one of the biggest monetization engines for publishers, which is why you see everyone having top 20 of everything or when it's Prime Day,

here's the 55 best things you can buy for Prime Day, because everyone is just scraping for any kind of affiliate ad revenue for transacting with their readers for these products. And I think that is all going to go away. I genuinely believe, and this is where when, and I don't think it's a bad thing. There's certain parts of the internet. We've all talked about recipes, how every recipe starts with 700-word story of the person's life so they can stuff a bunch of digital display.

ads in the middle so you scroll down and they get paid for them and everyone is complaining and saying this is going to hurt small publishers but unfortunately that was bad content meant to arbitrage the existing display ad ecosystem from 10 15 years ago and I think it already destroyed a lot of the web so to me it's going to be painful but I do think moving more towards especially when we hear open AI is going to launch a search engine I think I think that moving more towards getting just evergreen good information to users in a way that's clean and simple and easy to access, it's going to, you don't need a hundred different lists of best bikes for kids. You need to get, but if you do put in the work, and I think wirecutter from

the New York Times, which their quality, I think, has been on a bit of a decline. Like, I think they still are the gold standard of if you really put time and energy into your reviews and make them good and make them human and connecting to the reader and really building that trust, you'll be fine. But if you're churning out these lists of best bikes anyways, I think publishers are going to lose that revenue very, very quickly. Yeah. And of course it hurts the display advertising, right? And that sort of ship has sailed for digital publishers. But what it also does is it just increases distrust within the publishing ecosystem and actually these bad news sites these bad news stories will cause damage for everyone for instance if you go to the los angeles

times just for an example right because they apparently were working with this company apparently they've stopped but if you go to the los angeles times and you see a story about whether you could microwave aluminum foil and it gives you the wrong answer you're just never going to trust these publications anymore. It gives you all the more reason to go to Claude or chat GPT or Gemini and say, well, you might not be right, but at least you're going to take a swing at like at accuracy, whereas these publications literally don't give a shit about what happens on their websites and don't respect me as a user. And unfortunately, everybody does get lumped together. And it kind of goes to our discussion at the start of the episode last week where it's like the information ecosystem has

gotten so bad, what's so wrong with an AI chat bot that will actually like be measured and do its best to get you the accurate information versus publications that just don't respect the reader. I think this stuff is going to come back to bite the media industry pretty badly. And for Google, which enables it in a way, it will also harm Google and potentially put their business at long-term risk. Yeah, I think Google is at that inflection point. We've talked about this a lot between their actual search revenue and whatever model that's created from generative search, which they're doing better at actually outputting the answers, but it's going to be a huge, huge threat to their conventional search business that directs you to these

sites. And they created this whole model themselves. So I think it's still, it's going to be an existential question. They seem to be doing work. But I don't think, so small publishers, certainly but I'm also curious about what it's going to do to Facebook and I mean Facebook the blue app because I've gone on Facebook recently and in terms of AI generated garbage it's crazy the stuff you see I barely use it so so much of the feed is now like all these kind of just like purely algorithmic efforts to try to engage me in some way and I get so many of these like random AI generated images it's like have a drink in Capri Italy and it's just this image

it's so clearly fake and there's like hundreds of thousands of likes and comments of people being like nice good i love italy and uh that's just the kind of like entry level point uh 404 media had a whole story about how the AI generated images of mutilated children are going viral and people, you know, all saying how horrible it was. So it's just clearly engagement bait. Ryan Broderick at Garbage Day, which is one of my favorite newsletters, had talked about this. And I love what he always does. He like takes like a very investigative approach to the most random, weird parts of the internet. So he found this account that creates these AI generated recipe videos, tied it to some Brazilian company, saw that they also make Facebook pages with

AI-generated Jesus photos, which get a lot of engagement. So there are these companies that are totally cracking this formula. But I think this is also going to be a big threat for Facebook, and I think they're probably ignoring it right now because it's just juicing numbers, and it's totally fine for them. It's more content, more engagement. But in terms of, not that whatever it might mean to trust what's on your Facebook feed, but I think this is going to, the content is just bad.

So it's going to get even worse. And at some point there's going to be some big presentation in Mark Zuckerberg talking about how they've fixed your feeds. Well, here's the deal. Facebook ingested the web. And so the bad stuff on the web now happens on Facebook. It's as simple as that. And it probably spreads further because Facebook's algorithm sort of incentivizes that.

And so that's what we're seeing, I would imagine. Yeah. No, we saw the term zombie internet, and this was from Ryan Broderick to refer to the endless wasteland of algorithmically regurgitated and now AI-generated content filling up meta-platforms. And Sundar's talked about this a lot for Google, that like this flood of AI-generated spammy content that's going to be coming or is already there. And it's clear these companies are going to have to get a hold on it. Otherwise, it could, I mean, it can, it can destroy these products. And it could literally, this is a scale that in the past, you know,

Macedonian teenagers spreading disinformation or there's other very manual things that were happening that negatively affected the perception of these feeds and the trust around them. But this is, this is a scale that they have not countered this, encountered this kind of thing before. So, so I think these platforms are definitely going to have to do something about it fast. Absolutely. All right. Why don't we take a quick break and come to talk about the Tom Brady Roast, Netflix and King a deal with the NFL. Before we do, I just want to say that if you're in the New York area and you want to hang out with us on Wednesday, the 15th of May, which is coming up next week, we're doing a live event

in the financial district with Aaron Levy, friend of the show, CEO of Box. It's going to be a live podcast. We're going to plant some questions with Ron John so you now know the strategy. So you can sign up on big technology.com. It's right up there on the homepage, the story for the event with the link. Only caveat is you have to be a big technology paid subscriber. But it's $10 a month and you can cancel it any time. So if you're in the New York area, please come to the event.

We hope to see you there. And on the other side of this break, we're going to talk about Tom Brady. Hey, everyone. Let me tell you about The Hustle Daily Show, a podcast filled with business, tech news, and original stories to keep you in the loop on what's trending. More than 2 million professionals read The Hustle's daily email for its irreverent and informative takes on business and tech news. Now, they have a daily podcast called The Hustle. Daily Show, where their team of writers break down the biggest business headlines in 15 minutes or

less and explain why you should care about them. So, search for the Hustled Daily Show and your favorite podcast app, like the one you're using right now. And we're back here on Big Technology podcast Friday edition. So on Netflix, there was a really popular event that happened live, live television on Netflix, this roast of Tom Brady. I didn't know it was coming. But it all of a sudden became this pop culture moment where everybody kept destroying Tom Brady for ruining his relationships go eight and nine in the final season in the NFL. And as a Jets fan, I really enjoyed it. I respect Tom Brady, but it was fun to see him get ripped apart. But it also kind of showed you that Netflix is taking this move where it's saying, okay, like our future is going to be live

content, right? Live will be where the growth comes from. That was the message I got. What did you think about the roast and what do you think it means for Netflix? All right. So I'll get into what I thought about the roast and this will be from the perspective of a diehard lifelong Patriots fan. Sorry. By the way, it just says so much about this show that like I'm the big Jets fan and you're the big Patriots fan and we can bring everyone together.

You can bring everyone together. Anything is possible. But so what was fascinating about this for me is so I'll never forget my first moment of understanding binge TV or when all episodes are released in the same day. I think it was 2011 or 13. I was at my parents' house. House of Cards had come out. I had watched an episode, I'd watch another, and my mom had walked over. She was like, oh, is this on right now? When did it come out? I'm like, today. And she was just totally confused by, what does that mean? It came out today and you're on, been watching it for six hours. And she was like, is it a movie? Well, no, but is

it a series? Yeah. So then why are you watching it all one after the other? Anyways, it was the first moment I remember vividly thinking, okay, they changed the entire model. Now, this was the first time. I'm on Twitter, Sunday evening. I start seeing some people sharing clips. I also had not heard about it or been targeted with it on when opening Netflix. And I'd kind of let it go and I'm like, oh, well, it's Netflix. I'll watch it tomorrow or later this week. And within 30 minutes, I got the most extreme case of FOMO, and I turned it on, and again, I'll get into, I think it was one of the greatest pieces of content I've seen, greatest things of media in the last. But also, it created a moment. In Netflix, I think their biggest weakness to date, which was built into the way they do it, is they never had the Sunday night Game of Thrones succession type of engagement.

they when you release everything at once and they'd already started experimenting with rolling out seasons more carefully three episodes to start like kind of like apple tv and for me when you watch things like that i end up on reddit reading about the show i just spend a lot more time getting excited about it thinking about it it becomes more of a moment versus when you go and binge a show you don't real you just don't pay as much attention so i think this is a big deal for Netflix and to execute on it on it well and they executed on it well because oh my god this was for me again to see bill bellichick these are all players especially football i feel you're more detached from a player because they have a helmet on and like they don't really interview them

that much or they're not as much personalities as other sports and to see the gronk certainly a personality already but like you don't see these guys and get their humor know if they have humor and they the level of offensiveness of some of the jokes almost to the point that it was like shocking but amazing where they were going and delivering on them too tom brady i i think he's the greatest of all time i never would have thought he could be funny and i thought he actually almost in an amazing way delivered some of the darkest humor in a way that I would usually associate with, you know, like some, like, very experienced stand-up comic. I mean, he definitely had riders, but I would say Belichick was the funniest of them all.

Belichick is actually hilarious, and he's so good at media. He's, like, surprisingly very good at media, given this, like, dour personality that he had the entire time he was the coach of the Patriots. Yeah, he, I mean, I have always sometimes wondered how much of it is a schick and how much of it is, like, actually him grumpy. and treating the press like that. But I actually was also, I mean, gronk was so gronk and comical. He was having trouble reading the teleprompter. He smashed a shot glass that exploded

and then like sprayed glass everywhere, which was the most gronk smash thing to do. I thought Kevin Hart actually was a very good host. I thought he was hilarious. He was hilarious. I would love to watch a gronk. Kevin Hart Buddy comedy, if any Netflix executives are watching or listening. I would certainly pitch that one.

But overall, I thought it was a big win for Netflix. I thought Tom Brady, whatever he's going to be doing in this post football career, and it certainly, hopefully is not more crypto. I think he set himself up pretty well. Oh, they killed him on FTX. Tom also lost $30 million in crypto. Tom, how did you fall for that? I mean, even Gronk was like, me, know that not real money.

I mean, oh, yeah, that was classic. Brady was in FTX, honestly, out of celebrities. He's by far the deepest in, and Giselle, too. But he's about, they're about to get their money back. So with interest. Yes. But the broader picture here on Netflix is interesting, right? Because there was another report that came out in Puck that they're about to ink a deal with the NFL for two playoff football games.

not playoff Christmas time football games which I don't know might be even more valuable right where there is going to be this moment around Netflix in the Christmas time and where everybody's going to get their new thin iPads and they're going to need to fill it with content so they're going to sign up for Netflix and this is a moment where Netflix has this advantage

over all the other streamers who aren't making money Netflix is making money it's adding subscribers because of the password crackdown and it needs to press that advantage and the way that it's going to press that advantage is through live television It's the lowest taking fruit for it. It's obviously doing a good job being selective at this point, but now comes the haymaker.

It's going for the NFL, and the question was always, what's going to happen to linear television once the NFL goes to streaming? And the NFL is going to streaming. And this is going to be a very interesting couple months or a couple of years for TV because this is the beginning. And this is sort of where Netflix takes its strength. It takes the cards that it has in its hands. and it presses the advantage not only on other streamers but on the medium itself and it's going to be it is going to be a fight to remember well we will be watching okay and maybe we can host a big technology roast one day where uh you can make fun of me for this mustache that I wore on our live stream today I wasn't fully aware of when I joined on and we

are seeing each other on video I did have to ask Alex is that a mustache I can't tell Sometimes, you know, it could be a bit of a beard trim with a little extra mustache, but no, it looks like a proper, full-on mustache. I think he should keep it. Listeners, please chime in, but he says he might be shaving. It's gone. Yeah, it's gone. My wife is going to murder me if she sees this when she gets home.

So this is a little midday Friday fun. Something more real when you're doing a podcast with a guy with a mustache. Exactly. It's just, it just, who's his credibility. Yeah. All right, everybody. Thank you for listening. Join me on Wednesday with Dwarkish Patel.

Great podcasts for talking about the future of AI. Otherwise, Ron Dun and I will be back with you next week. So take care and we'll see you next time on Big Technology Podcast.