Big Technology Podcast - More on Airbnb, Jack Dorsey's Return to Square, Generative AI News Bonanza

Episode Date: September 22, 2023

Ranjan Roy from Margins is back for our weekly discussion of the latest tech news. We cover: 1) An update on our Yahoo episode quest 2) A recap and further analysis of Airbnb Brian Chesky's appearance on the podcast 3) Recent tech IPOs falling back to earth 4) The broader market's downturn and the chance of a recession 5) Jack Dorsey's Return to Square 6) The success of Snapchat+ 7) Generative AI announcements from Amazon, Google, and Microsoft 8) Does Generative AI take off in enterprise settings first? 9) The rise of CleanTok. --- 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/ Questions? Feedback? Write to: [e-mail]

We have updates on our Airbnb and Yahoo conversation. There's been a bonanza of generative AI news hitting the wire this week. We're going to talk about that. Jack Dorsey is back at Square. Snapchat's booming and people on TikTok love to clean. All that and more 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 whole heck of a lot of news to break down for you this week.

A lot of fun stuff. And let's dive right into it. First, joining us, as always, is Ranjan Roy of Margins. Ronjan, welcome. Good to be here, Alex. Great to have you. So I think we have to really begin with two follow-ups from our conversation last week. First of all, I want to thank Big Technology Podcast Nation for coming out and showing your support for our desire and our push to get Yahoo episode on the feed.

Some amazing reviews came in. Here's one from PD283, the host and his co-host. have great chemistry. It really is a nuanced conversation. I really enjoyed the 915 episode, and yes, would love them to do an episode on Yahoo. We also have someone, I think it's an equation editor. The review is Yahoo! With like four o's. And love the 915 episode, hoping for that Yahoo! Then, and plenty more. So first of all, thanks to everybody that posted a review. And if you haven't yet, and you want to use the review as a way to get questions, If you put a five-star review and ask a question in their review,

here's the thing. Ranjan and I will get to your questions in the next episode. So a little more incentive to post those reviews. Anyway, here's the update. Jim Lanzone, the CEO of Yahoo, is going to come on the show. It's going to be a couple months down the road. I was texting with him this week. Very busy heads down at the moment, working on everything Yahoo.

But we're going to get that episode. You asked, you will receive, and I am so excited to bring it to you. So stay tuned. I'm hoping sometime, you know, maybe later this year, or at the very worst beginning of next year Yahoo episode coming to the feed. I'm telling you it's one of the most interesting stories in tech right now that no one is talking about. So I'm excited for that episode.

Right. And we will be talking about it and I'm excited too. And I know Jim is as well. So can't wait for that. I'll keep you folks updated on when he's going to come on. And again, thank you for all the lovely reviews. It means a lot and helped us also increase our standing in the ratings,

the rankings on Apple Podcast this week. So thank you for that. Okay, update on our Airbnb conversation. Last week, Ranjan and I were on talking about whether Airbnb is going to do advertising. And he's like, why don't you put it to Airbnb? And of course, Brian Chesky and I were about to sit down a few days later. We did. I asked him about the advertising and his perspective, actually quoting Jeff Bezos, was that he's going after the perishable market first, fixing the main product. And then it seems like once he gets that down, he's going to go after advertising because when I started reading him the predictions of how much advertising revenue was going to come in the predictions from skift I mean folks for it was only him and I in the room we weren't able to record it for video but the guy's eyes started lighting up like you could see an instant reaction and he's like really like that's the prediction billions of dollars in from advertising higher margin revenue so Ranjan I'm curious what you thought listening to that

as we put our question to Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky Yeah. The numbers are certainly astounding. And again, it's an incredibly high margin business. So at every level, it made sense. But I actually have to say, and overall, I mean, honestly, everyone go back and listen to the episode, the entire episode of Brian Chesky, if you have not. Because he came off, honestly, is one of the kind of most thoughtful, but also, you know, fired up tech CEOs I've heard in a while, but in a kind of a smart thoughtful way. Again, on advertising, the whole. idea around Jeff Bezos. I loved that idea of go after the perishable opportunities first. What are the opportunities that will not be there if you don't go after them today? And so for them, and we can definitely talk about that. And we had fixing the product all, you know, it's become almost a meme, the cleaning fees around Airbnb. And clearly they, they're answering that. That was, you know, a big part of their overall announcements, how they're tackling that frustration that all their consumers have. So I think it's smart how they're approaching it. But

I mean, I will say that the product placement in Airbnb is I'm still kind of liking this idea. I know that's probably not. The way he talked about it is in the more traditional sense that Uber, DoorDash, Instacart, as we saw, it's pushing them to profitability. The idea of just having advertisement, basically people paying to push their listings up within the conventional product, but I still think Keels should do a collab with Airbnb and have their products in every Airbnb. That's me. It did seem to me that it's just something that he's chopping at the bit at. And by the way, it takes a little bit of pressure off the broader business and sort of allows you to do things with the broader business that you might not have been able to

otherwise. For instance, you want to provide better customer service? Well, one way to do that is have a higher margin business, hire more customer service people or, you know, potentially, you know, use that to offer more credits. It's the thing, this is the thing, and I think this is why Amazon went after it. By running this high margin business, Amazon is able to run a effectively break-even retail business and then keep people locked in because of that. So that's the one thing that I think we should be thinking about with this is, you know, is advertising actually ancillary to Airbnb? Is it ancillary to Amazon? Is it ancillary to Instacart right now? It doesn't seem like it is actually. It does seem like it's core. And so like I agree fixing the product number one,

but as you get deeper into it, some of this advertising revenue can become core and can enable a service that allows you to compete in a way that you can't without it. And that was my takeaway from it. Yeah. I mean, Amazon's a poster child of this. And again, from an antitrust perspective, that's a different topic. But again, AWS super high margin business. Now they're retail network, their advertising business, super high margin, funneled that back in. And you said break even, the actual e-commerce and retail business has lost money many quarters, but they can afford to do that because they have these others, you know, cash flow generating machines. So, yeah, I think it'll be really interesting to see how Airbnb pushes that opportunity. It was funny. I think

because at one point he was even talking about, you know, like, we won't get into the jet turbine business because that's so out of the scope of the type of things that we're doing. But very clearly saying advertising makes complete sense. Ron John, you also picked up a little bit on the product manager shift. I'm curious if you have a very brief reflection on that and why you thought it was worth paying attention to. I know. And I've heard on hacker news or wherever else, like Airbnb has always had this kind of mystique about it, that they're a design first company, that everything is design-driven versus, like, you think of an Amazon as operational masters. And he really kind of laid out the vision of a large company, and they're a huge company,

as he said, they're in the Fortune 500 now, is the idea that, and like Apple, things are not divisional. It's not that you have an engineering department in AWS, in the e-commerce division, like a company like Amazon, which is divisional. You have one engineering division. You have one U.X division that will go across products, across the entire company. And it was interesting me because you see how that ends up, you know, disseminating to the entire company, and you see it in the quality of the product. But also you see how something like the cleaning fees or these other issues, like how you can, how the whole company can come together to tackle something like that and how that energy can come around and really be focused versus, I mean, even a Google

especially, I feel they've kind of been the, you know, having the same product named two different things, having like, yeah, basically it creates focus in a way. And obviously Apple, you see it in the end product. Right. One other thing that I found interesting. And then we'll move on is that he talked about how writing the press release for the product you're building in a way that Amazon does, which I always thought was a terrific way to build products. It takes away, the weakness is that it takes away your ability to iterate and imagine on the way. If you're a way, if you're only building toward that product and that is your North Star, then you could end up missing the ability to really build different and big and interesting things that can come up in the

middle of the product building process. So, wait, wait, can you explain for people who aren't familiar the Amazon press release thing? But, and also, I actually, and how did Airbnb do it differently? I can't quite remember, but I remember it was interesting. Yeah. So, so basically when they build a product inside Amazon, they, they start by writing a press. press release with a quote with fake quotes from customers that talk about how much they love the product. And so Chesky is saying that when you're envisioning a product, you can write that press release. It's all well and good. But the thing is that as you're building and as you're moving toward that North Star, if, you know, for instance, your testing leads you elsewhere,

your designers lead you elsewhere, your instincts lead you elsewhere, you could potentially miss, you know, the big opportunity by focusing so much on the press release that you wrote in the beginning. So he actually wants a little bit more flexibility in the product process. And so they don't use those type of documents. And I actually think that, you know, for the first time, it was like an argument against the Amazon process for certain types of business that made a lot of sense to me. All right. Yeah. Yeah. No, you can definitely see that. I, again, the overall conversation around product management, and this is someone, as myself, not a product manager, but someone who's, you know, been part of teams building products. It was really interesting

how they approached it. Let's also go quickly through a story that we also brought up last week, which was the tech IPO is returning. And we had a bit of a debate about whether the pops are meaningful or not, that when the stock goes up on IPO day, you actually have something remarkable that's happening and it's good for the company. Let's leave that debate aside, but I want to talk a little bit about what has actually happened with these tech company IPOs since they went out over the past few weeks. So this is from Aaron Griffith, New York Times reporter. All three of the recent tech IPOs had first day pops that didn't last. Arm, Instacart, and Clavio are all trading below their first day opening price and are flat to

their IPO price. So for listeners, Arm went out at $51. It climbed 25 percent and now it's at $50. Instacart went out at $30. That was its IPO price. It climbed 40%. And now it's at $30 and 12 cents. So it's returned back to Earth. Claveo out its IPO price, $30.

It jumped 23%. And now it's $33, but it's really given up most of that pop. I'm curious. I mean, obviously it's a rough week for the market, right? But what do you make of the fact that these pops are now all gone? Yeah, it was only a week ago, everything was great in the technology industry and I imagine every investment banker out there was calling up their clients who have been sitting on the sidelines for months or even years now

who have just been chomping at the bit to go public that maybe the window is open and it's time but this week is not looking as good so I think we got us separated out into two parts one is the specifics of these companies and then two the economy itself now instacar was interesting like Corey Weinberg at the information, we had brought this up last week, and he wrote in more detail. And Arm did this a bit. So Arm floated only 10% of the company, actually made it available. The other 90% is still owned by SoftBank and Masayoshi's son. Instacart is even less. The entire float was only 6.7% of the company. Now, a typical IPO, 10% is already the very low end. You see typically up to 25%

of the overall value of the company being floated and available to sell. So you have a very, very limited supply of stock being issued, which obviously is, you know, it helps push the price up just because the scarcity of what's available and everyone is interested in this IPO and buying the stock. So I think already you saw the pop, you saw the interest. The financial engineering worked until it isn't as much anymore. And everything's coming back a little down to earth. But I think then, and we should definitely get into it, the economy as a whole, the Fed this week,

things are looking a little more reserved, let's say, from the federal reserve. I mean, I'll take it a step further. I felt this was one of the most depressing weeks in the market we've had in a very long time. You have the S&P this in the past five days alone, down more than 2%. A lot of the gains that we saw, at least in the second half of the year, have just been completely given up. And it does stem from the Fed signaling to the market what it's going to do. So there were two elements to this, Ron, and I. I'm curious if you think I have it right here.

The first was that the Fed didn't immediately say it was going to lower rates and said it might even raise rates this year. So that was element one. But the second and the more impactful thing is the Fed said, listen, we're going to keep those rates. We're likely going to keep those rates high for longer than we initially expected. And if the market's trading on the next 12 or 18 months ahead of time, it seemed like we had a pretty good time in the market, not for what's happening now, but for what was going to happen over the next year and a half or so. With the Fed sing, it's going to keep those rates high. All of a sudden, the good times the market expected are gone. And now you start to see what really is, you know,

a stock market crash. So I guess for you two questions. One, is that a proper diagnosis of what's happening? Two, is this still just really confined to assets? Or is the fact that the stock market is going south in a hurry? Lead us to a potential area where a recession could now actually be in focus? Yeah, so I think that's a proper diagnosis. Actually, one of the the best ways I read it put was, so basically, typically when rates are, you know, there's a hiking cycle, once that's finished, rates drop quickly. That, you know, the Fed's hiked, everything is like inflation is headed off. And then in order to kind of like keep the economy stable, they drop rates quickly. The biggest thing that Jerome Powell and the Fed indicated, both through what he said

and in the dot plot, which is where they indicate what their forecast for interest rates are, basically is that rates are not going to drop quickly in the same way. The line I read was is that rates go up like stairs and drop like an elevator. And it captures it. So what they're trying to say is inflation is moving down, but it's still not. dropping quickly. So the Fed has to be a little bit conservative, but economic growth has still been resilient. So from their perspective, it actually seems reasonable at this exact moment that they don't need to cut rates yet. They should actually give, because one inflation could raise its ugly head again, or the economy, if it starts to show signs of weakness, they need

to give themselves room to cut. So I think, again, at this exact, moment, the way the Fed communicated, I actually think is correct, but clearly the market did not take it as such. And what about the chance of a recession taking hold now? I mean, it's so interesting because every time, like, I see people predicting a recession, it's always like a year away. And at this point, like, I don't know how you can have any credibility if you keep predicting a six month away or one year away recession. And it doesn't materialize. So what do you think about that? Yeah, I actually, I would guess the number of pundits that are predicting a recession is probably going to be down because everyone was wrong 12 months ago. So people are going to be hopefully a little bit more

reserved. But again, I mean, the economy is in likely a more precarious situation right now than it was 12 months ago. But the precarity of it is, again, like as you see in the Fed's decision calculus it's it's difficult because everything's okay right now so trying to plan ahead for 18 months from now or 12 months from now that's the difficult part because inflation is still down growth is still pretty good right so where you go from there and how you navigate out of that it's it's a very tough thing to do it is interesting I mean one theory here has just been that like the main impact of their rates has been on asset markets inflation was going to come down anyway because the supply chain was riding it and the economy will look good until it doesn't and that's

when you might have a problem because this stuff works very slowly like it's not like you raise interest rates by 2% and next thing you know like that's reflected immediately it takes a while so speaking by the way of the stock market and good times to bed and then bad times to good a square or block as it's called now is down 85% since it's COVID highs um and And there's a familiar face that's returning to Square. His name is Jack Dorsey. He's the head of block, or they call him the Blockhead. So that's the umbrella set of companies that include Square and title and some other stuff.

Anyway, the CEO of Square is leaving. Dorsey is apparently returning. I'm curious what you make of the fact that Jack is back in the game and what it's going to say for Square. So Jack is back and what's really interesting about this company is one it is called block like we I think people are sometimes forgetting that this was like in terms of what it made me remember with I was on their website today I'm going to let you talk a second but I was on their website today and I saw like they're like blocked they still have like blockchain and their leadership is all like a cube and it's just amazing like how silly it seems right now sorry go ahead no no but exactly so that's what was so amazing about the stories. I had forgotten it was called Block. I forgot. I mean, if people remember, and we've now hit a point in the cycle where like COVID ridiculousness is kind of fun to watch in exactly that. I remember they renamed themselves Block in peak pandemic era, like insanity. They had a corporate site with exactly the leaders are all cubes. They're like, yeah,

their headshots are spread over three-dimensional cubes. And, it's hilarious because you have like their facial features on one side of the cube and then the top of the cube is just their foreheads. See see this happened this happened to a multi-billion dollar public company and again that the fact that blockchain was going to be the answer and they invested in title which was always kind of interesting or they did they buy title I believe bought it. Yeah so they bought it so overall the but the core business square has been having some issues. It had its first, I believe, nationwide outage recently,

but actually I was here at a blue bottle, and it just didn't work, and there was a line. And then read the headlines later, it's a massive outage for the payment provider, which actually is known as one of the more reliable systems in the market. So it was interesting to me that. Exactly. Exactly.

So I am so intrigued whether does this mean they are now getting back to fundamentals and recognizing, okay, Square is the business, all this block stuff was all kind of a diversion or maybe not the right approach. And Jack is going to clean things up and tighten up the old organization and make it all kind of built around the core business of Square? or are they just having a lot of problems and the CEO, Alyssa Henry, who was the CEO of Square, is leaving and they're going to have to find someone else?

It would be extremely fascinating if Jack comes back and cleans out all the blockchain stuff because he's like Mr. Bitcoin and Mr. Blockchain himself. I don't see that happening at all. And so that's going to be a very interesting tension between Jack who's all up on Bitcoin and blockchain and maybe what the strategic imperative is, is for square. So speaking, yeah, there's just very, there's so many of these stories.

I love like, and we're seeing it all now, September, 2023, all just kind of, and as you said, the transmission of effects of high interest rates take time, where all these things that happened in 2021, we are now seeing the fallout continuously on. And this is another one that just quietly, it's all related to. pandemic absurdity. I was going to say, have you seen the headlines or the snippets of the lawsuit that FTX has brought against Sam Bankman Freed's parents? Oh, my. Okay, talking about 2021 and Sandy coming out now. What did you think about it? I mean, maybe that can be for an entire episode or segment in the

future, but I strongly encourage everyone to go read everything they can around how Sam Bankman Spreed's parents were very involved with the overall FTX process and just the level of like, yeah, absurdity or just things that people thought they could get away with still blows my mind. I mean, there was a one snippet of it where the father had been asking, allegedly had been asking Sam for a higher salary and it was like supposed to be $2 million, but instead it was like $100,000. And he like writes in an email that cited in these court documents that he's going to go to Sam. mother to have a discussion about this. I mean, we're talking to your mom. Pretty amazing. Double my salary right now. One thing that didn't that seemed like it might be, you know, short-lived or a bit of hype, but it actually isn't and has been sustainable and very interesting in a way that has surprised me and might actually have me rethinking some of my

uh, thesis around when people are going to pay for social media is Snapchat plus. I mean, the company this week just announced that five million people have been paying for subscriptions on Snapchat and that's stuff that gets you access to new features on Snapchat. They're my AI bot, which is like sort of a dumb down chat GPT. I'm curious what you think about this. Obviously, it's very impressive success and starting to alleviate some of the business trouble that Snap has had on the advertising front. It's kind of the opposite of the way that we started the discussion today. But it is fascinating to me that they've been able to grow this product in the way that they have, especially considering the consumers that they have, which is that they have a lot of young

people without much disposable income and then millions of them are paying them for the premium version of this product. What do you make of it? Yeah, this is incredible to me because for the amount of noise and conversation over Twitter's subscription product, which at one estimate has around 550,000 subscribers, Snap quietly has for its Snapchat plus subscription offer five million subscribers, and that's up from 4 million in June, 3 million to mid-April. It's a growing product. And I'll admit, I am not a heavy Snapchat user. I subscribed to it a few months ago just to see what's interesting about it. And this was when it's my AI bot, you know, like it was kind of the driving feature of it. All the other ideas like custom app themes and unique app icons are

the ability to pin your number one BFF. I do not have a number one BFF on. snap. It's all interesting. The AI chatbot again, I tried to use it to set reminders to see if it could do it. It couldn't even do that. But apparently, they had numbers around how many billions of queries are actually made to it every day. Even they just added, this was interesting, a feature called Dreams, which is basically Lenza. For anyone who had ever used it, Lenza was kind of this viral app where you take 10, 15 selfies of yourself, and then it generates generative AI images and all different types of scenarios. And actually it was cool and it went viral.

And I paid like 12 bucks for one pack of photos. And if Snapchat it's another. So to me, it could be this really interesting sleeper story where you have millions of younger consumers spending money and getting used to an acclimated paying a social media company which no one has been and everyone has been trying to do and then you start at because already i checked the dreams uh the generative AI photo feature if you're a snapchat plus subscriber you get like one or two packs free but then you can start buying additional ones so you see how just that habit of creating payment um and a company that honestly the one thing they've never figured out

advertising well but creating highly engaging innovative products they're great So I think this is one to watch. I mean, talk about underrated stories that are going to really, you know, seem poised to take off. I think put Snapchat in the in the picture as well. Yahoo and Snap. That should be our, yeah, the theme of our second half of this year is Yahoo and Snap, the sleeping giants of tech that you've underestimated. I'm smiling, but I actually, I do believe it.

Look, this is one of the things that we talk about often here. There's hype and then there is actual production, right? that 5 million user number isn't made up it's real if it's made up it's an SEC violation and people are going to jail so the point is like when you have those results that's when you can start to talk about things and there's real real results there's the growth the growth as well again yeah three million just like five months ago it's impressive and like there's no advertising there's no I don't see I'm not again not a snap demographic necessarily but like it's not some giant story that everyone is a aware of. It's just, it's happening. Absolutely. I mean, the growth is amazing and they also grow their users. You know, they grow their users in a way like Snapchat's going to be a one billion user product. It's just crazy to say. But it is. They've been trying for a while. It is. No, it adds 70 million a year. So over time, it will get there.

All right. Let's take a break. Come back right after this. Talk a little bit about the generative AI stories. So don't go away. We'll be back right after this, myself and Ron John Roy. Hey, everyone. Let me tell you about the Hustle Daily Show, a podcast, a podcast, 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 Hustle Daily Show and your favorite podcast app, like the one you're using right now. And we're back here on Big Technology Podcast with Ron John Roy of Margins.

You can get the newsletter at readmargins.com. We talk a lot about generative AI on the show. And this week we had a trifecta of big AI announcements coming from Apple. No, sorry, coming from Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, where we saw like legitimately impressive or substantial improvements, shall we say, from all three companies. But I also think there's like a varying degree of adoption that they're going to see. I mean, I think that like, you can tell by my intro to this segment that like, you know,

there's stuff you want to be psyched about. But then you start looking at it a little bit deeper. And the conclusion I came to was that a lot of this stuff is going to be enterprise-specific and very interesting in the workplace and sort of like maybe it will catch on for the rest of the population. So I was at Microsoft's event in New York City this week where they revealed their co-pilot, which is going to sit on Windows and Office 365 and Inside Bing. And basically everywhere you use Microsoft products. There's going to be a gender of AI, effectively an assistant there for you.

And I got a chance to speak with their consumer chief marketing officer, Yusuf Medi, which was interesting. We got an interesting back and forth talking about whether enterprise is going to drive consumer or consumer is going to drive enterprise. But the thing that I, that really struck me is that there is clear, obvious uses in the workplace where the uses elsewhere are like not so obvious. So some of the things that I saw, and I noted in big technology today, is that they ended up, you know, shipping these like really interesting things within the,

within, yeah, within co-pilot, the co-pilot that exists elsewhere. okay i thought i had it pulled up but i'm just going to recite it from memory so there's one thing where you can say catch me up on a bunch of emails that gets that a co-worker has sent me so if you have a co-worker that sends you a ton of emails instead of having to read through like 20 of them you can just have co-pilot read them too you can submit like uh word documents with long lengthy you know details about a project and when you're ready to launch that project you can say here's those documents write me a blog post about it you can have it make header images for any posts you need,

which everyone who's made a header image knows that it's like the worst thing in the world to have to produce. I don't know why it's so annoying, but it really is. And then the coolest thing to me was that you could sit in on meetings for you and then transcribe the meeting and then you can actually say,

show me the relevant points, show me the relevant points for my boss. And then you can just ask questions about the meeting, hey, did this come up or did that come up? And like when your job, when you're raised or your promotion or the very state of the ability to work for the company that you work for is in the balance, and it will be for folks who have this stuff implemented.

Like, you're gonna learn to use these tools, you're gonna work on iterating with them, you're gonna learn their intricacies, you're gonna learn how to prompt them, and you're gonna have patience with them because that patience will be paid off in like legitimate, concrete ROI, or like searching on a Bing,

or searching on a barred, for instance, might not, because you have Google, right? So I think that like, that was the conclusion I came away from, from like this week's announcements, that enterprise is the most obvious and the most immediate application of generative AI. After about a year of talking about it, it seems like it's going to be a workplace product and then eventually expand to consumer.

I'm curious what you think, Ryan, John. That's really interesting because so much of tech, especially enterprise tech, over the last 10 to 15 years, has been driven by consumer. Again, the whole freemium, SaaS-ish model of like making things super user-friendly and starting with, you know, small and medium-sized businesses and then working your way up to the enterprise. So that actually would be kind of like a pretty seismic shift if we move towards a world where, like, generative AI adoption really does go in the exact opposite direction. Yeah, no, I think that makes sense because, and I have talked about this a lot on this podcast, like generative AI, I think one of the biggest and most important things everyone has to understand who works with it is the first results are always bad. Like until you know what you're doing, it's almost working through it as part of it.

So so many people give up the first time they make a mid-jorney image and it's not that interesting or ChachyPee doesn't give them the perfect answer. So I think that is. That's pretty, I think that makes sense, the idea that for your job, you're going to go that extra miles. So that's the place that the real adoption and kind of working out how these products work will make sense. But, so Google Bard just launched. Yeah, let's talk about your experience with it. Yeah. Yeah.

So, and it's interesting. They're taking the opposite approach here where Bard is only available. So Bard extensions were launched. And Bard extensions, they're connected to Google flights, Google Drive. So Google, Gmail. So, so again, Google flights, a couple. And the idea is within Bard, you can ask a natural language query, and it will call upon these other services.

So I asked, I was like, and again, in theory, really interesting. Hey, I have a family of four. We're going to L.A. in December. I actually did this search. Two small kids. What's something that's, you know, on the more affordable side, but still we'll have luggage. I literally wrote out this whole thing, all the things that go through your mind as you're going through an airline search. And that actually gave me very good results.

So that was huge. So I'm like, okay, this is really interesting. totally can change the way we search for travel, where you actually ask a question that's on your mind rather than click through 20 different steps to try to get to the answer. Then I tried to query Gmail. It just got it totally wrong. Like I literally asked, here's an email address of my now wife. We'd started dating in 2011.

What's the first email between us? And it showed me stuff from a month ago. So which is a pretty straightforward query. Now, to the New York Times, the director of Bard at Google had said trial and error is still definitely required at this point. The thing about this I kind of like, though, is I like that they're still pushing this stuff out there. Because I think it should be even more abundantly clear that it can get it wrong and it often will get it wrong. But these kind of extensions and tools and as they improve on it, I think getting it out there, because the, I mean, I'm sure there's cases of risk here, but the only way these will improve is people

asking questions and pushing these systems and really trying to get the right answers. So I think I'm excited that Google is being a little more aggressive nowadays. I would say credit for trying, but it doesn't alleviate how incredibly frustrating and annoying it is to use these experiences at this point. Like, I experimented a little bit with speaking to Bard about my emails and found it to be like a completely like useless search engine. And for every single search that I did, whether it was, you know, on, on Gmail or flights, this is again with the consumer hat on. It's not like tell me what my boss said in the last meeting or whatever. But it's like, you know, yeah, search my Gmail.

It was terrible. And every single one of these searches led me to say, you know what? I regret asking Bard to do this. I wish I would have just typed this in the search box inside Gmail or inside Google and then found the flights that way. So you're not a Bard boy, only a big boy. I'm not a bard boy. And frankly, like, let me be honest, like, and I've said this in the past, my usage of Bing

and chat GPT has declined and I think that's in line with the population. It's not that I don't see the potential. It's that like I've experimented a ton and I know the very specific use cases where these are going to be useful and the specific use cases where they've fallen short and like I don't have time to bash my head against the wall

and try to get it right just because it's generative AI. No, but see, I disagree because my, the average person is not actually using a BART extension. Even if they made it publicly available, even the only people who are using barred extensions right now are you, me,

and Kevin Bruce at the New York Times. I mean, I don't think anyway so that's what I like about it it's it's publicly available versus so much of generative AI has been demos and promises yeah that's true I would rather have put out your mediocre too crappy product let me use it because again most people aren't using this anyways and then and then it'll get better and I agree like Gmail search has always been shockingly bad to me for a company like Google because again like it's still better than some competitors but like having to learn bullion operators to do before and after dates and stuff like that to me was always nuts

versus saying pull all emails from this person in February 2021 or something like that and that's what this will allow you to do and I think it's going to get there quickly yeah it's going to again look at generative search on Google is good I'm I will admit I'm like getting more and more impressed now every time I click on and we talked about this last week now a lot of users are starting to have the option to when you do a Google search up top there's kind of a different color in a button where you could say generate me an answer it's getting good so you know six to 12 months from now I think we start our Gmail queries you don't even go near the Gmail search bar it starts from somewhere centralized whether never loved the name barred but whether it starts in

or where it starts, it's not going to be the Gmail search bar. I mean, we'll find out. Listen, these are my two ways where I think this is going to go mainstream. One is, of course, as I said, the enterprise first, learning how to do this with work and then maybe so, for instance, and it could actually be, we could be in agreement here where someone uses like Gmail for the workplace and they're having to search through their work emails and then they say, okay, I'm going to start speaking with Bard more often and that's the way it goes.

The other way is that these things remember who we are. I think the most annoying thing about all these bots is that there's no context there when you return. Well, hold on. Have you used custom instructions on chat GPT? No. All right. So chat GPT one month ago released custom instructions. And it's literally, it's all these different prompts for you to fill out. And again, there's investment of time, who you are, what you do, what kind of company you work for. So you can even say, you know, I run the big technology, I write a newsletter and a podcast, or even just saying big technology podcast, I'm assuming the system will know. It knows.

Know something about you. So you fill all that in. And then every response is now it's essentially embedded in the prompt. So every now it actually does solve exactly that. Maybe it will be personal. So that was only a month ago that they launched this. Okay. So maybe it's personalized to me. But what I really wanted to do is like have a conversation with me. And then I come back and it can recall who I am and what that conversation was. Yeah, yeah, it don't get there. I'd love to come back to Bing and have Bing be like, hey, how was your weekend? Did you end up taking that trip? It might be creepy to some people. Is that really what you want? Yeah, actually it is.

It is for sure. You know, or like, I mean, maybe, actually, hold on, maybe that's what the My AI Snapchat AI thing, that's what it's there for. Because again, I still don't quite get it because it does, it has. has no specific purpose, but people are supposed to just chat with it. And apparently people are chatting billions of times a day with it. So I don't know what they're talking to it about, but you know, we should. All right, let's do this. Next week, let's try to bring on a teen who uses my AI and can kind of talk a little bit about the experience. I know. Translate for us,

please. If you're a teen listener and you want to be on to talk a little bit about what's going on, write big technology podcast at gmail.com and we'll try to bring you on and talk about it next week. Okay, let's, let's, oh, sorry, we have to talk about the Alexa event. Oh, yeah. Let's go to the third technology giant who had an AI event this, this week. Here's my review of that event. Also bad. I just didn't, I watched this event where you can converse with Alexa and it was like the most stilted, forced conversation. And to me, it's just that the echo is, you know, it's not the form factor that we're going to use for this until it gets way, way, way better and write now it just doesn't seem like it's in that category yeah i think amazon and this is someone i switched

one of the drivers of switching from being a long time echo user and amazon in the amazon ecosystem was not the endless worries about privacy and i switched to apple and the home pod uh it was i got really annoyed with their follow-up uh it's called a let oh my god it's the most annoying thing it's like please stop talking to me so you so you're like Okay, Alexa, what's the weather? It is 58 degrees out. Would you also like me to do X or Y? And if that was where the idea of a conversation starts,

there's no way they're going to be able to figure it out, in my opinion. And again, they're trying to, the same way with chat GPT, I will have a back and forth or any of these other LLM tools, a speaker, that's not what you're trying to do. you're trying to give it a command to do something or get a very quick individual piece of information i i get or maybe maybe in a world that's just you go home and you just start talking to the your speaker and maybe that's where this is all headed there was a story yeah there's a story this week about how some of these companies that are training the models are like bringing in

literary people poets which i thought was interesting here's my perspective i feel like amazon should bring a comedian on uh and have them design like comedy mode of the the echo. And what I want this comedy mode to do is to like snark you every time you try to talk to it. Just talk shit up. Okay, can you order me the same pair of new balance sneakers that I bought six months ago and have like the speaker being like wearing those disgusting shoes again. Have you thought about a Nike? Something like that. To me that would be fun. I want a snarky robot. I don't want a polite robot or a literary. I mean, can you imagine you talk to these with these things and it tells you poetry.

I don't want poetry. I want a comedy. Yeah, but hold on. Also, imagine the moment in terms of like the Elon Muskian AI is going to kill us all, where you made a million requests to Alexa and your Amazon Echo over the years, suddenly it talks back to you. How could you just imagine that moment. You would not run for the hills.

It would actually be hilarious. It would be hilarious. I think it's a great, like, potential idea for a screenplay where like these set of comedians, they like, you know, dream up this idea or they help train one of these voice assistants. It becomes like, we can, that could be done. I feel that's, uh, actually, you could be, but then it would fall into these graveyard of Alexa skills and the skill store that never really went anywhere. Exactly. Well, you don't know until you try it Ron John. You got to dream big. You don't dream big, you don't win big. That's what I always say. 10x, 10x.

Speaking of dreaming big, let's just end with this story. Uh, clean top. is apparently the biggest thing going on TikTok. And the Wall Street Journal had a story. It's our fun story of the week. Folks, if you're listening for the first time, we try to wrap on something lighthearted or fun. So here we go with this week's story. All right, the Wall Street Journal headline

is millions of people see staying home and cleaning as their idea of a good time. And it talks about Clean Talk, which is this TikTok hashtag that has 84 billion views, which is the most viewed hashtag on TikTok. And basically the idea is that people enjoy cleaning. I guess this is something they picked up during the pandemic and they like the control that it gives them. And now they're all over this idea of cleaning and they

go on social media to learn how to clean even better. And now brands like Unilever are giving clean talk superstars like massive amounts of money to show their products. Ron John, what's your perspective on clean talk? Are you a clean talker? I am not a clean talker, but I regret not being a clean talker because I remember during the pandemic this is your one big missed opportunity this this is it this is in life that when I look back when I'm when I'm old and sitting on a rocking chair I could have been a clean talker because during the pandemic my my younger child was one at the time and every meal would just end up everywhere so I I literally spent time on Reddit learning how to clean like if you get wet rice in a carpet you put uh you put baking

soda on it and it dries it out. I learned that from Reddit. And in that time, like anything else in Reddit, you learn there's a lot of radicalized people about the most random topics. People on the internet will just go extremist. The level of extremism around cleaning. That's where I first saw. So I can see, again, the idea of watching other people clean, I wonder how much of it is educational and how much of it is actually like cathartic or therapeutic for people, but which it isn't for me. It's ASMR maybe type of thing. You know, there's a true satisfaction in taking something that's dirty and making it clean. I don't doubt it.

Actually, as we start talking through this segment, I think maybe I am a clean talker at heart. First of all, I need a state for the record that even though I started this segment saying it was weird, I am definitely in favor of cleanliness, okay? I need to make that clear in these public statements. But, you know, actually now that I think about it, just the small little victories in life, taking that rice and getting it out of the carpet, cleaning a table in the way. I'm going to make my bed in the person, make my bed in the morning. I think I, have you ever seen one of those, it's like one of those in TikToks or Instagram reels of like some motivational coach or like ex-Navy seal talking about how that you got to make your bed first thing in the morning? Yeah.

Yeah, exactly. But I'll admit that's one of those that you feel better. You feel like, all right, first task of the day done. So I'm on board with that. I'm good. Yeah. All right. Well, I know what I'm doing this weekend.

It's going to be me sitting on my phone watching cleaning TikToks and trying to sign up for the Snapchat, my AI bot. And then. Yeah, I'm not going to actually clean. I'm just going to watch other people cleaning. Ranjan, who knows? Maybe by the end, maybe by Monday, you and I will be pinned BFFs on. Snapchat and all will be right in the world. That would be nice. All right, Ron John. Thank you so much for joining. Pleasure as always.

All right. Thank you. Have a good weekend. You too. Thanks, everybody for listening. Next Wednesday, we will be back with an episode with Taylor Lorenz here to talk about her book, extremely online. I'm in the middle of it. I'm going to have some questions for her about the book, about her online presence itself and plenty more. So stay tuned for that. If you like the show and want to rate us, we'd love five stars on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. All those are appreciated. Thank you to the Big Technology podcast plus Yahoo Nation, again, who came in strong with the five-star ratings. It means a lot. To everybody who's a new listener who's come in after hearing

the Brian Chesky interview, I want to say thank you. I want to say welcome. It's great to have you aboard. We do these talks every Friday covering the news and on Wednesday we do our flagship interviews. So stay tuned for that. That'll do it for us this week. We will see you next time on Big Technology Podcast.