Big Technology Podcast - New York Times Sues OpenAI, Apple Watch Ban's Implications, Snapchat Rising On AI Success

Episode Date: December 29, 2023

Ranjan Roy from Margins is back for our weekly discussion of the latest tech news. We cover 1) The New York Times' Lawsuit against OpenAI 2) Whether the Times' case stands a chance 3) How the lawsuit will change perceptions of AI 4) How it will also create a strange realignment of the tech culture war 5) Will the New York Times build its own ChatGPT? 6) How much does news really contribute to AI? 7) Who is really at fault when a model generates copyrighted material? 8) Is AI in a trust crisis? 9) Where The Apple Watch ban goes from here 10) Big Tech's year of accountability 11) Is it safe to count on the vision pro 12) Amazon's big advertising move in prime video 13) Snapchat+ is the first successful consumer AI product 14) Year end predictions and thanks! --- 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]

Open AI sues the New York Times over copyright infringement. Are Apple's problems with the Apple Watch long-term or a short blip? Amazon brings ads to Amazon Prime video. Snapchat Plus keeps adding subscribers thanks to AI features. And what is Tan Mama? 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're here to round out the year of the last show of 2023. setting up what's going to be a fascinating and massive 2024. We're here, as always, with Ranjan Roy of Margins. Ranjan, happy holidays and a happy new year to you. Great to see you, man. How you doing? I'm in historic Lexington, Massachusetts, where I grew up at my parents' house, the house I grew up in, and thought it would be a slow news week, but I'm actually very excited about today's episode. Some stories, I think, that are going to be very important. to set the tone for next year. Where are you right now, Alex? Absolutely. So I'm going to apologize in advance if I have some sound quality issues. I'm staying at a hostel on top of a lava bed

on the big island of Hawaii. It's actually a pretty cool spot, just like in the middle of a lava flow, totally off-grid, but they do have some Wi-Fi, so we're going to give this a shot. It's not quite suburban Massachusetts, but I guess that'll have to do for you. I think if you average us together, we're like somewhere in Montana. Okay, so let's talk about this really fascinating lawsuit that the New York Times is bringing against OpenAI. So the New York Times is suing open AI over copyright infringement for training on many of its news stories and reviews, including that from the wirecutter. Now, I just want to start by sharing the context of this, and that this is bigger than just one company, right? It's not just the New York Times that's suing Open AI.

There are plenty of other corporations, news corporations. that are talking with OpenAI about licensing deals. And the sense that I get, and it's being somewhat, you know, not even winked at, but clearly communicated in the coverage of this, is that there will be a slew of lawsuits against OpenAI by these news publishers if they're not compensated in a way that they find fair. And this is from a New York Times story. The other companies that are talking to Open Eye about licensing deals are News Corp,

the IAC, which owns Daily Beast, the magazine publisher, dot-dash meredith, and the News Media Alliance, which represents more than 2,200 news organizations in North America has also been talking to Open AI about a deal. And so, Ranjan, I'm kind of curious whether you think that this is something that has the chance of working, whether these publishers are going to get their money, how it might differ from the big Google fight. What can you tell us about this? I think this is massive. As you said, this is much bigger than one company than just the New York Times, but I think it's important that it is the New York Times. And Jason Calacanis had an amazing post on this, and it is rare that you will hear me saying that. But he lays out

very clearly how in the 2000s, the publishing industry essentially got rolled over by Google, while the music industry was strong enough and cohesive enough to take on Napster. The New York Times of today is not that organization it was in the 2000s. It's a gigantic company. It's a, it's has a lot of technology underlying everything it's doing. It's a different company right now. And the way they've approached it, I think it's clear that this is going to be a much different effort. And it's important because, again, all these large language models have been trained on common crawl, at least GPT3, GPT4 on common crawl, which not only indexed and used every New York Times article, it even gave additional weighting to the New York Times.com domain because

it is considered a much more valid domain, that the information is more authoritative. So underlying all the information used to train GPT 3 and 4 was the notion that the New York Times content is more valuable than the average content on the internet. So I think it's right there that there is value to this. The New York Times, clearly there were discussions around licensing already that must have fallen through because Open AI did, there are some other publications I know, publishers that they did already sign deals with. But I think this is more than just a cash grab. I think this is really important in setting the tone of how large language model-driven

companies like Open Eye operate in the future because the models are not valuable without the content and the content up until now has been free. Yeah, they have signed deals with the Associated Press. By the way, hearing you praise Jason Calacanus, we're just going to go round the horn with all the all-in podcast members. It's almost New Year's. It's a month last week. It's a season of giving from Ron John. But I did think that Jason Calacanis post was good. And one of the things that really stood out to me was the fact that basically ChatGPT was taking wirecutter reviews and spitting them out verbatim. And the wire cutter comes with the Times, like, which is a paywall publication. So do you think that this lawsuit, you know, on its face has some merit and is there

a chance the Times wins? Yeah. So I think there's two important parts of this. One, the wirecutter example is so perfect because the query that the New York Times used was, you know, what is the top recommended X product from the wire cutter? It provides you that exact answer, which is what any of us go to the wire cutter. I've long loved the wire cutter. That's what we go to it for. It not only provides that information in a condensed format. It strips out any affiliate linked, you know, taking out any value to the New York Times for this, for collecting all that information. So there's such a clear business impact on the New York Times that chat GPT and OpenAI are impacting on them. So I think that one is very clear cut.

I think the most important part of this lawsuit, though, is going to really be public perception around this. And this is one of the fun things for me to watch because I think this is going to divide and chop up the tech and tech reporting landscape in ways that are just weird. again, I'm agreeing with Jason Calacanis today. I think Elon Musk is going to come out strongly in favor of the New York Times, which are words I never would have thought I would say, because I think Twitter's repository of information is of equal value, if not even more than the New York Times. I think Reddit, even Quora, if you've been on Quora in the last few years,

all these places have these incredibly valuable sources of information that should be licensed. they should be able to create their own LLMs and create their own, you know, chatbot experiences. So I think this is going to be so interesting in terms of who ends up on what side and how things get portrayed. But I think to the average person, it's just so easy and clear. You can get into the underlying technology of a large language model and how it works. But when you reproduce near verbatim, you know, content and journalism that the New York Times invested millions of dollars and thousands of man hours into it's pretty obvious that something is wrong there it's

interesting that you mentioned cora among your groups of sites that are going to need to charge to get paid to need to charge to get trained on because adam d'angelo who's the CEO of cora is on the open ai board oh yeah going back and forth being like what do i do about this okay but here so you talked about the divide between like tech reporting and reporting in general the news industry and open AI. And this is where it really gets fascinating because Jason's post ends with that the New York Times is going to take an open source language model, train it on their data, and create a chat GPT competitor. That much is clear. And that is like there's been this meme, wouldn't you say, within the tech industry that the reporters are competing with tech and that Facebook wants ad dollars

and that publishers want ad dollars. And they're showing that that's not brand safe and that we are brand safe and therefore they have an incentive to knock down the tech platforms and even more than that show that we should be trusted and they shouldn't and so if they're actually building specific competitors to tech products not just tech products but one of the most successful tech products in modern memory how do you think that changes this fight because what I wrote down is that the tech versus tech reporting fight is about to go to 10 here well I would love like to recall who predicted, I believe it was two weeks ago when we were discussing the hiring of Zach Seward at the New York Times to research general LLM products that the New York Times

could be preparing their own chatbot. We talked about this two weeks ago, and that's what I've been thinking. And they should. I 100% think they should. And they're already a tech company when so much of their revenue comes from even gaming right now. in other products that live outside of the journalism, they've already become a technology company. So this would just be another product that is even more suited to a journalism company or a publisher than cooking in games, right?

Like this is like the idea of a chat bot querying your body of information, any company should own that if they have a huge corpus of information. So I think yes, they should build it and they will build something like that. And I think that makes sense. and they would be able to make it much more reliable relative to their information. But I think the idea, I've never bought the idea that because once part of the New York Times will be building a tech product that competes with another tech company, that that will affect their journalists' view on technology and make it more negative.

This is one thing that's always bugged me because if you read the New York Times tech coverage, There's a lot of fawning coverage over plenty of tech companies that I think is irresponsible and just overly optimistic around it. It's only the few examples that are cherry-picked that are negative on very specific companies that everyone runs to. So I don't think it's going to impact that at all. Well, merit or not, it's going to be something that's going to be used as a cudgel by the critics of tech reporting to sort of amp this war up, a direct competing product with chat GPT. Yeah, but that's why it's going to be so fun next year, especially for us to watch sitting on the sidelines with popcorn. We are going to have a good time next year. Well, no, because that's again, but Elon Musk cannot make that argument and then claim that Twitter is its own valuable source of information and you should pay for GROC, right?

Like he, because then he is a competitor to chat GPT and Open AI as well. So, so I think it's just one of the, and then the citizen journalism on Twitter or whatever is, you know, going to be. unbiased. I think that's what makes this just so incredibly interesting because it divides what has, you know, we've called like the tech, whatever technology community, it divides it in ways that it has not been in the last couple of years when it was very cleanly media versus tech. So up until this point, we've basically gone under the assumption that the New York Times is going to have a good claim against chat GPT because it can't produce wirecutter reviews effectively one for one and other types of stories.

let's get more nuanced here, right? Let's do our show mission and go a little bit deeper. So I'll bring up some counterpoints and you tell me what you think. So first of all, there's actually the amount of training that the New York Times has been responsible for for Open AI. So this is from Benedict Evans. He goes looking at an estimate that the New York Times is approximately 0.0083% of common crawl, which is the crawling that some of these trainers use to build their models. So he says it's 0.0.083% of common crawl and reminded again of the disconnect

between the social and political value of professional journalism and the amount it actually makes up of internet consumption, traffic, and revenue. And journalists for current refusal to accept that news is important to society is not the same as Google's ad business needs news. your response that's exactly the point point zero zero eight three percent of common crawl yet the third most heavily weighted domain in common crawl i think that's that's exactly the point the new york times is making that it is a smaller percentage of overall content yet it's more heavily weighted because it's important and that weighting when you think about how large language

models or companies like open ai have to think about licensing is clearly going to play a part because if you remove that information and that source from the model, then it becomes of less value. If you have to rewrite the entire model because the top few domains that are not, that are from publishers all demand that their content be completely removed, it completely changes the way you operate your business and the underlying technology. So I think that it is a reminder, yeah, that, you know, the overall amount of content is small, but the importance is big.

And here's the thing I think that looking at the actual percentage misses, it's about the urgency, right? Because we all know that chatypte lost users across June, July, August, right? It's not like this ever ascending product. It needs something to keep people coming back. Now, one of those things is assistance with schoolwork, which is why it's senior resurgence in the fall, but has to be broader and more interested to people. And what's the thing that's the most vital thing that gets, that's really good for engagement? news. Hey, chat GPT, what's going on in the world today? You know, how should I think about this news event? And the news can present that value. And so even though it is a small percentage of the actual

training on chat GPT, it does seem like the news publishers are going to be able to make this point to say, hey, listen, like it's not just about the volume. It's about the vitality, the vitality of your product. And we provide a large part of that fatality. What's happening today? Yeah, no, I completely I completely agree from the consumer standpoint, this is big. What I do think is interesting about this is, and we've covered this a lot, the end monetary value or business value is not going to be from this consumer side. It's going to be from customized models that businesses can actually create their own tools, which right now, a lot of people I've built on GPT 3.5 and for plenty.

Like, it's very usable. But I think this stuff ends up becoming a lot more customized. And that's where I think either this should force Open AI to start really building up that enterprise side of their business and customizability and just, you know, thinking more from an enterprise standpoint. Or in a good way, it also opens up the game to the open source community to other smaller players as well who are focused more on the business use cases. So I think this is also a reminder that, you know, New York Times versus Open AI, it's these are the kind of, you know, the names that represent these tools to the general public, but it's not to me where the end value is going to be on this. And in a way, maybe this is good to force open AI to start thinking about enterprise. So that was kind of the easy bit of nuance to bat away. This is where it

gets a little bit more difficult. So Jan Lecun, chief AI scientist at Meta, posts a very interesting question. He says, genuine question about image generation. If someone uses generative AI tool, a generative AI tool to produce an image that is substantially similar to copyrighted to a copyrighted piece, like a drawing, a painting, a movie screenshot, who should be liable for the copyright infringement? Should it be the company producing the tool, the human creator of the piece, the person or entity posting or publishing the piece, the communication platform through which the piece is distributed?

And he adds some bit of nuance here. He says, when a person distributes a sufficiently similar copy of an art piece, it It's a violation of copyright, regardless of the tools and processes used to produce it. The liable person is the person distributing the piece, not the artist and the makers of the tool. Sufficiently detailed prompts will produce images that are substantially similar to images from the training set. It is not at all surprising that a prompt like the Batman movie, Rooftop Scene, Screenshot 4K, will produce an image very similar to an actual screenshot from the movie. That brings up a very interesting point here, and he posted it right in the aftermath of this New York Times thing, which makes me to believe, makes me believe he was sub-tweeting it a bit, which is the point, is it the tool that's the problem, or is it the actual distribution?

If it's the active distribution is the fact that you're now, you know, reading a wirecutter review on chat GPT, not actually a violation of copyright. Is it the point where you actually take that review, copy it and paste it and distribute it on your own? I mean, if that, you know, it's, that's a very interesting way of looking at a very interesting angle and it's a wrinkle I expect open AI to try to exploit. Well, I think the nuance is in where the monetization occurs. In the example Jan Lacoon gives is if I'm creating an image or even if I'm using open AI to create chat GPT to create text, if I am then monetizing that, then it could be more clear that the liability is on me.

But remember, the monetization and the examples of the wirecutter, is open AI is monetizing that user paying 20 bucks a month on chat GPT plus and to get that information. So then clearly the business impact, you know, falls on open AI versus the case. One thing that I think is really interesting from the Yon's example is I think the prompts are going to become more important. Like if an image ends up very similar and, you know, a brand is using it, being like liable to show the prompt and did you actually. actually include the Batman movie, I think this is going to be really interesting in where copyright law goes on all of this. But at the moment, I think, where is the money going? And I think

those people will be held liable for the copyright infringement. There's another side to this that's also really important to discuss, which is the reputation issue that OpenAI is now opened up to, where people already didn't trust that the material that they're typing into chat GPT or the material that their company is using as they interact with chatbots, they didn't trust that that was not going to be used to train. And as more and more companies raise their hand and say, hey, they trained on my stuff without my permission and I'm suing, it's going to create potentially an environment of mistrust,

regardless of whether or not they're training on specific use cases. And that's something that this blogger Simon Wilson spoke about saying that AI is facing a crisis of trust. This is an article that you picked out about how Dropbox has this, new feature, NUI, that companies can communicate with their data and that people are going to be say, and I'll just read directly, people will say, Open AI is training from every piece of data they see, even when they say they aren't. It's the new Facebook's showing you ads based off of overhearing everything you say on your phone's microphone, right? So it is this big reputation issue

that AI is going to run into, and it's really unclear how it's going to resolve. Yeah, so the example Hughes, and this is a really good piece from Simon Wilson, is that we all still kind of believe this literally came up over a Christmas vacation for me that Facebook is listening to you on your phone. And it's a UI feature or maybe, you know, like problem bug that ads will show up based on things you just said. But I strongly believe that Facebook is not listening to your phone. I've read a ton about this. And again, they're just so good at triangulating you and where you are and what your other interests are and who they can figure out who you are around and what their interests are, but they're not actually listening. But as much as they say that they're showing

you, that they are not showing your ads, no one believes them still to this day. And as much as when Dropbox launches their dash feature that's going to plug into your Slack and Gmail and everything else, are we really going to believe they're not training on the data? Same with OpenAI. Now, with their enterprise tiers, they will say over and over, they're not training on your data. And it will be in the terms of service, but do we really believe that? And that's a good point, that that's actually another major impact from this New York Times lawsuit, that it could, going back to the enterprise topic, it could affect how businesses trust them. We're here on Big Technology Podcast Friday edition.

I'm joined here with Ron John Roy of Margins. We're going to go to break, and after the break, we're going to talk about Apple. we're going to talk about Snapchat Plus and a few other stories. Before we do, just want to say thank you all for sticking with us and listening to us all through the year. We've seen the audience numbers rise and it's been amazing speaking with just a growing and engaged community of listeners. So thank you for that.

Also, if you're in the holiday spirit and feel like giving us a five-star review on Apple podcast or Spotify, we would definitely appreciate that. And, yeah, why don't we do more as we come back from the break right after this? 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 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, Friday edition, breaking down all the big news that's happened. Ron John, at the top, you really mentioned that we are in a sort of traditionally quiet week of the year, but we have so much news coming out. And one of the biggest stories is the fact that Apple had to temporarily pull, and maybe for a longer term, pull Apple watches because it's been accused of taking some of the blood oxygen reading technology from a company called Massimo and doing it without a permission.

And this has been such a big issue that it's now effectively been unable to sell these for a very important part of the holiday season. I'm curious how you read the case right now, whether you think Apple is in trouble long term, not only in terms of its ability to sell these current models, but it's broader pitch that Apple Watch is like really a health device. And where do you see it going from here? Yeah, for me, this was such an interesting story around the intersection of power and technology. And it's one of those topics we usually come up with it around antitrust, but even again, open a versus New York Times.

This is one of those weird moments where in real life, I went to the Apple store on like December 20th or a few days before Christmas. And you could see the Apple watches were still on display, but you could not buy them. and to see, you know, like the legal nuance of technology battles that you read about in the news, but you actually go to the store, and the impact is there. And I think this is a big thing, you know, around 2023 was a major transition in the way we look at power and technology and companies actually being held accountable. And when you get into the details, you know, basically Massimo, a number of their engineers early on went over to Apple. and then built their blood oxygen level monitoring technology in a very similar way. And the fact that a court actually demanded that Apple stopped selling during the peak sales season is telling that, you know, we are in a different time right now. And I think it's also a good reminder that me included, I get frustrated with Apple, but I still generally think of them as the good company and Tim Cook, you know, a friendly face versus many other tech. CEOs. I think this was a reminder, and if this story keeps going, that Apple can play pretty heavy-handed as well. Absolutely. I mean, they've done this. They've effectively ruined the

advertising businesses of companies like Twitter, which may have actually had an impact in the company's fire sale, not fire sale, but being forced to sell to sell. And yeah, it is this big backlash against Apple, which is interesting. It seems like it's been a while coming. But the way that it's happening, this sort of moment of accountability for tech power is something that I have kind of felt maybe been a little bit in denial over because of these companies have effectively had their way for such a long amount of time. But seeing the Apple Watch pulled because of this like trade issue, trade secrets issue in the middle of holiday season really does sort of make me have to relent and say, yeah, this is real. This was unthinkable a few years. Could you imagine like 2017? Can't even imagine it now.

Yeah, no, until I saw it, it did not hit home, how big of a story this was, that Apple, the, you know, the $3 trillion tech giant, actually a small company for unfair business practices, actually could hit them. But I'll probably be buying the Vision Pro. I probably will. So let's get to that in a second. But Reuters has reported that Apple can now resume the sales of the smart. smart watches after a U.S. Appeals Court paused this government's import ban on the

devices. So do you think that we've seen the end of this story, or is it possible that the Apple Watch and its current form will effectively be held from sale for a long term? I'm not sure the Apple Watch, the interesting part of this story is, will it be able to be fixed via software or will it actually require a hardware change in their new generation of watches, the Series 9 and Ultra Watch 2? So I think if it's hardware, that's huge. And if it continues right now, they're temporarily able to keep selling. But that's the part that we're going to have to see resolve.

But another thing I think that's important to note here is, as you said, it was an import ban. It was actually the CBP, the Customs and Border Patrol that were enforcing this, which was weird to me to first read because I assumed, oh, is this coming from? from the FTC or some other, you know, body that we regularly talk about. So I think another angle that's important to note here is it's a reminder that more and more of just the overall regulatory infrastructure is being used in these battles smartly. And I think that we're going to see a lot more of that. And it's the question is no longer going to be, is Lena Khan good or bad?

It's going to be, you know, big versus small, Massimo versus Apple, which is a much different conversation. Okay, you wanted to talk about the Vision Pro. Let's talk about the Vision Pro. But let's do it in context of the really rough, well, not rough year, but complicated year that Apple's had. So first of all, this is from CNBC, Apple's stock underperformed tech peers in 2023 due to the longest revenue slide in 22 years.

And it's remarkable that this year, despite going up, I think, 53%, Apple has had four straight quarters of declining revenue. And of course, the bad economy is potentially possible, but the smartphone sales, right, the iPhone is the company, more than 50% of its revenue or right around 50% of its revenue. Those sales were slowest in more than a decade as people hold on to phones for longer. We also know that there was no iPads in 2023, and iPad revenue has been down. It's been much tougher to sell Macs. And so you look at Apple's 2024, and you say, well, what does this company need to jolt back to, you know, growth again? Or, yeah, I mean, yeah, revenue growth.

And is it the Vision Pro? I mean, this thing is going to be $3,400, and $99. It's going to be, people are saying it's a big test. The company is expected to ship around 500,000 of these devices, so it's not a huge amount of sales. But I think people are going to be looking at Apple and saying, where's the growth going to come from? It's almost counting on this. show that it has this new area, maybe outside of services that can grow and can be a new product category. And I like sit back and I say, man, if the Vision Pro is what a company like Apple is

counting on, I don't really think that that is the product that you want to be counting on just given the obscurity still of virtual reality, a mixed reality. What do you think? I disagree wholeheartedly because I think the Vision Pro that like massive growth for a $3 trillion company is only going to come from some revolutionary

new computing platform or way of just doing things the same way the iPhone did that for phones and computing and overall just technology so I think it has to come from a place like that versus just nickel and diming streaming services

again Apple keeps jacking up the price and it's very annoying of their Apple one subscription or music or iCloud everything else so i think and they're making money and they're juicing customers and i think it's bad for long-term business but i think they have to it does have to be a hit i i think it very well could be and we're going to be talking about this a lot next year but i think like apple yeah versus this idea the services growth has been fine but the idea that everyone's going to keep buying an iPhone every year is gone iPads are good technology

so you don't have to buy one every year, so they have to find something new. And I think this could be it versus companies like Amazon that if you saw, I don't know if you saw this, they're going to introduce ads to Prime Video and you're going to have to pay an extra $3 a month to avoid ads. This, given it's the holiday season, I'm at home. I've watched a lot of streaming service content and I get very annoyed when I'm watching Hulu and I still pay for like the non ad-free version and the idea that one by one all of these companies are going to start injecting ads into it to juice revenue is just a reminder that how I don't know how they hid this the long-term business plan when the idea that it would be a different experience in cable and better

than cable it's just basically moving back to what that was okay we're going to talk about amazon's ad play in a moment because I have a different perspective on it but I just want to back to the Vision Pro. So you said you're going to buy one? I think so. I think so. I'm going to wait for someone else to buy one. And out of some trusted friends,

if they rave about it or if I try it and it blows me away, I think I could buy one. Because, again, I've spent probably close to 3K on a loaded MacBook Pro at some point that... Yeah. So the question is what you're going to do with it? So it's going to be a computer for you? That's the Vision.

for me. It's going to be, I can just sit there and have five screens. That's all I've ever wanted in life after working and trading with a huge terminal in front of me. Just a bunch of screens. If I can do that in the comfort of my couch, I think that changes everything. This is what I think might happen and why I might be wrong about why it's sort of dubious to count on something like the Vision Pro is because it just does seem like such a cool product that people will try to find uses for it, right? It's going to be like, You know, the Oculus right now for meta is not like, give me this and let me find a use case that will work for me. I need it.

Like, it's like pretty well defined there. But with the Vision Pro, it just seems like it's going to be a pretty cool device. The one thing, and people will try to find ways that they're going to make it work, whether it's going to be this, like, massive home movie theater or something that will give you these five screens. The one thing that I think is underrated with this Vision Pro is I think people are underestimating the percentage chance that, Apple is going to actually delay shipping this thing. It's a complicated product. It has to work well. The prototype that it showed in its release event was not complete.

And I would not count on Apple to have it ready in time. And if they do, I would not count on Apple to ship it perfect. I think it will be fairly buggy if they do ship it on time. Do you think this is a potential issue here? That's an interesting point because one thing with the iPhone and iPad, and watch and everything else. Apple has always done very well is ship things that are lacking features

that everyone wants, but that are not buggy. So I think, you know, remember, you couldn't even copy and paste on the original iPhone. Like, they are very disciplined

around shipping products that are tight rather than trying to stuff too many features into them. So I think that'll be, that'll be interesting to watch. And if it gets delayed, I think this,

looks very, very bad for Apple because I think everyone is looking at this as the next major growth vector. Yeah, I wish I would have listed. I did this post on big technology of my predictions for 2024 and I wish I would have listed that the Vision Pro is going to be delayed. I'm almost, I mean, I just feel like you said it here. It's on the record. So put it on the record. We'll check back when they're supposed to ship in early January what will actually happen. Very quickly on the Amazon ad thing. So this is again, what's going to happen. is from NBC, Amazon Prime video viewers. We'll have to pay an extra $2.99 a month in January to avoid ads. And, you know, part of this, you know, people are talking about how this is going to be on top of the 139 annual cost of Amazon Prime or the $8.99 per month standalone Amazon Prime video subscription and that Amazon's been spending so much on content and losing money and eventually people are going to have to pay.

I have a different perspective on this. My perspective on this is in 2023, Amazon's ads. business worked so well that the company just could not resist it would be felt it would be irresponsible to not include advertising in prime video where it could make insane margins and in fact the ad business has been powering a huge chunk of amazon's retail business for so many years and it just it's one of those things where it could not resist any longer it made zero sense to not introduce ads, including now that Netflix has put ads, the way has been paved for Amazon. And that is the reason. All right. I will agree with you on that one. That's a good time. Let's go. No, no, I hadn't thought of that one. That's fair. Because I have been looking at this as

just a follower move. Netflix, everyone else is adding ads. So why not just try to squeeze an extra three bucks out of customers. But you're right, you're right, it's more than the $3. It's actually the idea of kind of like interconnecting your entire Amazon ad inventory and business to an entirely new platform. The value is much greater than the three bucks. But then maybe, I guess you got to make it more than $3 because I feel the incremental value per customer to watch ads is so great that you should be charging people a lot more to not watch ads. Exactly.

Maybe that's just a temporary thing to ease people into this. Yeah, make them an offer they can't refuse. So there's another story that you texted me over the break, and I kind of let, I'll let you run with this one. The Snapchat Plus story is really fascinating. I think this is the most undercover story of the year. Snapchat plus, which for those who don't know, you pay $4 a month for things that is not a heavy Snapchat user because I'm old.

I don't even quite understand, but you get access to some generative AI features, some things around streaks and whatever else. Seven million subscribers to Snapchat Plus. This is a world where Twitter blue, I'm not sure what the last estimated count was, but, you know, a fraction of that, every social media company was trying to show that they could become premium and add a subscription tier because subscription revenue is the greatest revenue of all. and Snapchat quietly has grown this product to 7 million subscribers. I think it's just, and no one seems to be talking about it, which is amazing to me. And I know like Snapchat overall users had grown in 2023. It's still a very, very heavily used product. It has never really nailed the actual ad targeting side of the business in the way a meta has.

So, I mean, that's always been a shortcoming. But to me, this gets very interesting. Also, when you think about out of those 7 million users, vast majority of them are going to be younger, Gen Z, whatever else. So you're now, you know, training them to be ready to pay for products on your platform. So I think that as a gateway to other types of paid monetization, it opens up an entirely new window. And we're going to be talking about them a lot more next year. So we had somebody on LinkedIn post about, you know, did like a top 10 podcast they liked over the year. and Big Technology podcast was on the list.

And the person was like, basically, I think they said something like, I like Alex's hot takes on CNBC, and I really like it when he did this long hot takes on the podcast, which I was like, I hope this is more than just hot takes. But in the spirit of that review, let me drop my hot take, which is that Snapchat Plus is more than a social media subscription service. I think Snapchat Plus is the first large-scale consumer AI product. and it is the fact that they get this my AI bot,

but it's also the other benefits that people get. So this is from, I think this is the verge. Snapchat Plus has given subscribers the ability to use AI tools to create images from text prompts to send to friends, to expand existing real pictures with AI assumptions of what else should be in the image, and put friends together in fantastical image settings. And you put that together and you're like, wait a second,

that's not a chat app necessarily. This is an AI app. app. And the fact that they have 7 million people paying $2.99, no, $3.99 a month, it leaves me to believe that this is the first successful, outside of chat, GPT, the first successful consumer AI app, Snapchat Plus. Listeners cannot see my jaw on the floor because that is, I like this. As you're saying that, what I'm thinking is Snapchat essentially becomes a platform, like Lenza or any one of those AI apps that goes momentarily viral.

And I myself for AI avatars early on paid, I don't know, some random app that shot to the top of the app store $10 for that one time 20 images or whatever. Like every new technology that has gone viral and in some other Flash in the Pan External app can live on Snapchat. And you're right because the thing that has always been impressive to me is from a product standpoint, from a user interface and experience standpoint, they've always been ahead of the game. Like they've been so far above beyond their peers. Again, they were doing augmented reality long before Facebook became meta and doing it well and making everyone use it. So the idea that they could actually productize generative AI in a fun consumer-like way, I like this. I just hate saying any company is really an AI company, hashtag Tesla, but I think you make a solid case there. Snapchat Plus, the first successful non-open AI.

consumer app. I believe in it. They're doing it. I like it. God bless them. I mean, it's been a very rough couple of years for Snapchat with the ad revenue. I mean, so, you know, maybe this is something that gives them a chance to come back. They're supposed to make $4.6 billion in 2023, and Snapchat Plus is going to bring in about 7 million users, is expected to bring in $330 million a year. So obviously still just under 10% of the revenue, but grow that a little bit more and all of the sudden you really see that the monetization of Snapchat becomes very different. It becomes a

completely different company. And one more thing on this, I think why this is a good hot take is Snapchat has always been bad at the ad business. They have been bad at building and serving ads to customers. What they've been good at is building products customers love. So this is much more native to what they're good at and the way they do business and what they seem to like to do than advertising ever was. So this actually seems much more in line with, you know, what makes Snapchat good and what they're good at. So I think I hot take, mark this one down, put it on the record for 2024. All right. So let's end this episode and end the year with a couple of moments looking back and looking forward. So Ranjan, when we talked a little bit about your big takeaway,

your big prediction last year, all you would do is share this acronym with me, which is Tan Mama. What is Tan Mama? All right. So Tan Mama is the acronym that everyone should remember. It's the, in the past, we all had Fang, which was Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Google. And this year, all we've talked about is how big tech was back. And Tan Mama, for every stock market follower, is Tesla, Alphabet, Invidia, Microsoft, Apple, Meta, and Amazon. And these companies, Invidio was up 237 percent. that was up 1905%. Tesla, 108%, Amazon 83, Alphabet 63, Microsoft 56. And we had already said Apple was underperforming and Apple was up 49%. In aggregate, they were up 74%. And these are trillion-dollar companies. So I think even though we covered Apple and Massimo and how big tech has threats, it was a reminder that in 2023, big tech dominated. And I actually think it was four.

a good reason. It wasn't any kind of bubblish sort of sentiment. It was that these companies consolidated power, meta's advertising business came back. All of these companies have shown they can be leaders in AI. So I think this was the story of 2023 that we all did talk about. And it was, you know, rightfully so. But I think what happens to these companies in 2024, that's going to be pretty interesting. Yeah, I would say listening to you, I would say it's a fairly, it's a good time to have a publication called Big Technology. I'm not going to rename it to Tan Mama, but I am very glad to be covering the space that

we are covering because these companies are crucial. They're crucial in the business world. They're crucial when it comes to research and new technology, especially AI. They all played a role in advancing the state of artificial intelligence forward. We obviously are heading into a big election year. they're going to factor a lot there. And so I think just looking ahead to 2024, when it comes to big technology, these stories, these companies, you know, these firms, these people are at the center of every major

story. And it's kind of interesting vertical to cover, right? It's not necessarily like just the tech or just a business publication, but focused on big technology. And that to me seems to be the area to focus. And certainly, 2023, Ron John, we have had no shortage of topics to talk. about and I expect it to continue and to only build as we move forward into next year. And I'm super stoked. You know, we kind of started this Friday show as a sort of experiment. We said, hey,

like, it seems like when we get on the air together, good things happen. Let's try to do it on Fridays. And it's been just super awesome doing these Friday shows with you. And I can't wait to continue them next year. Yep. Thank you to our listeners as well, because this is my favorite way to end the week and now to end the year. So same here. Absolutely. Talking about tech. I look forward to it every week and appreciate you being here and appreciate you all the listeners. So thank you so much for that. All right. Great. Well, that will end it for us here in 2023. What a year it's been for big technology. I was looking at our download stats. We did more than 900,000 downloads this year and it looks like we'll be well over a million next year. So thank you for being here.

If you like the show, please rate it. If you really like the show, please share it with someone who might appreciate it. And we look forward to being with you all through 2024. The Emergency Podcasts, the Friday Podcasts, who knows what crazy stuff will show up. But I'll tell you one thing. We're excited to talk about it and bring you the latest news with discussions with experts and between ourselves and with you. So thanks again for being here. We'll see you next time on Big Technology Podcast.