Big Technology Podcast - Who Wins The AI Assistant Wars? + Why Didn’t Google Build Muse?
Episode Date: October 5, 2026M.G. Siegler is the author of Spyglass. Siegler joins Big Technology to discuss the escalating battle to build the dominant personal AI assistant. Tune in to hear why he thinks Meta’s Muse is surpri...singly strong and what will ultimately determine who wins. We also cover Apple’s dark-horse position, Anthropic’s absence from the consumer assistant race, Google’s repeated product missteps, and how AI agents could reshape subscriptions, banking, shopping, and everyday computing. Hit play for a wide-ranging look at the companies fighting to become the AI assistant that runs your digital life. --- Enjoying Big Technology Podcast? Please rate us five stars ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ in your podcast app of choice. Want a discount for Big Technology on Substack + Discord? Here’s 25% off for the first year: https://www.bigtechnology.com/subscribe?coupon=0843016b Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Who will win the great personal AI assistant war?
And why didn't Google build its own version of Muse?
That's coming up with M.G. Seagler right after this.
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Welcome to Big Technology Podcast.
It's the first Monday of the month.
And joining us for his recurring spot is M.G. Seagler of Spyglass.
We're going to talk today all about the personal AI assistant war,
which was brewing at the beginning of September,
but now has been.
basically escalated into a full-blown battle war,
legendary tech face-off that will continue to resonate
for months after this.
And we're gonna also discuss the one glaring company
that doesn't seem to have a competitive product here,
which is Google, although you could argue
that some others are there,
but Google especially should have it.
So in we go, MG, great to see you again.
Welcome back to the show.
I am really hoping my computer doesn't crash
during this recording because I'm running
so many assistants right now.
Like, it's, uh,
you just look at my activity monitor on my Mac, it's, it's near meltdown. I have a good amount
of RAM, so I'm okay, but it's, I'm pushing some limits here. Now, this is not a sentence or not
an opening you would have anticipated at the beginning of the month because, or the beginning of
last month, because in September, on the 1st of September, you wrote this, no one has nailed the
true personal assistant experience. And while you can finally at least squint to see elements of it,
it's still hard to see how anyone will in full.
Now we have obviously Muse for Meta.
We have instinct, which I think you wrote a little bit about in the piece.
We have OpenAI dots.
We have Grokbot.
I guess Microsoft has entered the battle in its own way.
So personal assistance are the flavor of the month.
And it seems like, and actually we're curious to hear your perspective on this,
that it's not just going to be a flash in the pan.
It seems like this is a new product experience that we're just,
seeing the early days of that is going to stick given the advancements in AI capabilities.
So I actually would love to hear you at the beginning of our conversation today.
You know, go back to your thinking there on September 1st and talk a little bit about what's
changed or if anything has changed and where you think this current moment in the AI personal
assistant wars is going to go and then we'll get into who might win.
Yeah, that post, sort of the impetus behind it was somewhat driven by instinct, as you
mentioned because I felt like, you know, it feels like months ago already, but even just a few
weeks ago, certainly on all the social media feeds, I feel like a lot of VCs in particular
were just touting instinct, which is a new startup in the, you know, agentic and specifically sort
of personal assistant use case role. And so we saw a lot of, a lot of love for that. Now,
you know, this is a world I come from. I know how this operates. Like VCs feel like they got to give
some love on social media so that they have any shot of potentially getting their foot in the
door if there happens to be a deal coming, you know, down the pike.
And as it turns out, this is a good secret of VC Twitter. Are you saying a lot of what we
see on VC Twitter is just attempting to get some allocation in a round?
Am I suggesting that some of these tweets are, have, have ulterior motives behind them?
You know, I can't imagine that that would ever be the case, you know, that some of this might be
financially motivated perhaps.
But yeah, I mean, obviously, you know, you read these as like, oh my God, is this the
greatest thing ever.
Instinct is cool.
Like, and so I signed up for it, got access to it, you know, to their credit.
They were ahead of this trend, ahead of, you know, which we'll get to some of the other
players like coming in.
Right.
Can you describe what it's like, like what the user interface is like, what it gets done for
you?
So instinct, I think they were so early.
Okay.
So instinct, first and foremost, again, going back, I.
I feel like the impetus for this piece was basically I saw instinct blowing up at least on the social feeds.
And I feel like me with in my own head, you know, having been a reporter for all those years, been a VC for all those years, dating back a couple decades.
I've seen this story play out a number of times.
I just felt like we were seeing some inklings of the same things that we've seen before.
And you've been in the same boat.
Like you've seen a lot of this stuff before.
And so it felt like, okay, well, what is actually going on here?
Why is this time potentially different if it is or is it not different at all?
And so again, so I signed up for instinct.
Instinct, I feel like first and foremost, there's sort of one of their obvious core
breakthroughs is just the fact that all these models now exist, right?
And so there have been, you know, long time ago, years and years ago, people have been
trying to do sort of these personal assistant AI, you know, for everything from way back
in the day on PCs before we had, you know, smartphones even.
and, you know, there was that old famous concept video out of Apple for, it was called Knowledge Navigator in the 90s.
If you haven't seen it, Google it and look it up on YouTube.
It's a great old school video of like this assistant running on a futuristic Apple device, which sort of, you know, is akin to an iPad and this face, this, you know, this personification of an assistant, a virtual assistant.
And, you know, in some ways, it is, you know, analogous to what we have right now, which is interesting.
But obviously, it was way too early.
So fast forward to, you know, what we're seeing with instinct, you know, out of the gates.
And it felt like, again, behind the scenes, now we have the actual models in place being LLMs have risen to, you know, sort of take over AI, at least for the time being.
And so it feels like, you know, of course everyone was going to try to go after what has largely been, you know, what I write about the holy grail of, of, of A.
at least from a consumer perspective, fulfilling this personal assistant need.
Instinct, I think, wisely recognize that they could sort of get off the ground running fast
by simply leveraging already existing messaging paradigms.
So rather than building a whole new app, a whole new suite of apps across all the different platforms,
they basically just said, hey, use what you're using already, sign up for our service and just start messaging us,
just like you would, you know, either a friend or potentially like a real life assistant.
and tell us what you need and we'll work on our end. You don't have to worry about anything. We'll work on
the back end to get done whatever you you message us with. And I think there was a lot of magic
for people in that experience, like not having to work through all these ideas of like,
you know, hooking all these things up and figuring out like what works, what doesn't. And sort of
just going. And I think there are other key insight in those early days at least was also being
super proactive. So, you know, and we can talk a bit about it, why I think.
it hasn't worked previously, but a lot of these things just have, you know, sort of like a blank
page problem meets a boil the ocean problem. So, you know, the blank page, you don't know
where to start with these things, right? And that's especially true, I feel like in the age of LLMs,
because as we know, you can ask them anything and they'll respond with something that hasn't been
the case historically, right? They've been very rigid in what they could respond to or not
dating, even with Alexa, right, in the last instantiation of sort of some of the voice-based
AI tech. It was much more rigid.
and you could only do certain things.
Now you can ask them anything.
So what do you ask when you can sort of ask for anything?
And then again, like to boil the ocean problem, which is long, I think, you know, held back
this space, which is just, they all try to do too much out of the gates.
Like when you say again, like, yeah, just start and see what you can do.
Now, I feel like you get around that problem again with some level of prompting.
So basically the assistant will come at you and say like, hey, I noticed that,
you know, you have a message from so-and-so in your inbox.
Would you like me to respond to them?
As simple as that.
But it can be a lot more in-depth than that, too.
It's like, hey, notice this bill is due, you know, in 10 days.
I notice you haven't set it up recurring payments for it.
Would you like me to, say, log into that site and set them up for you?
You know, if you give me your credit card information and we can get into some of that.
But again, that was sort of the kickoff point.
Instant comes out.
And then, lo and behold, we start this wave of things.
that come after that.
Yeah, and so, you know, when you try instinct out in the beginning, I think there was some
skepticism that you had about what AI agents could do.
And you actually wrote about it.
You said, I keep coming back to the idea that this first killer use case, the first killer
use cases may be more fun in nature, letting agents do lightweight tests for you that result
in an absolute delight, like opening up your to-do list and getting more comfortable over
time with the technology taking over, assuming it can, it will be baby steps, not one big
handover.
So before we get into everybody else coming in, I'd just love to get your perspective on, like,
what you've used it for and, yeah, what you think the potential is here.
And then we're going to go basically, you know, open the floodgates to the competition that came
in, starting with Metamuse.
Yeah, again, that speaks to just that sort of blank page problem and the boil the ocean problem.
They're both like they sort of push against one another here in this space in particular
because I feel like people are willing to try something out.
I mean, you know, obviously dating back to websites and apps.
And now with the with AI, people are more than happy to try things out.
But the reality is like that very few people, you know, if they don't get some sort of
immediate payback on it, like they'll just move on to the next thing.
Because again, there are so many things right now.
And so with a product like this, you know, with what instinct is offering, I feel like it needed to offer something to people right out of the gates.
One of the issues with that, which I hit upon is that the reality here, again, because this is such a broad space where there's so much to be done, I'm not sure that the killer use case is going to be or should be the same for everyone.
Whereas before I may have said, we may have even talked about it previously.
I would have said like they should nail like, you know, getting movie tickets or something, you know, that's like a simple, pretty defined use case.
But here, I do feel like that maybe instead there should be a focus on, say, doing five to 10 things, some of which will resonate with some user base, some of which will resonate with others.
Because I don't think it's going to be as simple as sort of just doing one thing really well.
I do think you have to do a number of things really well.
that said, I still feel like there needs to be the thing that you tell people, oh, yeah, it did this thing for me.
And it's sort of the viral word of mouth mechanics.
And it gets people both trying out these new products.
But also, there's a level of trust that's needed for these products.
Right.
And so if you know, you've heard from a friend that they're using this product and that they obviously inherently trust it because they're using it.
You're much more likely, I think, to do that.
And that matters more so, I think, in this space than it has in other spaces.
previously. And so you asked for like for specific use cases. It feels like the thing,
and we can go in my specific use cases in a minute, but it feels like the things that you
were seeing over and over again and the things that are clearly resonating with people is like
look over either my expenses or look over my credit card bills or look over just a general
bill of mine and find out a way to save me money. Right? That's always going to be enticing
to people, right? Like is there a way that there's something I'm not thinking about? Like I have
the X, Y, Z credit cards.
And I'm paying XYZ bills.
Like, should I be using this credit card to pay this bill because they give you a discount or this one offers this service for free?
And again, there's been services that have done, sorted these types of things before and plugins and browser plugins and whatnot.
But I feel like being able to speak in natural language and coming back to you in natural language, not even to sign up for, you know, myriad new services to be able to do this.
I think that was at least one of the early hooks that got people like, yeah, we're saving money.
This is great.
Yeah, by the way, there's been a lot of discussion, including from some bankers about how like basically the banking industry is only solvent because people keep their money in like non-interest bearing accounts.
And if these agents could efficiently move money from like cash accounts to safer investment accounts, you know, the arbitrage that banks were doing for.
for instance, you know, with cash sitting in accounts, would cause a massive financial hit to the banking
crisis, sorry, to the banking industry. And not only that, you look at things like credit card
points and sort of optimizing all these other purchases, loyalty cards. If you hand that over to
these agents, that upends so much. Even worse than that, Alex, as if just like, and others have
talked about this, and I feel like this is quickly becoming our reality. Just imagine how many
subscription-based businesses are based off of, you know, the fact that people just don't cancel, right?
They set it and forget it. And, you know, in the future, if you have an agent, an AI agent who
pings you every once around saying, like, hey, I notice you haven't watched, say, HBO Max in a while
or Netflix in a while, like, maybe you just want to, like, not pay for it this month, you know,
turn it off for this month. And then if there's something great coming back on, I can let you know
and you can turn it back on. You know, that's one very easy one. But even like,
any subscription service, right? It's like, yeah, you haven't read, you know, you subscribe to this,
this publication or this news like, it can, it's a, it's a problem for everyone.
Yes, that's right. All, everyone else. And, um, in YouTube and all of these things, it's like,
um, this is a real, real issue going forward. And I don't know, you know, we're going to have to
obviously have a whole new industry that sort of pops up around this and, uh, and figures out
how to optimize these things and keep people incentivized. Do we do more annual contracts or things?
And do we have breakage fees and all that sort of stuff? But there's a lot coming with this.
There's still this sort of open question about whether these things are going to work or not.
And I'm reading from the way that you're answering that you think that this is, we've just
seen the introduction of something that is going to be this concrete product that many people, millions,
maybe billions of people are going to use. Is your belief that this is not like,
Flash in the pan type of product and something that has staying power?
I do believe that at least one and probably a handful of these things will be used by most people
going forward from here. I think there's a question of what the timetable is to get this to like
mass consumer adoption. And I do think that there is a lot of questions to be answered around
some of the stuff we were hitting on with like churn and whatnot. Because if if the service doesn't do
something, you know, that you're sort of looking for. And or you just, more honestly, you just
don't know what you should be asking of it. Because again, a lot of people sign up for these
things just to try it out. What's the downside of that? I'll just see what it can do. But then after
they do like the obvious stuff or the stuff that their friend told them, they're like, well,
what else should I be doing with this? And they just have no idea. And so we can get to it in a
second. But I think a lot of this will be prompting. And from what I've seen, though, in these
early products. I think that they fully understand that. A lot of these companies fully understand
that. And they're doing some very smart things to sort of keep users engaged, keep people coming
back to try it, to try new things and to show real value, including with myself. So,
so yes, to answer your question directly. I do think that these things are here to stay this
time. I think that I don't know the exact time horizon for mass adoption, like when our parents will
be using them, but I do think that they will be increasingly baked into sort of a lot of the
AI services that we're already using. Okay. And, you know, my instinct initially, no pun intended,
was to talk a little bit about each one, one by one. But I'm going to shift gears a little bit
and just ask you to break down the competitive balance and who has the best shot to win. So just to talk
through the players, we obviously have instinct. We have MetaMuse. We have Open AIs new Dots product,
which they just released.
We have Grockbot.
We have a new product from Microsoft.
Let's not go too deep into Google Spark,
into Google Spark,
because we're going to talk about
why Google missed this moment,
seemingly, after the break.
But of the players today,
and I don't know if I'm missing any,
but those seem like the main ones,
just break down, like,
which personal assistant is going for what,
and who do you think comes out on top at the end of this?
Yeah, so right now, I think, you know,
Yeah, instinct is, it was interesting as sort of, you know, again, one of the early movers, first players here.
And because they're a startup, now, we talked about, you know, VCs putting out their, their tweets, you know, to perhaps showcase how much interest they have in the product.
And, you know, by all accounts, that seems to have worked as it seems like by the reporting, they've raised something like three rounds in, you know, a few months, period.
And there may be already valued a $10 billion.
Crazy.
And their CEO is kind of like a relatively unknown person, young guy, just kind of came out of nowhere and did this.
Sierra, which, you know, full disclosure, my family is an investor in and my wife is an advisor to as another AI startup.
But yeah, he came out of that.
And we have no financial stake in instinct.
But, yeah, so basically he obviously saw this world and decided he needed to.
to jump over and jump into this head first.
And so he did that.
And then, you know, I think he also probably must have known because, you know, the
rumors have been out there for a while that a lot of people, all the big players, which again,
we'll hit on in a second, we're all dancing around the space and potentially coming soon
with their own products.
And so instinct is interesting still to me, mainly in the case that they have a shot at doing
something interesting as like more of the Switzerland play here, right? Because they're not backed by,
you know, any of the major big tech companies right now. They're not a part of those. And so I feel like,
and this is sort of a different topic and one that's already playing on in real time, but I feel like
we're going to have these silos, these information silos that come into play more so than they have
even with AI overall to date where certain players do not want their products, you know, being
used by certain agents of other companies that they're rivals with, right? And so, again, instinct doesn't
have that dynamic right now. Now, they have the whole world of other issues like that are up against
them, right? They don't, even though they've raised a lot of money, they don't have billions and billions
and billions of dollars to spend. They're still a startup. They're going to be beholden to other models.
They're going to be beholden to other clouds and all of, and everything else. And then they don't have
all the built-in mechanisms to do distribution and all the other inherent advantages that the big players
have. So, you know. Yeah. And we're going to come back to it at the end of the break. But you talked
about some players don't want their services plugging into others. We obviously saw that Amazon blocked
Muse. So MetaMuse can't shop on Amazon for you, but Shopify came in and said, we'll work with you.
But the one that's really interesting is, and I think you've written about this, and obviously we're
going to get to it at the second, the second half, but it almost feels so important to insert now is
None of these things really work without Google.
I think most people, well, let's not, I don't even want to say most or less,
but we have billion plus, maybe billions of people on Gmail.
Google Calendar is obviously the biggest calendar.
When you connect those two to these things, they work.
When you don't connect those for most people, they're not going to work.
And so it is interesting, the dynamic here.
And I wonder if some of them are on borrowed time, aka maybe Muse,
where Google, which is typically pretty liberal in terms of who it allows to plug in with its
services, might just say, yeah, we're not doing that.
Yep.
Maybe the biggest question sort of going forward and in the immediate future, because, you know,
basically, Muse is obviously meta's product right now.
Dots is OpenAI's product.
All of them are frenemies to some extent, right?
They either, you know, have compute deals or, you know,
In some cases, they have other commerce-related deals.
Even, you know, you mentioned Amazon blocking Muse.
You know, it's interesting because meta has other deals with Amazon in place, you know, for things, for shopping elements and things like that in advertising, for sure.
And yet they still, like, felt the need to do this to make that, you know, to block that.
And why is that?
I mean, obviously, they have their own competitive products on Amazon.
They have Alexa Plus now working.
You know, they had Rufus, it was called, right, as their shopping system for a while,
but I think they're transitioning over to it being Alexa Plus driven.
And so they want people to use their own thing.
I think the bigger story of their advertising business, right?
It's around advertising, exactly, what I was going to say.
Okay, because they don't want other agents, you know, agents don't are not impacted by advertising
that they see in their, in their feeds based off of what they're searching for.
And so that, you know, potentially destroys what has been a huge growth driver.
you well know, for Amazon, you know, becoming one of the major players in advertising based off
of that. And so, so they have all sorts of reasons for not, not wanting to play ball here.
But just to back up to go, to, you know, you ask like which one of the of the current sort
of major players right now that have pushed their, their agents and assistants out there,
I feel like, I was surprised, honestly, of myself, that I really like Muse meta's product.
I'm not a, you know, I am not a big meta person.
I've written a lot about sort of negative in recent years about them for obvious reasons.
But also, like, I, you know, I've covered the company for 20-some years.
And I've gone through ebbs and flows of where I thought that they were doing the right thing being from a product perspective,
let alone the underlying fundamentals of the business and whatnot.
But I feel like, you know, I do not like the state that, say, Instagram is in.
I do not like the state that Facebook itself is in.
They're all just, it just feels like all they're doing now is milking their billion-plus.
user products to basically become, yeah, these ad vessels.
And we're all just, you know, these mindless meet people just sitting there looking at ads.
And so I was surprised by how well and how well done Muse was from the get-go.
And obviously we've talked about as well the whole meta situation with AI.
They had to do the big reboot.
I was pretty skeptical that they could sort of just buy their way back into the race.
And they obviously spent billions to do it from everything from doing the scale deal to building out more of their own
infrastructure, doing a bunch of these other acquisitions.
And basically just getting up to speed very quickly over a year span.
And now to their credit, not only getting models out the door, getting a new product.
This is not something that they've baked into Facebook or baked into Instagram.
Now, they probably will at some point.
But this is a standalone service.
it has its own interesting security layer going on.
They built their own virtual, you know, private machines for you to use because I think
they had to, right?
Like they knew that people are not going to trust this inherently something from meta,
especially something from meta.
And so I think that they did a lot of the legwork to get it done.
And to their credit, they got it out the door before even Open AI did.
And this is Open AI's business AI.
You know, they have no other business that they really need to focus on.
Now, they have other facets of the business, obviously, that they have been focused on.
But meta, you know, the meta AI team, the super intelligence lab, to their credit, they really, I feel like knocked it out of the park with this early version, at least, of what they launched with Muse.
So you think that when we think about who's going to win that meta has the best chance, because I guess like there is this growing, and you wrote about this a little bit about dots also, which is open AI's personal assistant.
There is this growing divergence here between which interests you serve, right?
So Muse is clearly a consumer application.
So I imagine a lot of people are going to be planning like vacations on it
and maybe do using it to like look at their like their service subscriptions and figure out which one to cut.
That seems like, you know, the use cases it will go for if people, by the way, this is I think a big caveat,
if people are willing to download the desktop app because there's the mobile app and the desk.
app and from what I've experienced so far I don't think these things work without
being on your desktop so I guess Muse will be the consumer application Dots
and you wrote about this last week despite the fact that Dots has this is
Open AIs personal assistant has this like kind of like Sesame Street type feel
with its mascots it's an enterprise thing and so they're going after
enterprise folks I'm curious if you think are there going to be two winners here
one in enterprise, one in consumer, does it all converge?
What does what, yeah, I guess what does winning look like and who is the ultimate winner?
So, and just to go back to one point you made about residing on the desktop, I totally agree,
though I also think that that Muse has an interesting advantage there in that from day one,
they launched with WhatsApp integration, right?
Something unique that meta can offer because they own a WhatsApp.
And so whereas we talked about instincts sort of smartly leveraging
chat, you know, I message and other chat services.
I think that meta was very smart and launched day one with WhatsApp.
So if you don't want to use, you know, a new service, a new application, you don't need to.
I mean, I think that it's much more fully functional and just has a pretty good UI to
sort of help you with what you can do if you do use the app.
Excuse me, but you can run it fully through WhatsApp and it totally works.
Now, dots, opening eyes.
Is that 100% true?
Because, like, you can run it through WhatsApp, but one of the nice things about dots is that it takes control of your whole, control of your entire desktop.
It takes control of your browser.
You put a browser extension on.
So it can go to websites and it can do things for you.
I mean, I guess Muse has the virtual machine that it can use.
But I think being in your context helps a lot if you just give it basically, I don't know if it's called root control or whatever.
it is, and I know Apple is starting to have some reservations about this, but just being in WhatsApp
doesn't give you that full control, and that I think is what you need to be and make this entirely
useful, although it is scary to give that type of control to one of these things.
So there's a couple things in that, right? So you hit on, yeah, so they have Muse launched,
again, talked about this second ago, but Muse launched with basically a virtual computer in the cloud
that is yours alone and, you know, for each individual user.
And it's really a cool implementation down to the point where if you click on your muse and
you can see basically, you know, when it's browsing a website and you can obviously take it over.
Now, other services have done that.
Open AIs had a version of that that you could do before.
But it really shows you that the full desktop is there.
And there was a bunch of headlines around like people downloading their computer, the
contents of their computer in the cloud and people being a little freaked out by that. And I thought
the meta's response was interesting to that, which is like, yeah, that's the point. That's,
it's your computer. You can, you can do what you want with it. Like, it's yours. You can download the
contents. You can do anything. That's great. And they've actually made it more explicitly like that
now. And I think Open AI did as well. They're even more leaning into that paradigm where you can
click in and you can see like, you can launch chromium, you know, on their sort of virtual machine.
So there's that element of it, which again, I feel like is a smart thing to do.
It removes a lot of the worries about security and some of the concerns there.
There's other levels of concern, obviously, that are baked into that still.
But I think it was a smart thing to go with.
What you're talking about computer use, obviously a lot of these services have had this for a while.
And it's to your point.
It's why they needed to have not just web apps.
It's why they needed, you know, native applications to be.
able to port into Apple and Microsoft different APIs on the operating system level to be able to
control your computer. I would imagine that at least meta is thinking right now that they think
that they can get done a lot of what people will want to get done from an agentic perspective
with this cloud service versus doing everything on your desktop. But you're right. Like if you have
an Excel sheet, you know, that that's not necessarily in the cloud.
or that just resides or that your natural working, you know, relationship with it is on your desktop.
Like, there's obviously reasons why Anthropic has done super well with that.
And so I think that there's, anyway, just laying out there's two different ideas there and how much that matters will ultimately determine, like, yeah, which of these services ends up being sort of a winner, if any of them.
Now, you bring into that, obviously, Microsoft, which has more recently come out with the newly unified super app version.
of co-pilot. And their play is much more, of course, down the consumer, sorry, down the enterprise
front, which is obviously their bread and butter historically. They'll say they want consumer
too, but, you know, I think that they'll be happy as long if they can, you know, stay in the
enterprise lane and sort of snuff out some of the would-be competition from Open AI in particular,
because as you note, Open AI's play here is much more sort of more business focused than what
meta is going after. Now, I do think, again, they all converge over top.
they all want to own it all. They want to be the one agent. There is this open question. And it sort of dates back to something I wrote
several months ago ahead of all this agentic stuff, which is the notion of bring your own AI, right? Like, is the workplace environment going to be such that you bring your own consumer AI service into the work or vice versa? That you bring home your, the AI that you're already using. Like, do people want two different AIs, one for work, one for home? That may play out that way.
Or it may play out that there's, you know, the one AI to rule them all of your life.
And that's going to be a big question mark for this space in particular.
Because again, as you're noting like, while meta is going more straightforward after consumer
and Microsoft goes more straightforward after enterprise, open AI sort of has a hybrid thing.
Again, with these cutesy figures, which is just this weird dichotomy, as I note in the piece,
between what that looks like and what it seems like they're trying to get you to do,
which is much more work oriented.
I just felt like that that's like indicative of the whole company right now
because obviously they've built this consumer facing behemoth in chat GBT itself.
But then they, of course, had to sort of halt the brakes and figure out like,
oh my God, Anthropic has passed us in terms of the business side.
And then in terms of valuation and like, why is that?
Maybe we should focus on what they're doing.
And so to me, that's sort of indicative of the whiplash,
the entire company has been under the past several months.
And so I feel like Dots is in some ways playing that out in real time.
Yeah, Open AI does feel like a little bit stuck between the two different use case.
And it does feel like, you know, I guess it, I'd still say it's the maybe the best product when it comes to AI.
But it still feels like as opposed to setting the vision it has been following to a degree.
And the way that you describe these, I do wonder like, do they all blend in together?
it's funny, like when I was talking about computer use, you know, hearing your answer about
Microsoft reminded me that Microsoft years ago had this product that like watches your desktop
and get stuff done for you and there was a backlash there. And they ended up by, I think,
pausing that, right? Yeah. So just thinking through, we're going to have all these different players
involved. So what is, what would you say the differentiator is in terms of who's going to win?
Is it going to be the one that like sort of nudges you the best? Is it going to be the one that's,
more effective in getting things done versus not.
Where do you think the line of competition is drawn here and who crosses the finish line?
I do feel like there will be a huge first mover advantage to a lot of these.
Whoever can get sort of the most people signed up and actually using these products.
And obviously, META has a huge advantage there because they have the multi-billion plus
user base of several products.
and OpenAI has ChatGBTGBT, which of course they bake this in to the ChatGBTGPT's Super app from the GitGo.
And so it's not like they have nothing.
They have a billion, Sam Altman said during the dots unveiling.
They're now at 1.2 billion weekly active users.
So it's nothing to sneeze at, but it's not quite meta at the 3 billion plus user scale that they can get this in front of so many different services.
And OpenAI will only let you use it if you're,
part of the pro subscription tier.
That's true.
That's a good.
Use dots.
So $100 a month.
And I have to say I just upgraded from 20 a month to 100 a month to be able to use dots.
I really like dots.
I mean,
we spoke about this a little bit on the Friday show.
I think it's great.
And, you know,
I know you got this feedback when you wrote about how much you like Muse.
I just don't have any interest in letting meta have access to Gmail and calendar where,
for whatever reason,
I wouldn't say I feel comfortable giving it to, you know,
open AI,
guess a little bit less of a gag reflex when I connected to chat chat. And I can't tell you how many messages
I got along those lines. Now, I want to be mindful that, you know, we are, we do what we do for a
living. We're a bit in a tech, you know, bubble, you know, regardless of where we live and whatnot.
Obviously, you know, the audience is, is going to skew more in that direction than say the general
public likely. But it is a real thing, right? Like, there is this real concern that meta is.
is just not to be trusted.
And I think, you know, we're about to see it play out in Hollywood in real time when all these
movies coming out.
Maybe this is who determines who wins.
We have an open AI movie and a meta movie coming out.
And whichever one does a better job at portraying Sam or Mark Zuckerberg as, I don't know,
a vile character, well, they will face a harder time getting their personal assistant off the
ground.
I don't know.
Is it as simple as that?
And I believe, and I think, so this social.
Reckoning, which is the meta, the new meta movie, sort of the unofficial sequel to the social
network is coming out, I think later this week. And then I think artificial, which is the open
eye movie, I think is having its premiere tonight. So we're going to find out soon. And from
everything I've heard, I have some, you know, Hollywood folks I know. And they're both portrayed
insanely negative, both Zuckerberg and Altman. So I don't know how this ends up. And by the way,
there's also an Elon Musk documentary, which is like four hours long.
coming out imminently.
And so he has his own AI service.
When's the Dario movie coming out?
Inquiry minds want to know.
We need the anthropic movie.
That will happen, by the way.
I think you know to the SNL thing.
You know, that will happen.
There's going to be the effective altruism, you know, the movie and stuffed animals and things.
EA, the theater production.
Yeah, but yeah, that will be an interesting.
The reaction to those movies will be fascinating in the face of trying to get these
adoption of these agents for the trust reasons that you're talking about. I mean, we joke about it,
but that will be, that will have some impact on like how these things are perceived in, in public.
And, you know, who wants to sign up for the meta version of, of an agent that controls your life versus who wants to sign up for the open AI version versus should anyone trust the anthropic version with all the stuff that they're saying about the end of the world?
Should anyone dare trust the Elon Musk version of this?
Do we default back to Microsoft because we should trust them? Or do we go with our own?
old friend Google, which I know you want to talk about in a second. And so yeah, this is,
this, to go back to your initial question, though, of what ends up being the key things? So I do
think that there's a first mover advantage here for sure, which obviously hurts the would-be
startups. You know, there's instinct. There's another one called towns. There's a few other players
that are, I think there's a bunch more that are going to launch pretty soon. And so they're
unfortunately going to have a hard time sort of reaching scale as quickly as some of the other
players that were mentioning simply because of obviously the baked user install base. But
there is an argument to be made for a pure play, you know, agenetic service here. And again,
the Switzerland argument, you stay away from all the infighting between these companies. Maybe
there's an inroads there. But I do think it's probably going to be one of the big players. And I do
think it's for ultimately also the reason that you hit on earlier, which is that the integrations
are so key here. You need the integrations to mail. You need the integrations to calendar. You need
the integrations to messaging. And which one of those players can nail all of that and keep them all
intact, importantly, without being, you know, blocked and everything, I think will be critical
in terms of like how this ends up playing out. On the movies, I just want to say Sam Altman was on
CNBC this past week and they asked him about it. Kate Rooney, who did a great job with that
interview, asked him about it. And he goes, well, it looks like a terrible movie. It's just the funniest
response. He is also on the cover of Vanity Fair with some huge profile today, which I do not think
is an accident in face of this movie that's coming out. Oh, yeah, there might be some
coordination, PR effort on that front. He did say something interesting in that interview, I think,
this was maybe the political interview where he was like, he's, wait, what did he say?
He said that him and, they, that, that opening eye and Anthropic have fundamentally different
worldviews on AI regulation and some AI benefit, that the AI benefits justify accepting
some risks.
And he's getting killed for that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
What risks are we talking about here?
Right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I think it's important to, well, let's.
see if we could channel him a little bit. I mean, I think, I think what he would probably say is
that there's going to be these sort of, you know, breakthroughs that will happen in the sciences
and maths. We've already seen the math breakthrough on Navier Stokes from Open AI and probably
more on the way. And that will help us understand the universe a little bit better, live longer,
be more productive, be less tied to work, which is a big question mark. And the risks are,
I don't know, cyber security probably.
And what else would it be?
I don't know.
Do you think that's the cost benefit that he's thinking through in his head or is there
something else?
Yes.
I mean, I saw the same quote and had the same reaction.
I feel like to give him some credit, I don't think that he's suggesting that the end of
the world is the downside scenario here.
No, that doesn't seem like it.
Right.
I think that he is saying that like he's trying.
to be realistic. And you could argue whether or not that's smart, you know, in this,
in that type of response. But I do feel like he's trying to be realistic and suggesting that,
like, yes, there are going to be downsides. He's talked about it before, right? A lot.
That obviously job displacements, you know, on down and sort of school displacement,
all different sorts of parts of life are going to be impacted by this in ways that are not
universally positive. And so to suggest otherwise is obviously going to be.
be disingenuous. But when you leave it that vague, it's, you know, it's going to, again,
just lead to the continued messaging problem around everything that's been going on with
AI. All right, MG, I got to ask you on this one, where is Anthropic here? I mean, they were effectively
the, they led this moment. It's a good question. Yeah. They had cloud code and co-work,
which were the initial, let me give control to an AI and see what happens. And yeah.
people took to it and they became the world's hottest AI company because they built those tools.
And now maybe they've decided that this is not a place they want to play in or they've decided, you know, sort of in disagreement with us on this show, that this is not going to be a popular product category.
What do you think their perspective is and why they're absent here?
Yeah, it's a good question for all the reasons that you note.
It's something I've been thinking about in the back of my head as well.
And I haven't explicitly written about it other than to mention them that they don't have, you know, a straightforward play here.
They might, it might be as simple as they view that, that basically, you know, Claude Code and more specifically Claude Co-work, I guess, are, will evolve into this, you know, as they add more features over time.
But you're right.
They were the first mover with, you know, sort of the coding movement.
Now you could say, you know, that there were other.
who sort of actually showcased it a little bit to them.
But they obviously came in and that's like what's what we were talking about has risen the
company, you know, to the levels that they're at right now.
And then co-work, you know, opening eye.
Everyone else felt like they had to have an answer for that.
And so where are they here?
To me, it goes back to what I thought about before when they were still very much the
underdog in the space, which is that they've always sort of, despite hiring people like
Mike Krieger, they've always sort of shied away from being more.
consumer oriented and sort of always wanted to be more about, yeah, work and, and sort of
productivity and whatnot. And so I feel like they, their answer to that would probably be like,
look, we want to do whatever, yeah, helps our user base be more productive, but we're not
necessarily looking to, you know, to do all of the consumer use cases. Remember, they still don't
even have an image generator product. They have like sort of minimal voice capabilities. I do
think that they'll have to ramp that up more, I think because voice will become a more key integral
point of how you interact with these services over time. But again, they haven't done an image product.
They haven't done a video product. And, you know, in some ways, looking back, you could say that
was smart, right? They weren't distracted by those things that perhaps open AI was. But I also think,
like, an image product is probably table stakes at some point, too, right? Because you're making a presentation.
Are you going to use another services sort of, you know, image generating, you know, model
to go along with the presentation that it's making.
Like there's stuff that they will have to do.
And I do feel like that eventually they will be probably dragged into this more,
even if they view it more consumer facing personal AI assistant mode.
I would imagine though they'll say like, look,
we're going to start with the professional AI assistance.
And we already have a lot of that with co-work,
thanks to all the work that we've done with Claude Code.
And so we'll get to that.
when, you know, down the road and we'll sort of morph into that.
They did do an interesting thing, which you probably saw.
I think it was just last week, which is that they merged the Claude and Co-Work text box.
So they're no longer the two, you know, the two different tabs that you click between,
which even Open AI has not done yet.
And so I feel like they're moving towards the Holy Grail of that space, which is the unified single chat box for anything.
And I do feel like dots in some ways might be pointing at this as well.
Like, is dots actually going to be the eventual total front end of chat GPT?
And it uses its stuff behind the scenes to basically determine what you're asking for,
whether it's a personal question or a work-oriented question and roots it behind the scenes for you.
Yeah, I can see it.
I mean, one of the nice things about dots is you can like sort of continue to throw stuff at it.
And then it will basically prioritize and work behind the scenes.
execute for you. So, all right, we've kind of danced around it through the show. I will give you
my perspective on who I think will win this battle and my dark horse, and I'd be curious if you
have an answer on your end. I think OpenAI is going to win. I just think they have shown that
they have the product shops. They have 1.2 billion users, so it's not like they're an instinct where
they're like trying to fend off meta's incredibly aggressive distribution attempt, which is not only
pushing it, meta is not only pushing this in its own products, like WhatsApp and Instagram,
but it's also, it's got the, it's got ads during NFL football. It's everywhere in the subway,
I'm in the subway. All I see is Muse. So I think Open AI does have that 1.2 billion users. People
who are there to use AI, people who are more comfortable to use its products. And I think
Dots is going to be the one that comes out on top. And my dark horse here, of course, wouldn't be
a show without, between us, without bringing up Apple. I think Apple, which will, which will
have device access from the get-go and has shown an interest in being more aggressive on AI
products is the dark horse to pull this off, you know, even if it might be last. What do you think?
I feel like I'm going to sound like that one scene in Jurassic Park where I'm like the,
and I'm the one defending the blood-sucking lawyer, you know, here where it's like, I'm the one
defending the meta.
Can't believe I'm the one defending meta. But I feel like,
One other element that we haven't really even hit on, which is interesting, is that meta is doing all of this without what is, you know, what they even consider to be a frontier model behind the scenes powering this, right?
Like, obviously Muse Spark, I think it's 1.3 now.
It might be 1.4.
I think it's 1.3 is good.
And it is powering, you know, this right now, powering Muse right now.
But they say any day now that what, quote unquote, watermelon, their actual big time, big front.
frontier version of their Spark models, or sorry, their Muse models, Spark is one variant of it,
is coming soon. And so when that happens, what does that change? Does that change anything?
I mean, like, presumably it will be much better, much more functional at doing certain tasks.
But maybe they built Muse in such a way that it is fine just running on, you know, not really good,
but not quite frontier. And maybe you don't need it for all of the.
these agentic tasks. And maybe that, maybe we're starting to break into a world where the absolute
frontier matters for science and for, you know, all of these really hard discovery and big data stuff.
But sort of the day-to-day operations can sort of fall back to these models, which, of course,
on top of everyone's mind is, is that they can run cheaper, they can be offered cheaper.
And so that's the world in which we're playing. But again, I just want to put that out there that
Meta has been able to do this without having the absolute frontier model, whereas obviously Open AI does right now.
And Anthropic, as we talked about, is not playing in the space right now, but has that model.
And so I'm curious to see what, if anything, changes when they launch watermelon.
Do they launch with new functionality for Muse that just blows people's minds?
Maybe not.
Maybe it's not.
That's meta's big upcoming model that we're waiting for.
Yeah.
And then you bring up Apple.
So again, I wrote a post right after WWDC, after they announced, you know, launched the new Syria
AI officially, at least unveiled it, and now it's out there in the world.
I still feel like that that post holds up where it's like Apple could win and probably will
win AI by default just because, again, it's baked into billions of devices automatically.
I do think that there's an interesting element, which I think I hit upon a little bit back in
that piece.
And I know that others, other, you know, key Apple Watchers like John Gruber and other.
others have been talking about more recently, which is that the biggest problem with Siri AI and Jason
Snell, I know, has talked about this bit too, is that you just forget that it's actually good now.
And so you forget to use it, right?
Even though it's baked into your phone, it's like, it's right there.
Everyone has it.
You don't need to download a new app, but you're like still opening up chat GPT and opening up
Claude for queries that you could easily do in this baked in version of Siri.
And you just forget that you can trust it now.
And so in some ways, it has the opposite trust.
of what meta, what we were talking about with meta, right?
It's just you don't trust that it's going to, with Apple,
you don't trust that Syria's going to work because it hasn't for over a decade.
And now the fact that it does is good, obviously, but it's still a problem now because
they have that trust deficit in another weird way.
And so I do think, like, time will alleviate that.
And especially as they release new devices, you know, the rumors are that they're going to have
their first sort of like, you know, a home device that could be largely predicated around
Siri AI.
It sounds like they're working on getting new home devices.
out there imminently. And so I do feel like that will help a lot of these problems. But you're
right. The key thing that Apple has, which no one else has, is again, they're on these devices.
They have inherently baked in support for mail, messaging, your calendar, your pictures.
They see everything on your screen. They can say, you can say, hey, Siri, what am I looking at right now?
Like, you can't do that with the other services.
So unless you, yeah, move heaven and earth to basically agree to all of these prompts, which, as I think you alluded to earlier, Apple is moving to potentially lock that down more, at least on the Mac in the future.
They haven't exactly explicitly stated what they're going to do.
But they're clearly going to put up more warnings that even the Mac, which historically has been open to whatever, you know, you as a user want to do to it, you know, will potentially now be getting these these prompts like,
Hey, maybe you don't want to give meta access to all of the information on your machine.
I wonder if it would be more effective if they would have said,
maybe you don't want to give meta all this access or Mark Zuckerberg.
I feel like maybe again after the movie we'll see.
Did you see the movie?
You know what this person wants.
Now free on Apple TV Plus.
It's just a giant ad for streaming.
Got to ask, do you have the fold?
Did you buy the Fult, the duo?
I have not.
It's up for pre-order on Friday.
Oh, okay.
Too early.
I will pre-order it.
I will, yeah, get it then I think it's the week later.
So I have just, I broke down and bought an 18 Pro just to have something, you know, while I wait.
All right.
We'll get your review in our November show.
Okay.
Okay.
So let's take a break and come back and talk about the thing that I've really,
This is the whole conversation I've been looking forward to,
but I've kind of been chopping out the bid
and barely holding back from asking you
why has Google not gotten into this battle?
So let's do that when we come back right after this.
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All right, M.G. So let's talk a little bit about Google, shall we?
Let's do it.
Google always seems to be a little bit far behind on these product releases.
And that is also the case here.
They have this AI assistant called Spark, but certainly not in the conversation with the others.
And like we mentioned in the first half, or in the beginning, because we only have a couple more minutes left.
They have Gmail. They have calendar.
They have talent.
they don't have a muse.
They don't have a dots.
They don't have an instinct.
What is going on there?
And now I'll do another movie
callback of swingers,
if you remember the scene where it's like,
you're the bear.
You're the bear and you got these claws
and you got everything.
You just got to use these claws, man.
That is Google.
It's the bear.
No claws, though.
What's going on?
Yeah, they're defanged.
The problem is, you know,
and again, I should disclose
like I normally do.
I work there for over.
a decade, but I haven't been there in a couple years at this point, and nor did I work on
AI specifically for the company. So I don't have any real insight, insider insight into this beyond
you know, everything that I read and think about. And that is, you know, what we've talked about
over the past couple of years. They were behind. They moved heaven and earth. It felt like to
sort of catch back up. And I think that they did that for a little bit. And then, lo and behold,
they seemingly fell behind again. And then you had the new shakeup of the company.
on the AI side of the deep mind side?
And is this all related?
I mean, to some extent, for sure,
like there's elements of it that are definitely related.
In my head, and I wrote a piece about it,
it just goes to the idea that clearly,
this past I.O. a few months ago,
they go out on stage and they just don't have anything really ready to go.
They have some little products here and there
and they're willing to talk about like these things
that are coming in the future.
But they sort of screwed themselves by, you know, like pre-announcing these things, including famously 3.5 pro, their forthcoming flagship AI model, which never came.
And now seems like it's never going to come.
I think they've actually acknowledged that now because they have their first version of Gemini 4 out in the wild for security testing and whatnot.
And so I think that part of it was probably they also at I.O. talked about a product, which is also confusingly called.
Spark, but not to be confused with Meta's Spark, but it's another AI Spark, Gemini Spark,
which is their version of, you know, agenic and assistant use cases. And they had it in beta
testing, but it was very limited. It was only, I think, at the ultra tier at one point. I think
it's come down. I've tried it. I've had access to it for a little while. It's fine, but it's not,
you know, it's not blow away, blow your socks off AI. It does certain things well because, as you
note, they have the integrations to Gmail, it's a Google calendar, to everything else, to Google
search.
Like, they should be the ones.
They have the clause.
They should be the ones to do this.
And yet, they cannot seemingly time it right.
They can't get out of their own way.
I mean, I've always had problems with Google from a product perspective, the way that
they implement a lot of things.
Obviously, you know, it's hard to argue with multiple products that have over a billion
users.
But I would still argue with a lot of them.
I think that they could be a lot better in terms of functionality and in terms of like user user interface, intuitiveness.
And I feel like it's pretty key in these early days for a product like this in the AI personal assistance space.
And again, Gemini Spark, it's not doing much for me.
I think it's not doing much for a lot of people, especially when you compare it to to muse and now dots and instinct and everything else that's out there.
Yeah, you're right.
muses full of fun and whimsy from the avatar on down.
Gemini Spark lacks that.
What's the word I'm looking for here?
Yes, it's a little on the nose, but it's right there.
It's like, that's Google though.
They just, again, I'll keep reiterating it.
They have the claws.
They have everything they need.
They have the talent for sure.
And they had, I mean, the deep mind purchase will be one of the greatest acquisitions of all times.
And they have everything that they needed to be to be in the right place, right time.
And even when they fell behind, it felt like they, again, they did everything right to come back and catch up and be there.
And it felt like, remember, we were having the discussion.
Is it over?
Is like Google going to run away with the game?
And then all of a sudden, now we're having the opposite discussion again.
And it's like they've done nothing since that conversation.
It's like Groundhog Day.
And, and, you know, they have, they have reasons for all of it.
And they'll say some of it, you know, externally even now because they sort of have to have like, you know, I think Sundar, you know, said like, yeah, we're, we're.
We sort of, I don't know if he said drop the ball on coding, but he said that they weren't focused on it as they should have been appropriately.
And then, so that was obviously a problem for a while.
And then again, it feels like there was a similar idea.
They just have way too much going on.
This is what it always comes back to for me.
They have too many cooks in the kitchen.
They have way too many people that work there that all want to work on the same thing, but all for different reasons don't want to work on the same team.
So they have like all these conflicting cooks, all these conflicting, um,
motives and it's not all nefarious or are, you know, mean spirit.
And I just feel like there's different teams.
It's a massive company.
You know, the Google Cloud team has different incentives, right?
Than the Android team.
And the Google search team is a different incentive than all of them.
And so it's very hard to get all those people to work together to get on the same page.
And I say all that.
And I,
but I thought we were over that when we had the unification of Google brain and deep mind and that that was going to be the time.
And it felt like it was working.
And then all of a sudden, though, these products creep up.
And, you know, I talked about in that piece, there's a product called CC,
which by all accounts sounds interesting, right?
It's like meant for families.
But when you have that product and you're trying to do to be a family-based assistant,
when you have that product and then you have Spark, Gemini Spark.
You have Spark.
And you also point out, search.
And it's up with AI mode.
Right.
All the AI agentic stuff built into it.
Like, if you have everything, people are going to use nothing because,
like they don't know which one to go to like for this. And so you can make an individual case that
all these are the right calls or their nice products or, you know, they do this and they do that.
But they need to get on the same page. And again, they thought, it felt like they were doing that.
You hear all the reports. Sergey Brin involved like that they're, they're really honing in and
they just can't get out of their own way for whatever reason. Yeah. And this is sort of the point where
if we have these conversations and I'm like, okay, just like, you know, remember, remember,
I'm telling myself, remember that, you know, it'll probably just be another month and they'll be
on top again the way that this stuff has been.
That's probably true, right?
They'll have Gemini four out there for consumers eventually.
And then they'll presumably probably try to tie that to, hopefully they'll rebrand it,
but the Gemini Spark, you know, full on launch and they'll go for it and say like, hey,
you saw all that cool stuff you could do with Mews and Dots.
Well, look at what you can do with all the Google services that you already use.
Like, and, you know, basically combat it that way.
And it will probably be compelling for a little bit.
But then now you have another.
We go back to the trust notion.
You have the trust notion of like,
should I put my entire agenic life and the personal assistant in Google's hands
when they're just going to fall behind again in six months.
I mean, they really, and I know this is a sort of, you know,
beaten down trope that's been going on for a while.
they need to just like acquire a creative agency and then get get this together in terms of like their messaging and product names because it's I don't understand how you have this problem persists for so long.
It's it's mind-boggling.
And speaking of acquisitions, maybe to tie it all back into the beginning point is, you know, I would expect that someone will acquire instinct.
Someone will acquire maybe the town's product.
Someone will acquire all these other things.
Basically because, you know, they'll feel like, look, we,
are, we're seeing what meta is done. We're seeing what Open AI is done. We need to be in this
fast. Like Microsoft will see how that goes. They obviously launched theirs. Where's Amazon, right?
Amazon has had Alexa Plus out there for a while now. Where are they in this space? There's been
rumors that they have, you know, work behind the scenes on a more agentic workflows for this
kind of use cases. And so where are they in this? What does SpaceX, SpaceX, SpaceX, SI now, it's
called, I guess.
Oh my goodness, don't get me.
Would we have another hour?
Yeah.
And so where did they take?
Oh my God.
Where did they take Grockbot?
Because Grockbot's gotten some love out there, right?
Right, we didn't even mention Grockbot.
I know.
I think they're doing some smart things with teams and some of the others are having to combat
that.
And so they've done good work too.
So yeah, there's, it's yet another battle.
The website, spiglass.org.
Siegler joins us on the first Monday of every month. M.G. Always great to speak with you.
Thanks so much for coming on. Thanks, Alex. Talk soon.
All right, everybody. Thanks so much for listening and watching. And we'll see you next time
here on Big Technology Podcast.
