Morning Brew Daily - Meta Wants to Take On ChatGPT & Duolingo Replaces Workers With AI?

Episode Date: April 30, 2025

Episode 572: Neal and Toby recap the whirlwind situation over at Amazon after the White House got wind that it was going to display which products are affected by tariffs in its pricing, which Trump publicly rebuked. Then, Meta throws its hat in the ring with a standalone AI chatbot that directly aims at ChatGPT. Also, Duolingo’s CEO causes a stir by announcing the company plans to eventually replace the work from contractors with AI. Meanwhile, the EU shuts down Malta’s ‘golden passport’ program.  Subscribe to Morning Brew Daily for more of the news you need to start your day. Share the show with a friend, and leave us a review on your favorite podcast app. Visit https://planetoat.com/ to learn more! Vote for us! https://shortyawards.com/17th/morning-brew-daily-show Vote for us! https://shortyawards.com/17th/morning-brew-daily-show  Listen to Morning Brew Daily Here: https://link.chtbl.com/MBD Watch Morning Brew Daily Here: https://www.youtube.com/@MorningBrewDailyShow 00:00 - Jeopardy Masters Tournament  03:00 - Amazon Tariff Prices  09:15 - Meta AI App 12:45 - Duolingo Replacing Contractors with AI   18:00 - Golden Passports 21:45 - Headlines  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Good morning, Brew, Daily Show. I'm Neil Fryman. And I'm Toby Howell. Today, Meta puts a social media spin on its AI chatbot, but will people like it? Then Amazon flirted with the idea of listing a tariff surcharge next to its products, but then the White House called. It's Wednesday, April 30th. Let's ride.

Good morning, everyone. Toby, I am hype. The biggest competition of the year kicks off tonight, Jeopardy Masters. The game show is bringing back its top-ranked players to compete in a tournament for a 500 $100,000 prize. Everything about this is going to be supersized. Nine hour-long episodes consisting of two games each with the hardest questions, well, answers you could think of. Jeopardy has done a great job of turning its all-star contestants into household names. We're also at the point in our lives, Neil, where we are seated for Jeopardy at 7 p.m. So this is appointment viewing for our

crew here at MBD. But also, Neil, I am talking to a bit of a Jeopardy legend here. You were on the show many moons ago. Tell MBD listeners about that lore. I don't know about legend, but yeah, in 2001, when I was 10 years old, I was on Kids Jeopardy, got to me, Alex Trebek. I said my favorite class in school was recess, which still is. The cool kid, the cool kid. And we had a little buzzer trouble in single Jeopardy, but we turned it around. I'm not going to tell anybody how it turned out. You'll just have to watch. It's deep in the throes of YouTube, but it was a great time. I just really want to go back. So if there are any Jeopardy producers listening, get me on that show.

I can get revenge. Give him another shot, Ken Jennings. And now a word from our sponsor, Plan It Out. Neil, you know what's better than a good morning routine? Going to be honest, Toby, there is nothing better than a good morning routine. Exactly. Trick question, my friend. But you know what makes a good morning routine even better? Plan it out.

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A report that Amazon planned to display the cost of Trump's tariff next to the total price of products on its site. That caused the White House to return with a punch of its own. This is a hostile and political act by Amazon, White House press secretary Caroline Levitt, told reporters. After that pop in the mouth, Amazon stock retreated to the ropes dropping 2% before dusting itself off and getting back into the real. clarifying that it was only ever considering listing tariff charges next to products on Amazon Hall, a smaller budget-focused section of its site that's meant to compete with TAMU. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnik thought it was time for him to jump in the ring, quote, tweeting a Bloomberg article detailing Amazon's walkback saying,

good move. But that was far from the only moves being made. CNN then released a report that said Trump had gone straight to the top rope, calling Amazon founder Jeff Bezos yesterday morning to complain about, the initial report about tariff prices. Amazon finally clarified through a statement that a proposal was never approved and it was not going to happen even for Amazon Hall, though Punchbow dropped back in and said that it was Bezos's influence that caused them to walk back their plans.

So after the dust had settled, it looked like Punchbow may have jumped the gun, but what they did get right to the heart of is whether companies should be adding tariff surcharges for users to see. Because, Neil, they are far from the only company. considering it? No, I mean, first of all, the details of this are extremely murky. We have kind of no idea what happened here. We know there was a call between President Trump and Jeff Bezos, where Trump expressed his displeasure at what was going on. And the subtext of this is that Trump and Bezos have become very chummy in an interview with the Atlantic release this week.

Trump said about Bezos, he's 100%. He's been great. He was terrific. And in Trump won, the first term, these two were very much at odds. So there is now a direct line between Trump and Bezos. We don't know whether Bezos called up Amazon and said, guys, you cannot do this. I just got a call from the president. Whatever you were thinking, don't do it. Or whether what Amazon was saying was true was that they were never doing this in the first place. Either way, it speaks to the heart of what's going on for many retailers right now. They are going to face higher prices because there are 145% tariffs on China. They need to make a decision. Not only are they going to determine whether to eat the costs or not, they have to figure out how to display, if they do charge higher prices, they have to

figure out how to display that for their customers, how to market it for their customers. Do they just do it subtly by just adding, you know, adding the cost and not even broadcasting it? Or do they say these are an import charge, or do they say this is a Trump tariff fee? There's a lot of options available. That's the talk of the retail world right now. So let's look at what some brands are doing, Dame, which is this sexual wellness brand, actually did implement what it calls a Trump tariff surcharge. And the way that they did that is they put a little $5 fee tacked on at the end as you're checking out.

And it has a little Trump-like toupee image next to it. So they are leaning into it, maybe tongue-in-cheekly. They see it almost as a marketing stunt as much as an actual way to eat the cost. They said that the $5 fee doesn't even cover the import costs. It's actually mainly just something to drive conversation. When the founder posted on LinkedIn about it, it went completely viral. So they are seeing it more as a LinkedIn or as not a LinkedIn post as a viral way to drive marketing. The founder did come back and say, though, it probably is hurting conversions.

It's tough to tell because they're not A, B, testing it. But whenever you add an additional fee at checkout, it's like any checkout process, when you think it costs X amount and then you see it's X plus this fee, that definitely hurts conversion. So maybe what you're gaining in that viral marketing, you're losing a little bit in conversion. So that's how one brand is approaching it. Not the only way brands are approaching it. No. So Amazon said it was considering doing this for its Amazon Hall purchases. Amazon Hall is this new storefront that it opened to compete with TAMU and Sheehan. And this would maybe make sense and go in line with what the rest of the industry is doing. Because TAMU, which is this

Fast Fashion Company that imports very small packages from China straight to your doorstep, did raise prices, and now it broadcasts that to consumers by putting a 145% line item charge that says Timu import charges. So it calls this import charges. It doesn't say anything about Trump. It doesn't say anything about tariffs. But that is sort of what the industry in fast fashion is doing. And that's what Amazon was reportedly considering.

And then let's go across the border real quick. Canada is doing this as well. Some Canadian grocery stores are labeling U.S. goods with a T for tariffs. And what some grocery chains anecdotally are reporting is that a lot of people are opting for, you know, produce or vegetables that are grown in Canada versus ones that come across the border from the United States. And it's not about saving money either. In some cases, these locally grown products are more expensive than the U.S. counterparts. That is also something that has not been necessarily reflected in U.S. businesses. This is just one business. There is a guy who sells showerheads on, who posted this thread on X about how he had a made-in-China version right next to a Made-in-USA version. The prices were Made in China, 129, made-in-USA, 239, which is what it would cost to manufacture here in the U.S. And he said, 3,500 customers bought the made-in-China version.

Zero customers bought the Made-N-U-S.A version. So clearly there's still price sensitivity that is driving these things, not just patriotism, like maybe you're seeing in Canada, especially when the difference is almost 100% more. So just, again, we don't know how every brand is going to approach this, but you're seeing a lot of different kind of throw stuff out the wall, see what sticks when it comes to dealing with these import fees. Meta says it's launching a standalone AI app that will go toe to toe with ChatGPT, and it's hoping that tossing a little special social media sauce on top will help it stand out.

The app announced yesterday will run on Meta's Lama AI model and come with all the fix-ins you expect out of an AI app in 2025. You can type questions to it, talk to it, generate images, and receive real-time web results. Previously, Meta's AI had been sprinkled across its apps like Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. Now it's growing up and moving into a house all by itself. But there is a twist. the most interesting and differentiated part of this app is the Discover Feed, where you can post your interactions with the AI and see how others are using it as well.

Meta gave an example of someone asking the chat bot to describe them in three emojis, which they shared with their friends. The company didn't show the part where the friends pretended like they cared and replied LOL. Either way, what Meta is doing here represents the tightest integration yet between social media and AI, but expect to see more of this thinking from companies like OpenAI, and Elon Musk's X. Meta thinks it can win this contest over those two companies because it knows so much about you already

from the data you've already shared with Instagram and its other apps making its AI more personalized and responsive to your needs. Toby, this AI sharing tool is sure to be divisive. Yeah, AI and social media are quickly becoming more and more entwined. I mean, I would maybe push back and say that the company that is clearly the most entwined right now is X and XAI because they recently rolled up

under one entity under Elon. must where social media posts are both fodder for training their models, but also a place for GROC, it's AI chatbot, to jump in and analyze posts as well. And then you have the reports that Open AI are trying to get into the game as well. Another big strategy shift here, though, is, you know, the stand-alone app. This is, I think, big psychologically for a lot of people, too, because a lot of people have begun treating AI chatbots as kind of this safe haven where you can talk to it about, you know, contractual issues about your math home. about these other things.

So that is something where you need kind of this own safe space digitally for you to feel like you have like this one-to-one relationship. That is why I'm not so sure about this sharing feature, though, because are you really going to post about how it helped you on your math homework, how it helped you work through a relationship or something like that? So the example that it gave, maybe I'm just not broadening my horizons enough here and people will want to share things. But it's an interesting psychological thing that's happening where most of these spaces

feel very one-to-one personalized to you, and now Meta is saying, hey, actually open it up and share it with more of your friends. People do already share their prompts and responses with chat GPT and other chatbots on social media. Do you find that engaging? Is that something you've ever thought about? Yeah, that actually is a good point where when the open AI model where you could do hyper-realistic image generation came out, a lot of people are like, what is the prompt? How did you share this image? So I guess you have kind of talked to me into believe leaving that a little bit more too. And then one thing that I do think is very smart for meta here is that it's merging this with its meta rayband app. So it used to be just for, you know, processing

the material that came in through your camera and your rayband. And that ability to interface with the world is something that no other company really has. Meta has, you know, the hardware aspect as well. So that merging of hardware and software, that's where things get interesting because if you can remember what it saw in your fridge and then you go to your chap and say, hey, what should I have for dinner today. That's when you start to see some really cool, you know, synergies being built here. All right, let's move on. Duolingo is betting big on artificial intelligence or intelligentsia artificial or kunchlique intelligence or rengongju unung.

Whatever language you are learning, Duolingo wants it to be AI that is making it happen behind the scenes. Its CEO Luis von On announced yesterday that the company will be AI. first going forward. The biggest thing that means is that the company will gradually start to phase out contractors for work that can be handled by AI. Fon-on said this was a way to overcome human limitations in creating the massive amount of content Duolingo needs to scale. The other changes include only adding headcount in places teams cannot automate and treating AI usage as a plus in hiring decisions. For the language learning company, AI is the next iPhone moment. Its CEO said in his email outlining the strategy shift. In 2012, we bet on mobile. While others were

focused on mobile companion apps for websites, we decided to build mobile first because we saw it as the future. We're making a similar call now, and this time the platform shift is AI. Neil, Duolingo is far from the only company taking this path. Shopify and Klarna have also been very vocal about their AI usage. Uber recently said it will be integral to its path forward to, so these AI replacing humanity stories, they are piling up. Yeah, Shopify CEO, Toby Luck, earlier this year, I would say, broke the damn open for CEOs saying, you better come with AI skills or you're just not going to work at this company. We are going to be an AI first company. He wrote in this viral memo that AI use is now a fundamental expectation of everyone at Shopify. And he said, if your team

doesn't prove that you can't do what you want, your team is coming to me asking for more a headcount, but if you can use AI to do that particular thing, then, you know, I won't give you more headcount. So you need to prove that to me. And it seems like what Duolingo CEO was doing was blatantly, or ripping off Shopify, a CEO memo, doing exactly what Toby Lucka laid out and Uber and Klarna. There's all these tech companies now saying the baseline now for you to come work for us is that you have these AI skills. So if you are listening to this, thinking about working at any of these tech companies, you know, I would certainly buttress your AI skills right now. And by the way, Duo is killing it. It went public four years ago. It sucks up

175% since then. It had 2 million paid subscribers back in 2021. Now it's got over 8 million as of last year. So maybe the humanity portion was doing pretty well here. Von On is saying like, hey, we are still a human first company. Basically, we just want you to do to be more productive. We want to remove some of these bottlenecks when it comes to creating content. So we still are looking out for duos, which is something that a lot of these CEOs are saying, like they have to have the addendum of saying, we care about you, humans, but we just want you to be better and more productive with AI. So towing that line is going to be a very interesting thing as these tech companies

continue to invest in AI and want it to replace humanity in a lot of cases. Up next, we're going to talk about golden passports. Today we helped a latte for Sam. Coffee shop. get an insurance quote simply and easily. And made sure a floral delivery van was able to make someone's day. We're the Hartford, with decades of experience ensuring millions of unique small businesses. When it comes to your small business insurance,

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Now through May 6th. Exclusion supplies to homedipo.com slash price match for details. You might have to give up on your dream of buying a beachfront mansion in Malta and getting EU citizenship in the process. Yesterday, Europe's highest court struck down the country's golden passport program, a landmark ruling that highlights the backlash to these cash for citizenship programs, even as the U.S. pursues its own. In its ruling, the EU Court of Justice said that Malta's golden passports,

quote, essentially amounts to rendering the acquisition of nationality a mere commercial transaction. The European Commission celebrated the ruling and chimed in, European citizenship is not for sale, in response, Malta's government did not put up a fight saying, okay, if you say so, we'll comply. Malta, a small archipelago of islands between Sicily and North Africa, was one of the last remaining European countries to have a so-called golden passport program. How it worked was this. You make a one-off investment of at least 600,000 euros, buy or rent property, live in the country for three years, and bam, you get a Maltese passport. But it's not just a Maltese passport, because Malta is in the EU. It

means you can travel freely among EU countries, which A, made it ultra attractive for Middle Eastern and Russian tycoons, and B, also made a target of the EU, which says it's abused by money launderers and other criminals. But while golden passports are under attack and gear up, they now exist in the United States. The Trump administration is selling an ultra-expensive gold card to wealthy foreigners, giving them a path to citizenship in exchange for an investment of $5 million. Yeah, these have been controversial for a while now. They kind of popped up post-financial crisis as a way to raise money. But now critics worry that these programs are enabling money laundering. They are also inflating property prices when you're making people come in and invest in property.

And then you're also creating a bunch of absentee housing owners, too. And so in countries that are specifically small in dealing with housing crises, do you really want the ultra-wealthy coming in, snapping out houses, and then not even living in them? So those are some of the pushback to these programs as well. But then you see the U.S. absolutely leaning into them because they see it as a fast track for wealthy citizens to come, have residency, have citizenships in the U.S. Trump thinks it can raise a lot of money. Howard Lutnik said recently, this program has been going very well in that a thousand people signed up in one day. So you are kind of seeing this distancing over in Europe and the EU, but then this leaning in very hard in the United

States. Another country that's leaning in is New Zealand. They've relaxed their requirements. Even as Europe has bat in the hatches, they've relaxed their requirements because their economy is stagnating and they want more wealthy foreigners to come to New Zealand. So you saw this very much during the pandemic when everyone was like, I need to get outside. How about a nice landscape? And New Zealand was like, hey, we have all of that. So they loosened some of their rules around golden passports and they want you to come there. And another area of the world where they heavily lean in to this concept of golden visas and golden passports is the Caribbean. In certain countries there like St. Kitts and Nevis, Antigua and Barbuda, St. Lucia,

golden passports make up more than half of revenue for these small island nations. Europe has been putting pressure on them in order to, you know, jack up the investment requirements or tighten their restrictions because some of them allow for visa fee travel to the U.K. and the U. so they're saying you got guys are becoming now a haven for criminals, and then they can travel to us so we want you to tighten the screws a little bit. Yeah, and I do think the final context we have to add here is that the Russian war definitely shown a big spotlight on these policies as well because a lot of Russians use these programs to skirt sanctions

and set up businesses in other countries. So that's definitely a reason why this EU commission definitely looked into Maltz in particular because of maybe Russian actors using them to get away from global sanctions. Let's bring to the finish with some final headlines. U.S. automakers are breathing a small sigh of relief after the Trump administration said it would soften some tariffs for them. Car manufacturers will still have to pay 25% tariffs on all cars they import into the United States, but they won't have to fork over for other tariffs stacked on top of those, such as an additional 25% for steel and aluminum or the tariffs on Canada and Mexico based on the fentanyl trade.

Trump said it was a little bit of help to the companies to give them, some breathing room to open up more manufacturing plants in the United States. And one by one, Detroit automakers issued statements praising the rollback, with Ford saying it welcomes and appreciates these decisions by President Trump. Yeah, Trump went to a rally in Michigan yesterday night and he said he's showing a little flexibility to these automakers because he still wants them to make most of their components inside the U.S. of A. But then he also said, we gave them a little time before we slaughter them if they don't do

this. So clearly there's still that threat looming of these tariffs. Even with the concessions, it does look like these policies will add a couple thousand dollars to car prices. It's not necessarily an existential threat anymore, which is why you saw kind of these praiseful comments from auto CEOs. Okay, let's do a little look ahead. Later this morning at 8.30 a.m. Eastern, the gross domestic product number for Q1 will be released, providing the most comprehensive report card for the U.S. economy for the first three months of the year. And this big report comes at a time when Americans are feeling historically crummy about the economy, like on a lot of the economy.

par with some of the worst periods in recent economic history. Yesterday, a report showed that consumer confidence fell for the fifth straight month, while expectations for the future dropped to a 13-year low. The conference board, which conducts the survey, wrote that notably the share of consumers expecting fewer jobs in the next six months was nearly as high as in April 2009 in the middle of the Great Recession. Toby, people say they're really down on the economy, but the numbers that we've seen in the past few weeks, the hard data, show that things are. are mostly healthy as of now. All eyes on this GDP report for more clarity. Yeah, economists are estimating that GDP will expand at a rate of 0.8% in the first quarter.

That's adjusting for inflation. But that would be the weakest rate since the second quarter of 2022, which is when we are still kind of emerging from the COVID-19 pandemic. I will have to point out, the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, though, has this massively negative forecast as well. They think that the economy or the GDP will decline by two and a half So clearly that's a little bit of an outlier here, but you're seeing the general estimates being just beneath a percent, which is far lower than the rate that we have been growing at. And then you have some Federal Reserve Bank, specifically down south in Atlanta saying, we think the sky is falling right now. So it will be very interesting to see what actually happens, especially because there were some cloudy stuff in the data as well. There was a spat of bad weather in California that depressed some data early in the year. So you're going to have to see or we're going to have to, have to. have to sort through, see what is real, what is weather-induced, and what is, you know, actual structural to maybe putting a dampening on U.S. economic growth. Remember the famous anti-piracy campaign that would precede your films back in the mid-2000s?

Before Agent Cody Banks would snap on, you'd see the now infamous lines, you wouldn't steal a car, you wouldn't steal a TV in order to equate pirating to stealing physical goods. Anyways, it turns out that the font used in that campaign might have, ironically, been stolen. The typeface use is called X Band Rough, which is purportedly a clone of the licensed FF confidential font from the designer Just Van Rossum. This discovery came from social media sleuths who analyzed archive campaign materials and found that the unauthorized font embedded in the official PDFs. But despite the irony, Von Rossum, the original font creator, found this situation, quote, hilarious and has no plans to pursue legal action. I mean, people love to hate on these ads. They've been

meme so many times over the years for being sort of over the top and preachy. So there you go. Even more ammo. The anti-piracy people likely pirated the font. It's poetic. And finally, Shaq has a new side gig that doesn't involve slinging pizza or car insurance. The Big Diesel is joining the Sacramento State men's basketball program to become their general manager. He is far from the only star to go down the GM path at a small school, where his responsibilities will include recruiting, managing NIL deals, and player development. Steph Curry joined his alma mater, Davidson as basketball GM back in March. Trey Young also signed onto a similar role with his alma mater, Oklahoma,

and now Shaq is jumping into the title in an unpaid role at SAC State, where his son recently transferred. Neil, as NIL deals become more lucrative and more complex, expect to see a similar rise in high-profile GM appointments too. First of all, Shaquille O'Neal's son is named Shakir O'Neal, which I think at that point you just keep it Shaquille and slap a junior on. But you're right, this is pretty much all about NIL and the professionalization of these athletic departments at universities. They need to fundraise and they can say, hey, we got check here. Want to throw it?

Want to write us a check? You know, that goes a long way. Same with Steph Curry. Same with Trey Young and all these other players and former players hopping on to, athletic programs. Fun fact about Sacramento State, they are called the Hornets, and they play at the Nest, which is one of the oldest facilities in all of Division I teams built in 195. So we got to catch a game there. I guess the Shaq marketing worked well on me. Also, the Hornets have never reached the NCAA tournament, so good luck, Shaq. You got your

work cut out for you. All right, let's wrap it up there. Thanks so much for starting your morning with us and have a wonderful Wednesday. You're almost over to the hump. If you've got any or feedback on the show, send an email to Morning Brew Daily at Morningbrew.com. Let's roll the credits. Emily Milliron is our executive producer. Raymond Lute is our producer, our associate producers, our Olivia Graham and Olivia Lake. Scoop's Dardaris is on audio, who is hair and makeup. Devin Emery is our president and our show is a production of Morning Brew.

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