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Amazon releases a brand new AI model OpenAI is going to ship daily for two straight weeks. Bitcoin hits $100,000 US courts deal TikTok another setback and Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger is out. All that and more is coming up on a Big Technology Podcast Friday edition right after this.
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Searching for the perfect place to grow your company. Whatever you're looking for, you can expect it and so much more in Ohio. Partner with Jobs Ohio and we'll connect you to the best sites earlier funding and top get started today@jobsohio.com I'm Tomer Cohen, LinkedIn's Chief Product Officer. In my new podcast Building One, I interview some of the best product builders out there. People at the intersection of dreaming and building and learning. Together you and I will learn from their experiences.
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If you're just as curious as I.
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Am, follow Building One wherever you listen and check out the conversation on LinkedIn.
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A
Welcome to Big Technology Podcast Friday edition where we break down the news in our traditional cool headed and nuanced format. We have so much to speak with you you about today ranging from the new AI announcements that Amazon has made. As if we haven't done enough here on the show with AWS CEO Matt Garman coming on on Wednesday. But there's more to discuss. We also have news at OpenAI which is shipping like crazy. Google which has a new video model and we're not just going to do AI today because we're going to talk about Bitcoin hitting $100,000. US courts telling TikTok it's got a ban. Got a ban. Tik Tok and Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger who's been on the show is out. So joining us as always to speak about this stuff on Fridays is Ron Jon Roy of Margins. Ron Jon, great to see you.
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B
It's the most wonderful time of the year. 12 days of Shipmas. Nonstop shipping from OpenAI. That's what I looked forward to every year in December.
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A
You know that this was like the roadmap that was supposed to come out in October, November and December, but they just couldn't figure it out. And because it was going to go into the hot holidays like they're literally shipping Christmas week. I think they decided okay, we have to roll this out in 12, 12 straight days.
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B
I think every company should do that. Just everything that you've been delaying for the entire year, just shove it all into December and call it 12 days of something.
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A
Yeah, I definitely, I thought I would thought about that at Big Technology that there was some Big stuff that I was hoping for, you know, to get in before the end of 2024. But my ship miss is going to happen in January. So stay tuned, folks.
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B
Right?
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A
That's how it goes. And then you just push past Thanksgiving of the next year and then circle back a lot of circle back in 2025.
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B
It's going to be a big year.
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A
We'll circle back in 2025. So, speaking of circling back, I had Mike Garmin on the show, the CEO of AWS on Wednesday. And I'm on the flight over to Vegas and I'm thinking, what do I want to start with? And I couldn't stop thinking about our discussion about how Amazon is the best scaler of compute in the world. They should have their own foundational model. So I spent like the first 10 minutes of the interview with Garmin talking about this idea. And he comes back and says, listen, like, we just want to be the place where if you want to build with AI, you'll find whatever models. And he says it's a mistaken idea to think that there's going to be one model to rule them all, and says, you know, we wouldn't rule out the idea of having a big foundational model at some point, but basically stops there. Clearly there was something else going on because the next day Amazon releases a new foundation foundational model called Nova that they say beats some of the state of the art models on a number of different factors. And the company is now back in the game. You know, it had its own model that everybody said was not so great. It's called Titan, brings in Nova. And so now Amazon is using that compute power to try to get its own foundational models in the game. Ranjan, you and I spoke about this last week, so I'm curious, from your perspective, do you think this makes sense from Amazon? Were you surprised? I'm curious what you think about this sequence of events.
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B
Well, first, I want to give credit to Matt Garman because I'm always impressed by any kind of executive who has the messaging discipline to sit there in an interview and kind of brush off a very direct question. Knowing and have having been worked on something this big for months and months, naturally, and then knowing the announcement is coming out the next day. But in terms of what it actually means, you didn't get them, Alex, you didn't get them.
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A
But I mean, look, I think it shows the questioning was in the right place. So I appreciate you helping me get there.
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B
The questioning was in the right place. And again for last week, I think it was. We were talking about how maybe the future of the battle around foundation models is not around the actual quality of the model, but the actual ability to scale the computer. And the companies that have the edge in that should actually be the ones best positioned to deploy foundation models to more customers. And AWS is the most natural player in that. So I think this is big. I think this is huge because Amazon really, almost weirdly has been completely left out of this discussion other than its investments in anthropic. And they had what they had maybe nicely been positioning themselves as this kind of Switzerland of building in with foundation models. And now they're saying, no, we have our own. And I think it's the right decision. I think they had to at some point and they're doing it now. So I think this brings them back into the conversation in a way they have not been in a long time.
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A
Yeah, just putting those compute resources to Utes. And I think they really relied on their natural strength here in one specific area, which is that they've made these models much cheaper than basically everything else. Just to give you an example, if you want to use Claude Haiku 3.5, the cents per million token input is 80 cents and output is $4. For Amazon Nova Micro, which is their smallest model, uh, it's 3.5 cents input and 14 cents output. Now, that's in comparison to anthropic smallest model. So actually you look at the cost savings there and it's massive. And also the reporting that I did when I was out at Reinvent this week in Vegas showed that these models are actually faster as well. So it sort of goes to this whole, like, what happens when you want to scale, what happens when you want to build? Some of these models might work well, but they're just very expensive to run. They're slow. And that's the play that I think Amazon is making, basically saying, get your product going, make sure you can swap models in and out. And once you get there, we're going to create a model that's both good and will save you from some of this sort of subprime AI crisis moments where you don't know how you're going to afford it and the user experience isn't quite there.
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B
Oh my God. I kind of love that because that's the most Amazonian playbook in history. It's like it's. No, I mean, actually that idea that come over, you're already on aws, probably build, use everyone's models and then once you figure out what you want to do and you want to scale it, then you want to come to Nova. We're the cheapest, we're going to undercut on price and still shipping speed, everything. I like that. I think that could be. That would be a brilliant way to approach this. I also, it is kind of interesting that like every big tech company seems to be heading into this battle in their own unique way. Again, meta without open sourcing llama Amazon if they're going to go with the scale and speed and cost like equation. Google integrating into their other overall ecosystem. So I think it actually this has me even more excited about the big tech foundation model battles of 2025.
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A
Wait, you missed one. What's the Microsoft strategy?
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B
What is the Microsoft strategy relative to I guess just integrate into the ecosystem? I mean Azure Office 365, which is kind of, I guess it would be the equivalent of the Google strategy as well. Just build directly into the overall ecosystem. That's both on the actual developer side and on the enterprise side as well.
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Yes, and I think, you know, sort of like a question that I had an answer in mind and that's basically it was rely on OpenAI till open AI got messy and then it was reset. But there was an interesting headline that I saw this week and we don't have to spend too much time on it, but that is that OpenAI. Is this from Financial Times? OpenAI is discussing ditching a clause that cuts off Microsoft's access to OpenAI tech if OpenAI develops. Hei. Right. Remember, Microsoft only put in just about a billion in OpenAI's last round, letting others lead it after being like OpenAI's closest partner for most of its existence. And part of it must have been the fact that if OpenAI decides that it's released reached AGI, Microsoft can't benefit from that technology. And so it's interesting to me, we already have OpenAI moving towards a for profit. And if OpenAI sort of restricts this clause or strikes this clause that says technology cannot be used by Microsoft, if it hits AGI, then maybe Microsoft and OpenAI can get a little bit closer and less messy.
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B
I mean, didn't we already establish a few weeks ago, though OpenAI all they have to do is say they've hit AGI and then it somehow removes them from a lot of contractual stipulations with Microsoft. So just say the words AGI and everything goes away and then they're free to do what they want. But yeah, I think, no, I think that's the right approach or I mean.
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A
Yeah, you could either check the magic acronym or to say, or say all right, we need more money from Microsoft because remember they're gonna need more money in a year and just strike the clause.
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B
It does make me think like are all the big how OpenAI is gonna fit into this overall, like in 2025 what it looks like? Because now again, if the idea really is, and I mean having built on these systems myself, OpenAI is a really nice way to get started in general and you can quickly get in, in the direction of like solutions that you actually are looking for. But it's expensive, it doesn't scale amazingly, they don't have a very well developed customer success or enterprise like function. And it's not built like a big, you know, enterprise serving business. So really it could make sense that let go out and experiment, build your POCs on OpenAI or anthropic or whatever else and then come to us and we will, we will be the place you actually spend all your money.
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A
Okay. And one of the limitations that we've seen with OpenAI is they haven't had that enterprise side of the business. And in fact, one of the things that really stood out to me as I was researching AWS is OpenAI still isn't on AWS as a way for enterprises to build with OpenAI through their services. And to me that one of the standout, if not the standout remarks from Garmin in that interview was he said we are open to having OpenAI on AWS if that's what our customers want. So that's the overture from Amazon. And I think OpenAI probably has a contractual obligation not to move away from Azure and Microsoft, but I could. That's one of my predictions, I think for the coming year. And I'm going to, I'm honing in a little bit on what I think is going to happen in 2025. But I do think hearing the way that Garmin spoke about it, OpenAI and AWS are going to make a deal next year because OpenAI needs that enterprise customer.
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B
You heard it here. OpenAI is going to be on AWS.
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Alex Cantroit's predictions so, speaking of OpenAI, we sort of teased it at the front. They're doing this thing called Shipmas where they're releasing a new product every day for 12 weekdays, I believe. And this is going to include, according to reports from the Verge, Sora and a new reasoning model. They've also just made their reasoning model 01 generally available. What do you think about shipments? Is this Kind of like a do or die moment for OpenAI.
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I don't think it's a do or die moment. I think it's as you said at the beginning of the show, maybe it's just them catching up. Sora was supposed to be out a long time ago. And let's also note one of the items that's anticipated is a Santa Santa inspired voice for ChatGPT. So let's not call that some massive piece of shipping that was.
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They were like, basically, we need a 12th day, what can we do? And they're like around the whiteboard and someone's like, Santa GPT. And they're like, Santa GPT.
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They're like, we got 11. Just one more. Someone give us something Santa. I think the idea also with ChatGPT Pro was another. I think that was the day one of shipmas $200 a month for advanced compute access and access to the O1 reasoning model. I think it's, I think it's smart. I think it's like, it's basically kind of a super fan strategy for people who are just really, really big fans of OpenAI ready to spend a little bit of money giving them access. And I actually think it's a better rollout strategy. And we were going to talk about Google's video models. Like a lot of these companies, the way they roll out product is either in some like exclusive limited preview that no one really knows who has access. There's some examples that, you know, get circulated on X and that's all we see. And then they have or they have a big demo and we just really don't know what it's capable of and who's using it versus if you're willing to pay $200 a month, you get access. And just almost starting to really test the price point that people are willing to be comfortable to actually access these technologies. So I'm a fan of ChatGPT Pro. I'm not going to subscribe, but I'm interested.
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A
So do you think that this $200 subscription which is going to give you unlimited access to things like the voice interface O and reasoning model, do you think it's going to appeal to a large enough base to be meaningful?
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B
Well, you know what, here, here's my theory on what the strategy is here. I think no consumer in their right mind is going to pay $200 a month. So maybe this is kind of the backdoor enterprise strategy of OpenAI. Rather than having some kind of like heavy contractual enterprise negotiation involving salespeople, it's basically like $200 a month is kind of. That you can put it on your corporate expense card. You can start to get it in more into actual like larger enterprise use cases without having to. Without again avoiding the traditional sales process. So that's. I think they this. They're sneakily entering enterprise in a way that doesn't go through that's different than the rest.
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A
And remember we saw that chart that said ChatGPT is going to be the bulk of their revenue and maybe this is part of it.
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B
Yeah, yeah. Wait, you're. You're really making me bullish on OpenAI again here.
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Just selling here. 12 days of shipments have a lot of opportunity ahead of them. And maybe part of that is Sora because they have. The rumors do say that Sora is going to be part of this 12 Days of Shipmas or they're calling it 12 Days of OpenAI. I think internally they call it Shipmas. Are you excited for Sora? Are you looking forward to it? Because here's the thing, the market is filled with video generators. I know you've used a bunch. And so what do you think about Sora and where it might fit?
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B
I'm actually very excited because I've been testing like Generative Video for a while now and Sora should is supposed to be good and it's in such a weird area because like you're not making anything extended, you're making short clips. It's gotten better and better. There's already. There's like a Coca Cola ad, I believe, that was supposedly completely made with Generative AI. And I actually believe it was like, if you remember like a year or two ago, people would say, actually especially like two years ago, people would say this ad was made with AI. And in reality it was like they went to ChatGPT and created a script with OpenAI and then probably had like very heavy production. Whereas now you can actually see it's like a bunch of disparate clips kind of inter, like spliced together with some narrative underlying it. And it's not bad for like a V1, not even a V1, but a V like 0.001. It's not bad. So I think if Sora actually the same way ChatGPT brought generative chat to the world, if it opens this to more and more people to just start being creative, then I think it start. We start to see like what is actually even get a glimpse of the possibility of what's going to happen. No one is going to be making like blockbuster movies tomorrow, but I think we'll start to see some really creative stuff done if this is actually easily accessible.
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A
The video quality of the stuff that's already out there is excellent. So Google, for instance, it made its largest or its latest generative AI model, veo, available for businesses. This is through its cloud offering. And this is according to the Verge, Veo is capable of generating high quality 1080p resolution videos in a range of different visual and cinematic styles from text or image based prompts. And on the page where they released this, they had a few examples of the videos they've created. I wouldn't say that they're, you know, mind blowing, but they're good enough, right? And I think that if you could have some consistency in scenes, right, because I think that's the big problem with this stuff is you can ask it to create a scene and then ask it to create the next scene, but the next scene looks nothing like the first scene. So you can't really stitch them together in any coherent way. So if it gets to that point, then you're talking about a tool that can be very, very useful to folks.
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B
Yeah, the Google one, I think actually the most interesting part. So their model VEO that they're, they've announced and again it's in like limited preview, it's. You can take, you can generate a photo with Imagen3, their generative image model. There's like a image of a puppy that's completely generated and then you can make it move and it actually works. But if you think, if you get, can make it from that image, then you can actually get a consistent character across a number of different videos and you can start to have some fun, you can start to do something kind of interesting. So to me, with video, I want to play with this stuff. I want access. If they're really shipping this soon, I'm very excited because I've been skeptical on a lot of this that like when all the SORA demo videos, even the SORA videos that quote unquote leaked that were all beautiful, like, until I can sit down, put in a prompt and see something very good, I'm skeptical. I think we, we should get there soon. But I have not said like actually been able to see the results in real life, in real time myself.
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A
I will say I saw a very convincing demo of video AI this week and I'm not going to name the company, I don't want to pick on them, but I tried it myself this morning, tried to make a video of two guys podcasting about technology as A cartoon. I think I tried it an hour and a half ago and it's still rendering. So I think the big issue here is the time that it takes.
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B
Performance and load time is a whole other thing like how, how these companies are going to actually try to make it a usable experience. And again, consumer, as consumers, we are spoiled beyond belief.
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A
That's true.
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B
The fact that like Amazon can't even add generative AI to Alexa because we want our answer in 0.2 seconds. I think in the latency, like we're, we're spoiled.
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A
Well, whose fault is that? I mean, the tech companies just keep doing things that make us take for granted.
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B
You made it good, Bezos.
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A
It is. He had, he had a great interview this week at the, at the Deal Book conference. I don't know if you watched that. It was excellent.
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B
No. What did he say?
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A
He talked a lot about his ownership of the Washington Post. He talked about the fact that he's spending a lot of time at Amazon now and 95% of that is on AI. So I do wonder if he watched the Garmin interview.
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B
Oh, he's back at Amazon.
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A
Yeah, he's back there. I don't think he actually ever left, but he's been prioritizing other things. Space. His space vision is pretty interesting where he is basically thinking of it as a way instead of escaping Earth, to basically take a lot of industry and move it off earth. So he's saying you do creative stuff like manufacturing on Earth, any heavy manufacturing, heavy polluting things, you do it off earth and then bring it back via low cost spaceflight. And he also just kind of talked a little bit about himself and his legacy and how he wants to be viewed basically as an inventor and not as the richest man on Earth. But that's also like cry me a river in terms of like you don't like people focusing on your wealth.
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B
I feel you never. You don't say how you want to be perceived.
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A
But no, that's what Sorkin asked him. And I think it was really interesting because he talked about how we think we know public figures, but we really don't and we're only going to read headlines about them which cover about 2% of what they do. And you can't really. And then the public just forms an image of a person and you can't really get to know a person based off of that. I think that's really true. And he basically said, listen, I gave up trying to be understood a long time ago. And that's basically why he's given up doing interviews with the press, and he does one every once in a while because he sees it useful. Go ahead.
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B
Okay, okay, okay. I think this is where you don't need to be understood as the CEO of a large tech company and owner of the Washington Post. You should only be understood. And the only expectation is you are understood as the founder and longtime CEO of Amazon and what you did there or the founder of Blue Origin. I don't need to know you any more than that. Like, I think this is one thing that the blurred line between, like, I mean, we're going to be talking about Pat Gelsinger in just a little bit. I know nothing about Pat Gelsinger, the person, and I'm okay with that. We can talk about performance at intel, but I think corporate leaders having the expectation that people have some deeper understanding or connection to them is definitely a more recent phenomenon. And I think it's a bad one.
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A
Okay, so, first of all, I, I just think it was an interesting point that he brought up in the interview. And what you just said reminds me of Charles Barkley's analysis of a dirty player in the NBA. And they were talking a lot about intent and characteristics and stuff. And the guy probably, I think he just bashed somebody in the face with an elbow or something like that. And he had had it. You know, he had done it repeatedly. I don't know who it was. Maybe it was Draymond Green. It was probably Draymond Green and Charles Barkley.
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B
You don't truly know Draymond Green. That's true.
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A
I think we know Draymond Green, though. But Charles Barkley basically looks at Shaq and goes, listen, like, you are what you do. And it's true. You are what you do.
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B
That's why. And it doesn't need to be bigger than that or deeper than that. I also find it kind of amazing that Jeff Bezos, social media and trying to say that people don't understand me and the, the tight shirt posts of the. Of recent years, that gave us an understanding that maybe I'm surprised he wanted us to have. Yeah, but we digress.
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A
No, I mean, he definitely cares about his public perception, for sure. And then one other thing that came out from that interview, he's definitely a huge Trump supporter, which is sort of like, you know, that's the context behind the Wash killing, the Washington Post endorsement. And it's one of those things where. And he's within his rights to do it. I think that it's one of those things where he really could have Just come out and said, hey, I'm killing this endorsement of Kamala Harris because I believe Donald Trump is going to be a better leader and I own the paper. And instead he made it this thing about media trust. And I just think that's just blatantly disingenuous. But we digress.
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B
With you on that one. With you on that one. But in terms of public communications and shaping the public perception, advertising is something that OpenAI is exploring.
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A
Oh, yeah. So this was really a fascinating story. So in The Financial Times, OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar gave an interview and I think that just like as a throwaway line and I could be wrong on here, but she said, we plan to be thoughtful about when and where we implement ads and said that she was open to it. And then the FT has this headline, OpenAI explores advertising as it Steps Up Revenue Drive. So they published a story and I think OpenAI comms was like, wait, that's not the message we were hoping to give. Because there's a paragraph in the story that says. In a statement following the interview, Friar added, our current business is experiencing rapid growth and we see significant opportunities within our existing business model. While we're open to exploring other revenue streams in the future, we have no active plans to pursue advertising. Look, I've done enough of these stories. When you see a note included after the fact, that's an angry call from PR and the reporter saying, okay, fair enough, I'll put in your statement, send me something. And then they drop it in.
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B
Yeah, But I think OpenAI, they've brought up search advertising in the past themselves and they should be like, if search GPT is really going to be a thing, then you monetize search. Perplexity is going to be doing it. Someone is going to crack like search based generative AI advertising. So it's odd to me that they wouldn't want to make that part of their overall portfolio of revenue because it seems it's a pretty good area. Google's vulnerable. They might as well go after it. I don't know why you would push back too hard on that.
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A
Right. It's a great point. I think they want to push back because I think Silicon Valley has a natural aversion to advertising. I mean, look at the companies that do advertising. Like the number one example is meta and there's like an ick factor to it. And I think OpenAI has a brand and they want to protect it.
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B
Wait, did you just say Silicon Valley has an aversion to advertising?
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A
No, no. So this is actually so thank you for pushing me on this. This is an important point. I think if you speak with most product people, they will tell you that ads ruin products. They don't want ads. Every company starts out saying, we don't like ads. Think about what Netflix has done. Think about the Uber business model and Lyft, okay, just to name a few that have recently introduced ads to their product. And Amazon Prime Video and Amazon in particular. I mean, Jeff Bezos himself has talked about how ads are terrible. Steve Jobs, I don't think like ads. Now, Apple is low key, a big ad seller. And so I think the vibe in Silicon Valley is your product should be good enough and loved enough that people will want to pay for it and you'll never have to use their data and sell it to advertisers. We all know the truth is that advertising is a high margin business and they all end up doing it and, but they take a brand hit. I mean, the fact that you have, you know, on your Lyft app there's ads for whatever or Uber there, ads for whatever.
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B
It's.
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A
It does, it does diminish the product experience, however useful advertising can be. And there are also data collection concerns, like think about everything you tell a chat bot. There's going to be concerns. Is ChatGPT taking what I tell it and handing it to advertisers and making money off my data? I promise you that when this comes out, this is going to be a controversy. And so that's why I think there's an ick factor. It doesn't mean that Silicon Valley isn't like the world's most successful seller of ads.
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B
All right, I'll give you that. At least they don't sit down and aspire to build the world's greatest technology so they can plaster a bunch of ads on it. I think that's fair. But again, with advertising, we have finally gotten to AGI and now here is a bunch of advertisements. Actually, I kind of respect perplexity that they are starting with actually embracing advertising and saying, you know what, we think there's relevant things to show you around the results that you get. And I actually don't think it's a bad thing. Meanwhile, I don't know. Have you ever used Nextdoor? So Sarah Friar, the CFO who was just cited in the FT story, was previously the CFO of Nextdoor, the local social network. Have you ever used it?
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A
Yes, I have used it just a little bit and they did send me an email about a tsunami hitting San Francisco, which never hit And I don't live in San Francisco anymore but I do appreciate the communication next door. Always looking out.
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B
Well, no. Oh no, sorry. She was the CEO of Nextdoor. I mean that was the most like kind of, I don't want to say spammy but aggressive advertising driven business around. So like and then OpenAI just hired as new CMO from Coinbase. I mean they've been bringing in a lot of traditional marketing and advertising talent. So they have to be looking at it. I get pushing back in the short term because you don't want to make it the conversation, but they definitely have to be looking at it.
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A
Wouldn't you say that these companies are well suited to pursue advertising because their own advertising efforts show just how well they get the advertising medium.
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B
The ironic segue from Alex because basically there's been a number of. We've talked about some of the past ads Google where with Gemini they had a dad trying to help his daughter write a sweet letter to an Olympian. But instead of just like her writing in misspelled words and backwards letters using Gemini to craft the message, Apple has released these terrible Apple Intelligence ads where the actress Bella Ramsey basically kind of like power moves over people trying to pitch her on ideas where she forgets what they had talked about previously but asks Apple Intelligence to recap it for us. We had this week the browser company who we've been talking a bit about more. They make the ARC browser which I'm a huge fan of. They've released an ad for their new AI browser dia, which it's still a little vague as to what it will be but the idea is it's a completely rethought browser experience based on AI, which I'm excited about. I think the ARC is so good, I have faith they should do something interesting. But the founder, Josh Miller, he in this ad, basically it's like instead of going to Amazon finding products for his wife and then creating a list and copying it into an email with this browser you could basically be like find me products for my wife. Craft an email. And the email that's crafted starts, hi Valerie, I hope you're doing well. I came across a few interesting products on Amazon. It goes on best Josh. So it basically generates an email from Josh Miller, the founder to his wife Valerie in the tone of the most like business corporate language imaginable that got a bit of backlash. And then you don't talk to your wife like that. Oh my God. I hope this email finds you well.
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A
I hope you're doing well in good health in this only I'm in trouble.
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B
Only if I'm in a lot of trouble.
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A
But that's when you break out the GPT email as an AI assistant. I apologize for what I said last night.
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B
I then Claude, I don't know. Have you seen these Claude ads? I mean, in New York, just when.
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A
You sent them to me, but I, I, why don't you talk about them?
- [32:48]
B
Oh, see, I, I've been seeing them around like out of home billboards, subway stops, but basically it's like the biggest disconnect from real people and these companies. So they, they have language. It's like a big splashy slogan. Move your work up and to the Claude building on up and to the right. And there's a graph going up to the right. No normal person who doesn't even understand what Claude is. If you haven't used ChatGPT, you don't even know it's a competitor to Chat GPT. Another one, a chatbot, a friend. Another one. Intelligence so big you'd swear it was from Texas. Like these anthropic is going into these and spending a lot of money, I'm sure, on these advertisements where no one knows what Claude is. I know what Claude is. You know, we love it, but no one knows what it is, what it's competing against. If they just said better than ChatGPT or something like that, I feel at least it would have a shot. But there was, I'd seen something a while ago where someone was like, these companies need to just hire one normal person who just sits in the back and doesn't do anything. And when an ad is ready for productions, they just put it in front of them and they just say yes or no. Just someone who totally detached and normal. And all they do is just review these ads for yes or no. I think this needs to be a fundamental part of every marketing department.
- [34:21]
A
Ron, Tony, you know, we joke about it on the show, but I really do think that we should form an ad agency or an ad consultancy because you're so right on this. Better than ChatGPT is a better slogan than any of the ones that you just read. And it just goes down to the fundamental principle of marketing. And this is the thing that I learned when I started my career out in marketing. All you have to do is talk to the person you're trying to sell to and tell them what the benefit is. And the second you get too creative, you lose that plot and you have to go back to the drawing board. And the benefit over here is that it's a chatbot that's better than ChatGPT. Better than ChatGPT tells exactly what your message is to the people using ChatGPT. These other ones question your questions. A chat about a friend, it's so big you'd swear it's from Texas. They tell you absolutely nothing about what this product is, what it should be used for. And to me, it feels like they hired the ad agency behind the Manhattan Mini Storage ads that we see in New York all the time. And it's always like a pun. And you know what it is, it's Manhattan Mini Storage. But this you don't. It's something that is a new category. You're establishing a category. Just explain the product, show the benefit, speak to the audience. And they haven't done any of that.
- [35:43]
B
Yep, most people like. It's still only a portion of the population that knows what a generative chatbot is and why it's useful. It's a growing portion, but they still associate. ChatGPT is kind of becoming the Google or the Xerox of that category. So you have to go at that. And also so people don't barely know what a chatbot is and then certainly don't know what Claude is. Yeah, I think big fail, big fail. But maybe it's a good product. It's. It is better than ChatGPT, in my opinion. So maybe they'll just say that and hire Cantrewitz and Roy and everything will be okay.
- [36:26]
A
It's a good sounding agency name. I mean, first of all, thanks for letting me go first. We could do Roy and Cantrewitz. I'd be interested.
- [36:31]
B
Alphabetical order.
- [36:32]
A
Alphabetical order, that's a W for me on that one. All right, let's take a break. We're going to come back and we're going to talk about Bitcoin hitting $100,000. And then we're going to talk about Pat Gelsinger, CEO of Intel, being ousted back right after this. You have one goal. Find the perfect place to grow your company.
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- [37:48]
A
We're back here on Big Technology Podcast Friday edition. So bitcoin has finally hit $100,000 per coin. It's up 126% since January coin according to Cointelegraph. A couple of ideas here for what is happening. There's an idea being floated by Micro Strategies Michael Saylor that you might want to, that the US Might want to create a strategic bitcoin reserve. Maybe now that David Sachs is going to be the crypto czar and the AI czar for President Trump, that is something that we end up seeing. Also, Gary Gensler, the nemesis of crypto, is out at the SEC and he is going to be replaced by a crypto advocate named Paul Atkins. So that, I don't know, I mean, I guess you have a more favorable regulatory environment. We also know that Bitcoin is in ETFs now and those inflows have been growing. So you have the conditions that make it time for bitcoin to grow. One question I have is the run up has been so fast and furious, you wonder where this could go and whether it's sustainable. But then again, you know, whenever I think about this is it sustainable? Question, I also wonder, well, does it now go to a million dollars a coin? I mean, can we see that? Like, where does this stop?
- [39:09]
B
I think the bitcoin story, for me, it's not really a story. It's more just because right now it's trading as a proxy for the more people buy it, the more the value goes up and as it always has, is like Zeke Fox's book number goes up. That's the story underlying this entire thing. There's no change in the technology, the fundamentals, anything. It's a bet. It's essentially the DJT or the Trump spec stock. Like it's a, it's a proxy of where people think it's going and who's being appointed SEC chair. So I think it should continue to go up, I guess, until one tweet, if Donald Trump maybe wants to push an alternative coin with his name on it over Bitcoin and say that actually bitcoin is bad, that could Hurt it. But right now it's just trading on the whims of, you know, like these. Who is going to be around, how much less regulation there can be. And there's really, in terms of things to try to analyze. We analyze a lot on this show, but I'm not even going to try to do this one.
- [40:22]
A
So let me tell you, I was watching CNBC this week and there was a great clip on Squawk Box where there's an investor who comes on and he's talking about, hey, there's all this risk and it's very volatile and I'm not advising clients to get in. And Joe Kernan looks at him and he goes, you missed it. And he goes, yes, we missed it.
- [40:45]
B
I respect that. I mean, I'll say I missed it. I'm like, if I was, if I was holding right now, I would certainly be saying, oh, this thing, there's so much promise. It's the new gold. But I'm not. So I will just have to stand by and just watch and. But I do like that. It. It's volatile. It's always been volatile. It's. Nothing has significantly changed other than there's going to be less regulation in the near term.
- [41:18]
A
Nothing has changed. But one rule holds constant number goes up.
- [41:23]
B
Number goes up. Other than Hock Tua's coin.
- [41:27]
A
So, yeah, I was going to say that. So when you mentioned the Donald Trump coin, I said, wait a second, this is, this could be risky. So what happened with the Hock Tua coin?
- [41:34]
B
Hock Tua issued a new coin in her name. What was it called?
- [41:39]
A
Okay, so it's called Hawkcoin. And she launched it. And within 20 minutes of launch, it goes from 40490 million to 41 million. So this thing launches. I don't know. I'm not sure if she pocketed all the money, but some fans said that they invested like their life savings in hoc to a coin and it's gone. And now people are saying that she should go to jail.
- [42:06]
B
When I was looking at the Hawk to a Coin, I wasn't thinking about just the price. I was thinking about the underlying technology and how it could really revolutionize the banking system and bank the unbanked and the true promise of what Hock to a coin could do for the world. So it was very sad to see.
- [42:26]
A
It'S all about the fundamentals. Hashtag fundamentals.
- [42:31]
B
I don't know. We're going to see a lot more of this. Thank you Hock to for stepping out there and giving us Dollar sign hawk to start this whole thing. But we're going to be seeing a lot more of this in the coming months.
- [42:47]
A
And you and I are about to sit down with Ryan Broderick from Garbage Day talking about what's happening to the Internet. And I think we'll talk to him also about once you reach a level of notoriety, you start one of these coins and it'll be interesting to hear.
- [42:57]
B
You gotta have his perspective. I mean, why? How do you not have a coin if you have the social media clout and you know it's fleeting, so you gotta cash in.
- [43:07]
A
Yeah, we could start a big technology coin, but it would be abbreviated as btc, and I think that's taken.
- [43:14]
B
And trying to be nuanced does not make the number go up.
- [43:18]
A
Also, we respect our listeners and we won't take your lifesavers. We're just here to provide a fun show for you every week.
- [43:26]
B
So maybe hire our advertising agency one day.
- [43:29]
A
That would be good. It's real value there. So, speaking of the podcast, we had Pat Gelsinger on from Intel a couple months ago. Former CEO of Intel who was ousted this week. Gelsinger, I think he's a fascinating guy. He's. He had been at Intel. He came back with a vision that said, we want to design, we also want to manufacture. We want to manufacture for others. And when he and I spoke, he told me that building the manufacturing plant is going to take five years. It's one of the more memorable moments of a big technology interview that I've done. And I'm like, five years? How does it take that long? And he started to explain the technical thing about it. And I don't doubt that it's very difficult to pull off technically, but it just is so interesting to me because his code word inside intel was torrid. A torrid pace. And people would wear shirts with the word torrid on it. But then again, you're taking five years to build foundries in the U.S. you have all this money from the Chips act, billions of dollars, and you're going to take that long. And it turns out that he just didn't have that much time. And just some really notable things. I mean, since he was named the CEO four years ago. Since then, Nvidia gained 150 trillion market cap, and he lost 150 billion in market cap from Intel. And it's no longer one of the 10 most valuable chip companies in the world. Its stock is also down more than 60% since he took over as CEO. And as we said, earlier. And as Charles Barkley would echo, you are what you do. And ultimately, time ran out for him. Even though he made his board pledge that they would be behind his plan. He simply just didn't have the ability to keep up with this plan given his poor performance over the four years he was CEO. And now he's out.
- [45:23]
B
I'm a little, it's, it saddens me because I like big bets from big corporate leaders of traditional companies and I respect it. And I like the fact that he was willing to say, like, this is going to be a big bet and you all need to sign off on it. And the idea that within two years you can already, you can be ousted in saying like something that really is like a foundational long term bet is not working. It's, it's kind of sad. But it is a publicly traded company and has quarterly earnings. And the number that shocked me was in October, the company reported a loss. The expected loss was $1.1 billion and the loss was $16.6 billion in a quarter. Like when you miss the numbers by 15 billion in a quarter, that is shocking.
- [46:24]
A
You can't survive that.
- [46:26]
B
You can't survive that. And that's, it's tough because you simply can't. And then the other one is, you said like, Nvidia's market cap is up $3 trillion since this big bet was taken. So I, I don't know what the right way to approach it would have been. Would have been the, again, Jeff Bezos, like telegraphing to the market. Clearly these things will take a long time. Still not losing 16 billion. Still maybe being slightly unprofitable.
- [46:54]
A
I mean, how do you miss a number by 15 billion?
- [46:57]
B
I don't know, like, I've never heard of that done before. Normally. In that case, you would think they would have already kind of like been having, you know, conversations, telegraphing, leaking, quote, whatever. It is just something to like warn the market.
- [47:12]
A
Guys, can you imagine what finance was like in intel when they saw those numbers come in?
- [47:18]
B
Oh, no, they're supposed to be tracking.
- [47:19]
A
That through the quarter too.
- [47:21]
B
I want to know the, yeah, just the prep for that call when they're all sitting around like, all right, what's the strategy? How are we, how are we, how are we going to spend this one?
- [47:32]
A
I wouldn't come into work. I would do an Antonio Brown, take my jersey off, retire, middle of the game, I'll be done.
- [47:40]
B
But he tried big bets. Still respected?
- [47:44]
A
Yes. No, I do respect the big bet. And the thing is, what's going to happen to the bet now because he was committed to building a foundry to build chips and building that business up. And this from the Financial Times. So that might not be the case anymore. Key to his plan was agreeing to accept some $8 billion from the Washington. From Washington and the Chips Act. Funding the deal made Intel a top example of Joe Biden's efforts to reduce US Dependence on Asian tech as trade tensions with China ratchet higher. But on Wednesday, while the co chief executive David Zisner reassured investors that the company's existing strategy is intact, industry insiders don't think that's the case. They believe that his hasty exit could be a prelude to intel doing what was once unthinkable. Moving away from manufacturing its own chips altogether, potentially dealing a serious blow to US Attempts to rebuild its domestic semiconductor manufacturing center. I think after this, I would be surprised if intel continued to build its own chips. It didn't work. Gelsinger's out massive losses. They might pull back under newer leadership.
- [48:55]
B
Well, as Charles, Charles Barkley also said, sometimes the. At the. Oh, sorry. Also, as Charles Barkley has also said, sometimes that light at the end of the tunnel is a train. And the CHIPS act really made it seem like investing in this would present an incredible opportunity. But unfortunately that 16 billion dollar loss hit the strategy proved wrong. And we are where we are now. And I agree this is, I mean we have talked, we talked about this. I remember after the Gelsinger episode, what is intel like? Where do they fit into this overall picture? And they were trying to figure out that themselves. And I think it's clear it has not been figured out.
- [49:44]
A
We have just a few minutes left. I want to quickly talk about this TikTok ban being upheld by the US appeals court today on Friday. So basically TikTok has been banned by the US Congress to basically either the company has to sell its US Assets or you can't operate in the country anymore. They went to the federal court of appeals saying this is violating free speech rights. And the judge said the First Amendment exists to protect free speech in the United States. Here the government acted solely to protect that freedom from a foreign adversary nation and to limit the adversary's ability to gather data on the people of the United States and therefore it's not an infringement on the First Amendment. So the ban is upheld by this federal court and this ban goes into effect January 19th. So we're literally a month and change away from it actually taking effect. And you would think that it's basically all said and done here. But, but, however, it seems very different because what I'm seeing here is that there are loopholes for TikTok to get out of the situation. And those loopholes include that they could potentially. This is from an NPR story. They could first go through the appeals process, they could reappeal again and then maybe take it to the Supreme Court. But there's also something else that's interesting that's happening here. And this is again from the NPR story. So it says Trump can declare when Trump takes office that the steps Tic Tac has taken to distance itself from ByteDance, including a plan known as Project Texas that walls off Americans data from China, qualifies as divestiture. It's brand new for me. And Trump also instructed his attorney general. Trump can also instruct his attorney general not to enforce the law. We all know that Trump has been, has done an about face here on the tick tock situation where he first was for the ban. Now on the campaign trail, he was not for the ban. My takeaway here is TikTok isn't getting banned and they're going to find some way, some loophole to get out of it.
- [52:02]
B
I think. I agree. I don't think they're getting banned. Obviously, the timing was very carefully set for January 19, still under the Biden administration where, you know, they like that they have to try to resolve this. We've been talking about big bets. It's kind of amazing that bytedance has just kind of doubled down. We are not selling our US Operations and that's that. So I agree. At this stage, the more it becomes clear that Trump will support TikTok being allowed to operate in the United States, I think they'll find some kind of wiggle room, some kind of appeals process. It's not going to go away and disappear from 170 million American devices. But it's still pretty interesting to me that like, you know, all the talk of spin outs and whatever else seems to be going away and it's literally just, no, we're here, we're sticking around. And I think they probably will. And I'm the one who was saying 2024, we'll see a TikTok ban. We saw the legislation, we just didn't see the ban.
- [53:09]
A
US Government I think, is just not good at acting against tech companies. So. And by the way, especially if TikTok is banned, then we'll lose one of the more in promising rising genres of TikToks, which is that people have been filming their layoffs and firings and then posting them to TikTok and getting wild amounts of views. This is from the Financial times. More than 32,000 posts on TikTok now carry the hashtag layoff. And the trend of publicizing layoffs, particularly among younger workers, has created new challenges to companies managing their public image. I think that layoffs these days are usually so impersonal, where people have to read off a script because they might get sued if not. And I, you know, I mean, I don't. I'm a one person company pretty much, so I don't have to worry about this. But I do celebrate the idea of people filming and sort of showing what layoffs have become in the United States. I think that if you work for a company, you're at least owed some sort of frank explanation of what went wrong and when it went wrong. So that's my perspective. Keep filming them, kids. Keep filming the layoffs.
- [54:21]
B
Well, okay, on one hand, I guess the promise of social media was always to kind of bring light to scenario situations that never before really were understood. And I agree that, like, what does it mean to get laid off? What does it look like? How does it sound? Is something that, I mean, hopefully most people don't have extensive experience with. So I think like, at least getting a better understanding of that makes some sense. But I just. If you're hiring someone and you're looking them up and then the first thing you see when you're reviewing their resume is them recording their layoff video, are you hiring that person?
- [55:04]
A
No, I wouldn't. I mean, yeah, okay. But then again, just shows how courageous those people are for posting this stuff because they are going to get blowback. And okay, maybe it's.
- [55:14]
B
They're just, it's not courageous.
- [55:18]
A
I think there is, there's something to.
- [55:19]
B
Be said for the likes.
- [55:21]
A
It is for the likes. But also just like, can we fight? I don't know, can we fight back against the system that sort of dehumanizes workers on the way out? I don't know. I mean, the thing is, we have the system the way that it is because workers often sue based off of what they hear in these layoff meetings, so.
- [55:39]
B
Well, exactly. Workers often sue because. And that, like, that is a big driver. And again, I think that can be good in many circumstances. But because it's like this is one of those where there's push and pull both ways. I'm a big proponent of limiting corporate power in many instances, but I think this is one where it definitely. There's push and pull.
- [56:03]
A
This is what China wants. It wants us to be filming our layoffs and destabilize the US labor force. Another W for China.
- [56:10]
B
So though we added 227,000 jobs today, so everything's still going humming along with the US Economy, we can have.
- [56:18]
A
We can have everything. We can have it all. We can have TikTok. We can have jobs, growth, and we can have more transparency in the workplace.
- [56:25]
B
I want to see people filming them getting hired and everyone just happy and celebrating. That's what I want. Mary shipman in this 12 days of shipment season. Mary shipments.
- [56:37]
A
All right, Ranjan, great speaking with you, as always. Have a great weekend.
- [56:41]
B
All right, See you next week.
- [56:43]
A
Thanks, everybody, for listening. And we'll see you next time on BIG Technology podcast.