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Big Technology Podcast
Apple’s Anthropic Flirtation, Can Meta Build Superintelligence?, AI Browser Wars — With M.G. Siegler
00:58:25
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- [00:00]
Alex
Apple is thinking about handing Siri's brain to Anthropic. Does Meta have what it takes to build super intelligence? And will you soon be using an AI browser? That's coming up right after this. Welcome to Big Technology Podcast, where we're kicking off a new monthly segment, or really monthly episode with the great M.G. siegler of Spyglass, who's a regular guest with us here. But I thought, you know what, let's amp it up. We'll spend the first Monday of every month speaking with MG about the latest in big tech and AI and spend a lot of time speaking about the great reporting and writing that he does within Spyglass. So, MG really happy to have you here. Very glad to kick this off.
- [00:39]
M.G. Siegler
Yeah, thanks for asking me to do it, Alex, and I'm excited to. To chat with you on a regular basis.
- [00:44]
Alex
Yes. And I'm definitely stoked about this. So to kick it off, let's pick up our Apple discussion. And I think just having this regular cadence is great because we can sort of check in on these companies and say, hey, how have they been doing since our last conversation? Of course, the last time we spoke, the day after wwdc, basically no AI, we said, okay, they're going to have to make some dramatic moves, maybe grasp for a perplexity, do some acquisition, or potentially even rewrite Siri itself. And it looks like Apple is starting to consider this seriously with some news that came out over the past week or so where they are considering taking either OpenAI or Anthropic's claudebot and putting it in basically the bottomizing Siri and changing the brain around. And Anthropic seems to be the one that is the leader, at least in the clubhouse. So what do you think about this potential move from Apple and what's the significance of it?
- [01:40]
M.G. Siegler
I think it's long overdue. You know, I've been writing about this for a while now, and at one point I think it was around. You remember when several months ago, maybe around the first part of the year, there was a whole meme going around about how, oh, it was around the time of the super bowl because it was a whole meme around how, you know, Siri couldn't correctly know who had won previous Super Bowls, something as rudimentary as that from like a knowledge graph perspective. And they would get all sorts of stuff wrong. Thought the Chiefs had won like 50 of them or something like that. And so it seemed like right after that point I had written sort of what I thought was a little bit more Provocative of a piece with you know, the, the old Betteridge's headline law of the question mark in it of being like should Apple replace Siri with basically an LLM with, with, with ChatGPT? And then after that that super bowl thing came out, it's like I was pushed over the edge. It's like they've got to replace Siri with something else, whether it be ChatGPT or Claude or Google Gemini or one of the other products. Because this is just really table stake stuff that they should. You know, they've been working on Siri for 15 plus years. You know, to their credit, as we've long talked about, they were first mover in that and I think that hurt them in many ways. But the fact that we're in 2025 or you know, last year 2024 and they couldn't get something as simple as that.
- [03:06]
Unnamed Guest
Right.
- [03:07]
M.G. Siegler
While all these other competitive products have no problems doing those things. And again they're trying to do it in house, they're trying to do their own systems and stuff, but all of this stuff is out there and the fact that they already had the relationship with OpenAI per last year's WWDC in place to do some of the offloading of, you know, the, the wider knowledge Siri stuff, you know, reaching out to the web, like why couldn't they just have slotted that in? Obviously it's easier said than done. But still to this, to this reporting now they've been thinking about doing it and obviously they've been testing it and doing this like bake off internally to see which of the products might be better. I did think that it was super interesting that they wound up at least per this report with, with Claude rather than ChatGPT.
- [03:54]
Alex
Yeah, that was surprising to me and I definitely want to get into the different decisions that they're making and why Anthropic is the lead here and what it means for Anthropic. These are all really interesting parts of the stories. Parts of the story. And I should also note the Betteridge law of headlines is if you put a question mark in the headline, typically the answer is no. But when you asked Jeff Lampada, my Siri, your answer was I think so.
- [04:16]
M.G. Siegler
Yeah.
- [04:16]
Unnamed Guest
Yeah.
- [04:17]
M.G. Siegler
And you know, again we'll see like I. The reporting on it, if I have it right from, from Mark Gurman, who else, you know, basically indicates that they wouldn't do this until next year, you know, a 2026 thing. Does that mean that they wait until sort of WWDC 2026 to announce it as part of iOS. I'm going to bungle it now. IOS 27. Yeah, because it's the future year. Right. So it's not. Right, Right. So would they announce it as iOS27 or do they try to get it out ahead of time as a release on iOS 26, something, you know, ahead of that again, presumably they could, they could just slowly, you know, behind the scenes, just start giving more of the workload over to one of these LLMs that they already have plugged in, as noted. You know, they have chatgpt in there right now. Do they slot in Claude, do they slot in Gemini and then start to offload that work without making a big deal about it? Or do they make a big deal about it? And I could see an argument both ways of wanting to do that.
- [05:19]
Alex
Now, I think you and I are both in favor of this move and we can make the case for it. We have on the show numerous times. Maybe we will come back to that in a moment. But I think let's just make the case against. Because I saw that you sort of grappled with whether this is actually the right move in your post. And the argument that Apple shouldn't do something like this is, look, large language models are going to commoditize at some point. You don't want to rely so much on a third party, a proprietary third party's technology. @ the very least, you can develop this either, either in house or use open source technology. And that importantly gives you way more control. And what Apple wants in every single one of its product experiences is the control. So is that the argument not to do this? And do you think that. I mean, I sort of have this feeling that Apple will eventually kind of fall back on that. Like, yeah, we'll just try to control the experience and do it ourselves. So what would be the counterpoint to that?
- [06:17]
M.G. Siegler
Yeah, and a lot of that was sort of even thinking back to pre. Last year's wwdc leading up to what they would eventually announce was the partnership with OpenAI. There had been the rumors that they were potentially going to do something with them. And what might that look like with regard to Siri? And definitely one of the things that jumps to mind when you first hear that is user privacy.
- [06:37]
Unnamed Guest
Right.
- [06:38]
M.G. Siegler
And Apple's big proponent of user privacy and not wanting to send their own user data over to third parties unnecessarily. And so they obviously have sort of an opt in mechanism to do that right now. But if they were to actually outsource this in A major way would presumably they would still have some sort of opt in to begin with. But would they do it on, you know, the ongoing basis, like saying hopefully not on every query that you know, you would do that. But do they sort of prompt users like once a month or more often or less often than that in order to ensure that they know what they're sending? And you know, I think that that's the one argument, the major argument on Apple side on top of the other stuff that you're, you know, talking about where Apple just wants to control that user experience regardless of sort of the data and user privacy aspect. They want to make sure also that the thing's not going to hallucinate.
- [07:29]
Unnamed Guest
Right.
- [07:29]
M.G. Siegler
I think this was the big fear leading up to again last wwdc, the LLM products were not as, you know, trustworthy as they maybe are now. I mean, in many cases they're still not for certain types of queries.
- [07:41]
Unnamed Guest
Right.
- [07:41]
M.G. Siegler
But obviously Apple's going to worry about that if, if, you know, Gemini tells you to eat rocks or put rocks in the pizza or whatever, Apple's not going to want that as a part of their, their experience. And so do they do something that's more like image playground, which has obviously been very structured and locked down.
- [08:00]
Unnamed Guest
Right.
- [08:01]
M.G. Siegler
Like they only let you use up until recently, up until maybe the new changes that they're rolling out in the new OS 26 layers, they basically only allowed you to do very specific types of, of scenes and using very guardrailed versions. And so do they do something like that? But again, that's probably not going to make for a good product experience for a user perspective if they really try to lock it down that much.
- [08:28]
Alex
Yeah, exactly. As we outline sort of the Apple strategy here and why they may not want to do something like this or why they've dragged their feet to do this. It just seems to me like just all the arguments you can make on the stay closed and don't do a partnership or try to ride it out. They just don't hold water because this stuff is moving so quickly. I'll just give you one example. I'm on my phone all the time talking with Chat GPT. It's like this past weekend I took it from like deep within the apps that I have on like the, you know, maybe third or fourth screen and I put it into the Doc screen because whenever I have a question, you know, this thing connects to the web. I'm like always talking with Chat GPT. It's kind of crazy how often I am speaking with these things and this format of voice is just the thing I believe that's driving a lot of the growth within AI today. And if you wait for, let's say a Samsung or some other Android to deeply integrate with a competitor and provide this experience while you're just standing still and you don't have this integrated into your operating system, I think you could really end up losing phone sales because of it.
- [09:34]
M.G. Siegler
Yeah, I totally agree and I'm one step further than you. Not only is it in my doc, I use the action button to trigger ChatGPT.
- [09:42]
Alex
Really?
- [09:42]
M.G. Siegler
So I have it from your iPhone? Yeah, from my iPhone.
- [09:44]
Alex
That's cool.
- [09:45]
M.G. Siegler
You can do it via shortcuts and it works very well. Like they have one that's like they have different granularity options. You could do it just to open up the app to chat with it. You can even do it so as an overlay screen so you can chat without having to leave another app. It's, it's pretty well done. And you could do trigger right into voice. You could trigger right into voice transcription. So yeah, I use it all the time as well. Certainly I'm not going to use Siri all the time, but if it was baked in, you know, like I think then it's an interesting question of, you know, what, what the differences would be because I don't know about you, but I still sort of do these own, you know, internal bake offs of my own.
- [10:21]
Unnamed Guest
Right.
- [10:22]
M.G. Siegler
When I'm, when I'm doing certain types of queries, right. I'll do, I'll use chat CBT and I'll have Gemini open and you know, sometimes Claude for certain things. Coding of course specifically and things like that. And so I do think that Apple runs a real risk without doing something here because to your point, they're just not moving fast enough to sort of catch up with the current state of the art. And you and I have talked about this before, right? Beyond just even the product integrations. Like one of the reasons that I would worry about Apple going forward is they don't have the right internal mentality about doing this stuff. And you can see it in the sort of products that they've shipped to date specifically obviously with Siri where they're clearly just moving too slowly and don't have the right product cadence in order to do that. And so offloading this will help them in that they would be using a third party to do that I think in the best state. And again, this is something that I, that I argued for in the original piece before this was rumored to be happening, but it's basically like, look, just outsource it for an indefinite amount of time while you work on your own stuff behind the scenes. Take the pressure off the team that's working on it internally. Again, we don't know the timetable of what that would mean. Does it take a year, does it take longer than that? But again, if you fully outsourced it to something like ChatGPT or Claude, then you have the breathing room to be able to do that. And then behind the scenes, it's almost the inverse of what we were talking about before. I would just start to slowly roll out the actual Siri version of Siri, the Apple made version of Siri again with certain types of queries that they feel confident that they can answer now and do a good job with. Obviously they keep the timers and they keep the, you know, the sort of low hanging fruit stuff that's, that's sort of simple right now baked into the system. But I mean for the world queries and things, if they're building it behind the scenes and they can eventually sort of roll in, roll back to, you know, Siri as they, you know, build it behind the scenes.
- [12:15]
Alex
With this integration, by the way, it's kind of crazy for me to hear how ingrained AI voices in your life. I mean, I'll give you kind of an example. What's happened with me. I've kind of ping ponged from Siri back to OpenAI. So using ChatGPT, I'm like typing all these things and I'm asking like it's become my search. And then, you know, I'm expecting AI to be able to do this stuff for me. So when I like need to know the answer to something, like I'll just yell, hey Siri, what's the answer? And then it tends to get that right. I don't know, 10, 20% of the time. And then I was like, well this is an experience I want to have. But obviously Siri's not holding it up to me. So that's where OpenAI got the promotion. And the more and the higher prominence for me and I'm just like, wow, like this is something that I'm just going to use all the time. I'm curious, what, what type of things are you speaking with ChatGPT about that you've given it such a prominent place in your phone?
- [13:08]
M.G. Siegler
Honestly, it's almost, I mean it's, it's most of the Google queries that I used to be doing right Like I mean Google now I predominantly use when I'm on my desktop, if I'm doing research for a post or if I'm trying to look up things to link to, then I will use sort of traditional Google search but for pretty much everything else. And yeah, like you, I would use Siri for things like you know, where, say we're traveling and we're walking around a city. I don't want to know the population like of a place.
- [13:37]
Unnamed Guest
Right.
- [13:38]
M.G. Siegler
I would use Siri for that. Like silly, silly things like that. But sort of fun especially with kids. Like, you know, they like those, those little fun things. But Open AI and ChatGPT have gotten so good at beyond just that, you know, very simple example of giving you like my, my older daughter is obsessed right now with like the London, London Underground system and like knowing all the different tube lines and like when they came about. And so she's like constantly like thirsting for information about these and obviously I know you know the high level names of them but I can't go deep on it. So previously, right, we would have done like a Google search about that probably on your phone like while you're waiting for a tube to come on a certain line. But now you can just, you can just chat with ChatGPT about it and it's really an incredible experience like being able to go back and forth and, and sort of follow answer, asking follow up questions and yeah, that's like one example of something that just has totally changed.
- [14:34]
Alex
Yeah, it's so good. And one of the things that's really nice about ChatGPT was when you're speaking with it in the voice interface there's almost no latency, maybe a little latency if it has to go search the web for something, but otherwise it's spitting these answers back so quickly and they have a bunch of different voices that you can pick from. And I felt sometimes like when I'm switching the voice I feel like I'm murdering that old. I feel kind of bad for it because it just goes to show you, you develop this rapport.
- [14:57]
M.G. Siegler
Your old friend is gone. Yeah, and that actually speaks to how, you know, my older daughter and I started using it when they, you know, the cute like gimmicky thing when they rolled out the Santa voice, right? It was just like it was such a fun thing to do during the holidays, right? It was like, hey Maisie, like come, come listen to this. And you know, it's like, ho, ho, ho, hello there Maisie, how are you? You tell, you can tell you know your daughter's name even though they know you're not talking to it directly. And yeah, it's all sorts of clever, clever user interaction.
- [15:27]
Alex
See, it's one of the more underrated releases from ship miss. Was that.
- [15:31]
M.G. Siegler
Yes, exactly 12 days of shipment.
- [15:33]
Alex
But let's talk about the decision between OpenAI and Anthropic because this to me is almost as interesting as the news that they're actually thinking about this. So the report from Gurman, like we mentioned, is that they are thinking about Anthropic over OpenAI. Let's just talk about the bake off there. Why do you think that is? Because if you just put it product to product, OpenAI's voice mode is mature and much better than Anthropics. Anthropic just released the cloud voice mode. So what do you think is going on behind the scenes there?
- [16:03]
M.G. Siegler
I sort of wonder. When you and I last spoke, we spoke about, you know, the list of companies that Apple could potentially acquire right in the space and, and the one that I had sort of at the top, you know, we, we talked about perplexity, but the one above that even for me was Anthropic, even though I don't think it's possible for them to do that for all sorts of reasons, namely the price at this point. But I do just feel like overall, from everything you hear externally, the mentality that, that Anthropic that team has, and obviously they spun out right from, from OpenAI, famously, you know, some of the, some of the team spun out and started Anthropic in that way. Just the mentality is more in line with what I think Apple would want from, from an AI perspective. And so part of me wonders if it's not that. That said, I don't think that they would, if it was much worse, I don't think that they would, they would pick that over ChatGPT. So obviously they're using it and they do think it's better. I mean, there's been the reports as well that they've been using it for xcode right, internally and that that was going to be the thing that they, they outsourced. Anthropic was going to be the tool that they used on the AI side to outsource vibe coding to. And you know, there's, there's some work, it seems like that's underway now within Xcode that they'll be rolling out along those lines. But at wwdc they also, on the flip side of that, they Talked about using OpenAI more on that side rather than anthropic. So there's all sorts of weird. I don't, maybe Apple is concerned about going too far deep with one partner and becoming beholden to them.
- [17:36]
Unnamed Guest
Right.
- [17:37]
M.G. Siegler
And they worry that if they go too far down the OpenAI rabbit hole that yeah, they could either get, you know, screwed one way or another, be it because they feel that they have to use them all the time going forward. And, and they would rather sort of have these entities play off one another. And again, like I would anticipate that in, in a final state, if they did do a partnership, they would probably ideally want to use a few of them. And that was obviously the rumor with, with Google as well integrating Gemini. But if, if they had to pick one, that is surprising that they would go with Claude ahead of chat gbt. So again, I'm just trying to ping pong why they might have gone with them. Or the rumor has it, I think.
- [18:21]
Alex
They probably, if they've met with both leadership teams, I think they probably are a company that would absolutely go for Dario's safety branding. Like it's the safety company with the Privacy Company versus OpenAI, which is kind of like the chaos product company, even though the product's working better. But the, the terms of the deal to me are also fascinating. So you wrote about this also that, that Anthropic is asking for a multibillion dollar annual fee that increases sharply every year. Now Apple's biggest acquisition in history was $3 billion. So it's not exactly a company that is sort of ready to spend 2 billion a year or more on a integration partner. So what do you think's happening in that negotiation?
- [19:09]
M.G. Siegler
Yeah, I mean that, that was maybe the weirdest thing about that entire report was, you know, the notion that both Anthropic might even just be asking for that because they have to know that Apple, you know, will be super reluctant to do anything for the reasons you're exactly talking about.
- [19:25]
Unnamed Guest
Right.
- [19:25]
M.G. Siegler
They just, they historically don't spend money even though they have all the money to spend. They don't spend money certainly on acquisitions. But if this, this could be really larger than their largest acquisition, which is wild. I mean, from the flip side, I think Anthropic probably, you know, assuming this is accurate, they're, they're looking at it like, I mean, if we really are the main focal point of Siri going forward, that is going to absolutely blow up our servers to an extent we haven't seen at least on the sort of user facing consumer side to date. And you Know, we see what happens or you know, we hear reports about what happens when sort of these viral integrations happen on the ChatGPT side and how that brings down their servers, blows up the cost and everything and, and so does Anthropic really want to be in that boat, you know, without any sort of life vest, you know, in the, in the form of payments? That was always one of the most surprising things to me about The Apple and ChatGPT deal was the reporting that it was no money exchanging hands.
- [20:29]
Unnamed Guest
Right.
- [20:30]
M.G. Siegler
Because it felt like too there was a real possibility that if one of those things, you know, went viral, that it was the weird situation where Apple was would be causing such an influx of usage of ChatGPT, which at the time at least and presumably still mostly is running on Microsoft servers. And so basically Apple would be, you know, causing these huge increases in cost to OpenAI and Microsoft by way of their deal. And if they didn't have any, I was always trying to like think through there must be a way that they're going to eventually pay them. And, and I do think that that's sort of what led down that, you know, at the time rumored and then rumored to be off potential investment that Apple was going to do in OpenAI. To me that made all the sense in the world because that was a de facto way for them to pay for, you know, that integration. Basically they would just be investing billions of dollars into, into OpenAI potentially. And obviously that didn't happen. But I almost wonder if something similar isn't at play here with Anthropic where look, they might say we're not going to give you whatever $2 billion a year say to use Claude, but you know, you guys always need more money. You're taking investment. We'll happily invest, you know, in the company knowing that their one thing that Anthropic seemingly wants is diversified investors.
- [21:52]
Unnamed Guest
Right.
- [21:52]
M.G. Siegler
Because they don't just want to have Amazon owning so much and they don't just want to have Google owning so much. Both of them own quite a bit right now, but if they could diversify that even further with Apple, I think that they might be interested in that. Another question of if Amazon and Google would be interested in that. But still I could see it maybe going down that path, but otherwise it's pretty shocking that they would ask for that from Apple.
- [22:13]
Alex
I think you're totally right about this. And if you are a client of Anthropic, whether you're using Claude off the shelf or whether using the API, one thing you know to be true is there are often lag times and often if you're trying to tag, tag into the API, it can be down. And I think a lot of people are saying, you know what, this is server capacity. So now imagine you plug that company in with Apple and then all of a sudden the product is good and demand goes through the roof. It just effectively, you know, destroys Anthropic's ability to deliver service.
- [22:46]
M.G. Siegler
Yeah.
- [22:46]
Alex
Its products. So can I ask you this? Like, what do you think it says about Anthropic that this is the biggest opportunity, biggest potential business opportunity of its lifetime to be like the de Facto Voice of AI on the iPhone, sort of surpassing that experience that we're both talking about with ChatGPT. But they just can't do it. I mean assuming we're right about this. But they just can't do it because of servers.
- [23:10]
M.G. Siegler
Yeah, I mean, and, and right. So I thought, I think about that as well too because basically Apple again assuming that the reporting is, is accurate here, Apple is handing them the golden ticket.
- [23:20]
Unnamed Guest
Right.
- [23:21]
M.G. Siegler
Like they, for since the, since the dawn of these LLMs, you know, basically ChatGPT has had the crown and has been able to sort of keep going and expanding, you know, their lead. You know, obviously Google and Gemini are giving them a run for their money because they're putting it in, baking it directly into Search and Android and have incredible scale in Gemini or sorry, in Chrome to some extent right now. And so they're, they're leveraging those, those strengths that they have in order to do that. But still, I think we would all agree that, that ChatGPT has been sort of the leader in the clubhouse, you know, at least when it become, when it goes to sort of consumer facing versions of this stuff. And basically Apple, if they were to give this to Anthropic, I mean, would they shoot ahead of ChatGPT in terms of actual usage? I don't, I don't know if that's the case. I do think that they would shoot ahead of them in like simple queries like we're talking about, you know, like what's the weather and, and that type of stuff. Assuming that Apple outsourced that as a part of that deal. But you know, we're talking about they would be in the hands of billions of, of consumers overnight doing these types of queries. And so to your question of like, like what's the reluctance to do that or why are they so reticent to that? I do wonder if part of it is, I think recently they gave Some, Some quotes in. In different interviews talking about how they're sort of okay with seeding the, you know, the chatbot market.
- [24:47]
Unnamed Guest
Right.
- [24:47]
M.G. Siegler
To. To chatgpt. And it feels like that's not the path that they want to go down anymore, at least the main primary focus there. They want to do coding and they want to focus on their strengths. So it's almost like if they already feel like they made that decision internally and now Apple's potentially handing them again this golden ticket to, to sort of shoot back into the forefront of consumer. Maybe there's some internal reluctance to sort of go down that path a little bit.
- [25:12]
Alex
Yeah. And it just sort of goes to, like, where you can make money in AI today. And I think there's like two different areas. There's the product side where you have ChatGPT and then you have the API side, and Anthropic is. Is doing quite well there. I don't know, would you call this like a product or an API play? Because you're going to give a version of Claude to Apple? I guess it would still be a product play. But I'm curious, like, what you think about the state of the AI business today? Because obviously we have like, a lot of applications that are out there that are doing well, but the API business to me still seems like a bit of a question mark, even though we've seen anthropic posts that, like, they went from like 1 billion annual recurring revenue, I think, to 4 in like, just a couple months. And it seems like they are mostly API. So what do you think is the state of play right now?
- [25:58]
M.G. Siegler
Yeah, I mean, that's still. It feels like a pretty risky business. Right. Because it's so unlike what OpenAI has done with ChatGPT, where they have a brand now and like a known entity. The APIs, like, those are relatively not necessarily easy, but they're easier to just swap in and out different, you know, different tools and technologies as they become more readily available and then, yeah, the cost will get sort of driven down over time. You know, as that happens is there's more competition in the market. So it does feel like that's a bit, yeah, more vulnerable of a state to be in. And I mean, even look at the. The vibe coding space that they're in.
- [26:34]
Unnamed Guest
Right, right.
- [26:35]
M.G. Siegler
It's like they, if I have it right, they are predominantly powering cursor right now.
- [26:42]
Unnamed Guest
Right.
- [26:43]
M.G. Siegler
And. And some of the. And the one as well, that OpenAI is buying, which they famously are now cutting them off Windsurf from the newest versions of the models. And the question becomes how much does cursor, you know, the company, any sphere, start to build their own stuff? And obviously they're doing some of that internally. But you know, that's a real risk point, of course, for Anthropic. And so it becomes like a point where do they really have to more rely on building, you know, Claude code, making sure that that's its own product and that's the product side again, versus sort of going down the full on API path. But it's still like so much of the stuff is moving so fast still. And it feels like, you know, we weren't even talking about quote unquote, Vibe coding tools a year ago and now, you know, maybe we were a little bit, but now that's all that anyone seemingly wants to talk about, certainly on the business side and the fundraising side. And so there will be something else that comes up in the next six months, some other layer of AI that everyone wants to talk about is the, is the new thing from the model perspective.
- [27:51]
Alex
Yeah. And this is a good moment for me to plug the Vibe coding episode we have coming up. I'm Jod Massad. The CEO of Replit is going to be on in a couple of weeks, so folks, stay tuned to that. And now, MG Let me give my Galaxy Brain idea about where all this anthropic chatter is leading to or where it might be coming from. I probably say there's like a 10 or 20% chance that this is why we're hearing so much about Anthropic being like the de facto new brain of Siri. And that is that maybe Apple is in negotiations with Perplexity and they're just trying to drive down the price, saying, well, we could just easily bring in these anthropic models. So therefore, you know, you're not worth the 30 billion to us, but maybe we could do 20 billion. Is that crazy?
- [28:30]
M.G. Siegler
It's not crazy. We, you know, there have been now other reports and you and I again, last episode talked quite a bit about, you know, perplexity as an option for Apple. And now there's reporting along the lines that they're at least talking about it internally.
- [28:42]
Unnamed Guest
Right.
- [28:43]
M.G. Siegler
Like not necessarily that they're negotiating with the company, but to your exact point, maybe they're loosely negotiating with them or maybe they're negotiating in public with them in order to get some sort of deal done, because it does from the product side. And given what they need, not only as we talked about with AI, but also on the search side, if and when the Google search deal that Apple has changes, at the very least, it slots in there in many ways. Perplexity does that I think could be really compelling, but not going to be cheap. Would definitely be more than any. Beats acquisition and Perplexity. Just one of the things, you know, we had talked about, is it going to be would that company and the founder be a fit inside of Apple? And I think that that's one debate. But they're also just like, I think that they've done a really good job on certain sides of the product, but they're also just like, they're doing a lot maybe, maybe too much. You could argue, you know, like in terms of they want to buy Chrome, they what? They just, they want to buy TikTok. They're, they're jumping at sort of everything that, that is out there chaotic. They just want to be in the government. They were launching a web browser, as I think we'll talk about in a little bit. But they're just doing a ton and I, I'd be a little worried. Like they've raised a lot, but not a lot compared to some of their peers. Right. I know they're not necessarily building, you know, a foundation model themselves, though. They're augmenting others.
- [30:10]
Unnamed Guest
Right.
- [30:11]
M.G. Siegler
But you know, they don't have necessarily unlimited Runway, I would imagine, to do everything that they're trying to do. And so from their side as they're talking to these big companies, we talked last time, they, it sounds like, you know, they're zeroing in, if they haven't already on the Samsung, on a Samsung deal to integrate with those products. And does that help or hurt? You know, sort of the negotiations with, with would be Apple, but they're just, they're doing a lot right now. And so I like your idea that Apple is potentially throwing stuff out there to try to get a better price on if they're, if they're actually thinking about going down that path.
- [30:47]
Alex
I'm just saying, if I was negotiating with Perplexity, the first thing I would do would be to call up some reporters and be like, you know, we might integrate with Anthropic all across the board. I think that would help my negotiating position. So we've spoken about the different ways that you can do business in AI. You can do the product side, you can do the API business. And I think that kind of leaves out one part of it, which is that you could just build AGI and that will be like this new form of value creation that we still haven't found our wrapped our head around, wrapped our heads around or even maybe not AGI, maybe you want to build super intelligence. And it seems like with the scale hypothesis starting to level off, I heard recently on a podcast that the trend is the trend until the bend at the end. And we might be at the bend at the end with scaling. You got to basically create better algorithms. And on the show on Friday, Ranjan and I were talking about how Meta is making this very interesting play to try to write better algorithms with this super intelligence team that Mark Zuckerberg is assembling. And you look at some of the names on this team and they really are, I think some of the stars at largely OpenAI but also some other research houses as well, including Anthropic and DeepMind. You have someone who is the co creator of the O series models at OpenAI which is the reasoning stuff. Someone who's the co creator of GPT4O voice mode which we just talked about is so impressive. Another co creator of GPT4O's image generation side. I could go on. But MG you don't think that this is going to work for Zuckerberg. So I'd love to hear your perspective on whether it's the right bet and whether you think and why you think this isn't going to pan out.
- [32:31]
M.G. Siegler
Yeah, I mean so look, this is obvious. That's obviously a little bit of first of all, no one knows, of course.
- [32:36]
Alex
This is like no one knows day.
- [32:38]
M.G. Siegler
One of them starting this, this, this new team as they announced, you know, last week. And I think it's a little bit of a contrarian statement to say that right now that it, that it might not work. But I also don't think it's crazy. Like I, you know, I hate to sort of pull on this, the sports analogies, right. But it is like they're putting together a super team and I feel like super teams in the sports world, you know, often don't panic, pan out at least the way that was expected. There are a couple maybe counter examples of it but for the most part there's a reason why like teams as that are gelled and have worked together for a long time and on sports as well.
- [33:17]
Unnamed Guest
Right.
- [33:17]
M.G. Siegler
Tend to perform better than people who are thrown together, you know, in, in, in sort of piecemeal fashion even with all the talents in the world to do something like this. And you know, I do, I, I think at least directionally agree with the very conflicted point of course that he's making. But Sam Altman is making about the, you know, mercenary versus missionary point. I think it's a, it's a fair thing to bring up the notion that, look, rightly or wrongly and whether you believe it's actually going to happen, like OpenAI has been on this mission to try to do AGI, which is I guess morphed into super intelligence. And, you know, yeah, no one's talking.
- [33:59]
Alex
About AGI anymore, those definitions and Microsoft.
- [34:03]
M.G. Siegler
Has muddled that all with that, with their deal and all that sort of stuff. But regardless, they, you know, OpenAI has always been marching towards this general goal.
- [34:11]
Unnamed Guest
Right.
- [34:13]
M.G. Siegler
Zuckerberg has been saying for, you know, he was saying not even that long ago, 18 months ago maybe, when they were sort of doing, you know, some of the initial work on llama, that he didn't believe in sort of the AI God.
- [34:23]
Unnamed Guest
Right, right.
- [34:24]
M.G. Siegler
And that he didn't believe that there would be sort of1,1AI to rule them all. And that, you know, a lot of those companies were, were going down the wrong paths. And, you know, it feels like now he's changing his tune and trying to, to ramp up this team in order to, to race OpenAI and Google to that goal of getting to again, super intelligence, AGI and super intelligence. And so why, I don't think it'll work. I think if I were to place a bet on it, I just feel like A, of course they're starting out behind, but B, throwing people together to try to work towards that goal. It depends on where you actually believe we are in the cycle. If you believe it's still really early days, that could work.
- [35:08]
Unnamed Guest
Right.
- [35:08]
M.G. Siegler
Like that we need new models now and we need new, some new sort of technologies that are even different maybe than LLMs, you know, that, that bring about sort of the next wave of breakthroughs with the broader AI space. And then you could sort of make the case that this is the right time to be doing it. If yesterday was the best time, today's the, the second best time.
- [35:28]
Unnamed Guest
Right.
- [35:29]
M.G. Siegler
But if you believe that we're farther along that path and hearing others talk about it, you know, some people think that we're. I know you talked about it with Demis, Hassabis and others before how close we are actually to AGI or super Intelligence, and if we're only a couple years away, do I think that Meta can win that race? Not if we're a couple years away. I don't think so. If we're longer term and this is the early innings, then I think they're fine, in a fine position. I would also Just say, lastly, I know that I'm being long winded on this, but I also just think the, the history of Meta is complicated, right, Dating back to Facebook with regard to launching new initiatives. And I do think that they have a very, a big problem with focus when it comes to new things coming out.
- [36:13]
Unnamed Guest
Right.
- [36:14]
M.G. Siegler
Even just look at the fact that they rename the company Meta, they reoriented Metaverse, and now it feels like, I mean, they're never going to say that they're going to abandon the metaverse. They'll. They'll instead say that, look, this is all a part of working towards the same thing, right? Like, they'll use the, the talking point that we need, you know, augmented glasses to be the, the conduit for AI, and AI is going to power those. And they're not wrong about that necessarily. But we're not working towards the same metaverse that, that we were with, you know, with the Zuck avatar in the Eiffel Tower, his little cartoon avatar thing. We're not there anymore and we're not going to go down that path anymore, it feels like. So I just worry about focus with Meta and that this is, this is the thing right now. And, you know, I do think that spending tens of billions of dollars will, will force them to sort of focus on this. And I do think that they, they will, but I'm just not sold that they will remain as focused on this as, as sort of like an open AI would, where it's existential for them.
- [37:13]
Alex
By the way, just on the technology side. And you know, about. You note this in your story. It looks like raw scale, at least coming from these newcomers who thought they could build up massive data centers and then take the lead in AI, it's not working. You said Elon Musk was able to throw capital at the AI problem to get Grok up to scale fast. Meta was already at scale. This, ironically, is a people problem. Now, I think believers in the scale hypothesis will be like, look like the ingredients are not lined up correctly. You don't just, you know, big. Build bigger data centers. You need data centers, larger models and good data to be able to continue to see the gains with scale. But it is pretty interesting that these companies are like seemingly uniformly, maybe outside of anthropic saying, you know what, scale is important, but it's going to take other breakthroughs. And that's why you see this talent war happening right now.
- [38:10]
M.G. Siegler
Yeah, right. I think that that situation is interesting because when, when Elon went down the path with building Colossus right. The, the. His AI giant, massive data center thing. Basically he made the bet that they could jump ahead of the line in terms of compute and scaling, compute and get there. And they were able to do that incredibly.
- [38:34]
Unnamed Guest
Right.
- [38:34]
M.G. Siegler
Like they were able to build basically a data center with enough capacity to pump out a model in the form of GROK that was at least competitive with the state of the art at the time, even though they were starting so much later than all the others who had done it today date. And Zuckerberg is, is basically sort of making an opposite end of the spectrum bet in terms of people.
- [38:57]
Unnamed Guest
Right.
- [38:57]
M.G. Siegler
But in some ways that's because they already made that bet with Llama.
- [39:01]
Unnamed Guest
Right.
- [39:01]
M.G. Siegler
Like that they would be able to also scale up a model that was competitive. Now, there have been a ton of problems, as we all know, with llama 4, it seems like as being reported, and that's why they're sort of now moving down this new road to be able to do that. But it's interesting that people are like, trying to figure out these, like, hacks to get back into the right to jump in, into contention again and, and the people thing again. If, if there's something new that is going to come about, I do think that it's compelling the team that Met is hiring, but if it's not, and we're already on the path to where we're going, I think it's problematic for them.
- [39:43]
Alex
Yeah. And by the way, Elon also, I think it actually hasn't been as big of a story as it should be that Elon has lost control of gr.
- [39:51]
M.G. Siegler
Grok.
- [39:51]
Alex
I don't know if you've been following this, but I've seen.
- [39:55]
M.G. Siegler
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [39:56]
Alex
GROK basically established this, like, liberal posture. It's talking about how it's using sourcing for Media Matters and Rolling Stone to document misinformation from Cat Turd, which is one of Elon's favorite accounts. And Elon goes like, shame on you, Grok. He also said there was going to be a full rewriting. I think they, they rewrote it or may have released an update because now it seems like GROK is like a step further, as, in terms of, like, being like, I don't know, Holocaust denier than you'd even want it to be, even if you want it to be, you know, quote unquote, like an edgelord. And, and it just goes to show, just like people talk about alignment in AI and you build up these big data centers and you want to try to align it with your Values. And Elon, who, like, say what you want about him, one of the most successful tech entrepreneurs of our time, if not the completely lost control of his AI. It's crazy.
- [40:54]
M.G. Siegler
Yeah. And I mean, it sort of speaks to the unknowns of where this is all going.
- [41:01]
Unnamed Guest
Right.
- [41:01]
M.G. Siegler
Like, so Elon, you know, pours as much money as he possibly can towards building, ramping up and building these, this new model, thinking he can get back into the, into the air race. And then there's just these, all these sort of second order effects of what actually happens when, when you, yeah, just roll out something that you don't have full control over. And so what happens, yeah, when Meta's team, you know, is, is fully ramped and sort of working on new projects. And what if it's, you know, what if whatever they end up building is, you know, in some ways sort of going off the rails and, and, you know, does Zuckerberg feel the need to, to sort of start from scratch again? Do they? Like, this is gonna go, this could go infinite different ways right now. And that's why it's so hard to sort of try to extrapolate out, like, what this race actually looks like in even six months from now.
- [41:59]
Alex
Totally, yeah. It's crazy. By the way, speaking of Elon creating things that he can't control, let's just speak for a minute about his new third party and the U.S. the America Party. After being very close to Trump, he's now, it seems like in the process of launching a third party. Trump responded to it today. This is from the Guardian. Trump says Musk is off the rails and calls his new political party ridiculous. He says, I am saddened to watch Elon Musk go completely off the rails, essentially becoming a train wreck. Train wreck. Over the past five weeks, he even wants to start a third political party despite the fact that they never succeed in the United States. Let me take Elon's side here for a second. Just on the third party, we do have government in the United States that doesn't reflect the will of the people. Often we just know this policy. Polls totally divorced from each other. Oftentimes. I think that the campaigns that have been successful over the past, I don't know, 20 years or more have all been about the fact that the government is not working. If Elon creates a third party and says, I'm going to try to be competitive in some, you know, battleground states and try to hold some influence, like, let's say he wins a Senate seat and that becomes the deciding vote and something like this big beautiful bill which even the Republican senators were saying was a mess. Some of them, like Murkowski from Alaska, you know, as she's talking about voting for it. So this bill's terrible and I hope it gets revised. It wasn't revised. I don't know, maybe that does some good. Is that, obviously that's probably a little too optimistic, but what do you think? M.G.
- [43:35]
M.G. Siegler
I mean, I'm, I'm with you at the highest level. Like, you know, I don't disagree with the notion that the two party system, you know, could probably use more diversification from, from just a two party system and how you go about doing that. Obviously, many people have tried, you know, from Ross Perot to some level of success to, to, you know, many others, Ralph Nader and stuff. But the, the, I guess the issue is that obviously Elon doing this so soon after being so closely aligned with President Trump is, you know, just beyond self serving. And that's not to say I, in some ways, like, I don't know enough about the, the history of, you know, third party political systems to know that that's not always the case. Right. That there's someone who's like, you know, obviously in some ways disenfranchised by whatever part political party they were a part of before and so they break off into a splinter unit. The thing that I guess would be the, the take on, my take on this would just be like, I'm not so sure how much success even someone as wealthy with the resources of Elon Musk will have when he, when he's not pouring those resources behind Donald Trump. I think, like, I just think he's, I don't know that he's necessarily underestimating him, but I think he's downplaying the importance of the Trump part of everything that he did.
- [45:02]
Alex
Oh yeah.
- [45:03]
M.G. Siegler
And I feel like if he tries to do it with sort of, you know, no name. He tried in Wisconsin, right. With, with, with, with backing someone that didn't work out for him. And so I feel like it might play out that way. On the other hand, like again, he could be looking at his old friend Peter Thiel and seeing what he did with the certain person who is now the Vice President of the United States and figuring out a way to get someone like that placed into a position of future power. And maybe there is a way to do that. But Thiel tried, of course, with others, with Blake Masters and some other folks that didn't work out. And so will Elon. To our point earlier about, you know, meta sort of remaining focus. Will Elon remain focused long enough on these political aspirations? Does he hate Trump that much? You know, a year down the road doesn't matter anymore. And once, once Trump is sort of the lame duck, hopefully, you know, leaving office because of term limits, then, you know, does he, does he just sort of move on from worrying about this stuff as much?
- [46:09]
Alex
Yeah, I think one of the things that you bring up, and this is the point that he's one of the least popular political actors in the country right now, you know, so it's going to be hard for him to sort of shift the politics in the country. Seems like he had one play to make, he made it and it didn't work according to his plan. Now I wonder, actually we spoke about this a bit on threads. I wonder how much of his support for Trump was to sort of rig government policy in favor of his companies. Now we, we kind of went back and forth about this, that it could have just been, if you want to be as cynical as possible, he was backing Trump to get Trump to revoke the EV credits for his competitors, which could put a company like Rivian out of business. But on the other hand, it seems like losing that 700, I think it's seven hundred and seven thousand five hundred dollar credit for Tesla buyers is going to smart, pretty, pretty bad, at least in the short term.
- [47:08]
M.G. Siegler
Yeah, you know, as we sort of went back and forth about my, my general view on that is I do think like, and this is an original thought, I think many people sort of thought this at the time that when he was, you know, okay, at the very least with losing that credit, that it was sort of a pull up the drawbridge thing where, you know, Tesla's in the, cemented as the leader in EVs, therefore not having that credit is much more detrimental to the Rivians of the world and some of the other newcomers and even vws and all these player, you know, legacy players who are trying to, to enter the space. But I think that if that's the case, what he majorly made the mistake with was not recognizing the potential that Tesla itself could fall as a result of his, both his affiliation, you know, with the, with the administration and also just like the, you know, the, the ever oncoming Chinese EV revolution and sort of all these other plays which have really hurt Tesla in the market. And so the fact that Tesla is no longer necessarily, you know, the de facto leader that can afford to have that, that credit go away is a real miscalculation perhaps on his part that he might not have been able to, to sort of play out in his, in his head at the time. It does feel like he, you know, from everything you've seen and read and even the actions, right. Like he seems like he's fairly freaked out by the reaction of the, the general public to Tesla, you know, from the, obviously all the protests and everything. But even just the sales now, just the fact that like he's firing the, the head of sales in Europe and, and sort of making all these things. It feels like there was a real miscalculation there at various points.
- [48:55]
Alex
Definitely. By the way, Tesla down today 7% at least as the time of that we are recording this and down 22, close to 23% on the year. So not a good stretch for what's the 7% today?
- [49:06]
M.G. Siegler
Is it just Trump's tweets or.
- [49:09]
Alex
I think it's more specific probably. Yep. Yeah, this is it. Tesla shares drop 8% after Elon Musk says he is launching a political party. This is according to cnbc, so that's probably the cause of the drop. Yeah, not a good, not a good year for Elon or Tesla. All right, let's, let's close with this. You have been using AI browsers. So can you tell us a little bit about what an AI browser is and why you believe in that?
- [49:36]
M.G. Siegler
Yeah. So I'm speaking to you now through dia, which is the AI first browser by a company called the Browser Company, which if you've heard of them before, it's because they had previously made arc, which was a sort of a mildly popular third party browser that was sort of a power user browser. It did things like put tabs on the side of the window so you could have more of them sort of squeezed in and you know, did it did a whole bunch of other things trying to reconstitute the way people actually use browsers. It was very like again, power user centric, a lot of keyboard shortcuts and things of that nature to the point where many people, including myself, loved it and was was sad to hear that they were sort of pivoting their focus. The company was on this newfangled browser called dia. But I decided to give it a go like, because they were obviously the writing was on the wall for arc. It's still live, but it's probably, you know, not going to be developed for future features anymore. And so I decided to give this DIA browser a go and I will say I really like it now. I was skeptical at first. It's hard to Learn, you know, new, a new browser to change sort of UI elements, to change your workflows. But the main thing, it sounds simple, but it's, it's actually rather profound I've found when you use it on a daily basis, basically it has a chatbot built into the browser framework itself. So on by default, the left hand, sorry, the right hand side of the window, there is a chat window that's natively integrated into the browser window. So anything that you're scrolling and looking at on the Internet, you can basically ask the chat browser about it. And it's using its own sort of flavors of different other LLMs. So I think that they integrate, they don't tell you, by the way, they obfuscate what they're actually using, not to be sketchy or weird about it, they just don't want the user to have to focus on that.
- [51:35]
Unnamed Guest
Right.
- [51:35]
M.G. Siegler
Like it shouldn't matter what the, what the LLM is that's powering it. So I think that they use, you know, some from OpenAI, I think they use maybe some from Anthropic and some others and sort of, they bake all those and roll them together to sort of pick on their end which is the best one to use for any given query. And so again, it sounds like it's a simple thing because, well, why can't you just use the browser version of ChatGPT, you know, have a tab open. But again, it's able to do things like one of the cool things that they tout is the ability to sort of search all of your open tabs at once to be able to sort of do some data analysis or, or sort of query different things about different stories that you're reading at the, at the same time. And so the way you would do that right now in, you know, in a browser tab, if you were using say chatgpt, you could paste in all the links and sort of get that going. But in your, in a, in a more seamless workflow, this basically is just right there on the side, sorry, able to integrate natively within there. And the thing, the last thing I would say is that I sort of compare it in writing it up to the integration that Google's doing with Gemini, right into Chrome. So there's a beta version of Chrome that's live if you download the beta version right now, where basically Gemini is baked into the web browser, which is sort of incredible given everybody, everything Google's going through from an antitrust perspective, you know, including that the, the DOJ wants them, you know, to spit out Chrome that the fact that they're baking Gemini in sort of is maybe making some of the government's case for it, of how, you know, Chrome is problematic going forward in the age of AI. But I would say that integration is not good. It's. It's like very slow. It's also in the upper right hand corner, but it's not. It doesn't feel native. It just feels like sort of a popover type situation. It just feels like an extension, honestly. And obviously there are many of those right now that you can use within, within Chrome and other browsers. But again, it's one of those things that you sort of have to use it and live with it for a bit, meaning dia, what it actually is can be useful for. And I'm using. I would say that I'm querying various web pages a lot more than I was without it.
- [53:51]
Alex
Yeah, that's cool. I love the idea that you can basically reference all the tabs in the browser to be able to like find out what's, you know, if you're, if you have a bunch of tabs open and you. I guess you could say, like, what's the commonality between these stories? It's like a, it sounds like a perfect use case for, I imagine people like us who have like a gazillion tabs open and never close any of them. I come back to the computer after. Yeah, go ahead, go ahead.
- [54:14]
M.G. Siegler
The only other thing I would say on that, because that reminds me, because yeah, you talk about like people like us and I think that's honestly the thing that the browser company, and I should say I'm not affiliated with them at all. I know the founder a bit. I met him way back in the day and I was an investor in his first company way before he worked at. He went on to work at Meta. He worked at the White House for a long time. Great guy, Josh Miller. But I'm not affiliated with them in any way right now. So just to make that clear, but because I sound sort of like a spokesperson for this thing. But I, I have no, I have no, no skin in this game. But I do think that the one thing that they're trying to do with dia, that's, that's the exact opposite of what we talked about earlier that they had done with arc. It's not meant to be a browser, or at least hopefully not at scale at browser for you and I doing sort of these like, you know, power user news junkie, you know, workflows. They instead want this to be as simple as possible, it feels like. And so in many ways it just feels the same as using Chrome only with again, a chat bot sort of baked into it natively. And so someone who is say they rolled this out at first with students, for example, so students with their college email could, could download it before the general public could. And I think what they were going for there is, you know, similar strategy to, to others who have rolled out social products and things like that back in the day. But they wanted young people to know like how they were actually using AI in their, in their own workflows. So not again, not power users, but just regular users and, and what they would find useful about this. So all that is to say that it's just a super simple web browser. It seems like it's almost like lacking a lot of the bells and whistles that you might expect of Chrome and some of the other more robust browsers now. And I think that that's the feature that they're going for that they just want it to be simple for people to use.
- [56:01]
Alex
Love it. Well, I'm definitely going to check it out after this and I'm excited to explore it and I mean deepen my AI use even more.
- [56:10]
M.G. Siegler
And I should say our friends, we often talk about perplexity or coming out with their own.
- [56:14]
Alex
Right. They have their own browser, Comet, which.
- [56:16]
M.G. Siegler
I've not tried, so I can't compare the two. People seem to like it, but the people who seem to like it, at least we were talking about it online, seem awfully conflicted about there's something going on that they are. They love it a little bit too much for, for my.
- [56:31]
Alex
Oh, Comet.
- [56:32]
M.G. Siegler
Spider sense. You think they're getting paid something that. Or they're. They're just enthusiasts about it. Yeah, whatever. But yeah, we'll see, we'll see. Should launch soon in beta.
- [56:43]
Alex
All right, the website is spyglass.org.org really recommend you go check it out. Obviously we love having MG on and can't wait to do this again in August. Mg, thanks so much for coming on.
- [56:53]
M.G. Siegler
Thanks, Alex. Talk to you soon.
- [56:56]
Alex
Speak to you then. All right, everybody, thank you so much for listening. I'm going to switch it up. We had Ed Zitron planned to come on this Wednesday. That episode's still going to run. We've recorded it. But instead we're going to run an episode with Ryan Peterson, the CEO of Flexport, about how international trade has changed since the tariffs as the deadlines for these 90 day pauses come up. That's coming Wednesday. And then, of course, we'll be back on Friday with Ranjan Roy to break down the week's news. So thank you again for listening. And we'll see you next time on BIG Technology Podcast.