Ben Thompson (2:23)

Yeah.

James Allworth (2:23)

And it's just on the tv.

Ben Thompson (2:25)

Oh, what's on before football or what's on before baseball.

James Allworth (2:27)

So I think it could potentially shrink the audience in the US but it's very clear that live sports are an area that traditional TV and streaming will continue to have an edge. Because streaming rights exist, it's effectively a monopoly that gets granted to a platform.

Ben Thompson (2:46)

Yeah, it seems really powerful. Is there a real lift from having adjacent sports related content that can funnel new viewers into live sport viewing? Apple doesn't have Drive to Survive. So there is a world where Netflix bought the F1 rights. And as soon as you finish the Drive to Survive season, because everyone's watching Drive to Survive all the time. So they, they could just say, hey, click this button and we'll send you a push notification in your Netflix app. When the real race goes live. Apple can do something similar with the F1 movie. If you watch the movie, it could just say, hey, you know, want to watch the real race?

James Allworth (3:19)

Yeah, but way, way, way less watch.

Ben Thompson (3:20)

Way less watch, way less watch time.

James Allworth (3:22)

The other thing about F1 is just how dangerous it is is also an element. A driver makes a mistake, they could actually die.

Ben Thompson (3:30)

Like the business side is what's so fascinating to me because you're not just talking about the athlete, you're talking about the car. So if you're an engineering nerd into the car. But then also if you're a business nerd, you can understand, okay, this team principal is getting fired. They're like the CEO of the organization who's putting the money in. And then what does that, what, what effect does that money have if the content stack works and you're funneling people from the F1 movie to a drive to survive to actually watching the race? Apple has been for the last few years talking about what comes after the screen. And they've been saying it's the Apple Vision Pro. It's immersive video, it's 3D, it's spatial, it's augmented reality. And I was really, really disappointed in the Apple announcement post. Which is beautiful, has some great graphics, bunch of details, but basically all they're saying on Vision Pro is that you'll be able to watch it in Vision Pro, which is like, yeah, of course I could watch ESPN in Vision Pro. I could watch any TV show in Vision Pro. So yeah, they're not doing any 3D content and they're not doing any spatial content, which is, it's not look, it's not turn your head all the way around and look behind you. But it's basically a bubble. It's like 180 degrees. And so with that, it's not that expensive. Everyone's so Expensive. It's like there's a $10,000 camera from Blackmagic. I would set up film.

James Allworth (4:47)

How would Apple not negotiate the ability to.

Ben Thompson (4:51)

I think that they, I think they. The steel man, like the bull case, is that like they're going to do something, they just aren't ready to announce it.

James Allworth (4:58)

Yeah, that's potentially, you know, out of the million or so people that tune into each race, there's a set of fans that are hardcore that would just buy and use the Vision Pro because.

Ben Thompson (5:08)

It would be even just as a novelty a few times. Black Box Infinite had a demo of what watching an F1 race in Apple Vision Pro would look like. But of course, like Black Box Infinite is like a dev shop and they don't have the rights and so this like probably has to be negotiated with Apple and Apple's just not really doing it.

James Allworth (5:24)

Vegas just unveiled the a massive F1 venue called Bar and Grill. It's the top golfer, F1, most generic name in history.

Ben Thompson (5:33)

Extremely, extremely. Since the initial demo of the Apple Vision Pro, critics and analysts Ben Thompson and more have been saying live sports are going to be amazing in Apple Vision Pro because you can just drop a camera there and you don't need to do anything else because he had this demo of putting the camera at the half court line courtside at an NBA game and he was like, it doesn't require any production because if you want to see them go over there, you just turn your head and if you want to know the score, you just look up at the scoreboard because it's the experience of being courtside, which is already the best experience possible.

James Allworth (6:12)

Metta cuts 600 jobs at AI superintelligence labs. The layoffs do not affect Meta's newest AI hires who are in some case, who are in some cases being paid up to hundreds of millions of dollars.

Ben Thompson (6:24)

They're in what's called TB Lab.

James Allworth (6:26)

Meta said on Wednesday that it cut approximately 600 jobs in its AI division, according to a memo sent to employees that was relayed to the Times. As a company seeks to keep pace with competitors in the furious contest over the technology. The layoffs were in Meta's so called, super so called, so called, so Shots Fired, which is the umbrella name for the company's AI efforts. The division has around 3,000 employees. This seems healthy and normal. I think these 600 people are going to have a bunch of job offers really quickly in my view. Like if you're not meeting the bar at Meta, it's very possible that you would be elite at like thousands of other companies that want to have an AI strategy. So I think these people will be back in the workforce quickly. In a sign of the escalating competition in AI, Meta on Saturday also said it would cut off access to non meta chatbots like ChatGPT on WhatsApp beginning next year. Oh yeah, that means. I didn't even know, you know, 3 billion users will no longer be able to use ChatGPT in the messaging app. Apparently there was like around 50 million people that were primarily using ChatGPT through WhatsApp.

Ben Thompson (7:29)

Whoa, that's WhatsApp power user.

James Allworth (7:30)

Makes sense. You can just chat with somebody.

Ben Thompson (7:32)

Kevin says it had many, many millions of happy users. If you're one of them, you can migrate to our app, website or browser. Let's hear it for Atlas RT. If you agree that WhatsApp is better with ChatGPT, let's go. All of the hyperscalers hate each other. I think super, super intelligence is over if you're at Meta. My for you is to start working on hyper intelligence because the super intelligence thing is just obviously, it's obviously last year's news. Do you agree?

James Allworth (8:03)

Giga intelligence.

Ben Thompson (8:04)

Giga intelligence. That might be a 2030 goal.

James Allworth (8:07)

Anthropic is currently in compute discussions with Google in a deal valued in the high tens of billions.

Ben Thompson (8:13)

That's a lot.

James Allworth (8:14)

That's a lot of billions if Anthropic prioritizes Google infra over aws. It's very telling on AWS AI infra and AWS AI strategy is cooked without Anthropic. Ultimately, I don't think it should be a huge surprise that Anthropic is interested in working with Google. Google owns roughly 4, 14% of anthropic. If they were in charge of Apple today, the first thing that they would do is buy Anthropic. Yeah, it's a very kind of weird take in my view.

Ben Thompson (8:41)

Anthropic scaling revenue. They're doing B2B token generation and they need more compute. And so they went to the biggest.

James Allworth (8:47)

Compute provider, very Drake Coded. Yes, I had someone tell me that I fell off. Ooh, I needed that.

Ben Thompson (8:54)

Anthropic gets wildly disproportionately less MSM coverage than OpenAI despite approaching 3/4 of its revenue size because its quiet blowout success severely hurts the broader AI bear case. You'd think the fastest growing scale technology company ever would provide a lot more fodder for the press.

James Allworth (9:14)

OpenAI has 10 times the deals and 10 times the products getting announced.

Ben Thompson (9:20)

That's true if you're in the business of like the mainstream media. Like you need to put the water issue or the electricity issue or the financial issues in terms people can understand. People understand ChatGPT. So you put that in the headline and you get more clicks than if you say a clock.

James Allworth (9:34)

I wonder how Anthropic tries to track weekly actives because they have a lot of their users are using the product through other front ends.

Ben Thompson (9:42)

OpenAI ships a browser. Anthropic ships a blog post. DeepMind solves Navier Stoke Meta Eff it. Let's do a layoff. Let me tell you about Google AI Studio. The fastest way from prompt to production with Gemini. You can chat with models, you can vibe code, you can monitor usage.

James Allworth (10:01)

Louvre heists are always a false flag by the art world. To increase notoriety of certain works, do not fall for the Frankish tricks the.

Ben Thompson (10:09)

Louvre has been heisted from multiple times. They really got to step their game up.

James Allworth (10:13)

Yeah. Do you think the management team over there is thinking we shouldn't have. We shouldn't have been so scrappy on security considering we have billions of dollars.

Ben Thompson (10:25)

I think if I was in charge of loop security, I wouldn't have thought about the furniture elevator Vector of attack.

James Allworth (10:32)

See this dashboard? It gives executives actionable insights into critical business functions. Classic true story, I'm sure. Nvidia says space isn't just for stars anymore. Star Cloud's H100 powered satellite brings sustainable high performance computing beyond Earth. Have we got a compelling pitch for space data centers yet? Have a wonderful evening.

Ben Thompson (10:56)

Leave us five stars on Apple Podcast and spot cheer.