OpenAI’s Superapp Ambitions, Jensen on Jobs, Bezos’s $100 Billion Automation Fund

OpenAI is ditching side quests and building a super app. NVIDIA's Jensen Wong comments on AI layoffs. The metaverse is dead, or is it? And Jeff Bezos is raising a massive fund to automate industry. That's coming up on a Big Technology Podcast Friday edition right after this. Fiscally responsible, financial geniuses, monetary magicians. These are things people say about drivers who switch their car insurance to Progressive and save hundreds. Because Progressive offers discounts for paying in full, owning a home, and more. Plus, you can count on their great customer service to help when you need it, so your dollar goes a long way. Visit Progressive.com to see if you could save on car insurance. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates, potential savings will vary, not available in all states or situations. There's one place for the newest drops in wellness and performance, and the biggest sale of the year. It's The Drop by GNC, curating the best of what's new, hand-picked by the pros who know what works. And right now, get it all buy one, get one 50% off during the semi-annual Live Well sale. From crushing workouts to leveling up your nutrition and everything in between, get the best deals on the latest innovations. All the newness is all on sale right now during the Live Well sale on The Drop by GNC. Welcome to Big Technology Podcast Friday edition, where we break down the news in our traditional, cool-headed, and nuanced format. We have a great show for you today. We're getting some new direction on OpenAI's products, something we've been advocating for a while, focus. That's coming. Also, NVIDIA's Jensen Wong has some comments on AI-driven layoffs. We're also gonna talk about the end of the metaverse, or whether it actually is. And then finally, Jeff Bezos might be raising $100 billion to automate seemingly all blue-collar work. Joining us as always on Friday is Ranjan Roy of Margins. Ranjan, great to see you. Everyone has been listening to us, Alex. OpenAI is ready to focus. That's right. Finally, OpenAI seems like the side quests are over. And in fact, OpenAI did have a meeting saying especially that. Now, we had been talking about the fact that OpenAI had so many projects going, whether it was video generation with Sora or the browser with Atlas, coding with Codex. I don't know. Not to mention the image generation stuff. It seemed like they were trying to tackle a new multi-billion-dollar industry every week. That might be coming to an end. Here is the Wall Street Journal story that sort of heralded this new era of OpenAI. OpenAI to cut back on side projects and push to nail core business. OpenAI's top executives are finalizing plans for a major strategy shift to refocus the company around coding and business users, recognizing that a do-everything-all-at-once strategy has put them on the defensive. Fiji Simo, OpenAI's CEO of applications, previewed the changes to employees in an all-hands meeting, telling them that the top leaders, including CEO Sam Altman and chief research officer Mark Chen, were actively looking at which areas to deprioritize. They expect to notify staff about the changes in the coming weeks. Here's what Simo said. We cannot miss the moment because we are distracted by side quests. We really have to nail productivity in general and particularly productivity on the business front. We'll talk about the focus, but I have to say, my first takeaway is not focus. My first takeaway is, oh my God, they're giving up on consumer. Oh, I think that definitely feels like it's embedded in the entire announcement. And I have to say, a couple things jumped out at me. One, that I should be happy that they're finally focusing. And for months on end, we've been talking about, you didn't even mention it. I think you said AI cloud. You didn't even talk about the pin and consumer devices and whatever might come out of that. Like there was so much going on, but I actually was kind of surprised that Fiji Simo is the one that made the announcement, according to all the reporting, that she's the one who led the all-hands meeting and kind of like spoke on behalf of Sam Altman. Because I think for something that major, you would think Sam should be giving that message to the entire team. So that was the first thing that jumped out at me. But the other, the more I've been thinking about it, it's as you're saying, the one lane I think they still truly have a path to success is consumer. And is it because of Google? Is it because they're just looking at Anthropic and investors are telling them that that's what's more attractive right now? To me, this isn't the bet that they should be taking. Well, let's talk about that. Because if you think about the consumer bet versus the business bet, well, can we both agree that if you're able, it looks like the AI models have gone from this like fun chat interlocutor to something that could actually do real work for you. Have they? Have they? Okay, this is all right. So, so folks, listeners, this is an important moment on the show. Ranjan, at the end of 2025, predicted that this year was going to be the year that we were going to see agentic AI enter the mainstream. And he said he was living the future. And I was skeptical. And I said, we're going to hold your feet to the fire this year. It's March, towards the end of mid-March. I am going to raise the white flag on this one and say, Ranjan, you were right. That's all I ask. That's all I ask. I was, I have been surprised at how quickly AI that does work for you has, has actually emerged this year. I can't believe I'm using it. And it just goes to show you that the progress of this stuff is crazy. So, so, you know, it seems like it would make sense if you're OpenAI, you have to play there given the valuations. I think it would make sense. But again, this is like, is AI erotica no longer on the roadmap? I'm assuming so. I hope so. I mean, like the things. You're assuming that it's no longer on the roadmap. Yeah. In terms of side quests, my God, if, if that one doesn't get put on the chopping block, I'm not sure how they're going to get into enterprise, but OpenAI has a very, very different perception. There's one of quality and innovation, but there's also one of, you know, a more cavalier idea, attitude towards data privacy, towards security, towards all these kinds of things that, which they kind of, that's the way they pushed themselves. It's, it's, we're going to release a video model. Are we going to use a lot of copyrighted material? Sure. We'll take it down in two days after Disney complains, and then we'll somehow do a deal with Disney. Like, but like to date, they kind of leaned into that, like break the rules, no holds barred mentality for progress. And I think that's going to, that's going to hurt them in terms of trying to actually make this shift. But I also do think when we talk about focus, of course, Anthropic has made massive waves. Of course, enterprise. Again, as someone who works in enterprise AI at Rider, like it's a very large, attractive market. I get it. But to shift that massively, such like a fast moving business. I just think it's, and they've hired a lot of very, very talented people. I just think there's a lot of baggage within the company that you can't just make a shift like that, that easily. Okay, but here's where I'm going with this. So to me, like there's reason to try to go after enterprise. You, you basically, you can't let it go because it's such a big market opportunity. Even though, and we talk about this on the show all the time, there's potentially a lot of side effects. The question would be, okay, so you're going, so I think that's a given. You have to do something in enterprise. Now the question would be, is it worth going after consumer? And maybe the answer is no. Maybe the answer is in this, we're three years into this AI shakeout. There's no real consumer play. I mean, think about all the consumer plays that people have tried and failed, whether that's the AI girlfriend, the AI pendant, the AI necklace, the AI, you know, chatbot friend, like how, how much, you know, how many consumers are you actually going to get to pay that $20 a month just for, you know, AI companionship? I think this might be a larger indication that, you know, may, think about all the meta Chatbots that they made. Maybe consumer AI is a thing that's going to happen down the road, but it's just not happening yet. It's not materializing. Large language models, the stuff we're seeing with agentic stuff, is an enterprise thing, and it's a very valuable enterprise thing, but we're certainly not seeing the consumer market materialize. And that's where you're seeing this shift from OpenAI. So a couple of things, I think that's still ignoring, that's still looking at what current day consumer AI products are, but that's still discounting where they could go. So again, and there was reporting from the Wall Street Journal or Bloomberg on Friday that I found really interesting that OpenAI is stepping back from ChatGPT shopping, that retailers haven't actually seen results. And Walmart is now going to inject Sparky, their internal AI tool, into ChatGPT, which is pretty interesting, I think. But advertising, shopping, and retail, I don't know, streaming entertainment. There's just any, take any consumer business, and OpenAI could start to own it if AI yet. We don't know what it looks like. We don't know what like the real juicy business models are gonna be. If it's advertising, maybe Meta is gonna figure it out. And we talked about that last week that maybe Zuckerberg is gonna be, make his big comeback because they're gonna figure out consumer AI themselves. But I think it's premature to discount enterprise. And again, as someone who is very aware of the attractiveness of enterprise AI, like to discount consumer as an entire market and like addressable market. Okay, I'm not saying there's no way this is gonna work. I'm just saying it's clearly not working now. And I will point again to, you know, adult mode on ChatGPT not shipping because we know it's delayed. That's why it's not working. They didn't ship adult mode. That might have been the... That might... I would say maybe. But that's probably the last, sort of the last gasp of like, oh, we need it to work somehow. Let's try adult mode. And now that's, you know, that's delayed where they're shifting to enterprise. I mean, Fiji says it outright. Pretty amazing. Okay, sorry. Go ahead to your point about this lawsuit with Microsoft. Okay, so, and we hadn't planned on talking about this, but this just came to mind and I hadn't connected it before we started talking right now. Like, so there's reporting from Reuters that Microsoft may sue OpenAI over their $50 billion investment from Amazon. And because it could violate the exclusive cloud agreement that they had set a number of years ago that, like, all OpenAI products had to be actually served through Microsoft Azure. I even saw there was stuff around, like, the language they have to use is like, we are invoking the model, but not we are executing on the model. Like, they're really being a bit... Reinvoke the model. Yes. Look, but we're not, we're not actually, like, deploying or executing the model on our cloud service on Amazon because that would violate the contract. But if you think about it, like, I mean, who are you... Anthropic, yes, direct competition. Everyone's going, they've made a lot of waves in it. Enterprise is a gigantic market. But Microsoft is the... Is it 800-pound gorilla? What's the saying? That sounds like a nice size for a gorilla to me. That's... Okay, 800-pound gorilla in the room. And already, if they're starting to kind of, like, make some waves around, they could put a big thorn in the side of OpenAI in the years they move towards IPO. If you're then going towards their market, I mean, that's a whole other thing that awakening to continue on with the 800-pound gorilla metaphor, like, the 800-pound gorilla, I'm not sure how to continue on that one. But, yeah, you're gonna piss off Microsoft, and they have some leverage over you, and you haven't really been a threat to them yet, and now you are trying to be. I think that poses a whole other problem. Oh, yeah, that... I mean, that is one of... Do you remember, you know, the relationship started to seemingly maybe not fray, but have some distance in there, and they were both like, okay, no, we're still very close. Clearly, something went off the rails. By the way, my favorite Microsoft news of the week, and we won't spend too much time on this, but they made some changes with CoPilot and Mustafa Suleiman, head of AI there. He said, quote, I think he's gonna be focused more on the model. He said, quote, the model is the product. Mustafa Suleiman. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I saw that too. I saw that. Actually, no, no, he brought us all together. It's no longer product versus model. The model is the product. It all converges. Yep, convergence theory. I think I also... The kumbaya moment. My other favorite Microsoft news of the week is... I mean, I guess it was last week. They launched CoPilot CoWork, which basically is like layering Microsoft CoPilot over Claude CoWork, and somehow multi-trillion dollars of corporate value, and they came up with the name CoPilot CoWork. What would you name it? Okay, okay. You know what? I would just stick with CoPilot. I would just be like, own the brand. Own the brand. If that's your thing, no one needs to make that additional distinction between, like, Claude is, it's a name. It's not like a brand name, so you can alliterate on it a little bit. You can add a... But CoPilot's already Microsoft CoPilot. So yeah, I would just stick with CoPilot. Just make it another feature. All right, I could see that. Make another feature in CoPilot. All right. So, by the way, this is not just, like, with OpenAI's direction. This is not just rumblings. There's actually news that we've seen come out recently or over the past 24 hours that they're actually gonna go ahead and make some product changes. And speaking now, so, like, we talked about consumer, enterprise. I think that's the most important thing. Number two, secondarily, is focus. And that focus is coming. And here's the news that's happened. From the Wall Street Journal, OpenAI plans to launch a launch of desktop super app to refocus and simplify the user experience. OpenAI is planning to unify its ChatGPT app, coding platform Codex, and browser into a desktop super app, a step to simplify the user experience and continue with efforts to focus on engineering and business customers. OpenAI president Greg Brockman, who currently leads the company's computing efforts, will temporarily oversee the product revamp and related organizational changes. And Fiji Simo, the chief of applications, will lead the company's sales team as it markets the new product. Very interesting. The strategy change marks a shift from late last year when OpenAI launched a series of standalone products that didn't always resonate with users and sometimes created a lack of focus within the company. OpenAI executives are hoping that unifying its products under one app will allow it to streamline resources as it seeks to beat back the success of its rival, Anthropic. One more line. OpenAI is seeking to focus on so-called agentic AI capabilities within the new super app project. Your reaction. Okay, so number one, reading between the lines, one thing that jumped out at me is Fiji Simo was referred to as chief of applications. Do you remember what her title was when they hired her? CEO of... Wasn't it CEO of applications? CEO of applications. Oh, that's, that's... I just think that's the Wall Street Journal writing it. No, no. I think that's, I think it's telling because already it was very confusing when she was announced as CEO and then it was that she would be reporting. Okay, I'm, I'm saying, watch, watch that space. Is she gonna remain CEO or is she gonna become like chief application officer, chief of applications? Should maybe, maybe reading into it. That seems, yeah. I mean, you would, in this type of thing, you would write, like, chief and CEO. Like, chief, CEO is chief executive officer, so chief of applications. But whatever. If, if this was the Wall Street Journal's way of signaling that she's getting demoted, which I don't think it is, it would be far from the weirdest thing that's happened in journalism and AI this week, which we'll probably get to in a bit. I don't think it's demotion even, because again, she led the company All Hands to actually kind of, like, send this message. I just think it's, it's interesting. I'm curious whether the three-letter CEO will remain that long. But moving on from that complete speculation, I, I found, like, it's been odd, because I don't know if you, did you see Gemini is now launching a Mac app? They're talking about, like, merging browser and desktop. One using the term super app, which I haven't heard in a while since the days of everyone wanted to be WeChat and we would hear about Chinese super apps. And it was funny to me that they kind of used that. But I don't understand why that's, like, that interesting. Browser experience, desktop app, platform, like the coding platform into just one UI or interface. I don't know. What do you think is interesting or exciting about that? I found it almost like a very mundane product detail that they could have almost just done without announcements. So... Well, I have this desktop app on my desktop that has, you know, standard chatbot and co-work stuff and coding capabilities in it. Claude app. And having all that together on your browser, sorry, on your desktop, you know, and giving it access to use your browser to go do things, that has been an unlock for me and many others. So I do think this might be OpenAI seeing that that system really works and saying, and maybe it's going there and saying, you know, we'll put our models against Anthropic's best and our coding against their best, and let's go. Like, let's have at it. See, here's where I will push back. CoWork and computer control, essentially giving Claude unfettered access to the files on your hard drive, basically, like doing local work on your computer. That kind of experience from an enterprise standpoint is terrifying. So if you're really making the shift to enterprise, allowing local file, like open local file access is actually not what you would want to be doing as like a core part of the product. Again, Claude CoWork is in research preview still. It's not a core part of the platform that they advertise, especially to enterprise. So like, to me, that, that's the reason, like, I think the, All signs point to this open-claw style agent. And by the way, Anthropic just launched a version of it with, I think it's called a Claude console, where you could just kind of text Claude to do stuff when you're away and it will do it for you. So this is, I will go even more in the tank for agentic than you are. I'll say this is where it's going. No, no, but the distinction between kind of like launching cloud-based operations and accessing kind of like monitored files versus local files and like, just like where you can be offline or, I mean, it's just such a, it's such a different thing. And again, I agree, like the whole open-claw thing has taken the industry by storm across the board. Everyone's pushing it. Everyone's gonna jump on it, but it's still like what it represents in terms of like finally doing agentic work. Yes, I get. But I think like if that's the core part of what OpenAI is trying to do, again, like everything is reactive right now. As you said, Claude has a good desktop app that combines multiple platforms into one and makes it more usable. So then they're gonna do that. Claude, we started talking about this last February when people were actually criticizing and showing charts about their drop in consumer usage and joking about it, pivoted hard to coding, which then led to enterprise. Like OpenAI being this reactive, I think, again, if they mean it, show it by just smashing the pin. That's all I ask. They're not smashing the pin. I'll just say this. I have no inside knowledge on this, but pretty interesting. Greg Brockman's gonna run the super app. Fiji's gonna help market it. Where's Sam? Probably working on the pin. He's in the back with Johnny. That's my guess. Just in the back with Johnny with the pin. And launching the entire AI cloud business and the whole consumer devices arm as well, in addition to the pin. Why isn't the pin the consumer device? Oh yeah, that's true. And it's the only device that will exist and the only interface through which we will access AI in a matter of years. Maybe headphones. No, headphones are dead. It's only the pin. Don't tell that to Tim Cook. iPin. iPin. Yeah, iPin. IPin. Oh God. That's what they're going to call it, I promise. It's gonna be yesterday's vision, today's technology, the iPin. Simplicity. All right, let's talk about productivity. Let's talk about our favorite type of productivity, which is consultants. You know, this stuff is messy. It's going to take your computer over. What do you need? You need consultants. CNBC, OpenAI lands a multi-year deal, multi-year deals with consulting giants in enterprise push. OpenAI on Monday announced it was entering into multi-year partnerships with four consulting firms that will help the company deploy its enterprise platform called Frontier. It's going to be working with Accenture, Boston Consulting Group, Capgemini, and McKinsey. OpenAI is racing against rivals like Google and Anthropic to win users and market share. And the company has to make an aggressive push to court enterprise customers. Frontier, which OpenAI unveiled earlier this month, acts as an intelligence layer that stitches together disparate systems and data within an organization. It aims to make it easier for companies to manage, deploy, and build AI agents, which are tools that can independently complete tasks on behalf of the user. All right, so that's maybe how it works. If it's going to build technology that's going to just take your stuff over, maybe it happens with the assistance of McKinsey and the merry band of consultants who have now gone from being potentially displaced to essential in the rollout of this technology. Your thoughts? Well, so this is a very delicate balance in these kind of situations in terms of, like, you have the Palantir model of take technology and four-deployed engineer, and our people will be in there implementing technology. You have the partnership model in this case, and I think, like, it's interesting. Anthropic has been traditionally more kind of the four-deployed engineer implementation model. They've also launched large partnership efforts very, I think, just last week as well. Again, reacting in these kind of ways, like copying what Anthropic is doing in this case. I think, like, giving the relationship to the partner, if OpenAI, if this is truly the priority rather than just going all in and being like, we're building a business around that, I think it's another, it adds another element of risk here. But yeah, I think it's a bet and it's actually gonna kind of, like, be a big judge of the type of success they do have. Now, one more idea about why we're seeing this. This is some crazy stuff that came out of Ramp, which is access to enterprise spending. And Axios wrote it up in a story called The AI Spending Flip. Here's the story. Anthropic is now capturing over 73% of all spending among companies buying AI tools for the first time. 73%. Just 10 weeks ago, the split with OpenAI was 50-50. And it was 60-40 in OpenAI's favor as recently as December. This is an unbelievable flip where you're starting to see Anthropic be the first choice. Obviously, it's related to Claude code among companies who need LM technology. And they've surpassed OpenAI. And I'm sure OpenAI has access to this data, and it's probably driving a lot of what we're seeing and have talked about in the first half of this show. I was just, it's funny because I will take my momentary rant that it still shocks me that everyone in the industry is okay that Ramp does release this kind of data as someone whose company uses Ramp. It's still just kind of weird to me that whatever I'm spending on will be able to be, in an anonymized way, still kind of advertised to the entire world. But I'm all about that Ramp economics lab, man. Arrow over there, just unbelievable data. No, it is. And that's already run, John. I'm sorry, it's amazing, but it's still kind of weird to me that everyone's okay with it. But that's for another day. I think it's funny if, let's say OpenAI is looking at this data because Ramp is a really specific company. I work at a high-growth technology enterprise AI startup, Writer. We use Ramp. Many people I know who work at cutting-edge technology companies use Ramp. It's an amazing product. I love it as someone who had to file expense reports in the past and it was a pain in the ass. It's still such a specific profile. So their data is gonna be heavily skewed in whatever the coolest new... So it'll show momentum, but in terms of showing actual aggregate impact in the economy, most large companies are not using Ramp. I can't imagine, especially more kind of old-fashioned companies. So I don't know if it's true. It would be surprising to me if it's actually reflective of the economy at large versus the cool kids are using Claude more than OpenAI right now. Yeah, well, maybe they're a leading indicator. I guess that's the question, is what a Silicon Valley startup is using today, is that gonna be an indicator of what's gonna happen to the rest of the economy? Do you think it's a good one or do you think it's actually almost counterproductive because it's such a different personality and consumer? That's a good question. I mean, I think category, yes, it is a leading indicator, but maybe not a specific vendor. And we're gonna find out later this year. I don't know if you've seen this. Morgan Stanley, of all entities, has warned, this is according to Fortune, that an AI breakthrough is coming in 2026 and most of the world isn't ready. A massive AI breakthrough is coming in the first half of 2026. I guess we're halfway through. And Morgan Stanley says most of the world isn't ready for it. In a sweeping new report, the investment bank warns that a transformative leap in artificial intelligence is imminent driven by an unprecedented accumulation of compute at America's top AI labs. Executives at major AI labs are telling investors to brace for progress that will shock them. What do you think they could be seeing? I mean, what does Morgan Stanley know that we don't or we do? Well, you did, there is also the part that says researchers specifically highlighted a recent interview with Elon Musk citing his belief that applying 10X to compute LLM training will double the model's intelligence. So that's one of their citations. Like I think beyond that, I don't know. Like, yeah, I genuinely don't know. And this is again as someone who is very bullish and somewhat thinks we need to be thoughtful about how smart and fast this technology can move. I'm still, it's still funny to me, this kind of curiosity gap style research report from Morgan Stanley versus just say what is it? Is it just, what's gonna happen? Take a bet, take a bet, give a prediction. Well, it's very bizarre. Anyway, that's another interesting note. On the bottom of the story, it says, for this story, Fortune journalists used generative AI as a research tool. An editor verified the accuracy of the information before publishing. I thought that that was interesting, but it wasn't to me the sort of weirdest use of generative AI in tech journalism or journalism this week. I don't know if you saw the Vanity Fair story about Dario Amadei. It was initially titled Dario Amadei Has a Cold. And it was, it seems like this reporter got some decent access into Anthropic. And then like towards the end of the story, he's been building up the whole story about getting to meet Dario Amadei, CEO of Anthropic. And then he writes this whole long interview that he had with Dario. And then afterwards, he's like, oh, I actually didn't So disrespectful to the reader, to the companies you're, especially to the reader. I mean, that's awful. Yeah, I think, I mean, yeah, it's more, was it like performance art or something? I hope that. That's the best possible explanation. It wasn't just the interview. It wasn't just, like, this person seems like they actually did real reporting and then just wrote the, put the fake interview at the end. Truly a puzzling situation. I mean, like, I guess we hadn't planned on talking about it, but in terms of what is real and what's not anymore, I'm sure you've been following good old Bibi Netanyahu and these videos this week. I have, yeah. So go ahead, you can introduce it. I mean, I almost have to imagine every listener would have crossed paths with the rampant speculations that Benjamin Netanyahu is deceased and has been putting out AI videos of himself at a coffee shop. And then even today, there was a press conference, but still endless speculation that it was AI-generated. And honestly, like, this, like, again, this kind of like Dario interview, and then it was AI, like, the Netanyahu stuff is actually, I think, the most scared I've been around the impact of, like, AI and video and people trying to understand what is true, that, like, just how absurd and crazy it is that if we're actually living in an era where world leader somehow, and are they, is he trying to troll us by putting out a coffee, weird coffee shop video rather than just showing up live with, like, a bunch of people. But yeah, this one has got me pretty rattled this week. I don't know, I think you're on Blue Sky too much. I saw those videos. I didn't have any question about the veracity of them. Maybe I'm gullible, but... No, no, no, no, no, no. This is X. This is, this is, I feel, you're getting both sides on X. Yeah, that's true. I feel like this is one of the unifying things on all these social platforms. This is Horseshoe Theory loves AI-generated Netanyahu. That's true. The epitome of it. Yeah. All right, we, let's go to break before this really goes off the rails. But if you're interested in the political story, folks, Senator Mark Warner is going to be on the show on Wednesday. We're going to talk about AI job loss. We're going to talk about the anthropic and the Pentagon thing. And yes, we'll talk about one of my favorite topics, which is why do members of Congress continue to conduct seemingly insider trading? And they will not stop. They can't stop. And Senator Warner and I will discuss that next week on Wednesday. All right, Ranjan and I will be back right after this to talk about Jensen Wong's comments on AI layoffs, a little bit about the metaverse, and then, of course, it's really interesting. Wait, sorry, sorry. Who did you say is going to be on the show for discussing insider trading? Mark Warner. Jesus. Man, the guests you get. I love it. For listeners, I love that Alex, with no heads up, just casually drops these names right before we go to break. Sorry. Okay, I have to. That was a compliment. That was a compliment. Yeah. All right, I guess we're leaving this in, Ranjan. I was just making my pitch for this. All right. We'll be back after this with a conversation about Jensen Wong's AI, Jensen Wong's comments on AI layoffs, the metaverse, and then Jeff Bezos' fund. We'll be back right after this. I've interviewed a lot of great tech founders on this show, and one surprisingly universal challenge comes up again and again, finding the right domain name. It's something I ran into myself when launching big technology. The names you want are often taken, and it's tempting just to settle and move on. But the founders I respect most don't settle on fundamentals, and your name is one of them. It should immediately signal what you actually built. That's what I appreciate about .tech domains. It just makes sense. It tells the world, your customers, your investors, and anyone googling you that you're building technology, clean, direct, and no qualifiers. And I'm seeing more serious startups leaning into it. Nothing.tech, 1x.tech, Aurora.tech, CES.tech, Pi.tech, and so many more. If you're building something tech-first, don't settle. Secure your .tech domain from any registrar of your choice and make your positioning obvious from day one. Starting something new isn't just hard. It's terrifying. So much work goes into this thing that you're not entirely sure will work out, and it can be hard to make that leap of faith. When I started this podcast, I wasn't sure if anyone would listen. Now I know it was the right choice. It also helps when you have a partner like Shopify on your side to help. Shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world and 10% of all e-commerce in the U.S. From household names like Allbirds and Cotopaxi to brands just getting started. With hundreds of ready-to-use templates, Shopify helps you build a beautiful online store that matches your brand's style. Get the word out like you have a marketing team behind you. Easily create email and social campaigns wherever your customers are scrolling or strolling. It's time to turn those what-ifs into $t with Shopify today. Sign up for your $1 per month trial today at Shopify.com slash BigTech. Go to Shopify.com slash BigTech. That's Shopify.com slash BigTech. And we're back here on Big Technology Podcast. Friday edition. Yes, as you heard before the break, Senator Mark Warner is going to be on the show next week. We have an amazing, honestly, I think the strongest lineup we've had in a very long time, if not in the show's history coming up on some of these Wednesday shows. So stay tuned for that. All right. Maybe Jensen Wong will come on. Maybe not. He can say AI. Oh yeah. So this was, so he did do this tour around GTC similar to what we thought, which was basically making the case for artificial intelligence. And Jim, and part of it was Jim Cramer asking him on CNBC about his, about his, his impression on whether companies will continue to lay people off with AI. And Jensen, I think captured what I was feeling about this pretty well. Here was what he, what he said in response for companies with imagination, you'll do more for companies where the leadership is just out of ideas. They have nothing else to do. They have no reason to imagine greater than they are. Then when they have more capability, they don't do more. And this has kind of gone to my, my thought on the whole AI layoff thing, which is that, yeah, if you have no imagination, you'll just lay off and take profit. But if you do have imagination, you're going to do more with these tools. And there's so many things that ambitious CEOs want to do. And that's why I'm a little bit skeptical whenever I hear this AI will cause mass unemployment, you know, sort of line like we heard, you know, I don't know, we've heard from multiple places. I don't, it doesn't mean that the government, we shouldn't be prepared. That's what I'm going to speak with Senator Warner about, but it also means like, let's look at this in context and with some nuance, like we tried to do on Wednesday with Andrew Ross Sorkin. So what do you think about this line from Jensen? I think it captures it so well. I think Jensen is slowly cementing himself, as we talked about on last week's episode, as the good guy of AI. And he's got a shot and he's, people are going to like the leather jacket, the drinking beer and the fried chicken. I think he's, this is a good line. When you have imagination, you can do more that you can use this to just try new things and like scale more quickly and just, yeah, it just opens up. I saw one thing, I think I'm starting to buy into. It's like, it could mean fewer SaaS giants, but it could mean many, many more medium-sized SaaS businesses of like smaller teams, but still just more software is created, more technology is used in new kinds of ways. Like I think that's definitely the optimistic scenario. I think where, again, we saw with Block, we've seen a lot of time and we're going to get into the rumored or the reported potential meta layoffs. Like people are going to be attributing these to AI directly. People might even use AI as the excuse, like we saw with Jack Dorsey, but in a lot of these companies, maybe they don't have much to do. They overhired, they were bloated and they potentially would have need to cut anyway. And they couldn't just reinvest those people into more interesting things. Yeah, exactly. I really, I'm a believer in the bull case here. Not to say there won't be any disruption, but it also means that like, I won't discount the fact that there's a percentage chance that like things will go bad and that's why you have to plan for that. But I think Jensen really captures it. If you have imagination, you're going to do more. If you don't have imagination, you're going to lay off. Do you think by the summer, is Jensen, has he cemented his role as the good guy of AI? It's clear he's, he's pushing. Well, I don't know if good guy is the sort of framing I would use, but I think he's... Friendly face. He has a chance to be sort of the Steve Jobs of AI. And maybe he's already there. But, you know, he, he can be the visionary that explains and makes the, like we were saying last week, You know, I think you're also someone who's like, let's not believe, you know, fully and drink the AI Kool-Aid on this, because if you go all the way in, you could end up having, you know, shocks and disappointments on the way, you know, if things don't go positively, right? Well, there's two types of shocks you can have. One is it, it doesn't work as advertised, and that's just its own kind of shock and disappointment. Or it works just in a very scary way and just causes mass disruption, as many in the AI community talk about, and it's its own kind of shock. So I think it could be either of those, but there, yeah, that narrow path through the middle of those two, no one has outlined in any kind of like decent way. Well, I mean, yeah, the numbers, the numbers tell the story, right? What was it? Oh, they were below, AI was pulling lower than ICE. Yeah. Yeah. The only above Iran in the Democratic Party. Yeah. Which is not, not exactly the things that people are most into right now. By the way, I, you know, I, just one more plug on the Warren interview. I do speak with him about whether this negative polling can lead to delays in data centers. And coming from Virginia, which has the most data centers in the U.S., certainly knows a thing or two. So something to look out for. All right. Meta and the metaverse. Should we call this segment, is it Schrodinger's metaverse? Is it alive or is it dead? This is from, let's see, CNBC. Meta is shutting down VR social platform Horizon Worlds and further pivot away from the metaverse. Meta announced Tuesday that it was shutting down Horizon Worlds, the virtual reality social network for Quest VR headsets that was once a key piece of the pivot to the metaverse. Horizon Worlds, by the way, was this kind of VR world where you would start hanging out with people. No one really used it. Maybe some people did, but not, not many. Then here's the next story from Mashable. Meta isn't, oh sorry, Engadget. Meta isn't shutting down its VR metaverse after all. Meta is backtracking on its plans to shut the VR version of its metaverse. The company now plans to support Horizon Worlds in VR for the foreseeable future, according to Andrew Bosworth, the CTO of Meta. We will keep it working for VR in VR for existing games to support the fans who've reached out. Rajan, is the metaverse alive or the metaverse dead? I'm going to pivot from Schrodinger's metaverse because it's dead. This isn't a dead or alive question to me. I would like to pivot to a very nostalgic kind of like wishful look at, I liked, I was seeing people share just those ridiculous, like, I think it was Mark Zuckerberg interviewing Gayle King in the metaverse. There's like, just, just remember that time. I don't know if this is true or not, but I saw someone share that someone paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to live next to Snoop Dogg in the metaverse. What is it? Remember metaverse real estate? Metaverse. Like, ah, what a time. What a time that was. This is from the New York times. They highlight some of it, some of the madness around it. Disney and Crate and Barrel and other companies were quick to appoint chief metaverse officers. And this is from McKinsey. With its potential, with its potential to generate up to 5 trillion in value by 2030, the metaverse is too big for companies to ignore. So, question. Did you ever go into the metaverse? I think I did. Like, I, what do we consider the metaverse? Did you own an Oculus Quest or, I guess you tried, I mean, you tried the Vision Pro. I don't even know if that counts as metaverse. No, that was spatial computing. No, I never owned one. I did, I did have an Oculus, you know, I had an Oculus when I was, it was a test device when I was at BuzzFeed back in the day. And then I lent it to a coworker because I wasn't using it very much. And then COVID happened and I never saw that person again. Meanwhile, I would have loved to have that, you know, metaverse with me in COVID, which, by the way, it ended up being mostly a COVID fever dream. Well, I think, because, so I played like games with the Oculus Quest, but I didn't interact with other people also. Certainly never like a Horizons world or anything like that. Yeah, no, I don't think I ever made it to the metaverse. I, I kind of I'm regretting it now. Maybe we should go find ourselves some quests on Facebook Marketplace. Pretty cheap and just go see who's hanging out on Horizons world right now. If any listeners are, let us know. We'll come find you. We'll hang out with you. If you're the person that's going to, that's going to go meet someone to pick up a quest on, to go to the metaverse on Facebook Marketplace. They're just going to hit you in the head with a crowbar and take your money. You should be robbed. Sorry, sorry. Raja, decorum. No, no, but on a serious note, maybe the metaverse was never just virtual reality. I think this from Matthew Ball. The metaverse is misdescribed as virtual reality. In truth, virtual reality is merely a way to experience the metaverse. To say VR is the metaverse is like saying the mobile internet is an app. Note too that hundreds of millions are already participating in virtual worlds on a daily basis and spending billions of them without VR, AR, MR, or XR devices. As he's talking about Roblox, as a corollary to the above, VR headsets aren't the metaverse anymore than smartphones are the mobile internet. So maybe the metaverse lives on. You know what? Here's the comeback. So world models, I think, are going to be like the, you know, like AI models that instead of being based on language are being based on actually understanding the physical world. And we're going to get into Bezos' new fund. I think, I think they keep the metaverse alive and reality labs, and then slowly, quietly pivot to the whole world model space. And then suddenly it all comes back and Zuck was right the whole time. As he figures out AI LLM-based advertising and comes back with world models and gets on his hoverboard thing with an American flag and just wins again. By the way, that thing is called a foil. I called it a skimboard. It's a foil hydrofoil or something. Yeah, one of my, yeah, yeah. Apologies to listeners that we should have known that one. Or we regret the error. But the funny thing would be if they do pivot to world models, guess who the perfect person to bring back to run that would be? Veehan Lakuhn. That's, that would, oh wait, isn't that his new startup? It's like, is a big part of it is understanding the world. Yes. Yeah. World models, but it is, I think, it is interesting to me because like you take your Fortnites and Robloxes and people are still spending ungodly amounts of money for like skins in those games and interacting everywhere. And those are, those are virtual world experiences. So, so yeah, metaverse is alive, just not, not legless avatars while wearing a virtual reality headset and sitting in a meeting because I still wish I did that once, but never got around to it. I, unfortunately, I think I was just not working in a company for, when the time that came around. Oh, one last thing that we should say. I think that this conversation about the metaverse, you know, is incomplete without talking about what it led to, which is like, if there is a hope for consumer AI, which we debated in the beginning, it's probably through some form of device. And meta certainly has a head start on that. I mean, the Ray-Ban metas, which you and I both really like, and these newer projects are direct results from this VR move and the VR headsets live on, just the metaverse, no. Take the win. I think like if they just said openly, like these technologies gave us a head start in wearables in the entire new world of AI. No one would question it. It's, it's right. So you don't have to just shut down Horizons world. It's okay. You don't have to pretend to keep it open. You don't have to. You guys, no. No, I was, I was just saying, I, to myself, I think they are basically saying that, that version of what you just said, which is like, this was, it's almost like, you know, like the, uh Fire phone led to the echo or something like that. Exactly. Exactly. There's a, there's a hero story here. There's a definite hero story. And now that they don't have to spend all that money supporting it, they can actually work to build, build AI. So, all right. Uh, speaking of Amazon, there's this really interesting story that I don't think we should leave without talking about, which is that, uh, Jeff Bezos, according to the Wall Street Journal, is in talks to raise $100 billion for an AI manufacturing fund. Bezos is in early talks to raise $100 billion for a new fund that would buy up manufacturing companies and seek to use AI technology to accelerate their path to automation. The Amazon founder is meeting with some of the world's largest asset managers to raise funding for the project. A few months ago, he traveled to the Middle East to It seems like he's ready to automate, you know, real, you know, blue-collar jobs with this push. And third of all, you know, knowing, knowing Bezos the way I do, and that is, of course, reading about him and speaking to people who know him. He just tends to be right about these things all the time. And I really do believe that he's on to something here, that manufacturing transformation with AI is already underway, but it's about to make a major, major leap, and there's a real opportunity there. So I think Bezos is on the money. And I have a lot of these feelings. What do you think, Rajan? Well, if you continue reading the next two paragraphs on this, Bezos was recently appointed co-CEO of Project Prometheus, a new startup that is building artificial intelligence models that can understand and simulate the physical world. While much of the AI revolution has been focused on large language models, billions of dollars have begun to flow to companies that are seeking to apply spatially focused AI systems towards industries, including robotics and manufacturing. So yeah, I had not even seen that in the, our, our prep doc here before. World's models. That's, that's going to be the next big thing. And, and again, I like the point, not only is Bezos someone who is often right about this kind of thing, again, like what Amazon did to the entire warehouse space, bringing in more people and, but still the level of automation is what led to us all getting addicted to two-day delivery and one-day instant delivery. Like, like the, the technological innovation that they were able to push, like he gets it. He, he's shown it time and time again. So I think he will definitely, this is, this is something we will watch very, very closely. No, totally. I agree. I mean, the thing with Bezos is he knows that there is like, there are going to be companies that will implement this and companies that don't. And I think he's making a pretty sizable bet, of course, with others' money, but he's going to make this big bet and, and probably be right. All right, Ranjan, before we leave, I have a question to ask you. It's somewhat sensitive. It's not easy to ask. Do you dry chat? I have dry chatted. I have dry chatted. So Wall Street Journal reporter Meg Gamberowski tweets, what the, and this is seemingly a pitch that she got. She goes, one in four admit they, the email goes from Mandy, poor Mandy getting put on blast in front of everybody. One in four admit they dry chat before emotionally difficult tasks. What is dry chatting? Here's the pitch. Hi, Megan. Did or before a tough conversation, have you tried dry chatting? Dry chatting. Apparently it's a trend as over half of adults admit they find it hard to articulate their emotions during tense conversations. Many are turning to AI to rehearse. Enter dry chatting. Rehearsing emotionally challenging conversations with AI before having them in real life. I guess we found it. This is the use case AI consumer. This is the consumer use case dry chatting. I kind of, when I saw this, obviously the term dry chatting is just like, I don't know, it's, it's just something that gives you the icks. But then when you start to see it, you're like, wait, this is, so I have a mid like, if you have to write a tense email, running it through an AI and asking for some pointers and saying like what you want out of it is a pretty good thing. I think most people should do. I haven't gone straight for the voice dry chat. I'll admit, like I haven't, I haven't talked to ChatGPT, Gemini cloud, whoever else, and tried to rehearse the conversation in full, but maybe it's, maybe it's worth it. Maybe I might try dry chatting soon. It's like, you know what? If it helps you actually resolve the situation in a, in a much more amicable way, shouldn't we all be dry chatting? First of all, I will say I have used voice to dry chat on some of my interviews before, like I have like a rundown and you know, I want to anticipate what the interviewee is going to say. So I role play with the bot sometimes and I'm like, you're this person and I'm me. So I'm going to separate dry chatting from like role-playing from like rehearsing. Cause this, this is a specific, I feel dry chattingly applies to like really like emotionally challenging conversations. It could be if you're about to fire someone, if you're like, like, you know, you have to break up, you have to like deliver some really bad news to me. I'm going to, I want to keep dry chatting, make sure we all understand. Oh my God. The sycophancy and the dry chatting. I don't think it goes well together. It's all right. It's all right. ChatGPT, you're going to be my girlfriend and I'm going to be me. And I have some news to share with you. And ChatGPT will be like, okay, go ahead. And you'll be like, baby, we need to break up. And ChatGPT will be like, great idea. You're always coming up with the smartest ideas. Well, so, but so does dry chatting work better or what's like the eval? What's the dry chat benchmark? Because if 4.0, 4.0 sycophancy would, then when you go to deliver the actual bad news, you'll get ripped apart because sycophantic GPT 4.0 told you you're right about everything. Maybe that, that's my, that's the new benchmark we need to come up with. Well, you have, it has to be this like sort of reinforcement learning where you reward conversations that don't get the person slapped in real life. That's the, so there's some poor scale AI guys who have to go through. You got to go. All right, listen, your, your task this week. I'm ready for it. You got to break up with your girlfriend for science. We got to see if she's, you're getting slapped. I'm telling you, man, this could be, it could be a reality, reality TV series. Dry chat. Actually, you go, wait, wait, this, you go, you dry chat and then you go have the real conversation and everyone gets to watch how it actually plays out. This is not a bad, not a bad pitch. Have you seen Nathan Fielder's the rehearsal? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's just like that. Nathan is just dry chatting with all these people who put comedians out of business now. All right. Well, I think on that note, well, this has been a lovely, I don't even want to say it. Is this a wet chat if that's a dry chat? Joe, don't, don't, don't. I think we should go. I specifically refrained this entire time. Folks, don't miss my interview with Mark Warner on Wednesday. Thank you, Ranjan. Thank you, everybody, for listening and watching. We'll see you next time on Big Technology Podcast. Security program on spreadsheets, new regulations piling up, and audit dread? It's time for Vanta. Vanta automates security and compliance, brings evidence into one place, and cuts audit prep by 82%. Less manual work, clear visibility, faster deals, zero chaos. Call it compliance or call it comp-liance. Get it? Join the 15,000 companies using Vanta to prove trust. Go to Vanta.com slash com. Rinse knows that greatness takes time, but so does laundry. So Rinse will take your laundry and hand deliver it to your door expertly cleaned, and you can take the time pursuing your passions. Time once spent sorting and waiting, folding and queuing, now spent challenging and innovating and pushing your way to greatness. So pick up the Irish flute or those calligraphy pens or that daunting beef Wellington recipe card and leave the laundry to us. Rinse. It's time to be great.