More OpenAI Executive Drama, Is Siri Seriously Broken?, Meta’s Elusive Next Hit

Top OpenAI executives are reportedly at odds over its spending and IPO plans. Apple keeps making plans for Siri and well, nothing to show for it yet. And can Meta find its next hit? That's coming up with MG Siegler from Spyglass right after this. This episode is brought to you by True Diagnostic. I've been trying to get more intentional about my health lately, not just how I feel day to day, but what's actually going on under the hood. That's why I checked out True Diagnostic. They offer at-home tests that measure your biological age, not just how old you are, but how your body is aging on a cellular level. Their TrueAge test looks at things like your pace of aging, organ system health, and even risk factors tied to lifestyle, giving you real data to act on. What I like is that it's not guesswork. You can track changes over time and see how things like sleep, diet, or exercise are actually impacting your body and taking the test at home was so easy. 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You can even get real-time updates on your expert's progress right in the app, which makes it so much easier to stay on track. And you can get unlimited expert help at no extra cost, even on nights and weekends during tax season. Visit turbo tax.com to get matched with an expert today. Only available with TurboTax full-service experts. Welcome to big technology podcast. It's the first Monday of the month and MGC Ziegler is here with us in his traditional spot to break down what's going on in the world of tech. We have a lot to talk about today, including more turnover at the top of OpenAI and what that means. We'll also talk a little bit about OpenAI and Anthropic seemingly headed toward the same product. Then we will return to a common theme in these discussions. Apple and whether that company's plans for Siri will ever materialize. And then finally, why Meta seems not to be able to find its next hit. MG, great to see you. Welcome back to the show. Thanks, Alex. Super sunny here in London, so it's nice outside. Got Michigan Wolverines in the National Championship game this week, and so I'm glad we're recording this right now and not, say, tomorrow when I might be staying up till about four in the morning. Oh goodness. Well, it's definitely going to be a busy week on a number of fronts. And certainly the OpenAI team is going to have to figure out what's happening once again in the C-suite because there's breaking news that we have coming basically within our recording window here that there is potentially some discontent between OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and CFO Sarah Fryer. This is from The Information. Sam Altman has committed OpenAI to spend $600 billion in the next five years and privately said he wants to go public as soon as the fourth quarter, despite expectations his company will burn more than $200 billion before it starts generating cash. Behind the scenes, Sarah Fryer, his Chief Financial Officer, has voiced concerns that reflect the tensions and risks inherent in the CEO's extraordinarily ambitious plans. She told some colleagues earlier this year that she didn't believe the company would be ready to go public in 2026 because of the procedural and organizational work needed and the risks from its spending commitments. She also said she wasn't sure whether OpenAI would need to pour so much money into obtaining AI servers in the coming years or whether its revenue growth, which has been slowing, would support the commitment. And seemingly as a result, Altman has excluded her from some conversations related to the company's financial plans. Now, OpenAI has a statement between Altman and Fryer saying everything is hunky-dory, but this does seem like yet more drama at the top of OpenAI. On one hand, I would expect this type of disagreement between any CFO who's done any sort of financial job and OpenAI with its unbelievably ambitious plans that don't really fit any model previously. So I can't tell whether or not this is a big deal and another problem within the company or whether basically this is just kind of business as usual for a company growing at an unprecedented pace that's going to deal with some typical tension at that juncture where the finance and the product strategy meet. What do you think, MG? So, yeah, my first initial thoughts, same as what you just said, was like, oh, my God, I can't believe a CEO and a CFO are at odds. What are the odds of that? Like that happens in every company, of course, because obviously the CFO often has to be the bad cop telling, you know, slowing down spend or sort of putting a dose of reality into, you know, any sort of future plans. But at OpenAI, not a normal company, famously, things are always sort of to the extreme. And I think this one is obviously unique in the case that we're talking about the IPO. You know, this had been rumored, of course, dating back to last year that basically OpenAI and, of course, Anthropic are sort of in starting to put the wheels in motion, at least, to go public potentially this year. I actually predict as one of my year-end predictions, I predicted that neither OpenAI nor Anthropic will go public in 2026. That was looking fairly bad, I would say, a few weeks ago, like it like it was going to happen. But, you know, there's reports like this now coming out that are not too surprising. Again, it's the CFO. Of course, she's probably going to be, you know, if anyone putting the brakes on a little bit more than sort of others at the company. But, you know, the CFO is obviously vital to a company going public and being instrumental in that raise. And Sarah Fryer in particular, who's been involved with public companies and on the board of companies and knows what to do here. But again, I just think when I was, you know, when all these rumors have come out about OpenAI and Anthropic potentially going out, like there are so many wild cards still at play over the next even, you know, six, seven, eight, nine months. Macro wise, as we've talked about before, like where anything could derail like an IPO from happening. But I do think, you know, now that SpaceX is formally, you know, put the wheels in motion to go out and it sounds like, you know, they're angling for June for maybe for Elon Musk's birthday. And, you know, that puts a little bit more pressure, of course, given his position with OpenAI is technically a co-founder, but now at odds, obviously, with the company and with Sam Altman in particular. You know, that adds another layer to this. But it does feel like that maybe Sarah Fryer's looking at sort of the overall picture and looking at these leak, you know, what these leak financials, obviously they have they've even better insight into what the actual numbers are and just looking at the market and being like, It's unclear what would happen if OpenAI went public. You'd think like, oh, it's an AI company. There's so much buzz like everyone. But again, SpaceX is already going to be out there touting the AI angle, right? Elon's going to play up the data centers in space and XAI and all of that. So we're going to have sort of some of the some of the wind taken out of the AI hype sales in the public market already. And then if they go, if OpenAI goes out and you see just this massive, massive burn, how are public markets going to react to that? It's sort of unknown, but I think like she might be saying, look, we're in the midst of changing a lot about the business right now. You know, famously, we're putting a pause on these side quests and at the same time sort of maybe, you know, pivoting to sort of focus more on what historically has been Anthropic strength in enterprise and obviously with what's going on with Claude Code and Codex. And so we don't have like a full vision into what like the next year is going to look like, even financially. Yeah, I mean, any CFO, no matter who it is, sitting in this company would probably be having a heart attack because the belief within OpenAI is that this technology is moving on an exponential and it may well be. But as a CFO, you're not really able to think in those exponentials. You have to think of like, am I going to, is this company going to go bankrupt? Like, are we investing so much that we're gonna end up, you know, sort of not being able to meet our commitments? And we've already seen OpenAI pull out of a few commitments recently. This is a quote, it's kind of an interesting quote in this information story. Fryer has a hard job, said someone who works closely with her and Altman. She's working for a founder with big ambitions who wants to push the envelope as hard as he can on spend. to know exactly what the growth picture is going to look like over the next year. And so if I'm Sarah Fryer, I'm probably saying like, hey, we just raised this $122 billion round, by far and away the largest round ever raised, by far and away larger than any IPO, including SpaceX's upcoming rumored IPO, which would target a mere $70 or $80 billion, right? And OpenAI has raised more than that in a private round. And so if I'm Sarah Fryer, I say, well, look, we just got this done. This buys us X amount of runway. We don't know exactly what that is, but it's not indefinite, given these burn numbers. And you know, just sort of slow things down a little bit. Let's see how all the codex work that we're putting in this new super app, you know, that we're working on. Let's see, you know, give this some months to play out so we have a better picture of what our actual financial picture will look like before sort of we start the wheels in motion. But again, Sam Altman and maybe others within the company are probably looking at this, you know, overall picture and looking at not only SpaceX, but again, Anthropic is probably the main concern here, because if Anthropic were to go public before OpenAI does and has a sort of is able to paint that better picture in terms of profitability, that's going to be even more problematic for OpenAI. And so I get sort of the, you know, the two sides here, the push and pull, as it were. But again, it seems very risky for them to try to go out this year, regardless of all the macro stuff going on. Yeah. And you're going to really need your CEO and CFO to be in sync if you're going to do it. And this is, again, the reporting from the information. In recent months, Altman left Fryer out of a conversation about service spending with leaders at one of OpenAI's top investors. Her absence was notable, noticeable, and awkward, given the previous conversation on the same topic included her. A different person who also attended a senior level meeting at OpenAI with Altman earlier this year said it was unusual that Fryer was not invited. Also, this is again from the information, in an unusual move for a large company where CFOs almost always answer directly to the CEO, Fryer stopped reporting directly to Altman in August last year and instead began reporting to Fiji Simo, who had joined as head of OpenAI's applications business, who, as we know, after last Friday's news, Fiji is now on medical leave. So leaving Fryer where exactly? I mean, there's so much in just what you said right there. So sort of going backwards, when the news came out that Fiji Simo was joining, I did think it was odd at the time, even that, yeah, all of these reports were moving over to her. You know, she had the CEO title, but it's not the CEO of the company, right? It was at the time CEO of applications, and now they've changed it to CEO of AGI something or another. I'm not 100% sure what it is right now. AGI deployment. Yes, AGI deployment. Totally normal. Whatever that means. And so, so it seemed a little weird at the time that, yeah, Sarah Fryer, the CFO, was was sort of moving in that. Now they would play it as like, look, we just needed to free up Sam's time. He needs to do fundraising, though, obviously, finance is pretty important with fundraising. You'd think like, again, they might want to be, you know, perfectly in sync and in line with one another talking through that. But that's sort of why I've always sort of had in the back of my head that I would not be shocked if Fiji Simo is eventually sort of overall CEO and they just sort of have Sam Altman there because he's vital still, obviously from a fundraise perspective from sort of these higher level mission-oriented goals. But, you know, if and when Fiji Simo, you know, is in a place with her health where, you know, she can be sort of more instrumental on the day-to-day, obviously, you know, everyone hopes that she gets better and she's able to come back quickly from this leave of absence. You know, you can see a world in which she already has all these people who normally report to a CEO reporting to her as the sort of sub-CEO. And so we'll see where that path goes down. But yes, the sort of fracture in this report between Sam and Sarah Fryer seems like the big element of it. Obviously, that's very damning if you have financial meetings and the CFO isn't involved, and you're specifically not including the CFO. What does that suggest? Now, it might suggest that, who knows, Sam Altman is saying, like, Look, I'm trying to come up with all these new methods of financing, as he's talked about in the past, and maybe I just need someone to brainstorm with that's not necessarily our CFO because, of course, she'll say no or she'll, you know, lead us down a more traditional path and I really need to think outside the box. I'm trying to come up with some way in which, you know, you could say, like, yeah, the CFO doesn't need to be in this very important financial meeting that she's normally involved in. But the reality is, like, it might be a bad sign or, you know, there might be something else going on, but it doesn't look good regardless optically, you know, from the outside. And of course, the company is going to say everything is hunky-dory, just like they historically have always said with Microsoft and, you know, everything else, like, you know, nothing to see here. But there's always something to see with OpenAI, as we've learned. Absolutely. And it's also interesting that that meeting leaked. Like, who leaked it? It probably wasn't OpenAI. It seems like that was leaked by the investors, maybe someone who wasn't happy with how the latest $122 billion funding round went down. I don't know. I mean, obviously, this is all just speculation, but that is an interesting wrinkle as well. A top investor leaking this stuff is weird. By the way, the entire press strategy around the $122 billion round was weird, too. It's like, look, I get that they had, you know, again, as we just mentioned, it's like a record raise. It's an incredible number, but they also had just announced the $110 billion dollar raise, right? And now, and then they felt the need to do a whole nother cycle with Sarah Fryer going out there and talking to folks. It's sort of felt very, it felt like the most defensive way to announce the biggest fundraise in history. You know, obviously they're under attack on a few fronts. You know, we talked about Anthropic and everything else going on, Google and et cetera, et cetera. But still like that whole cycle was just weird. Yeah. It's an up of, it's an upgrade of $12 more billion coming in, which again is incredible. That's bigger than almost every fundraise ever, you know, not done by OpenAI. That in and of itself, the delta between those two numbers. But still, it was like, you just announced the $110. Now you're announcing the $122 and like you're getting, you know, two bites of the apple out of these things. And I don't, I don't know. There, there's weird, weird, weird optics around this. If you just take a step back around a lot going on at OpenAI. Well, MG TCPN fixes this. You know that. Yeah. We haven't even gotten into that. I mean yeah, but like, yes, there's, there's so many weird things going on at the moment. One last thing about the revenue side. There's this chart in this, in the information story. And for those of you in audio, I'll just kind of narrate a little bit. It looks at OpenAI versus Anthropic revenue. And you could sort of see why they'd want to go public before Anthropic, because late last year Anthropic was doing, looks like about $10 billion in annualized revenue and OpenAI was over $20 billion. But now Anthropic has closed that. They're at $19 billion in annualized revenue, while OpenAI, according to the latest report, has $25 billion. So if things continue at this rate, does Anthropic surpass OpenAI in revenue? And what does that do to the IPO story? I think I actually asked Claude to do that extrapolation. I'm trying to remember exactly a few weeks ago. And it did have them crossing. It's, I think at some point next year, if memory serves. And you know, it's obviously a moving target, quite literally. But, but even that speaks to exactly like why OpenAI is doing this, this sort of product and in a way, business model pivot because of those very numbers, right? They see them too. Like they see that Anthropic is gaining steam. And, and we, you know, we talk a lot about like, yeah, Claude is, is getting consumer usage, which sort of they hadn't had historically or hadn't had a strong point there historically. And that's, that's big. But the key thing is, yeah, this Claude code usage driving these, these, these sort of enterprises to sign up for, for Anthropic versus using OpenAI and how that is closing that gap as you're talking about. And so regardless of that being bad from a public company, you know, narrative when you're trying to go public, it's bad for the company overall because that's entirely why they're, they're pivoting, it would seem, right? That's why they're doing everything and, You know, that's really what the sprint is, is all about. But again, at the same time, I go back to, it's not just that they're sort of doing all of these, you know, this focus. It's also that they're... This is a different sort of muscle than they've needed to, you know, sort of adhere to in the past, where, again, they're not selling directly to consumers. They're talking about selling into enterprise. And by all accounts, they've been doing a good job. It seems like it's a fast-growing business, Codex, for them. But it's still not nearly, you know, as big as Claude Code is. And they've got Cursor out there, and they've got, you know, and myriad other, you know, would-be competitors. And so they, like, these next few months are going to be even more fascinating than they always are for OpenAI. The fact that, you know, these past few years have been, this has been arguably the most interesting company in the world to watch. And now these next few months seem like they're going to be absolutely vital to watch. MG, let me ask you, is this wise, the fact that OpenAI is going to build this super app that will have computer use or browser use, ChatGPT and Codex all together? And Anthropic also has their own version of this super app, which is, you know, Claude and Co-Work and Claude Code all together. Do you think that this is the right use case to be running after, basically, this AI code jockey that can just basically go do everything for you even if you're not technical? I mean, I go back and forth a little bit on this, and as I think the companies do, right? It's like the famous bundling and unbundling quote, right? Jim Barksdale back in the day. It's just like companies always do this from meta. Meta famously has done this multiple times now, right? Where they have all these products inside of, back in the day, Facebook, and then they start to unbundle them into their own sort of disparate products. And then later, they've realized, like, oh, actually, we should bring them all back in together. And so companies just bundle and unbundle. And OpenAI, again, is just doing it a little bit faster, it feels like, than than sort of historically has been the case. Do I think it's a good strategy? I think it's it's probably the right thing to do right now for them, because again, they have this massive user base with ChatGPT. They have what they feel like is a good competitive product in Codex. If they're able to bring the two of them together, I think that it makes sense in a world if you truly believe that Codex is not just going to be coding, you know, for developers, if you believe it's going to be the future of sort of agentic software, that it's going to be meant for consumers as well as enterprise and everything sort of all in one, then I think it makes sense to do that. And I think that, you know, Claude right now sort of already has that baked in, right? Like they're all part of the sort of the same, at least Mac app payload right now. I think there's other sort of variables at play with regard to mobile, like how you make this all work on mobile and what that might look like. But at least for now, I think it probably makes sense and I think it's sound strategy to do it. There is a risk though, obviously, that both, like your app just becomes this bloated mess of, you know, Microsoft Office, and you've got drop-downs, and you've got drop-downs of drop-downs. And ChatGPT has had this problem in the past, right, with the model picker, and they had to simplify things. And so when you're bringing in two products together and potentially three, as we mentioned with Atlas in the mix as well, like does it just become the sort of thing that that consumers all of a sudden don't like because it's just like this Frankenstein of a product, Frankenstein's monster of a product. And so there's risk to it. But again, I think that their strategy is to basically leverage that ChatGPT massive user base in order to, again, get out ahead or try to stop the growth of Anthropic that they're seeing. Right. And it is interesting because there used to be, like, OpenAI was going after consumer. Anthropic was going after enterprise. Now they're going after the same thing. And it really does take the experience to a different level, right? It goes from AI being a chatbot to AI being this, like, personalized agent for you that can help you with work or your personal life. And so I guess what I'm asking is, do you believe in that vision? Like, do you think that is appealing enough to pivot the entire company toward? And if it is, I mean, we're basically going to see OpenAI versus Anthropic head-to-head. So who do you think wins? So first, I do think that it is, again, I think it's directionally the right bet. I think we've seen enough now of the early signs. And I think it was, frankly, I'm not sure how much it was Claude Code that drove this decision, as much as it's Claude Co-Work, right? The offshoot that sort of goes after the more, again, computer use, agentic use cases that are more meant for regular day, everyday usage of quote-unquote regular people, not just developers coding, where OpenAI must have looked at that, mixed with what's been going on with OpenClaude, and just been like, look, we need to be the one go-to shop for everyone to do this. We already have ChatGPT, which has sort of become the Kleenex of, you know, the ubiquitous brand within AI. And we have a risk of losing that if we're not there with these sort of agentic coding and agentic services. And again, it feels like it's early, even now, like with all the momentum and all the hype around these things, it still feels like it's too early for these things to really take off in a meaningful way on the mainstream. But I think that you're seeing everyone sort of go after little pieces of it. Again, we talked about OpenClaude. It felt like that was, you know, there's a movement behind that, but at the same time, it's sort of too obtuse, I think, for sort of everyday regular people to wrap their heads around. Claude Code comes in and others, Perplexity and even Microsoft and some others are now trying to make it more, you know, regular user consumer friendly. These general ideas about, you know, using agents on your behalf, on your computer and letting them like sort of roam free and sort of trying to, yeah, sequester them or put them in their own little sandbox to make it a little bit safer so people aren't, you know, doing all the bad things that, you know, you can easily go down the path of. And so you ask, do I think that OpenAI or Anthropic has a better shot of sort of doing this? Again, OpenAI, thanks to just ChatGPT, has a huge, huge advantage in terms of just installed user base. And when they're shoving this new product, you know, this new super app in everyone's face, presumably in the next couple of months, they're going to have the opportunity to overtake certainly the momentum that Anthropic has. That said, Anthropic made the absolute right bet here, whereas OpenAI seemingly did not, at least for where we stand right now. And everything they've done over the past few months has just been insanely impressive of how they've angled, you know, what seemed to be this enterprise-oriented company and product towards being able to do some things which may or may not be the future of AI, at least in the relative short term. So I gave you a non-answer, but, yeah, I mean... A lot of it is TBD. Yeah. Right now, I would bet, honestly, on Anthropic doing it first, doing it better. But it really comes down to the timing of when OpenAI gets this super app out there, and if the world is ready for sort of, yeah, all this agentic workflows that come in. And I still think it's early. And so I think that they'll have some time to be able to sort of catch up to all the work that Anthropic's been doing. Which, by the way, just going back to the numbers for a second, when I looked at the published charts, Wall Street Journal publishes those charts, it's sort of incredible that Anthropic is where they are, given the relatively much smaller spend on compute versus OpenAI, right? And that's still going to be the case from these projections going forward. And it's not like, you know, in some cases, of course, you could argue OpenAI's models are a little bit better. But, like, by all accounts, like, Claude is near the top of most things, most of the leaderboards, for most use cases. And again, they've done that without nearly the amount of spend, it seems like, from OpenAI. But that's gonna hurt Anthropic because it seems already like the demand for their services is outpacing what they're willing to invest in from a compute standpoint. That's just the sense I get from seeing the developers react. They just did this thing where they pulled back some of the Claude code from OpenClaude type instances. And if you're... It is interesting because Anthropic is like, we are gonna build with caution, and OpenAI is like, we're gonna build because we see the demand going this way, which is probably what's causing those issues with the CFO in the beginning. But if you get to the point where the demand is outstripping your ability to deliver the They did go out and they made those deals, but you're kind of over a barrel then and your margin goes down because you're paying so much for the data centers. Yes, and that was the story of sort of the end of last year, and I think it's mentioned in one of those stories today, right? Like their margins are not going the wrong way. They've been going the wrong way and that's, it's largely sounds like it's just the under, under appreciation for how inference costs would sort of go through the roof. And that's, yeah, again, that's demand and utilization of these things. Can I share like one perspective of the way I think this will go? So you know how like the, these GPT-5 series models, they'll give you an answer. And I think they've gotten a little bit better at this, but like basically every question you've had, they've tried to do something useful for you. So they've been like, let me build you a PDF of that or give you a five-step plan and I'll make that an image or, you know, why don't I take that, you know, idea that you had for a business and then flesh it out and deliver it to you in a doc. I think as all this stuff merges, that will end up being either A, let me build you an app that will be able to, you know, sort of handle some of these things that you want to do. Like, for instance, let's just take the fitness example. You know, okay, you have, you keep coming back to me with these fitness ideas. I think I can build you an app that will sort of, you know, help you accomplish those goals. Or even take it a step further. Let's say you're asking, I'm just going to use an example from my world. Let's say you're asking it for help about like how to break a video into chapters. And this is something I spoke with Greg Brockman about last week. You know, instead of just taking the transcript and breaking it into chapters, this thing will now want to go into Adobe Premiere and start the edit for you. It's going to just take that one step further because it knows what you're trying to do. It knows your interests and having the ability to code and go out and get stuff done, it can become proactive about suggesting these things and then do more than just give you that PDF or the business plan. That's interesting. When you're talking about that, my mind goes to the, you know, the teaching a man to fish, you know, idea. And like basically AI is saying like, we know what you're trying to do. So we're just going to go ahead and do that so you can do this and you don't have to keep coming back over here and, you know, doing it step by step and slowly. One other thing that that jogged in my head while hearing you talk through that, I do wonder if there's a way, and this is sort of delicate given privacy and whatnot, but like you think about how back in the day when YouTube and Netflix and just the sort of other services along those lines had to scale, and they sort of realized like rather than, you know, sort of doing the same thing over and over again, they were able to sort of save up some of the content that they knew would be sort of pulled by, was going to be asked for by multiple people. And instead they would just serve. They've had one version of that and then they would distribute it out, right, to whoever asked for it. Like, is there a way in which AI for some of these, you know, for some of these ideas and queries that are just getting asked over and over again, and maybe they're already doing this to some degree, but they can stop sort of trying to do everything on the fly and instead sort of go back to their own sort of broader memory of things that have been asked in the past and sort of reference that up just as a way for like a, you know, they would never frame it this way, but it's like a good cost saving mechanism, right? Like when you don't have to do the same sort of queries over or sorry, you don't have to run basically the models and do the inference over and over again because you already have, you know, a corpus of data that people that have asked for this. I mean, considering that I would imagine the vast majority of users have the default toggle on to allow the AI to train on my conversations. I mean, basically, you know, wittingly or not, most of us are giving these things permission to do this. Exactly what you said. Yeah, we'll see. We'll see. Yeah, it's going to get, like you said, I agree with you. It's going to get very interesting very quickly, especially over the next few months as we see this all play out. You know, IPO notwithstanding, although that will add a new wrinkle to it and we'll be able to see even more data on the revenue numbers. Yeah, and I guess, so if, so as talked about, SpaceX has confidentially filed. Sounds like they're targeting June. So if OpenAI and Anthropic really want to go out and they're both said they're targeting Q4, at least that's those are the reports. They haven't said that, but those are the, you know, the internal reports say that, you know, we're looking at the end of, you know, summer, early fall when they would have to sort of file. And, and so those are the targets that we're going to be looking for and seeing what, how their businesses look at that point. Okay, I was going to say they should both wait, but they won't, but do you think they should wait? Maybe they should just go out now. I'd just raise, get out there, raise that money. I mean, how ready can you be? That is the unstated thing here, which is that we can go back and forth about whether they should or not, but the reality is like, given these numbers, OpenAI is going to need to go public. Like they need the capital and Anthropic as well. Like they basically have tapped into all of the possible, you know, private capital. I'm sure there's some other things out there. There'll be other little like strategic things that come in. And I say little, I mean billions of dollars, of course. Do you think the Gulf money is, is still in play given what's going on in Iran right now? That's a good question. And actually, Because I thought that they were the next one, the final boss, then you IPO, but we haven't heard that mentioned at all. Right. That's true. So there is already quite a bit of money in there, but yeah, I mean, Sam Altman and Dario have been spending time over there for reasons, right? They're establishing these relationships. So yes, that would be sort of the one final thing. But as you noted, given all the turmoil in the region right now, it's a little bit tricky. But at the same time, there's other reports. Like there was headlines about today, just about the debt that, you know, the Mideast wealth funds are putting into the Warner Brothers deal, which we previously talked about, right, for Paramount and Warner Brothers. And so they're still apparently active, you know, doing that. And so it seems like they're still open for business, but still at the end of the day, at some point, OpenAI and Anthropic are going to have to go public in order to just access the amount, the sheer amount of capital and not meaning in one big slug. Because again, they're already raising rounds that are bigger than any IPO, but it's just like all different sort of instruments that you have access to when you have, you know, when you're a fully liquid public company and the different mechanisms you can use. Because remember again, like OpenAI in particular has had a really hard time, and this was in some of the reporting today as well, like with regard to trying to build their own data centers because they just, they don't have profits. Like what are, how are they, you typically do that with debt and they're having a hell of a time raising debt because of the financials of the company. And so, you know, if and when they go public, while they might not be profitable for some time, at the very least, they'll have, they'll have more avenues and more levers to pull in order to, to put some of those wheels in motion. All right, let's, let's go to a break because we have plenty more to talk about, including what's going on with Siri and then the latest that we have on Meta's attempt to diversify its business beyond advertising. So let's do that right after this. 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 anybody 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. 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So let's just talk about the latest, and then we can kind of riff on what the vision here is and whether they'll be able to accomplish it. You highlighted some reporting from Mark Gurman at Bloomberg that, where Gurman said that Apple is testing a dedicated Siri app for the iPhone. The app's main interface will display prior conversations in either a list or a grid of rounded rectangles with text previews. Users can pin favorite chats, save older conversations, search across interactions, and start new chats. The conversation view resembles a thread in Apple's Messages app. You also, sorry, Gurman also highlighted that one new design in testing places for Siri is at the top of the screen within the dynamic island. There are also some reports that it's gonna use the action button on the phone. So it is interesting. It seems like Apple is basically kind of warming to the idea that it's going to bake a chat bot app or Siri, the chat bot app built on top of Google, directly into the operating system, whether that's above the dynamic island in its own app, using an action button or a combination of all of the above. But yet again, you know, Siri is not really ready to do that. So what do you think this is all about? What do you think this means? Where do you think it's going? And do you think Apple is capable of pulling it off? I think this is a good sign. The fact that they're going to do a standalone app, you know, per Gurman's reporting. I actually had written about this last year that it seemed wild to me that they weren't going to do it, right? Because the previous reporting had said that Siri was going to sort of remain as it has been over the past 15 years where it's sort of in the background and you invoke it by either saying, you know, hey, so-and-so, which I don't want to do because I'll trigger all of my devices right now, or using, you know, some sort of software or button or whatnot. But now if they have an app, it felt like they needed to do that because that is basically the standard thanks to ChatGPT that everyone is used to now. Like you say, like, oh, I'm going to use AI to do this. And you either, you know, at the very least you're loading up then a website to do it, but on a phone, you're definitely loading an app. You're not talking to Siri in the background. And so it felt like this was the type of thing that historically Apple would learn the hard way, meaning like they'd roll it out. They wouldn't have the app. People would be confused and not understand like where Siri's app is, and then they would eventually launch the app. But instead, it feels like they're getting ahead of it by doing that and sort of recognizing like this is the reality of the market, even though they've historically said, they've historically, by many reports now, you know, in the past, have disparaged the idea of a chatbot and an app, right, for those things. They thought that AI would be some bigger, more grandiose thing where it's, again, running in the background and a part of every app and doesn't need to be its own standalone thing. But that's not the reality of the market right now. The reality is like people are going to want this chat app and they're going to want a repository to see what they've asked before. And they had no way to do that without building an app. And so I think it's a good sign. You know, yes, everything continues to be delayed, but it's obvious now that they're just waiting for WWDC coming up. They announced the dates of it coming up next June, which will be the two-year anniversary of when they last announced, you know, everything that was coming before famously, infamously having to pull back all the things that they just couldn't ship on time. And so I, I'm getting more optimistic as time is going on that I think that they're going to do it right this time, that they have obviously the deal in place with Google to use Gemini and Gemini is going to underpin, you know, the, the Siri models and now the new reports that they're going to allow other third parties potentially to come in there, including obviously they've already had ChatGPT as a part of it. I think it's way too buried for what it's been right now. It's way too buried within Siri, but if they make it more of a first-class citizen and along with Claude, if you wanted Claude, if you wanted perplexity, if you wanted any number of other sort of apps, they'll just allow them to plug right into it on top of their baseline Siri powered by Gemini. I think that's the right approach and I'm getting optimistic. I know that sounds foolish, given the 15 years, given we've been fooled every single year for those 15 years, but I think that they're starting to sort of come into focus on what this should look like for them. Interestingly, their perspective of, yeah, it's got to be a chatbot app kind of is now changing places with the others, which are like, it should be an AI that is sort of magical and baked into all programming. Hey, it's baby steps. This is Apple. Like they're always going to be, you know, late to the game and that's the real risk with AI, right? Even at a bigger level, like the AI moves so fast relative to other technology and Apple historically has come into markets later than, you know, than competitors and sort of, you know, quote unquote, done it right, done it correctly. And so that might be the case here where they make the most beautiful, the best sort of AI chat app that anyone's ever done. And it makes the others sort of look, you know, much worse, more childish or whatnot. And then everyone else though has moved on to these agentic full on service suites of AI and Apple then has to sort of go back to the drawing board and try to hustle to come up with that as quickly as possible. Right. I mean, it is interesting. Like Apple still hasn't gotten chatbot right. And OpenAI and Anthropica are already on to the next thing. And you sort of highlight this in your story. You talk about the biggest issue or the bigger issue remains that by outsourcing the core work to Google, Apple is might never be able to catch up from a pure technology standpoint. And this encumbers the true what's next shift in hardware. And I think this kind of points, we've been having these like debates back and forth on the show for a little bit about whether Apple was actually right and not making these big investments in AI development and sort of what does it lose if it just implements like Google's technology into its products and doesn't have to do all that big R&D spend. But I think the answer really is that if you don't do the R&D spend, you're in a, you're working in a technology world that's going to be passing you by. And by the time you catch up on, you know, step one, the, your competitors can be at step three or four and it's basically at their whims as to whether you're even able to participate in that game. That's the problem. Yeah. And, and sort of, so I think that that's all correct. And there's also the sort of the second order effect of that, which is that, look, they may or may not be behind on, on the product side and with the models, but what if even just by not sort of competing in that space, while it may make a lot of sense financially, they run the real risk that they just never get the right DNA within the company and the right mentality to really be able to compete in, in AI. And, and if you believe that it's the future technology that sort of permeates everything, there's a real risk that they just don't have, again, that right, that right mindsets, and they are constantly like, as you know, running a step behind and or, you know, they don't quite have all the right people in place to be able to execute on this. And as we just talked about, like this is technology that's moving faster than any other technology that's come before it. And so it's not just being behind, it's that they will fall increasingly further and further and further behind. And I do think that that's a real risk. And it's also like, it goes back to the notion that, you know, Apple has long sort of adhered to, which is that, look, if the whole mentality of, if you want to, you know, prove yourself in computing and in hardware, you've got to, sorry, in software, you've got to make hardware. And it's like, what if in order to prove yourself in this next phase of computing, like you also have to sort of make your own AI like that's a part of it. And Apple is sort of seeding that to Google right now. And you'd hope like they have their own projects, obviously that they've been working on internally. You'd hope that this is just a stopgap measure, but at the same time, what if they can never bridge that gap because they're just, you know, going and seeding that work right now. And this is almost the perfect setup for what we had planned to speak about next, which is should they acquire Anthropic? Now it's been floated in the discourse, shall we say, that maybe Apple should try to acquire Anthropic. And you wrote about it a little bit over the past month. I, we never really spoke about it too much in depth on the show just because it seemed like Dario, just, I couldn't imagine Dario selling that company to Tim Cook and being a subsidiary of Apple. And now also the finances might just be unworkable where Apple is They need to do something. There's a world in which they need to do something that's a true game-change deal. And it's not, you know, making these $100 million purchases here and there, which they do from time to time of talent. And those are good. And obviously, Apple has run that game plan as well as anyone over the past couple of decades. But this would be more like, you know, I hate to invoke the idea of buying Next and bringing Steve Jobs on, which was a much smaller deal relative to what this would be, of course. But it's still, that was a game-change deal that really changed the DNA of the company, right? And this hypothetical, theoretical deal would be along those lines in that I think it would be about much more than bringing on a great product and a great potential business. It would be about changing the DNA of the company and really getting them geared up for the next phase of whatever the AI future is. And right now, it's hard to see for everything we just talked about, how they do that without some sort of real mentality shift and something that totally changes the culture to do that. So that's my argument. You know, I was going to say, I couldn't really imagine Dario as a product manager at Apple. But then again, we know they've been looking for a successor to Tim Cook. He – I don't know that he would be – He would be the head of AI, obviously. Yes. You know, he'd be the John Gianandrea. Chief AI officer. But would he still be OK with that? I don't know. I mean, again, you would have Apple's unlimited resources. They would never have to worry about fundraising. Well, presumably, if they struck the right deal with Apple, they would never have to worry about that. Like, Apple has more profits that they could funnel into this. And again, if you believe, like, Google's got DeepMind. Microsoft had OpenAI. Now they have their own, you know, version that they're working on internally, the Maya stuff and their own superintelligence stuff. Amazon's obviously working on their own internal superintelligence stuff internally. And so Apple, can they really afford to just partner? Like, yes, literally, they can afford it. That's why it's a great deal in that they're not spending all the money on CapEx that all of their rivals are. But there's still a real risk of that. And everyone points to, like, oh, Apple's going to get the last laugh here. But there's a real, real longer-term risk for the company by not going down this path. Totally agree. All right, before we go, we should definitely spend a couple minutes on Meta. They just haven't been able to put together the next hit. And we can talk about Reality Labs. Clearly, whatever's happening on AI within that company. I mean, maybe there's, you know, sometimes you can have delayed progress where you need a couple of years of research to put something together. They don't have a competitive LLM. And again, it's the same problem as Apple. They're now, you know, not one but two generations behind what the cutting edge is. And so what do you think this data, what do you think that says about where Meta is today, what it says about Zuckerberg, the fact that they are unable to come up with that next hit and certainly have not been able to diversify away from advertising? Yeah, I've swung around a little bit here because when they first sort of announced the scale deal that sort of, you know, was the effective end of the llama strategy and, you know, their new path going forward, I wrote a post like just saying, like, can Meta buy the future of AI? And my thesis was no, that I felt like they were basically buying up mercenaries and it would require a team of true believers in the mold of sort of Anthropic, I think was the main example I used, to be able to actually do this. And then, you know, all this stuff happened. A lot happened, obviously, in the subsequent months, but like certainly with Elon spinning up XAI and how we got that data center up so quickly. And basically it felt like maybe, maybe you could just throw money at the problem, right? And you could basically get up to speed quickly. Fast forward, you know, a couple months ago, there's new reporting that, well, actually it looks like XAI, for all that money spent and the models by all accounts are good, but it's not good enough. It doesn't matter, right? Like what's the point? Like what's XAI doing? And Meta, all that money spent, the billions spent. And now they have to delay. They delayed, you know, potentially their new work. And it seems like that work is definitely feels like it's being couched in the public comments about it. It's like, oh, it's going to be a good first step, but it's not going to, you know, be competitive with the Geminis of the world and the cutting edge models. And so there, there's also a world now, it seems like in which all of that money, you could spend all the money in the world and you still can't catch up to what the leading edge is and or even being at the leading edge. It doesn't matter because the ChatGPTs of the world and now Claude with Claude Code, they have the mindshare advantage where they're just going to be locked into these cycles where they just keep improving. And it's sort of the self-improvement stuff, um, just makes them better and better, faster and faster, just like Google leveraged back in the day with the search engine, um, where they were able to just outcompete the Bings of the world and the Yahoos of the world, because again, it just was self-fulfilling in a way. And so it feels sort of like that we're into that. And now Meta, you know, is, yeah, there's all these reports about these little new sub super intelligence projects that they're spinning up and these new groups and all this other sort of stuff. And, and again, the reports, you know, that they say on the record, everything is great and we're making progress and yada yada. But like the posts that you're sort of alluding to that I wrote about where they weren't, you know, they just, they don't have a good track record over the past decade plus of launching new things. Obviously with the Metaverse, uh, being, you know, the prime example, but several other projects. They had a crypto project, DM, and, and, you know, they've had many, many other things that just have gone nowhere. And, and of course they had their Zuckerberg's big initiative of going after encryption and that was going to be the future of, of social networking. And that was going to be the future of the company. And now they're pulling back on that because again, they don't get, they don't seem to get traction unless they acquire something. And we're in the tricky position where who are they going to acquire besides scale? And that's a, seems like, you know, maybe a problematic, uh, problematic deal that they did there. Yeah, I don't think that worked. You know, it's interesting because I was thinking back to like the old developer conferences that Meta used to hold. And Zuckerberg put like a 10 year roadmap. And I remember being in the audience in 2016 specifically, and he was basically right on the roadmap that there was going to be some technology development. And then AI was sort of at the end of the tunnel. And here we are. And yet, They don't know, they also, like Apple, don't have much to show for it. And not only that, Super Intelligence Labs, like, is already seeing some departures. We don't know what Alexander Wang is really doing within the company. You know, from the chatter I've heard, you know, there's definitely been some disputes with him and Meta leadership about the product, you know, the, the path forward. And what are you going to do to him? You just paid, you know, billions of dollars to bring him and some of his team onboard. And now, and this is again, just according to reports, but the company might be staring down the barrel of a massive layoff that could be en route, you know, between now and the next time we speak. And you put it all together and you're just like, uh, you know, they got maybe a couple more shots at the AI getting this AI thing, right. Other than that, they, they, they look like they look kind of like a potential Yahoo, right? Where like they, they got advertising right. And it's the one thing they do right. And they're going to live off it for a while. But you know, anything we know about Mark Zuckerberg is that that has effectively been his greatest nightmare. Yeah. That's a, that's an interesting analogy. I hadn't thought about that, but I could see why you draw that. Um, the difference would be that Zuckerberg is there. And while like Jerry Yang tried to come back, as you'll recall, to Yahoo and they almost sold to Microsoft for 40 some billion dollars, uh, back in the day with the Steve Ballmer days, um, Zuckerberg has total control of the company, right? From the stock on down, he is in control. And so it's, it's a, it's a strength and probably a weakness in ways, right? Where like they do as he goes, so, so goes meta. And so he leads them down the Metaverse path. And maybe he, maybe he was wayward in that, right? And maybe he was distracted to your point of like, they, he had the roadmap for knowing AI was coming. So did Google, by the way, and Sundar's been talking about that for, for a decade plus, right Apple has a retail footprint all around the world. They're going to be able to move any sort of product that they put out there. And if it's fairly priced, if it's not the Vision Pro pricing strategy, they're going to have an advantage over Meta in a number of ways. And it really becomes sort of a footrace as to what's the better strategy in terms of getting these newfangled devices out there. I know we're over time, but I just want to end on this. Sebastian Mallaby has this book about Demis Hassabis, the head of Google DeepMind, coming out. And there was this excerpt published in the Wall Street Journal, and it just made me, you made me think about it when you talked about how good Meta has been at buying and about how Zuckerberg has sort of been all over the place in his bets. And this anecdote just brings it together perfectly. So Demis Hassabis was on the West Coast when DeepMind was still independent to have lunch with Larry Page from Google. And Zuckerberg heard about it and invited him to dinner. This is from the excerpt. Arriving at Zuckerberg's Palo Alto home, Hassabis administered a subtle test on him. The two men discussed the potential of AI, and Zuckerberg expressed appropriate excitement. But then as the dinner continued, Hassabis brought up other hot technologies, virtual reality, augmented reality, 3D printing. Zuckerberg sounded equally excited about all of them, but told me what I needed to know, Hassabis said later. Facebook offered more money, but I wanted somebody who really understood why AI would be bigger than all those things. And then he sold to Google. Oof, that's that's painful. That is an expensive dinner in what he didn't get to spend on on potentially acquiring the future of his company. And it, of course, harkens exactly right to the future where by the reporting of the founder of OpenCloud, you know, wanted Mark Zuckerberg wanted to bring him on board as well and maybe offered more money as well. And he went to OpenAI and again, history repeats itself. So, yeah, not a not a great look. Website is spyglass.org. MG Siegler, of course, is our guest. First Monday of every month. MG, great to see you. Thanks for coming back on. Thanks, Alex. Talk soon. All right. Speak with you soon. Thank you, everybody, for listening and watching. And we'll see you next time on Big Technology Podcast.