Did Google Just Fall Behind Again?, iPhone Fold Cometh, Anthropic Files To Go Public

As Anthropic's Claude Code and OpenAI's Codex take off, where is Google exactly? The iPhone Fold is on its way. Will we see it later this month? And do Meta employees still believe? That's coming up with MG Siegler right after this. I'm just back from ServiceNow's Knowledge 2026 in Las Vegas. And the conversations I had there are ones you're going to want to hear. I sat down with their president and CPO, Amit Zavery, on the platform strategy powering enterprise AI. Chief people and AI enablement officer, Jackie Canney, and chief digital information officer, Kelly Romack, on what AI really means for the workforce. The technical leaders behind ServiceNow's NVIDIA partnership on shipping AI at scale and Ulta Beauty on deploying ServiceNow's technology across 1,300 stores. If you want to know where enterprise AI is actually headed, not the hype, but the real story, you can find these videos on my YouTube channel. Search Alex Kantrowitz on YouTube. 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We have a lot to talk about. Welcome back to the show. Thanks, Alex. Yeah, right in the middle of like all these conferences going on. IO, WWDC, there's Computex going on, like all these different things. So lots going on right now. Definitely. This is, you know, one of the hottest times of the year for tech, all the big developer conferences. Yes, smack in the middle of Google I/O and WWDC, which is great because we'll be able to talk a little bit about what we saw from Google and what might be coming from Apple. Let's just talk about Google to start with, because we saw, I think what we would both agree is an underwhelming Google I/O. But the question is, does this really put Google at the back of the pack again? And I think there's a chance that there's going to be some of those bigger issues that we all thought were coming for Google at the beginning of this and the kind of pushed aside, you know, as they started to build these great models might be sort of coming back. And so today will be a good time to discuss that. Let's just go quickly to the news. They, as you put it, they held a giant event to talk up a bunch of talk up a bunch of products and functionality coming soon. But Gemini 3.5 Pro, their strongest model, just doesn't seem to be ready yet. And while other AI labs do previewing at their developer events, Google has this big Google I/O event that you would expect there to be some more meat on the bones. So I think we'll start, you know, micro and then go macro here, because, yes, the model doesn't seem to be ready, but maybe the bigger issue is they don't have the codex and the cloud code competitor that you thought they would at this point. But begin, if you could, just with your reaction to the model news and what you think might be going on there. Yeah, so they did release Gemini 3.5 Flash, right? And they made sort of the whole announcement sort of based around that. To their credit, they rolled, it seems like pretty much every product over to that new model. But as you're noting, it's not the flagship one, right? It's not Pro. And they had to sort of awkwardly say, like, Pro is coming, I think, next month. So presumably sometime this month in June now that we're in. And, you know, so they sort of wanted to address, I guess, that elephant in the room because in the lead up to it, right, everyone assumes like, oh, it's I/O. Google's going to make a big splash like they do every year. And they know that there's competition as there is every year. And oh, by the way, Claude's just rolled out a new model and OpenAI has rolled out a new model. And so therefore, it's going to be time for, of course, Gemini 3.5 Pro, you know, or something else to be ready. And, you know, the backdrop of all this is also with the stuff going on with Mythos and, you know, on the Anthropic side and sort of a, you know, a killer model, like above and beyond even what's at the flagship, the front end right now, sorry, the top tier of the models right now. And so, again, they come out and they basically, again, have to lead with the notion that, yeah, we don't have 3.5 Pro ready, but we have this great Flash model and it's super fast. And then, you know, once they release it, it's sort of like after the initial sort of momentum, people start digging in. It's like, actually, it's, you know, it's a little bit expensive and it's a it's good, but it's it's certainly not taking them, you know, steps above what the other, you know, frontier model makers are at right now. And so, you know, why even bother to do this at their flagship events? Why not sort of wait? And that was basically the angle that I took. You know, I've been going to these as have you for years and years. I haven't. I didn't go to this one. And, you know, obviously I worked at Google for a long, long time, but it's an awkward situation in that this is their big conference every year. And again, they want to seemingly make a big splash at those conferences. But in the age of AI, it just seems like these announcements don't don't roll with that cadence. Right. Everyone sort of followed the Apple model of, you know, always doing these big yearly events and having something and holding something back for a little bit to be ready to tee it up at these. And it just feels like that doesn't work right now because, again, Google looks sort of silly for not having their model ready to go. Maybe they should have done WWDC or another event in June when they're ready to go with the pro model. Yeah, MG, this is why I decided to start here today for us. It's almost like a double whammy for Google, right? Because, all right, you would think that, and I'm actually surprised that there hasn't been more discussion about this, maybe because the momentum has been so good around Gemini that people are reticent or hesitant to, you know, say anything bad or anything, you know, potentially skeptical about Google because they've shown the ability to ship. So we'll give them credit there. But this is, to me, you know, potentially your double whammy for them. First of all, they didn't ship the Gemini, the latest edition of Gemini Pro. So if you think about foundational models, they have fallen behind OpenAI and Anthropic with Mythos and 5.5, as far as we can tell. But to me, the bigger issue is they are not playing in this, you know, quote unquote super app area, right? Like, it seems like their bet is make the models efficient, which they have with Flash, right? That's the big draw for Flash is that you can effectively deep seek your way through AI as you make it super efficient and then you can do more, Jevin's paradox, et cetera, et cetera. OK, cool. But for Google, you would really want to see them have a competitor to these cloud code and codex apps, which has driven so much of the growth in AI right now, which is sort of applicable for coders today, but over time, if the AI labs see it, you know, see their way, prove out, everyone will use these type of apps. So I'm curious to hear your perspective on this. Is this as big of a liability for Google as I'm imagining? I mean, I do think it's a problem. You even heard Sundar Pichai was on, you know, with Casey Newton and Kevin Ruse on their podcast. And he explicitly said, like, just straight up, like, that they're a little bit behind in coding, you know, with regard to AI. And everyone knows that this is sort of the forefront where you need to be, not only from an actual coding perspective, but because a lot of people, of course, think that this is what is the key for sort of the agentic use cases going forward. And, you know, potentially self, you know, these models that can teach themselves and whatnot. And we'll see how that plays out. But still, it's clear that everyone recognizes from OpenAI, which realized they had to sort of, if you don't want to call it a pivot, they had to reorient the entire business, right around, yeah, building towards a super app and bringing in codex and putting it all together, which they still have not done yet, but presumably we're closing in on that happening. And now, yeah, And all of a sudden valued more highly than OpenAI is. And everyone's like, whoa, maybe we were not focused on the, even though we're focused on important things and we think we're doing great stuff in AI, maybe we're not focused on the thing that we need to be focused on right now. Right. And this is sort of why it's bringing up some of the old questions that I had about Google and many of us had about Google, which is how are they going to play if the entire concept of the web sort of stands on its head because of this AI moment? And so my perspective about this, and I wrote about this on MB Technology on Friday and definitely want to have a conversation with you about it, is that, you know, there was this notion that the idea of a super app was a misnomer, right? That they, that let's say OpenAI was calling Codex a super app because they were bringing ChatGPT and coding and a browser together. And that's not your traditional super app, which is like what you would have in China, which is like one app that does lottery and you can hail an Uber there. You can do payments there. Your bank account is there. And it's all in one. And everyone's like, well, that's not exactly a super app, including myself when I first heard it. But, you know, after experiencing these products a little bit and listening to people like Greg Brockman and Boris from Anthropic, I think super app is the right word. And, you know, as you use these tools, they're not just, you know, coding is what they do best right now, but they're not just coding, right? They're specifically designed to take over your computer and your browser and get things done for you. And so they started with coding, but they're going to do far more than that if these companies have their way. Just one example that I gave in my article is that, let's say you're trying to hire someone for like an entertainer for a child's birthday. Like right now, you would do the research stage in ChatGPT, but you would still go to the website to book it. And to me, you know, I think these labs view that as an accident of history or as an incomplete path, right? They want everything to happen either within the app, which they've tried to do, or the app actually takes control of your computer, emails the entertainers, see if they meet your specifications, if they're available, maybe runs a background check and then books them. And that turns the entire web on its head. So I'm curious what you think about that thesis. And if that's true, I think it is. Then Google's sitting this out or not being the leader is actually, you know, a potentially, you know, company destroying liability. So, and part of what a big part of the other showcase of IO was obviously, you know, the product they're calling Spark, which is weird because like there's so many different Sparks now within AI, like Meta has their Spark. And I think, does Microsoft have their Spark? There's another Spark. Oh, NVIDIA has a Spark, I think too. Like there's all these Spark products and they're all different products, but they're all using that name, which is very confusing from a branding perspective. But anyway. Gemini Spark, I guess, which is not out. Some people have, I think, early access to it if you're on the ultra tier, which is also confusing because now there's two ultra tiers of Gemini. Beyond that, so some people are able to test it out on that tier, but still that's sort of speaking to some of what you're talking about. But there's also, I go back to the notion of how long it took them to release a standalone app for Gemini, right? Like Google thought like maybe they would just be fine doing this all in the browser because of course they famously control the most popular browser in the world in Chrome and Gemini is now baked into Chrome. And so I think that they might have thought at one point that that would be good enough. And that might be their quote unquote app for AI. And as it turns out, like they needed to eventually roll out the standalone Gemini app, which they now have. But again, to your points, it's like, it's hardly a super app. It's super rudimentary. It's just very basic. Like this is a way to access Gemini, you know, natively on a Mac right now. Now, obviously that's setting up, you would presume that's setting up to eventually roll out anti-gravity, which is their also, I think, awkwardly branded, you know, coding product. And then, yeah, eventually roll out Spark or whatever they're going to call sort of their agentic full-on computer use tools. But still they're behind the eight ball on all of these things right now. And I do think it's partially because of exactly what you're hitting on, which is that it's, they're sort of ingrained in their nature to be this sort of web-centric company. That's how they've been throughout their entire history. And so when you talk about like, yeah, making these native apps that are using native tools on your computer and taking over the computer usage and not necessarily doing this all just through a web browser. I think it's a little bit of a mindset shift that needs to take and a mindset that needs to be altered in order to do some of that. And I think they're trying to work their way through it, but that's probably why you see them now, again, a few steps behind and not ready to launch all of these things, you know, at the same cadence that the competitors are. And just to go back to the broader point about the super app stuff, I am in agreement with you. It feels like there's a movement right now for, I've written a little bit about this. There's a movement of all these services to come from Airbnb on down. They're all trying to come up with their quote unquote super app. And obviously, as you're noting, that's coming from sort of the Asian markets where, you know, there's these handful of players that really do a lot of your life sort of routing through these things. But in the Western world, it seems like it's going to be take on a slightly different sort of tilt and there'll be these apps that are sort of just like these steroided up apps, if you don't want to call them super apps. And they control a lot of different use cases. And again, we go back to the notion of Claude and Claude code. And now we obviously are starting to see these things converge into that Claude code was obviously setting up the idea of computer usage. And at what point, you know, you see people already complaining about it. It's like, why are these two separate tabs now in Claude itself, right? Shouldn't they just be one tab? And I think that you're going to see that more and more. And we'll see again what OpenAI ends up coming out with when they do release the quote unquote super app for ChatGPT, if it's all just like one box or if it's now like going to be these like multiple stages where you have to pick. And it's like, it's sort of an extension of what we've had in the earlier days of the chatbots where it's like, you have to pick a dropdown model, you know, model from the dropdown and you get super granular and it's like, a user shouldn't worry about that. And as we get beyond power users, they're not going to want to worry about that because they're going to worry like, especially with computer usage and stuff. It's like, am I selecting the right thing? I don't want it to have access to this, but I don't know which service I'm supposed to select for it to be able to do that. So yeah, it's sort of opening up a can of worms. Yeah. I almost feel like once people get comfortable with the AI taking control of their computer until it makes a fatal mistake, they're going to stop checking. I'm almost there. I'm almost there. I don't, I basically, and, you know, this will obviously someone will play this when, you know, my computer self-destructs or someone shares all my emails when I'm an agent shares all my emails on Twitter or something like that. But I'm always allowed, I've given access. I spoke about this with Ranjan on Friday. I've given access to my Gmail, plugged it in with ChatGPT after ChatGPT asked very politely. And I'm at the point now where, you know, there's always been this discussion of will computing sort of happen through the messaging layer? And it's been this dream of Facebook and others for a long time that messaging is the new platform. And it sort of was, again, the title of my story was the agents and the chatbots are going to merge. And it always felt, and this is why I feel like it's important to gut check this. It always felt to me like it was a nice fantasy of Silicon Valley, but was just too hard to execute. It was never going to happen. We've already seen the cases of people trying to do like chatbot commerce and that people still want to go to the website. But I will say that it feels closer to me now than perhaps ever before. Like if you, the more you engage with these spots and the more you engage with these agents, it becomes really possible to see how that experience merges and how this does become, I guess, the new operating system or the new interface through which you access, you know, not all computing, but maybe almost all of it. Do you, what do you, do you think I'm, I, I'm like getting ahead of myself here? So my angle on this has long been that I think that there, that we're on this steady march now. And I think that it seems like OpenAI has been hinting at it for a while that they're working behind the scenes and they've rolled out some things, but it seems like they've been setting the stage for at But I do think that that's one key element of it to to your question. And then just one other thing that while you were talking, I remembered from the IO part is that, you know, Demis Hassabis came out specifically to talk about their their breakthrough and what they view as a breakthrough in their Omni models. And this again goes back to sort of 4.0 and what ChatGPT was was long ago trying to do with with beyond just text, right? And doing doing visuals and video and everything else. And now, obviously, they've pulled back from video, but Google is not. And what they showed off at IO also seemed a little lackluster with regards to, you know, the Omni model. But it was also clear that it wasn't everything that they wanted to show, but that's all that sort of they had, I guess, ready to roll right now and that clearly Demas views this as like the quote-unquote world model for them and that they're they're working hard on this sort of behind the scenes, but they don't have enough sort of to showcase yet. But that's sort of the next step of, yeah, where this goes. It's like text, voice, and then Omni, I guess, for everything else. Right. And so whether it's chat or whether it's voice, you know, to see, to see more and more computing happening within like the, let's call it ChatGPT interface, no matter how, which format or form you use to access it. You know, I think what you said is actually really important. You have to get to the point where you trust it. Right. And I don't think these things are extremely trustable yet. I think maybe I'm just kind of a psycho that likes to press these products to the limit for the service of the audience, of course. But, you know, you could see so much of computing happening there. I mean, you think about, you think about it and it's like the chatbot is going to be the place where you're going to want to direct most of your interactions with the web, with the internet, with information online, with computing. For instance, like when you connect it with your Gmail, instead of searching Gmail for like your flight data, you just go into ChatGPT, give me my flight information, my confirmation number, and it spits it right out. I have, so I, my one use case that I use right now all on a daily basis is basically I use Claude to check in on my Gmail. So I don't go to the Gmail interface anymore, but I basically just say, give me all the the situations where I've written about X topic before, and Claude provides a much better interface than Gmail for that, right? Because it will give you like a natural language spit out of like, oh yeah, in this, in this newsletter on X date, you wrote, uh, you know, this about, uh, X topic. And here's a link to that. And versus obviously Gmail right now is full on just, you know, old school search paradigm. Now they have Gemini baked into Gmail, but it's not nearly as seamless and as good as it is on, on these other services that are much more predicated around the agentic use case. So again, that's on Google being behind in that, which is weird because they own Gmail. Like you would think that they would have like the single best place. They should have the single best place to do any sort of agentic email workflow, whether it's sending emails or searching emails or doing anything with email, they should own that. And they don't own that right now. They just are on the layer, you know, behind it that all these other services are latching onto. I don't know a single person who uses, um, sort of AI and agentic workflows that doesn't have it connected to their Gmail. That's like the first thing that they do. Um, so it's wild that it's not Google that's like owning that right now. Yeah. It's amazing how searching Gmail through ChatGPT is better than searching Gmail with the Gemini baked in within the Gmail window. It doesn't make any sense. And, and I think that like, as you go through different experiences, like you will see that this is sort of just like talking about what the bull case might be. In many cases, it will be a better experience to use ChatGPT to do things on other websites. For instance, like think about booking.com. Booking.com has a chatbot in booking.com if you're looking to book a hotel. You can ask it for things. It has all the booking data, but you can ask ChatGPT similar questions about hotels and it can scan everything, right? So you're going to want to use that. And then of course, like, are you, even if the booking API is unavailable to ChatGPT because booking wants to keep their own experience theirs, you can just tell, let's say Codex, go and open booking.com, log in for me, and book the one that you just suggested. And so this, this is my, like the, my core question. I mean, of course there's a question for Google, right? What happens to Google? But the bigger question is, does this mean that power, like the power of, I don't know how you put it, like the power of the web or the power of controlling the interface to the web will reside with the OpenAIs and the Anthropics if Google doesn't get to that. And then what is, what are the implications of that? So super interesting. I, I actually was thinking about this earlier today in a totally different context, but it's analogous, I think, which is that one of the still very annoying things about trying to use, especially in, in the current age where um cable has been totally taken over by streaming and now we all have, you know, five to 10 different streaming services. And we were all, and we've all been longing for, I think this, this like UI to unify all of them together. Right. And Apple is some of it. Amazon has some of it, but no one will, can work with it fully because, uh, Netflix, the biggest one, refuses to play ball and give their, you know, content out to others to sort of be able to surface all of this. And why do they do that? Because they want to control the interface, of course, and they want to control that relationship. Um, and so when you think about that in the context of what you're talking about with these, with these, you know, AI tools, like you can easily see a world in which um a lot of different players think it was like basically a mistake um to allow, you know, Google search to become the interface by which, you know, that's the main way you found your way to a lot of sites. Obviously, many would already say that, right? Because if you've fast forward to where we are now, they're losing search traffic and stuff because of the changes that are happening. And in the entertainment world, right, a lot of people went on to say like that they, they regretted giving over their interface to iTunes, right, and because again, they were, they were giving up yielding control to Apple, even though Apple, you could argue Apple, like saved them from themselves, uh, by, you know, what they did with iTunes. But still, um, you, you understand the argument of why these companies sort of make that decision. And I worry that we're already in this world, certainly with agentic uh shopping that you're seeing with Amazon, right? Like not, not being able to fully play ball with uh with certain other, you know, uh shopping agents. And uh and vice versa, others not wanting to play ball necessarily, you know, so Amazon owns the relationship, which obviously a lot of people also regret that, uh, you know, in our, in our web day and age of allowing just everything to be outsourced to Amazon. And so, yeah, I worry that we're gonna not get a seamless move into like a one single place where we can do all of this, like the sort of the pie in the sky version that you're talking about where there's one tool, but instead we have to use like three or four different AI tools in order to get full coverage of whatever task we want to do because uh certain ones just refuse to play ball. And certainly as, as uh, you know, as the big players, the big tech players are all, um, you know, doing this right now, we're not going to be able to, do you really believe that we're going to be able to do Amazon purchasing through Gemini, uh, you know, as seamless as you could through, uh, through Amazon's, you know, own tools and, and Alexa. Uh, it's certainly doesn't seem like it anytime soon. And so that's a world that I think is going to be potentially painful for, uh, you know, this transition. Right. Okay. So here's where I think it could be different, which is like, and you can sort of gut check me on this one if I'm, if I'm, you know, going too far here. The agentic tools may not need the permission of the sites that they're working with because what they're doing is instead of having a plugin, they are not relying on, let's say, the data plugin from booking. They are taking over your browser. They're taking over your computer and they're acting as you going into those sites and they'll be able to move faster. They'll be able to browse faster. And like maybe there's some blocking that these companies can try to do on their end to like, sort of like not, not let you non-human traffic crawl. Right. Um, that's very difficult. So I, I think that they might be able to get around these, these walls. Yeah. And I mean, that battle is sort of playing out right now, right? Like there's certain, Copying and pasting everything that's in that article that I want to read and putting it into the chatbot. But these are like the silly things and these silly edge cases that I feel that I fear we're going to increasingly run into. So I hear your points about that, yes, there will be fallback to the web, but I already see, feel like there's, there's these ways that um we're seeing that break at the edges. Right, right. Yeah, it'll be a very, I mean, there's gonna be some, some serious fights here. So, okay, let me ask two questions and then we'll move on. two big picture questions. We've talked about these, you know, Anthropic and OpenAI evaluations and, you know, their, their addressable market largely in terms of coding and enterprise, right? That's sort of been the thing that people think is gonna take them, you know, to the promise land, not necessarily consumer. Um, if this works though, you know, maybe because again, because they would ingest so much of the experience online, um, those have to be massive, massive businesses. And so maybe this sort of super app style way to access the web if it works, um, becomes the core business over time. Like, it's almost the analog to the SaaS apocalypse just in consumer. Yeah, and again, when I hear you talk about that, my mind naturally just goes to, I think that they need to do, they need to get that part in order because if and when they try to do their own devices, like, and if those devices aren't screen predicated, how you're going to be able to do that is mostly through voice and or, I guess, glasses in some capacity. Um, but they need to basically have everything sort of teed up to perfection in order to do these workflows. Because the second that any of that stuff starts to fail or you have to say like, oh, just, you're gonna have to wait until you get back to your computer. Like it just feels like it's going to be too big of a hassle for a consumer, uh, for an end user to do it. And they're just gonna stop sort of doing those types of use cases. And I think this is just like, you know, basically what we saw play out with the first instantiations of Alexa and HomePod, to some degrees and Google Home and everything else, or Google Assistant, I guess, where because you couldn't do everything that you wanted to do, You know, they basically just fell back to these really rudimentary use cases. And the fear with these new devices coming out would be like, if they're just like really expensive, newfangled music players or weather, weathermen and, you know, these other sort of very rudimentary, simple use cases versus all this agentic stuff that we're talking about, which is obviously what they aspire for them to be. You know, you're out, on a walk and you just say like, yeah, send, send an email to Rick and tell him that I'm going to be 10 minutes late. And it knows to follow up on the email that you had going back and forth to set up the appointment and whatnot. And if you can't trust that agent to do that without a screen, I feel like, yeah, that's where this all breaks down. Yeah, no, I love the way that you're thinking about it. Um, we have Greg Brockman round 3 coming up at the Big Technology AI Summit later this month. And I'm just kind of, I don't know, I'm gearing up to be like, where, where do we want to take this conversation? And I think it has to go in this area, especially, you know, what the plan is. I love what you're saying that if you can't get everybody to participate, you know, do you end up having, you need a network effect basically for this stuff to work. Otherwise, you know, it's just not, you're right, it might be just another fancy, fancy alarm clock. All right, here's, here's my second big picture question. Going back to the Google example, we started with Google. Let's end the segment with Google. Don't they need to get, they, they need to do this, right? Don't they need to get involved here? Like to me, sitting this out and letting the other companies try their hand at this experience and not putting all the effort into it, just as like a recipe for disaster. Or am I being too inflammatory? No, I mean, I think that they do and I think that they probably recognize that. Again, I view this, this IO was super awkward because everything, as we kicked off talking about, was just like, coming this summer or coming later this year, coming in a few weeks, coming to ultra users, coming to, and it's like, nothing is just like ready to go. And I feel like the whole reason they did the timing of it is because that historically this was when they've done it. And you know, now in the age of AI, they didn't have the time. They didn't have the timing lined up for all of these different things that they want to do and that they want to talk about. And yeah, to your big question, like, shouldn't they be doing exactly sort of what everyone else is going for? I think that they are. I think that they know that they have to do that. I just don't. I think that because of the way that they have sort of, yeah, aligned around doing, getting the search stuff out of the way, they sort of focused on their strengths and figured out like, we're the only ones who do this and this is our core business, so we have to get this nailed down. And then I do think that the Demis Hassabis team is probably behind the scenes working on all these crazy models and crazy health and life science ideas that they want to work on. And so it's not to say that those things are a distraction, but it's just a matter of focus. It's what you want to focus on. And Google famously, you know, goes through these cycles where they're doing too much and then they have to pull back, right? And fewer wood behind more fewer arrows and all that, that sort of stuff. And so I feel like they know that they need to do exactly what you're talking about. And I do think that they will get there at some point, but it's a matter of like, is there, yeah, is there like a first mover advantage, much like there has been for Claude Code, right? Where it's like all of a sudden, because even though by all accounts, like Codex is good, but it's just not like, Cloud Code was there and just hoovering up all of these users. And so like, if one of these players gets to that quote unquote super app stage and yeah, hoovers up all the users, like, is anyone else going to be willing to switch, especially with memory and everything else, you know, that, that's integrated into this. Yeah. Now I'm not 100% on this, but this is one of the reasons why I think this is difficult for Google is that, so Google famously, when they built this great Gemini model, they sort of centralized it in something they called the engine room, right? And they put some of their best people on it. And what they did was they then farmed it out in a way, or they worked, they collaborated, shall we say, with the many product areas, uh, within the company to integrate it, right? So Google has these famously sort of walled off product areas, not walled off, but like, you know, they're, they're fiefdoms in a way, not in like the same nature as Apple, but they have their, you know, politics and they built this engine room, uh, with AI and they sort of work together, this, with the centralized group work together with these product areas to integrate the AI in all the products. So that was, you know, sort of push from the core pushing out. The tough part here, I think, is if you're going to get this right, you need to almost reverse that, right? You need the product areas working to centralize in a way, um, which will, you know, require some ego subsetting and some prioritization that some might not like. And that is sort of where you might end up hitting some sort of build out wall where you're not able to work as fast as an OpenAI and Anthro because they just don't have that legacy stuff to work through. I think that's a very good point. I had not thought of it from that perspective, but you're right. It's basically Google's immense size and capabilities become a hindrance in, in the building out of this. Right? Because like, imagine that they feel like they have to answer for OpenAI's super app coming, ChatGPT's super app coming out and it has, you know, from what's been reported, it has ChatGPT baked in, it has Codex built in, and it has Atlas built in. So if Google feels like they have to answer that with something with Gemini, Chrome and Antigravity, and those are three totally disparate, huge teams working on these things. Certainly Chrome, which has not been, you know, historically like linked into the AI group. I know again, we talked about it earlier. They have, they have Gemini baked into it, but even now it sort of feels tacked on. It feels like it's not, you know, like it's not an AI native product. And if they have to sort of make it an AI native product in order to meet the moment with regard to these, this super app question, like, can they really do that? And it's gonna be, it's way harder than it will be for any of those much smaller, more nimble teams to do it or who are more, to do great. And so, you know, when they're rolling out this new, one of the things that's not, that's supposedly coming, but again, not quite ready, is this, you know, agentic version of Gmail where it's like a, from the screenshots that they've shared and whatnot, it looks like, you know, you have the high level like to-dos and things like that. And so they're trying to accommodate for that world that we're talking about, but again, the real ultimate answer is, again, not to open Gmail itself. And they, there's a, there's a tension there, for sure. That's right. Yeah, when you were saying they're trying to do these to-dos, it's like, I'm thinking, but it just doesn't belong there. It belongs in Gemini. All right. Let's take a break and come back and talk about the iPhone Fold and what's going on at Meta right after this. Summer always changes how I get dressed. I want pieces that feel lighter and more comfortable, but still put together. That's where Kints come in. They focus on well-made essentials in breathable linen and soft organic cotton. The kind of basics you will keep coming back to. Everything at Kints is priced 50 to 80% less than similar brands because they work directly with ethical factories, cutting out the middlemen. So you're paying for quality, not brand markup. Personally, while I'm moving between air conditioning and summer heat, a lightweight zip-down sweatshirt from Kints has been a life changer. Elevate your summer wardrobe. Go to Kints.com slash BigTech for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. 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One of my favorite reads in the tech world. And I'm sure we're gonna all be glued to Spyglass for the WWDC coming up this month. You, it's kind of funny, the way that you're, you know, obviously I wondered the big news will be Siri. They may, they may preview the iPhone Fold. They may preview the glasses. It's sort of up in the air. We're going to have a new CEO that's incoming, right? That we're gonna, we'll probably hear from a lot or a little. Maybe it's Tim Cook's last hurrah. Maybe it's the Turner show. So many variables around WWDC. But anyway, let's talk about the iPhone Fold because that to me is the thing that I'm most excited for. You call it the iPhone's BlackBerry moment in that it's going to be, so for folks, if you're thinking about this and if you're on audio, the way that we need to describe this Fold is it's not a phone that sort of folds out from a vertical axis, right? It's a phone that folds horizontally, kind of like an old flip phone. And that might make it easier to type because they won't, you won't have to hold it. So, you know, so uniquely to make sure it doesn't fall over, which is what you pointed out in your, in your story, MG. I, I'm, if that's the way that it looks like, I'll be honest, I'm a little bit stunned. The, the folding out on the vertical axis to me is always the benefit here. So you can watch things with, you know, a bigger screen. But Apple doesn't seem to be going that way. Talk through the Fold. So there's a few things in there. First, I wouldn't be shocked if it's still sort of marketed that it folds out horizontally, not vertically. So it's not like the, a flip phone. It's more like a Fold. The weirdness that you're alluding to is basically because it's so short relative to the current, like, foldable phone. So I have a Pixel Fold, which is, yeah, just when it's folded together, it looks like sort of the regular size of a regular, you know, smartphone that you would normally see, like the iPhone looks right now. This new Fold, by all the mocks that we've seen coming out of Asia and, and everything else and all the leaks, it seems like it will be this short and squat, you know, little thing that looks like it should flip open like an old razor and whatnot. And obviously there is a razor that does that now. And I think Samsung makes a version that does that. But I do think Apple will probably still align it around folding out more book style, even though it's short and fat, even though it might be awkward. But that's like, that's the biggest thing about this, right? It seems like they have a good moment to sort of try to own a new, these new sort of use cases for this new type of device. That's not simply making a big, you know, a smaller screen and making it a bigger screen. If there's actual, like, ways to use the device when it's folded, and this is what I talk about in my piece, where it feels like it's actually a great typing device because it's a little bit fatter than what the current phone is, which is maybe a little bit too thin for people who are used to sort of thumb typing, you know, and again, I allude back to the old BlackBerry days where those were a little bit fatter, for lack of a better phrase, a little bit wider. And so they were a little bit more conducive to that thumb typing, which obviously became a thing and crackberry thumb and all that sort of stuff. And so, like, there's a world in which we maybe go back to that because this device is a little bit better for typing when it's folded up like that. And then you unfold it to either do, like you're talking about, watch videos and do other sort of gaming and other content that way. And maybe it's for quote-unquote real work if you want to have, like, two apps side-by-side and things of that nature. But it's a very big question of, like, how they get this working. I think some of the reports are, you know, talking about that when it's unfolded, it will look a little bit more like maybe an iPad mini interface, but it won't be exactly iPadOS, but it will be a souped-up version of iOS in terms of, you know, what it, what it can showcase when it's like that. And I would imagine that's sort of like widgets and other things that are more than just the typical, you know, laid-out apps on a screen because that would be sort of boring. And then that just brings me back to the notion of, like, I think if Apple is going to do this, and obviously they're doing it, I think that they would only do it or at least frame it that they would only do it if they could really do something different with it that's not just another form factor, the same iPhone, but another form factor of it. I think that they want it to be sort of a newer type of device, a different style of iPhone where it brings different use cases with it. Now, if they can pull that off, who knows? I mean, again, no one's actually seen this. We've seen dummy units of it. We've seen what it looks like. I do not think we're going to see it at WWDC. I think that they will wait for the fall to do it. I think that, yeah, WWDC, they'll have their hands full with making sure Siri is right this time. So, okay, so that's sort of getting to WWDC. You know, neither of us expect the preview of the Fold. I think there's just like, that's the, the product with the most excitement in the Apple lineup. But we might see a Siri rollout. We might see, do you think we'll see a preview of AirPods with cameras? Do you think we'll see a preview of glasses? I mean, is this going to be, so there's a lot of pressure for them to deliver this You should be happy to use all these things and get excited. And maybe they'll throw out a bone and say like, hey, it's going to be ready sooner than you're expecting. Like you don't necessarily have to wait for the fall. We'll have it in beta in the late summer so all of you guys can test it out. Because by a lot of accounts, like Gurman in particular, this version of iOS is not going to be totally different and not a big sweeping change, right? It'll largely be predicated around Siri again. And so maybe it'll be ready to roll a little bit early. And maybe that's a surprise or something like that. I mean, what are the pitches? Siri that almost works. Now more almost than ever. I think they'll have something a little more elegant than that. But yeah, I mean, I wouldn't be shocked if you and I are catching up in a month and sort of we're talking about like similarly to Google's, right? Because again, it's sort of the same idea of are do these big events, showcase events make sense in the age of AI, right? Because AI just rolls at a different cadence than what product announcements do. And to Apple's credit, WWDC was always meant to be a developer conference. It sort of has morphed into this more consumer-facing thing over time. But it's not the iPhone event. It's not meant to be fully consumer-oriented. It's going to be about APIs. It's going to be about all these different things. I mean, the big thing, here's a big wildcard. What if they did something like this? What if with the transition that you're talking about is we're moving away from the Cook era and into the Ternus era and he wants to set the stage and Cook wants to set him up well. What if they make a big announcement around the App Store and changing the fee structure? Like, that would bring down the house, right? Like, if they were able to actually finally change, you know, tear down those walls, as it were, and change the, you know, the cuts, change it from, say, you know, 70-30 to 80-20 or, you know, 85-15 even, and, you know, make that sort of get ahead of some of these legal battles that they're in right now, right? It's not like fully magnanimous that they would be doing this. There's other reasons why they would do it. But I feel like something like that could be perceived, at least, make the perception of such a conference good, even if they don't have to have, you know, they don't have that much to talk about from an AI perspective, let alone a new device perspective. Yeah, I wonder what the stock market would do, because that would take a hit directly from the services business. Yeah, but again, think back to when Satya Nadella took over at Microsoft, right? One of the first things he did, introduced Office for iPad. Now there was talk that that had been in the works for a while under Ballmer, but it was Nadella's moment to make it, put it out there and sort of set the tenor of how his administration, for lack of a better phrase, would go from there. And so what if, you know, Cook handing off to Ternus, setting a new stage for the next 10, 15 years of Apple? Yeah, we'll have so much to talk about next month because we can recap it. But clearly, like a big moment. It will be a transitional WWDC. The question is how big the transition will be. Of course, Cook to Ternus, but also, you know, home-built Siri to Gemini Siri. It'll be really interesting. All right, before we go, let's talk a little bit about what's going on at Meta, where, like, the word mess has been associated with many things that they're doing from branding, which you pointed out. Let's just read it, folks. If you want to, you know, do a Meta subscription, you can subscribe to WhatsApp Plus for $299, Facebook Plus for $399, Instagram Plus for $399, Meta One Plus for $799, Meta One Essential for $1499, Meta One Premium for $1999, and Meta One Advance for $4999. That's a marketing in particular. You call this out in Spyglass. I mean, it does, you know, this is where I wanted to take our discussion about Meta. You wrote, we're not quite in Microsoftian territory, but we're close. Maybe Meta should just stick with ads. And, you know, between sort of the uninspired product direction and now subscriptions, which you say, okay, this is what you do when you're late stage and you need to milk the profit out of your users. And these layoffs where, you know, people have, you know, within the company, the morale is terrible. State of Meta looks kind of rough right now. It does. And, you know, also not helped by the fact that every time there's some sort of negative story, certainly culturally, you know, the negative report, they are so adamant about pushing back against it that it just feels disingenuous, right? Like, obviously things are not, it's a big company. Things are not always going to be hunky-dory. There's going to be, you know, turf disputes like we talked about earlier between big factions of companies that are sort of moving in different directions and maybe have different priorities. And so not to acknowledge that and pretend like it's everything's going fine and sort of a little bit gaslighty. It just, that doesn't help their whole, I think, vibe going on right now. And look, they released the first, you know, new models, early versions of them. They're the first to admit that they're not quite at the frontier yet. And so sort of like Google, they're going to promise those down the road, right? And, you know, do they actually, how long does it take them to get there? We'll see. And do they get there with coding? We'll see. It seems like they're behind there as well to our earlier discussion. But yeah, like this whole pricing thing, you brought up just the various different levels of the tiers. But the fact that you named all of those and all of those, almost all of those things do different things. It's not like they're all, they're all just for different AI tiers. They're all just for different product tiers. It's so confusing, like in terms of like what each tier offers you that I don't really understand why they would roll it out that way, other than to, you know, earlier point, like I do think that they are under some pressure to certainly from the highest level to move towards a sort of a more sustainable model for their business, which is not right now, I think it's still 98% predicated around ads. And if you believe that we're sort of at like at the top and everyone famously has always predicted like, you know, we're at the top of Facebook and we're at the top of all these services. And then they just keep growing. But the reality is like, they're not really growing anymore in Western markets. Maybe they're growing in some, you know, some pockets of different parts of the world, but they're not growing in the place that, you know, that they feel like they can monetize as effectively with the ad product that they've been doing. And so that plus all the spend, famous capex spend that they're doing, all the spend that they obviously spent on the metaverse, which may or may not end up, you know, coming to anything. It feels like that they're probably under some pressure to figure out these new models. Zuckerberg, even this week or this past week was in the news again saying, like basically acknowledging that with all the capex spend, if they need to, they can roll out a cloud, right? They can roll out a cloud that other businesses can use. And I think that's a direct result of what we saw with Elon Musk and SpaceX of leading up to the SpaceX IPO. It's all of a sudden, oh, they're a neo-cloud. That's great. Like, don't worry about this, how much money XAI is losing because it's just a neo-cloud now for Anthropic and for Cursor. And this is great. Like these are great growth businesses now. And so can you imagine Meta becomes like a neo-cloud business based off of all the capex spend that they're doing? And like, we just, I could joke about that, but I don't, I wouldn't put it fully past them if they need to and say a year from now, you know, suggest to Wall Street, like, look, we're being a little bit more prudent with how we're trying to, you know, do the spend and, and we want to bring money in beyond just the advertising layer, which again, AI is helpful with, but it's not the same return that the other peer group is seeing with their capex spend. Okay. One more thing before we go. Do you have like another minute or two? Yeah. Yeah. Keep going. Okay. Love it when news breaks while we're recording. News just broke. Anthropic has filed to go public. Really? Wow. Today, Anthropic confidentially submitted a draft registration statement on form S1 to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for a proposed initial public offering of our common stock. So they have now, it looks like they've jumped the gun on OpenAI to file for public. I was going to say, so there was the report last week, right? That, that, uh, and it was right ahead of, uh, SpaceX filing their S1. It seemed very not coincidental that OpenAI let it perhaps leak out that they would be filing soon. And one of the reports that suggested that it would be last Friday, as far as we I feel like they needed to against Anthropic. That doesn't necessarily mean that they would. And I feel like Anthropic doing it now, though, puts so much pressure on them to actually have to do it because now they're going to just be afraid that if they don't go out, Anthropic could go out at any moment. And then, again, that's a big, big problem for them. Yeah, talk briefly again, and then we'll head out. Why is it important for OpenAI to go before Anthropic? So, so much of this, to your book publishing point, is around the narratives and around drumming up investor interest in these stocks. And while SpaceX and OpenAI are interesting because, obviously, SpaceX has XAI now, which is directly analogous in ways to OpenAI's business. They're very different businesses. Obviously, OpenAI doesn't have a rocket launching arm, nor do they have Twitter, probably for better in that case. And so they don't have a lot of overlap. And so there's going to be comps that are done, like market comparables done between the two companies on their AI businesses, but they're not direct. Anthropic and OpenAI would be much more viewed as direct, obviously, competitors between the two. Now, their businesses, as we've been talking about, are different in ways, but as we've also spent a lot of this conversation about, they're converging, right? Because OpenAI feels like they have to go after what Anthropic's been able to tap into with developers and leaning into coding and then eventually agentic work. And so they are converging. And the comps between Anthropic and OpenAI that we're seeing with these most recent fundraisers just increasingly do not look good for OpenAI. And so when public investors see that, they are going to say, okay, we're going to invest in one of these or the other. Which one are we going to invest in? Previously, when you said ChatGPT was by far and away the leader in, yeah, top line revenue, and yeah, they might be behind in bottom line because they're spending so much on servers and they want to grow into a bigger market opportunity than what Anthropic could do. That's the narrative they would have projected with that. But now the fact that, again, they're converging businesses and that Anthropic has sort of zoomed ahead on the top line too is a real, real big problem. Now, I would assume that OpenAI would try to counter by saying, look, we still have 900 million MAUs, which is also slightly problematic because that number has not shifted in a while. And clearly they've wanted it to shift above a billion so that they could announce that. And it seems like the IO point, Sundar was on stage announcing that Gemini is also at 900 million MAUs. So that's not good. Your move, OpenAI, your move. MG, great to see you as always. Always fun to talk about breaking news live. So thank you again for coming on. Likewise. And you totally hit me with that blind, Alex. I didn't even get a push notification about it. So, wow. Oh, yeah. Email in my inbox about 10 minutes ago. But it's good that we were able to address it. All right. Thanks again. All right, everybody. Thank you so much for listening and watching. Go check out Spyglass, spyglass.org. Highly recommend you sign up. And we'll see you next time on Big Technology Podcast. From the right window treatments change everything. Your sleep, your privacy, the way every room looks and feels. At Blinds.com, we've spent 30 years making it surprisingly simple to get exactly what your home needs. 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