Another Podcast

Apple does VR. We watched. We took pictures. We talk about it. 

We don't know what generative AI will be (or what will happen next week), but we're starting to work out what questions to ask

Buzzfeed News dies just as Reddit and Stack Overflow say they'll charge LLMs to train on their data. Who owns content and how does distribution work in an LLM age? Are those the right questions? What should we be asking? 

Crypto crashed, metaverse was silly, and now we know that generative AI is the future of everything. Right? Well, sort of. But though the hype has moved on, the reasons web3 and VR were interesting haven't really changed. 

If you spend an hour typing prompts into MidJourney, who owns the result? There are easy answers to this, but they're probably wrong - these are new questions with new puzzles, much like radio, photography or music before. 

Generative machine learning is moving so fast it's impossible to keep up. What questions can we ask about GPT4, before everything changes again next week?

The 'ban it' snowball is getting bigger and bigger, but what problem are we solving - privacy, or propaganda? How does this scale to all the other Chinese apps? And meanwhile, how well do we pay attention to the product itself? 

Amazon sold close to $40bn of advertising last year - bigger than Prime, bigger than the entire global newspaper industry and probably more profitable than AWS. But is this really advertising, rent, or something else? And what does that mean for Google? Blog post and charts  

Microsoft thinks (or says) that Generative ML will reset the search market, unlocking Google's market share and collapsing those 60% operating margins. Really? What would that mean?

What would generative search mean? Generative video? Indeed, Generative products? Last week we talked about how ChatGPT, LLMs and generative ML work - now, what might they mean. 

The wave of enthusiasm around ChatGPT and generative AI feels like another Imagenet moment - a step change in what ‘AI’ can do that could generalise far beyond the cool demos. But - it makes things up, and it doesn't actually understand anything it's doing. Probably. What does that mean? What's this for?

Chips have always been the foundation of tech, but the rest of us didn't need to pay much attention - stuff just got faster every year. But now there are actual real, big, interesting structural changes happening - what does that look like?

Within and Activision, but also PA Semi and Android - how do we think about big tech buying stuff, and why is it hard for regulators?

When machine learning started really working, back in 2012-13-14, the demos were amazing, but it wasn't immediately obvious how universal the applications would be. The same with Generative AI now - now - the demos are cool, but what will they mean? How will this generalise to change search or law firms?

What does Anker have to do with Mr Beast, Amazon ads or Aesop? A chat about unbundling ecommerce and building brands in a world of infinite media. 

What can we say about a ‘crypto’ crash if we’re not crypto people, nor Wall Street people? How much does it matter?

Every now and then, big company CEOs all read the same tech trends piece and send the same email - "what's our strategy for this?!" And in 2022, there were a lot of "metaverse?!" emails. But what does 'metaverse' mean, can you have a strategy for it, and do you even need to care? Probably not. 

Generative AI looks like second wave of ML hat might be as big a deal as the Imagenet wave from 2013 or so. What questions can we ask?

What does Adobe's purchase of Figma tell us about the ways that software is changing, and the kinds of tools that people build and use? And, how long until the antitrust lawsuit arrives?

‘Software eats the world’, and now it’s eating TV, but then what? Pretty soon software seems to stop mattering, and all the questions become TV questions, fashion questions, or music questions, while tech moves on to something else.  Follow Benedict on Twitter Follow Toni on Twitter

Adam Neumann's latest venture shines a light on some of the interesting questions that arise, such as: What is this, what could it be, and can it work? Can this person make it work? As well as, is this the kind of deal we should be doing? Do we understand this? Follow Benedict on Twitter Follow Toni on Twitter

What does a light on a restaurant table say about the failure of smart home startups? Or Shein? Follow Benedict on Twitter Follow Toni on Twitter

The US is fundamentally rethinking its approach to competition, and M&A, and tech, and big tech buying startups. The FTC trying  to block Meta from buying Within is the test case for all of those. How many interesting problems can we cover in 30 minutes? When big tech buys small tech Follow Benedict on Twitter Follow Toni on Twitter

What does 'focus' mean for a trillion dollar company? Amazon is buying doctors and Apple might be a bank - should we change our assumptions for what these kinds of companies would never do? How does the point of leverage change? Follow Benedict on Twitter Follow Toni on Twitter

Five years ago AI was everything, but attention moved on (Metaverse! Crypto!) and ‘Applied AI’ became useful but boring. Now things like DALL-E look cool, but what are they useful for? What’s the second wave? Follow Benedict on Twitter Follow Toni on Twitter