Apple After Tim Cook, OpenAI’s New Mojo, Meta’s Internal Tracking Escapade

What does Apple look like after Tim Cook? We have a preview of new CEO John Ternus' opportunity and challenges. OpenAI seems to be getting its mojo back, and meta employees are now part of a weird AI tracking experiment. That's coming up right after this. This episode is brought to you by ServiceNow. If you want to see where enterprise AI is actually headed, Knowledge 2026 is the place to be. It's ServiceNow's annual conference, May 5th through 7th in Las Vegas, where thousands of business and tech leaders come together. Expect headline keynotes from ServiceNow chairman and CEO Bill McDermott, real stories from companies running AI at scale, and major partnership announcements turning AI ambition into actual business results. I'll be there in person sitting down with some of the most influential voices in the space, and we'll be bringing those conversations back to you here on Big Technology. Welcome to Big Technology Podcast Friday edition, where we break down the news in our traditional cool-headed and nuanced format. We have a great show for you today. A lot to cover. We're going to talk about what's ahead for incoming Apple CEO, John Ternus. We're also going to talk about what seems to be an improvement of messaging for OpenAI. And we'll also discuss meta employees getting their keystrokes tracked with screenshots that may be training the next generation of AI. So a lot to cover today. and we are joined as always by Ranjan Roy of Martians. Ranjan, great to see you. Should I be this excited because this new Apple CEO, John Ternus, is going to fix Siri? I am a little bit excited this week and that's all I'm thinking about, but we're going to have to talk about this. And that's the only thing I care about, about this monumental announcement. So when we were recording a podcast this week, Joanna Stern and I, I had the message come through mid-podcast that Ternus was going to be the new CEO and Cook was stepping down. And we put it out there and some people were just like, why are you focusing on the AI? Like stop focusing on the AI stuff. It doesn't matter. And I strongly disagree with these people. I think it does matter. And so does John Ternus. And we're going to get into after this a handful of products that he is expected to release as CEO. So stay tuned for that. But first, very interesting challenge awaits him, according to Mark Gurman of Bloomberg. Gurman says Apple's new CEO will need to stave off exodus of top talent. After years of relative calm, the company has suffered a wave of recent departures, both among C-suite executives and rank and file engineers. It's up to Ternus who succeeds Tim Cook in September to stabilize the workforce. I mean, goodness gracious, going through this story, there's so many people that have left or have considered leaving. Mike Rockwell, who created the Vision Pro and is working on Siri, has considered leaving. He has reservations about reporting to his new boss, Craig Federighi. By the way, Craig Federighi might not be happy that he didn't get the CEO job. By the way, I told you all, I'm pretty sure, when Jeff Williams left, the supposed heir apparent of Apple, the COO, when he left, it meant that Tim Cook was leaving. And lo and behold, that's what happened because he wasn't the pick and Ternus was the pick. Here's more from the story. Several leaders, including marketing chief Greg Joswiak, retail head Deidre O'Brien, Apple store head Phil Schiller, and service leader EdQ are approaching for decades at the company. There's also a Fortune article from December that shows that there's like a whole heck of a lot of turnover at the end of the year last year. interesting i will ask you this up is it a challenge or an opportunity for turnus that the seemingly the entire you know senior suite of apple may just kind of sweep out either because they're not happy they're all they all felt they might get the ceo job and they're unhappy or they're just they've spent enough time there um is this good or bad i'm going to have to go with opportunity. And the reason being, Apple today and any regular listener will know that as someone fully locked into the Apple ecosystem, it's just not been an exciting company you love any longer. It's a company that you're stuck with. And it's just felt like that for a long time. And I think the decision to have a hardware leader of the caliber of Ternus actually take the job is actually, it's important. And I think having others who have kind of built these very heavy things, like very successful, but like the services business or, you know, just overall, like we haven't seen hardware innovation that succeeded from Apple in a long time. And that's what they need. And I think, again, another Craig Federighi, like, you know, a big announcement of him kind of getting excited. Like, I feel a little bit of turnover and a little bit of new blood is not the worst thing for Apple. Would you agree? I agree wholeheartedly. And I think people might have heard from my, you know, my first comments about turn is that I had some reservations about him just because he comes from the hardware side of things and we're moving to more of a software world and has the hardware of the iPhone changed all that much. But now, obviously, the chips have been important. But the phone that I have now, the latest generation, doesn't look very much different than the 16 or the 15, the 17, that is. So I would think that maybe you'd want somebody more services or software oriented, especially because service has been showing all the growth within the company. But then I thought about it. And you know what? I'm a turn of said now. I'm a full on turn of said. I think that he is going to be that new blood the company needs, like you said. This is what he said when he came in. He said, I'm especially excited to be stepping into this role at this moment because I am telling you we are about to change the world once again. He said Apple had an incredible roadmap ahead. I'm not exaggerating when I say this is the most exciting time to be building products and services at Apple in my entire career. AI is going to create almost unlimited potential. We're going to be able to keep unlocking possibilities that are going to create entirely new opportunities for our products and services. And I'm so excited about what that's going to mean for our users. Seems like the right message to be sending if you're taking over Apple. And I just I thought the same thing that you thought. This company needs new blood. They have not been inspiring. You know, yes, their products are great. Yes, I'll choose an iPhone over any other phone any day of the week. sorry to android users my personal preference i just think it's a great phone but they became uninspiring stale as a company unable to ship the products they announced like apple intelligence clear out the upper clear the decks bring in new blood the leader seems like he knows what he's doing and let's have some dynamism from this company again yeah i think i'm on the team turnus turnus tribe maybe we'll have to work we'll think through take a moment on that one but i think team turnus i think works better turnus head does not sound right no no team turnus team turnus tribe i don't know if you can say tribe but we'll go we'll go team turnus for uh for both alliteration and it's safer so i think the it's interesting the idea like for i i mean the service is part of the business though i hate right now and that's someone who i realized i'm paying like 40 a month for icloud because i just have more photos and i am stuck and i will never be able to get out of it like overall the way they've grown that business has been it was 110 billion dollars in revenue last fiscal year which is insane when you think about it but no one is actually excited to be paying apple that money they just kind of have to so i think taking services taking software and i'll put ai under that and starting to rethink how that lives within whatever world of hardware they're going to actually is exciting like we've talked about a lot this a lot like the the interface with which you interact with ai no one knows what it's going to look like we've had our pins we've had our rip humane we've had what was the rabbit r1 was like an effort like people have been trying things and no one has nailed it so the idea that at scale there could be someone who might figure this out in a pretty compelling way i think that that could be exciting if he if he starts to starts to do something and you have a list we'll get into about these potential new products and that's like the most excited i've been about apple just reading that list as we get into it so so i think yeah i'm gonna this this at least makes me want to wish apple well and hope for the best oh yes most definitely i mean the again like if you look and this is of course products that were developed under cook but this is something that german spoke about on tbpn this week the list of uh of product categories that apple is um you know working to build new product categories that apple is working to build to me make a lot of sense There are these AI AirPods. There are smart glasses. There's the pendant, a smart display, a tabletop robot and a security camera. Now, again, this is this been under development under Cook. But Turner's basically said, again, most exciting time that I'm you know, I've been working on products. And of course, he's been central to the iPhone. Obviously going to shepherd a lot of these products into production. seems to care somewhat about siri maybe let the guy running siri leave i don't know uh and and is and is prioritizing what the future is going to be uh so yeah i think that this is bright what has you most excited about that list you just read um i will say that the ai airpods really do i mean you would imagine that they're going to have a better assistant and maybe again like let's believe it when we see it you would imagine they would have a better assistant now that they're like I think distilling Gemini and turning that into new Siri. And if they do that and they have an idea of what to do with when you put that in the AirPods, then you're looking at, you know, and immediately the most mainstream AI device in the world may be outside of the Amazon Echo. I don't know. What do you think? No, no. And it could be less intrusive and more accepted because I myself and many, many other people around the streets of New York certainly are just wearing their AirPods. I wear them even when I'm not listening to anything that's weirdly comforting as I walk around. So to have that as a kind of always on device, I don't know, tabletop robot. I don't know what that means, what it is, but I want it. I'm excited. I'm pre-ordering. I'm pre-ordering whatever you need. john whatever you need turnus i will take your tabletop robot pendant kind of exciting i think like no no it's not a pendant it's the pin the pin the pendant one of those one of those will be something will be something really we're going to be where can we wear all this stuff we're going to airpods a pendant glasses the glasses do we need any more stuff on our body that can do ai I think so. But actually, in terms of New Blood, I was just thinking – no, no, I mean, you know what? If it's good, I'm putting it all on. But in terms of New Blood, it is crazy to me. I mean, you had just brought up the launch of Apple Intelligence. in any other company how botched that rollout was if like listeners remember what's her name from last of us bella something the actress like bella ramsey bella ramsey those ads were so misleading just flat out lies about the capabilities that were existing at the time took i mean apple very few companies have ever done any like have done something that egregious so the fact that heads did not roll in a public way actually is kind of a sign of like overly being comfortable i think but also i mean even more now that i'm thinking about it like most companies there would have been some serious ramifications around that and if you do i remember that interview where like craig and i think it was eddie were just kind of talking about how ai takes time and they just had like the most no one took responsibility so i think if john tarnas starts having people take some responsibility for what has happened and again financial results notwithstanding when you have an ecosystem monopoly i think like new blood actually is needed rather than it's just okay to have. Yeah, that's right. Let me tell you one more thing about this because a lot of this is speculation, but we can at least talk a little bit about the position that Apple is in right now. And doesn't it seem like John Ternus is going to be the make or break CEO for Apple, that they are really at a place where they can go one of two ways and one is sort of nail this moment and just become the ultra company uh or you know they can sort of become the company that like to it two generations after jobs kind of got stuck under the weight of its own body and and stalled yeah i fully agree make or break moment like the financial results don reflect and i know i sound ridiculous saying that the actual state of where the company is because it is a monopoly in terms of like the way they've locked people into the ecosystem has been brilliant in terms of its execution but it's not going to last forever i think already that they i actually saw this one tweet where apparently the green bubble in iMessage has like a slightly lower resolution even so like they created this you don't want to be the green bubble person in your group text like you want iMessage they created that luxury feel for so long but now no one i talked to is excited about Apple products in any way, which is not a good thing in terms of the future of the company. And they can kind of ride out the ecosystem lock-in for long enough. But this is it. Tarnas, no pressure. They need the tabletop robot. That will make people excited again. Tabletop robots will solve everything. Everything. Everything. I mean, until it decides to come down off that tabletop, if you're mean to it. But that's for another time. I don't know if you've seen these. Stay on the tabletop. Just stay on and we're okay. I don't know if you've seen these videos of – do you remember – this is actually an important point to just talk about robotics for a moment. Do you remember last year there was the robot half marathon in China and all these robots were hilariously like slamming into the floor? These things – I think one ran the half marathon in under an hour this year. I mean, I want my robot running a half marathon in less than an hour. Like, a robot should be faster than a human. That doesn't scare me, I think. Like, if we're putting them out there, it's going to get you. You're not going to outrun a robot. I think you're fully underappreciating how difficult it is to get a robot to move that fast, a humanoid to move that fast. But I guess it was inevitable. my yeah okay i guess the mechanics of it do seem like something very important to uh to for the robotics industry but as long as the tabletop robot is not leaving the table and i don't even know what it does like what does it do on the table by the way i just want to say that this is your um humanoid anti-humanoid bias coming out you're like if it runs i don't care about it at all because folks if you've been listening ronjan is not a fan of humanoid robots he wants purpose-built robots see this is why i like the tabletop robot i've been saying this for for months now i don't understand why robots need a human form factor i want purpose-built and whatever this tabletop robot is doing on that table i'm sure it's something very helpful moving stuff around it's working through actually i don't even know what it would be doing on the i mean And from what I've read, I'm pretty sure it's like a robotic arm with a screen attached that like rotates and shows you shit. Okay, that does not sound that exciting. Sorry to take beer out of this discussion. I thought it was fixing me a drink or something like that. I think that's a few generations away. Okay, so that's Apple. I think ultimately good moment for Apple. uh honestly kudos to them because this was like the smoothest uh ceo transition ever and their stock is it hasn't happened yet you're good what you think there's going to be some last moment like tim cook sitting on the throne being like i thought i could leave okay okay they'll never replace me i mean have we done our background checks on turnus i'm a patriots fan and mike rabel good god what's happened this week so let's just apple do your background checks that's all i ask i want to just say there's been great willpower on us to not bring up the variable situation but this is not a sports podcast we're going to just glance past it but that is that's the only reference that's the only reference um all right let's be so let's speak about open ai and and their controversies there um you know they released we're talking right after the release of TPT 5.5, aka Spud. And I think one thing that I've learned is to not judge a model the day of. You got to give it some time so people find the uses, but you can judge the rollout. And one of the things a lot of people have noticed is that the rollout has been much smoother, maybe than typical. This is a tweet from Cree Bivois. I think that's how you pronounce it. This feels like someone inside OAI, OpenAI, is doing work. They realized that Anthropic Dario were gaining more traction, mostly because they have a good product, but also because people like them and want them to win. First, there was a night of funny drunk tweets, which I think Sam tweeted an Anthropic growth employee, OK Boomer, after this person was like trying to explain away something Anthropic did. And now this new product announcement feels noticeably more personable and, dare I say, humble. My take, this is going to be a war of authenticity. And that was above a tweet from Sam Altman announcing GPT 5.5 with a kind of different tone than usual. He wrote, GPT 5.5 is here. We hope it's useful to you. I personally like it. Like that's the spud tweet. Compare that to the Mythos rollout. Do you think that OpenAI is getting its act together on comms? I do. I do. I think this is what I've been saying. like everyone in any of these cycles within AI, everything is so heavy and fast that I think we forget how quickly things move. And because again, Anthropic has been the last, call it what, four to six months that it's just been on a tear, especially from like a public perception standpoint. But the last, since the launch of Opus 4.7, there's been a lot of negative sentiment around the launch of the model and we can get into mythos overall and how it's been rolled out and i gotta say gpt image 2 like the way that was the most excited i've seen people about kind of an advance in model even 5.5 i haven't really heard much i think that was today right or as we're recording it's uh like the 5.5 part is just kind of quietly rolled out but gpt image 2 like And I saw more excitement around that than I've seen in a long time. I went in, I started trying stuff. It was actually, it felt like a step change from Nano Banana, which kind of had people excited by last. So I think on that side, they are doing something right in the last few days they have not done in a while. I think also, I don't know, did you see what Sam Altman changed his Twitter bio to? Yeah, it's something understated, like I kind of like AI or something like that. Yeah, no, no, it is AI is cool, I guess, lowercase i. Like, so I saw you had pointed out that one of the reasons that they bought TBPN was from a comms standpoint. And it was interesting because, like, it felt like this was a very purposeful thing. when you're changing that when he's starting to kind of like snarky tweet back at a anthropic when he's just doing like we hope it's useful i personally like it i mean this is this is a decision and i think it's a good one i do think that we could be seeing some tbpn uh influence here i definitely i tweeted that over um this one about that was praising open a iscom strategy and it's definitely liked uh by someone high up at tbpn we'll put it that way so you know maybe that's what's going on but certainly this rollout has been you know fairly smooth it's not been something that they have inflated expectations on um you know remember when before gpt5 like altman was on theo vaughn and was talking about like all these like massive things that it was going to do uh and then it just was felt it was he built it up so much it was going to inevitably be a letdown i mean obviously brockman talked about it on on this show beforehand. So I think the expectations were managed. They also did something interesting, which is that they gave access to GPT 5.5 to the entire company of NVIDIA. And obviously, NVIDIA is locked in this battle with Google and Amazon and Anthropic, which have together basically trained two competing models against the NVIDIA OpenAI axis. And then Jensen sent an email out to all of NVIDIA, obviously praising GPT 5.5 and talking about how well it's done. And Sam also tweeted that. So that was like another smart move. And lastly, they are positioning it against Mythos. And that's something that I want to get your perspective on. Mythos, of course, cybersecurity capabilities and cyber attack capabilities. And they portion it off. And this has not been the case with 5.5. And Sam, in a tweet on launch, said, we believe in iterative deployment. We believe in democratization. We love you and we want you to win. basically saying we're doing it completely different than anthropic maybe they're seizing the moment what do you think okay you know what i'm already having to back off i was getting excited about sam's new face in this uh launch but we love you and want you to win come on my whole career has largely been about the magic of startups like i think enough has come out do you think people are going to take this as sincere i'm sure plenty of people will but do you think like he's going to be able to maintain this sincerity of we love you and want you to win i also noted and i remember there's this one after replying to an anthropic engineer okay boomer he quote tweeted tonight i have had a couple of drinks misspelling tonight i actually looked up like does sam altman drink And it's saying he's had a lot of public statements about for sleep optimization, he does not consume alcohol and then very rarely might. So, again, is he actually just sitting there a little tipsy tweeting or is this now now that I'm looking at it, it's feeling a little bit insincere? It might work, but it might backfire, too. Well, OK, so let's talk about this, because ultimately what this comes down to is mythos versus spud or mythos versus 5.5. and um and i i think that i'm curious what you think the right approach is i totally hear anthropics perspective on this which is like we know that this thing can do cyber attacks we're going to roll it out really slowly with a series of trusted um partners and then i kind of hear open ai's perspective as well which i spoke with greg brockman about that um and you can listen to that show on the feed. That was yesterday. And what he said is basically like, we're pretty confident in our governance. We've built this in a way that is not going to be permissive towards cyber attacks. And you can, you know, you might get more refusals because of it, because of our, the walls around cyber attacks, but we want everybody to have it. What do you think is the right approach here? I think there's got to be a middle ground between our next model release will destroy humanity and crush the world economy and Sam telling everyone that he loves them. There's got to be, I mean, like, take a Microsoft announcement or an Adobe Summit this week. There's some software releases. There's some upgrades. Not everything has to be earth shattering and world defying. Like, it's just the next iteration of the model. Like, if these companies weren't in the position of having to kind of keep this drumbeat of hype being pushed until they go public in the markets, do we need this much hype for every new model release it makes for good conversation fodder but my my wish is these would just be kind of like they would be in release notes maybe maybe there's like a press release and that's it it doesn't have to be this all or nothing type of way of communicating around it is that are you a truther on the well i guess it sort of depends on whether you believe these things have real cybersecurity capabilities or cyber offensive capabilities as well if they have cyber offensive capabilities then you can't just you know sort of say all right go for it so what's your perspective on that do you think okay okay because i think it's real from the people that i've spoken with i've done enough reporting on it that i believe it's real at least to some degree so so if it is real this week bloomberg reported there was a breach for Mythos were an unauthorized group. They tried a number of different strategies and were able to gain access to the model. They work for a third-party contractor that works for Anthropic. And the way they did it is they literally made educated guesses about the target URL to access the model If your model is truly as dangerous as you have made it out to be over the last two weeks If I am anthropic this announcement you should be hair on fire running around because if they did it by guessing a URL and having contractor access, God knows who else has it. China already has it. The whole Jensen-Dwark-ish thing just becomes moot. Like, if it is so powerful and dangerous, this should be the biggest story, And they should be telling the world how not only are they incredibly sorry about what has happened, they are doing everything in their power to actually fix this. And nothing. This is just like they don't care. I don't know. It's truly breached in such a pedestrian way. Shouldn't they care more? Well, first of all, I'll say just because a couple of dorks in the Discord got access to Mythos doesn't mean that the cyber offensive capabilities of Mythos are a lie. If you would have given it to everybody and had a nothing burger, then I would have said something. But it's not on its face disqualifying. Then I'll say it's we're already now in week three of this Mythos Real. And I appreciate your skepticism around it. I really do. I think that we just we kind of hear our this is our new product or the model. I think you and I are kind of at an impasse and we're just going to have to wait and see to get that answered. No, no, but I want to ask, shouldn't that be more important if a couple of guys and a couple of folks in the Discord are able to access your potentially world-destructive model? Shouldn't that be – if you are working for Anthropic, if you're leading Anthropic, shouldn't that be the most terrifying thing imaginable if it is real? I mean, let me put it this way. Hasn't Anthropic had a number of similar situations? the source code for like claude code leaked and all this stuff and it's just like they're i think it's almost like they're leaving too much to claude and they probably should have thought this through why didn't claude tell them to change the naming convention if they were working on this release no you're right yeah i think it's just more if like it the the kind of whiplash from most dangerous thing on earth sandwich in the park the model is coming to life and you're anthropomorphizing it and it's like gonna come out and take you and send emails and posts without your like going from that to oh yeah by the way anyone can access it by guessing a url and some contractor access and whatever to me it just doesn't square you and uh i brought this up in the greg brockman conversation yesterday but you and sam altman have a similar perspective on this. This is just a... So Sam Altman was on Ashley Vance's podcast this week, and he talked about Mythos, and he said, it's clearly incredible marketing to say we've built a bomb. We were about to drop it on your head. We will sell you a bomb shelter for $100 million thrown across all your stuff, but only if we pick you as a customer. That's good. That is good. Okay, maybe Sam does love us. maybe he wants to make magic at scale which is i think what the rest of that tweet said yep well magic at hyperscale magic it's just that scale would be yeah i mean that's who wants that come on uh well did get dario back into the white house looks like they're gonna have a deal with the white house again to start working with the whole government so if anything it did that magic at hyperscale that's all i'm thinking about right now that's my new purpose in life to deliver magic at hyperscale i don't know how but that's what that's what i want to do you're now having this skepticism around ai so this might be a good opportunity for me to read a comment that we got on the uh on the brockman video and and see what you think uh we're closing in on four years since lm models were broadly released to the public and you guys are still talking about how the next model will be so amazing always the next one meanwhile oracle laid off half its company facebook is in the current currently in the process of laying off half its company data centers are being canceled one after another chat chipt now has ads it was a good run try and time to pivot to the next topic that's a good our listener we got some spicy we have smart like it by the way i like it i appreciate our reader feedback our listener feedback our viewer feedback just as long as it's not two stars in the apple podcast or spotify app but when people disagree with us i i like it it's it's mind expanding you know we are because we are again in this world where it's like all right the next model is going to be so good um but i i would say they've improved i would say it's really hard to argue that they haven't improved i i will say they've dramatically improved again i work in the industry i that was the one who said when everyone said 5.0 or 5.1 was a dud that reasoning and tool calling were going to be the next big thing you're right there's been dramatic step changes along the way but but i also fully empathize with the listener that like i hate the talk about the next model and what i was saying yeah a few moments ago i want the next model release to be as boring as whatever adobe launched at summit this week or microsoft launched it whatever else copilot for a co-work or whatever else you know like that's what it should be not like beware humanity our next model is dropping you want to know what i think is getting underplayed this week and you already mentioned it but i think we should just say this before we go to break the chat gpt images 2.0 is insane oh It's insane. It can search the web. It can edit images. I mean, it is – I've tested like crazy every one of these image generators from Dolly on out. This thing is insane. Insane. No, no. This is why this was genuinely – I would put this at step change on the image generation side. The thinking side wasn't as interesting to me because any recent model should be able to do this kind of multi-step reasoning and if web search is part of it. But like just seeing the outputs and I've seen a lot of kind of what got us all excited about Nano Banana 2 or Nano Banana Gemini Flash 2 like looks cartoonish already compared to what like ChatGPT Image 2 is doing. So I think this was big. This was actually a very impressive thing. But it's interesting. It's a software update that is good. Do I think it's going to change humanity? No, but it was very impressive. This was the first one that actually had me worrying about the future of graphic designers. It's that good. I'm not even kidding. oh i guess i mean this is i've worried about the future of graphic designers who do traditional graphic design for a long time and actually i mean claude design and what it's able to do i think this has been coming for for a while and i think like just being able to do some kind of like image alteration or improvement or even like ux layout of a website i think that kind of skill has been going the way of someone kind of like writing email subject lines for a long time but i don't i guess to me that didn't change that much it is interesting like visual communication and because what i saw happening much better with this is actually kind of communicating an idea like nano banana could do some kind of like good cartoonish flow charts, but like GBT image two actually was communicating visual concepts much, much better or like communicating visually, not even visual concepts. Agreed. All right. Let's take a break and talk about these cuts at meta and whatever else we can fit in until we have to go. We'll be back right after this. Your IT team wastes half their day on repetitive tickets. And the more your business grows, the more requests pile up. Password resets, access requests, onboarding, all pulling them away from meaningful work. With Servo, you can cut 80% of your help desk tickets. While legacy players bolt on AI, Servo was built for AI agents from the ground up. Here's the transformation. When a manager used to onboard a new hire, the old process would take hours. They'd ping Slack, email IT, wait on approvals. Meanwhile, new hires sit around for days. With Servo, a manager asked to onboard a new hire in Slack. The AI provisions access to everything automatically in seconds with necessary approvals. IT never touches it. Companies like Perplexity, Verkata and Merkur automated over half their tickets immediately after setup. 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The job cuts come as Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg is spending aggressively on the talent and infrastructure needed to develop state-of-the-art artificial intelligence products, including LLMs and chatbots. Well, as if that was not enough, this is from Reuters. meta to start capturing employee mouse movements keystrokes for ai training data meta is installing new traffic tracking software on us-based employees computers to capture mouse movements clicks and keystrokes for use and training its artificial intelligence models part of a broad initiative to build ai agents that can perform work tasks autonomy the company told staffers in an internal memo seen by reuters one hand laying people off on the other hand those that stay have the pleasure of their movements and keystrokes and whatever they're doing on their computers being used to train ai your reaction okay let's separate out the two the first it actually shocked me or it didn't shock me but it's just it's incredible to me that for years on the metaverse spending and reality labs they never would tie any kind of cost-cutting efforts the entire year of efficiency what was that 2024 2023 23 23 uh like he never directly attributed it to because we are spending so much on the metaverse and it's kind of like amazing that now we are cutting 8 000 people to offset our heavy spending on artificial intelligence. So the market I get loves hearing that. So investors love hearing that. So people will continue to do it. But I don't know. I feel, do you think it's the right way to communicate for these companies just because they know it'll pop their stock in the short run? Well, this is one I don't think is about comms at all. I think this is legitimately like they are doing what they said they're doing right they are is it over hiring an abloated company that just needs to actually trim itself which is i think very true for many many of these big companies especially over the last five years or is it really like we need to cut costs so we can invest more in artificial intelligence i think it's the latter i mean they've spent so much money on ai they're spending on the data centers the market is actually much less forgiving if you don't have margins, right? And they don't have, I mean, they have some ROI on the AI because it's helping optimize their creative stack. And I think there was a headline recently that they're going to pass Google as the largest advertising business. So they see the results there, but they're not a platform that's sort of benefiting from this surge in demand for AI compute. They haven't built super AI, super intelligence. So they are in a position where they cannot remain this bloated, especially as they don't have the leading model. Well, but normally they've spent a lot of money. So just saying we will spend more money to me isn't a reassuring message. Like as a headline, it sounds like, OK, this is good. This is what everyone needs to be doing. But like money has not been the problem. What were they paying people a couple of months ago to join? I mean, this is facetious, but they effectively spent $15 billion to hire Alexander Wang. Yeah, I mean, so more money is not the answer. So, like, again, I get if the company is just bloated, if he wants to kind of, like, start to make things leaner, go into Zuck beast mode, year of efficiency type stuff. I mean if anyone is able to do that well and better than others it his Zuckerberg But like I don know just because it means we be able to invest more I still I don quite buy that But that separate from the key tracking that yeah talk about that i it's one of those that it starts to make like purely technically it's almost kind of interesting like if it's terrifying but it's interesting in terms of is everyone essentially training models to do the things they're doing repetitively which is efficient i guess um i guess like yeah why do you work there then I think if the goal is maybe there could be an inspiring all right here's my attempt here in the future the type of work you will need to be doing is and I believe this like moving a little bit of information from system a to system b making a little presentation around it doing a little kind of like adding your own tiny bit of insider analysis and being that cog in a larger process is not going to be a lot of knowledge work. So maybe Zuckerberg can stand up and he can just be like, I am preparing you all for the future so you can be the best positioned out of any kind of tech company employee to kind of meet the needs of this future. That's my inspiring message behind this. I mean, I hope he'd be doing it like, you know, locked in his office on like a conference room phone because he would get vegetables thrown at him from the meta cafeteria if he said that um you know in in the history of of labor and transitions of this nature um there was a practice back in the day called taylorism where they they measured the movements of people working in the factory and they got them to move as efficiently as possible they literally controlled their movement to be like a machine so there wouldn't be any wasted movement and then eventually they replaced many of them with machines i just don't see stories like this uh ending uh in the right way for the worker and um i will say there's one interesting wrinkle here which is that do you remember scale ai alexander wang's uh company they told me recently that most of the training that they're doing is reinforcement learning where you build environments for the bots and they go and they try to figure out what to do and well if you're what do you need to do to build these great reinforcement learning environments you sort of need to show them forms and web behavior and stuff like that and then you try to get them to model it and uh with alexander weighing within meta i wouldn't be stunned if that is what's happening is that Maybe the other way to read this is instead of a complete AI automation move, it is effectively building gyms for bots that need more environments to do reinforcement learning within. That is fascinating. And if Alexander Wang is adding value post-acquisition in this way, maybe that $15 billion was worth it. I was kind of fascinated. There was no denial at all of this happening. Part of the reporting was that the CTO, Andrew Boz, he responded in the thread that there's no option out of this on your work provided laptop. This comment received a mix of crying, shocked, and angry face emojis. But also the official response from Meta to Business Insider was, there are safeguards in place to protect sensitive content, and the data is not used for any other purpose. It is amazing to me that they just said it. There's no backing off of what they're doing. So this is kind of nuts. This is crazy. Yeah, there's definitely a few jobs that I've held in my life that I really would not want this software to be installed on because I had nothing to do and spent a lot of time on my college humor dot com. See, this is actually imagine if everyone is just on Twitter is not doing work. And that's what all the training data is received. And like that, the, the agents just like, they start, he starts to put them to work and then they're just scrolling and then they go to Instagram. You're going to see these agents. You're right. They're going to be tasked with like, you know, writing a deck for you. You're going to have it take over your computer. midway through it's going to be on youtube watching dogs on skateboards and you're going to be like what's going on here it's like well i learned that this is the right way to do work trust the data trust the data trust the training i'm sure we'll end up seeing some ridiculous study about this and it'll be like ai models that procrastinate are actually more effective than ai models that stick to task actually did you see i think she's like the anthropic ethicist there's all these videos going around around like this interview basically the idea was like she was she's like the one who's under supposed to understand like the emotional underpinnings of claude and the model and like oh yeah was talking about amanda askel yeah and how it is anxious and so maybe you should let your agent watch a little youtube surf a little x just it will get the job done in a more efficient way when you push it too hard it's it's just not going to do a good job give it a break and don't don't we all don't we all need a break don't we all just need some time to divert from task and try something completely meaningless that's that's what being human is all about and it will learn as it tracks your behavior if you're a meta employee i could just imagine all these meta employees like built having ai token max doing some dumb shit while spending the whole day like watching videos on the phone that's the truth that is that is the future of work in 2026 if there's a silicon valley if that show existed now i wonder if there'll be a new version of that but there's just so much material. Kind of hard to parody at this point because it is so ridiculous. Yeah, you're right. There's no parody. All right. So look, as we come to a close, we've had this basically comparison of streaming prices in our prep doc for weeks now. And we have an opening for a rant. So why don't you take us home, Ranjan, with a little exposition here on the increase in streaming prices and what it means. So the Bureau of Labor Statistics tells us that the consumer price index rise in the last year was 2.6%. Now, as someone who's subscribed to too many streaming services over the last years and does not know when to cut what and has a son who won't let them cut Disney Plus and a wife who said the idea of Netflix or HBO ever leaving or even Hulu or Peacock, you know, these things. So I was curious because Netflix the other day just raised prices to $15.99 for the individual plan, but they severely restrict you in number of devices. So I think I'm paying $27 now, which is insane. so i went back and looked it since 2019 because i was kind of like pre-pandemic how much have prices gone up and we all knew there was this moment where the streaming business did not make sense and this was a loss leader for all these companies other than netflix so disney plus came out at 6.99 it's currently 18.99 hulu went from 11.99 to 18.99 hbo max actually to their premium positioning only $14.99 to $18.99 now. Peacock basically $5 to $11. Paramount Plus $5 to $8. Apple TV again going back to my hatred of their services business now comes in at $5, bundles you in. Now it's $13 a month. All of these things I think, I don't know, when you look at your monthly expenses, then deciding what you're going to have to cut. And you see this across everything. It was the Uber mentality as well. But I think, I don't know, I was thinking there needs to be an inflation metric relative to the average, probably big technology listener, tech industry participant, just kind of like, I don't know, just like upwardly mobile tech savvy person that is just stuck subscribing to all this do you suppose spotify has been jacked up as well and there's no backlash there's no big consumer like movement to actually like cancel these services are you cutting any of these i i have tried for a while to just be subscribed to the one that I use most often. But I've given up. I'm quite fatigued at trying to cancel Netflix and then reinstalling it and stuff like that. So now I have Netflix. I have Prime Video, HBO, and I think I subscribed to Powerbounce Plus for like $30 for the year. I wanted to watch the Southparks with the AI. But then you had Peacock. for premier league paramount and nfl paramount plus for nfl i don't know i like it is interesting to me that i was at my parents place who still have cable and it actually kind of made me miss cable and i don't know they're spending like 180 bucks which i think i'm spending more now but crazy is is all this ai hype gonna end up with us longing for the days of basically what streaming has done make me wish and miss cable is that what's going to happen well first of all it's just going to get worse for two reasons uh one is we're starting to see consolidation in the space like you have netflix as this clear winner and then um and then paramount and warner brothers discovery are going to tie up right so like you're going to see well it's actually good that the two will balance each other out um but like the days of every streamer competing with every streamer kind of on even footing in price matters, seems to be away, seems to be going away. And then, of course, with AI trained on human screen behavior, they now are required to watch at least five hours of Netflix during the workday. And that is a demand signal that we're all going to get screwed by. And then Apple and Ternus will somehow solve it all and unbundle all their subscription services and actually make it just a product i'm excited about and i don't feel trapped by that is something that apple could do so maybe they will i will be again yeah i cloud freaking photos i'm paying 40 a month i don't even know how it literally was telling me that like it was telling me telling my wife we're on a family plan like you will lose access to your photos your entire life like if you do not pay us gun to head that is the apple services business model now they certainly have i will say this they certainly have some mafias-esque business practices in there so i mean turnus of course will have to make make money to bring a full circle but hopefully he like looks at this and this realizes it's going to be his legacy and decides not to do stuff like this because that sucks. Do you think there's subscription revenue tied to the tabletop robot? I hope so. I hope so. It's consumption-based, token-based. That's it. Every time it moves, the more complex it does. You just get an iPhone notification. You've been charged another. Oh, my God. I can just imagine the ad. The scene fades in from black. Standing next to a beautiful glass table with a tabletop robot and a screen attached to its hand is one Ron John Roy. Here's how the ad begins. Hi, I'm Ron John Roy. I hope you're enjoying your tabletop robot, and I hope you keep paying $10.99 a month for the pleasure of being able to preserve everything in your house. Because once your subscription lasts, I will be using these robots to smash your shit up. That is the Ternus business model, and the stock is going to skyrocket. That's it. That's it. Now we figured it, we at least figured it out, figured out what the tabletop robot is for. There it is. It's merely a threat. It's merely a threat to keep paying your services bill. Gotta have something. That thing will knock you the fuck out of here. Now that is innovation and that is how we will end another week here on Big Technology Podcast Friday edition. Ranjan, great to see you as always. Thank you again for coming on. See you next week. Nothing is safe. All right, everybody. Thanks for listening and we'll see you next time on Big Technology Podcast.