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TBPN is a live tech talk show hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, streaming weekdays from 11–2 PT on X and YouTube, with full episodes posted to Spotify immediately after airing.
Described by The New York Times as “Silicon Valley’s newest obsession,” TBPN has interviewed Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Mark Cuban, and Satya Nadella. Diet TBPN delivers the best moments from each episode in under 30 minutes.
In the news Yes. Today Yes. Apple said this morning that it has acquired Q dot ai Mhmm. An Israeli startup working on AI technology for audio. Apple didn't disclose the terms.
Speaker 1:The Financial Times reported it was worth nearly $2,000,000,000 so pretty meaningful deal. Apple is not known for really paying up on a lot of different M and A that they're kind of folding in to their roadmap. We had Mark Kermin on yesterday talking about how Apple uses M and A effectively to accelerate their roadmap. According to Reuters, Apple did not say how it will use QAI's technology, but said the startup has worked on new applications of machine learning to help devices understand whispered speech Mhmm. And to enhance audio in challenging environments.
Speaker 1:QAI last year filed a patent to use facial skin micro movements to detect words mouthed or spoken.
Speaker 2:Is this is we we've seen a couple startups that are, you know, doing like the whisper. It's like telepathy almost. It tracks your mouth movements so you can just and then it like will track what you're Really, really crazy.
Speaker 1:So facial skin micro movements will be used to identify a person and assess their emotions, heart rate, respiration rate, and other indicators. Crazy. Very sci fi.
Speaker 2:It seems
Speaker 1:like it's Yeah.
Speaker 2:You can
Speaker 1:read this. Avid Maisel founded three-dimensional sensing firm, PrimeSense, and sold it to Apple in 2013.
Speaker 2:Absolute dogs. They're doing They
Speaker 1:call it double kill. That's great. The PrimeSense deal eventually helped Apple move away from fingerprint sensors on its iPhone and toward facial recognition technology. Interesting.
Speaker 2:Pop quiz for Tyler. Why does Apple acquire companies?
Speaker 3:I mean, I why questions are usually pretty open.
Speaker 2:Okay. Good answer. But Mark Gurman told us why does Apple acquire companies to accelerate the Accelerate the roadmap. Yes. And it's funny because I asked him like, why are we going hear Tim Cook say that?
Speaker 2:And he was like, oh, because of earning. But we're basically hearing him say it today with this surprise acquisition. That's obviously the line from Apple. And it makes sense. This is something that is uniquely acceleratable because of the Apple hardware ecosystem.
Speaker 2:They can deploy this through AirPods. They can deploy this through the phones, just like they did with Face ID. If you have that technology and you're like, oh, well, in order to log into your computer with your face, you're going to need a third party device that you plug into USB C. Like, no one's going to do that. But yes, I've very bullish on this.
Speaker 2:I was thinking back then that people get their wisdom teeth out. This is very weird in cyberpunk, but if you got your wisdom teeth out, you could potentially like create like add a like a port for storing a microphone.
Speaker 1:Tyler, do you have any of these?
Speaker 3:I should have got that.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Exactly. Because a lot of people get them out, and then you could just put a port there, and and you could and you could insert basically the tip of an AirPod, very, small device that you would charge and then you put it in. And then when you're whispering, you can just hear it. It can only hear that and it goes dictation straight to your phone.
Speaker 2:I was wondering about the the quality of Whisper transcription these days. Like, if I just open up Whisper on the ChatGPT app, put my phone in my pocket and just talk, can it just hear through my pants pocket and just dictate perfectly now? Because, AI is so good at transcription that it can be really muffled. Like, you can have music playing in the background and talk to Whisper. It just won't mess up.
Speaker 2:So there is a world where you don't actually need a separate pin. You just have something anywhere on your body. And it knows, Okay, this is what John sounds like. Let's kill all the background noise. Let's kill all the other people talking.
Speaker 2:Let's isolate that with AI. It seems pretty, pretty good for that.
Speaker 1:One more thing on this QA acquisition. They're using going back to their patent, using facial skin micro movements to assess emotions, heart rate, respiration rate, and other indicators. You could imagine where a world in the future where you have Apple smart glasses Mhmm. That effectively have like health monitoring.
Speaker 2:Because it's
Speaker 1:tracking respiration, heart rate, all these different things, and just basically integrating the features you're getting from the Apple Watch today.
Speaker 2:I wonder what it's really unlocking that the Watch can't do. There's always the question when you pitch a new device, It's like, well, your phone does have a camera on it. So you're not this isn't like the smart glasses aren't the
Speaker 1:first Yeah. But it's a new device, but it's a Lindy form factor. Right? True. True.
Speaker 1:Like this something we've talked about in the past. It's like the new hardware that's taken off is an existing form factor. It's like headphones, eyewear, you have watches, Creating these pendant things so far hasn't hit, right?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's fair. I just think like on the heart rate issue specifically, there was an app before the Apple Watch existed where you could put your finger over the camera of the iPhone and it would use the light, the flashlight which was right next to the camera, to light up your finger so your finger would turn red. And then it would take the sensor data from the camera and measure the pulses of the red and give you your heart rate just It's from touching your pretty cool. Like, it was completely outside of the Apple ecosystem, just an app that you could download or pay for. And so the phone can take your heart rate.
Speaker 2:The watch can take your heart rate. If you give me glasses and you say, those glasses can also take your heart rate, I'm like, I got enough heart rate measurement. I can also just go like this and estimate it. Like, there's a bunch of ways to know that your heart rate's spiking. Maybe tracking it's in different but it feels like they need to go farther.
Speaker 2:And the real opportunity is something more around audio interfaces, link it to Siri, have more ways to triangulate what the person's trying to say, what they're saying in a noisy environment, whether they're trying to be quiet and you still wanna isolate what they're saying, having a back and forth, reducing latency, all of those things are very critical to success in that category.
Speaker 1:Let's go into Microsoft.
Speaker 2:So, Microsoft shares have taken a dive as data center spending overshadows earnings surge. Let's give some numbers here. So Microsoft's q four revenue was $81,300,000,000, which was higher than the consensus estimate of 80,230,000,000.00. So they're making money. There's no there's no lack of demand for Microsoft services.
Speaker 2:Q three twenty twenty five revenue was 77,100,000,000.0, up almost 5%. And year over year growth was 17%. But the stock sold off by 12%, and Microsoft is now just a tiny little $3,150,000,000,000 company. Not bad. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Mean, have been excited about the OpenAI investment, which did show up in earnings. So Microsoft owns 27% of OpenAI's new for profit entity. That value was actually reflected in Microsoft's earnings. And of course, more importantly, the GPT models are truly frontier. We've seen it again and again.
Speaker 2:There's this horse race over this model's better at this thing, this model's better today. But it's just very clear that OpenAI is on the frontier and in the conversation for pretty much every application possible. And so you can just imagine, you take GPT 5.2 Pro, you vend that into knowledge work pipelines for Microsoft users. That sounds really useful. They aren't behind on coding.
Speaker 2:We've heard great stories about how Codex is a great model. Maybe it's a little slow. Maybe they need to speed it up. But people are having a lot of luck with Codex. And so you can imagine that Microsoft is capable of integrating Codex into all sorts of different pieces of the Microsoft empire to create agentic workflows.
Speaker 2:And and then they also have a deal with Anthropic. They also made made a made an investment. So they they they are multi model, multi platform. But the problem is is that Microsoft seems to be constrained on the data center side. Limited availability of artificial intelligence hardware is affecting how quickly Microsoft's cloud business can grow, and it's capping Azure's revenue potential.
Speaker 2:Not good. They need to take another trip to Abilene. They need to build more data centers. Maybe it's just a data center capacity issue. What's next?
Speaker 2:Is it going to be an energy bottleneck? Is it going to be a chip bottleneck? These are stories that we're tracking.
Speaker 1:Obviously, it's amazing that Microsoft owns such a big slug of OpenAI. That's great. But the challenge is so much of their backlog is OpenAI. Yeah. And they're actually getting less credit for that.
Speaker 1:Right? Yeah. Same way that Oracle Yep. Had gotten punished for it. Now it's Microsoft's chance to actually, get punished.
Speaker 1:Microsoft, if you actually zoom out a little bit and just look at the last six months, down 17% Mhmm. In the last six in the months and down 4% over the last year. So it's funny. In a year where it feels like the last year, Satya and Microsoft have just been on this insane run, They've fully round tripped.
Speaker 2:Totally. Meta also reported earnings yesterday. Dollars 59,900,000,000.0 in revenue in 2025, beating expectations of 58.5%. Revenue is up 16% from Q3 of last year, which was 51.24. The company is growing its revenue 21% year over year.
Speaker 2:That's higher than Microsoft's 17% top line growth. Market cap is now 1,840,000,000,000.00. Mark Zuckerberg told analysts on the earnings call, in 2025, we rebuilt the foundations of our AI program. That should be obvious. There's so many acquisitions, so many hires, so much so many experiments, so many different strategies and discussions and changing of the guard and restructurings, layoffs in reality labs.
Speaker 2:It's the compute desk. There's been so many stories about Meta really rethinking their AI platform, rearchitecting the foundations of it. Over the coming months, we're going to start shipping our new models and products. Very excited for that. He says he's, I expect our first models will be good, but more importantly, they will show the rapid trajectory we're on.
Speaker 2:And I think that we all have high expectations. I don't think anyone's expecting them to jump way, way out in front of everyone else. But if they can just be in the conversation with DeepMind, Anthropic, OpenAI, I think that will quell a lot of
Speaker 1:the concern. But also, what are they doing with them? Yeah. I think that matters more. Think that matters more.
Speaker 1:You look at Meta's business and the way in which Gen AI can accelerate everything from generating more content on the platform to having better ads to better targeting, all all these things. Right? And not to mention, like, where they can just vend it in at the product level. Right? The product
Speaker 2:stuff is tricky. I mean, like, I've I've bumped into Meta AI in Instagram many times, and you do get reasonable, you know, natural language responses. But it it's it clearly still has the knowledge cut off. It's It's not searching web as effectively. It's not pulling together.
Speaker 2:It doesn't feel completely native to the platform. Like, if you go into Meta AI in Instagram and you ask it to go and hunt around in Instagram for a specific creator or reel based on some clues, it doesn't feel like it has the hooks to really go in and understand, okay, based on what you've watched and what I've showed you in the past, this is probably what you're thinking of. That is sort of a superpower where there's so many times when you're on the timeline and you're like, I saw this post, I didn't bookmark it, didn't like it. What was it? And you want the search products to be empowered magically.
Speaker 2:What are we laughing at? What are thinking? You're gonna flash bang me again?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Close.
Speaker 2:Continue. I think that there's the basic case of they gotta get an LLM that's frontier that's, you know, has the big model smell, fun to talk to, good vibes. Then they need video and audio models that are rock solid, and then they do need to vend those in. I think just having an API or just having a place where people can generate photo real videos or even things like Sora where it it has the aesthetics and pacing and cuts of an Instagram reel. That doesn't feel like it's enough.
Speaker 2:It feels like to really empower, like, the Instagram creator, it needs to be built into the platform. Letting people still bring what's personal to them, their their family, their experiences, their car, but take a couple photos of their car and turn it into a really, really awesome drone shot of them driving their car. I've seen a lot of really sweet edits where people will fly a drone over a car. Then they'll have a first person GoPro on their chest while they're driving their car. And then they'll use AI to interpolate between the drone shot and their first person view.
Speaker 2:Yep. Because they can't actually like, if you have a multimillion dollar Hollywood budget, you actually can fly the drone into the car, have someone sitting in the car. They grab the drone, and then they hook it on a crane, and the crane takes it out and does a different shot with it. But that's, like, a multimillion dollar experts, tons of equipment. And so even just like AI powered transitions would be a really, really cool thing to bring.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Not to mention they own Manus now, which is a fantastic product team. They've built some great agents. You could imagine them integrating Yeah. Like, basically, like, prompts to short form video.
Speaker 1:Right? Where you can just describe the video that you wanna make, insert real, like, basically, like, generate b roll for this, pull footage from around the Internet, whatever. Yeah. Yeah. And so there's so many things that they can do.
Speaker 1:And again, they've just been using Meta AI Yeah. As a sandbox for the most part. But I'm just excited for them to start shipping across The every
Speaker 2:remixing thing is so underrated. Because there's a lot of people the number of people that have true inspiration for new formats is pretty low. People always do the sketches.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think think about the remix functionality. If you see a funny video Yeah. And you can just basically do a character swap Exactly. In it's like that's a new content that's going to be shared and a bunch of people engage with.
Speaker 2:Tyler, what what's your take on Meta's new plans for 2026?
Speaker 3:Yeah. I mean, I I definitely think the image and video models are much more important to get right than the LLM. Mainly just because like it's it seems like very natural them to bend it into everything
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Compared to OpenAI or Google who are like right now finding it out in image or Yeah. In video.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:So it seems like if they can kind of do really well, can get OpenAI and Google out of that basically.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3:And then the LLM, it's like it's unclear what the actual like use case will be in the short term. Eventually, want some cool like, you know, Claude bot style agent somehow vented in.
Speaker 1:But Yeah.
Speaker 3:It's unclear how that's gonna work out. So I think in the in the short term, I'm very excited on the
Speaker 2:Yeah. Model. I really like that model of the LLM going around and just seeping into the cracks of all the different product experiences, but in these really subtle ways. YouTube now has AI generated summaries on videos, and you can chat with a video. So if you're watching someone build a PC, you can ask Gemini on YouTube, hey, just print out the exact list of parts that the person used to build the PC.
Speaker 2:And there might be a parts list at the end of the video. There might be a parts list that's you know, randomly mentioned throughout. Sometimes a creator might actually link to a real parts list, but Gemini allows you to scrape the transcript and then just get that however you want and then transform it or add prices to all of it or see what see if it's available in Japan, because I'm in Japan, all these interesting things. I can imagine on Instagram being able to go to a post that has thousands of comments and just say, hey, I want the LLM to summarize the sentiment. What are the facts?
Speaker 2:People were debating whether or not this is AI. Is there a consensus? People were adding context. What was the key context that people were adding? There's a lot of posts that are basically rage bait or click bait, where it's unclear what's going on in the video.
Speaker 2:And so you go to the comments, people are like, I don't get it. Or they put up that sign like, context needed, please. Right? And so you can kinda
Speaker 3:do that. Yeah. But I I feel like that stuff can just like I'd rather just have that be in the like recommendation algorithm.
Speaker 2:Like sorted in the comments.
Speaker 3:If everyone in the comments is saying this is clickbait, just don't put it in my recommendation algorithm.
Speaker 1:Suspended cap says, I gotta really respect Zuck willing to spend over 50% of revenue next year when they still haven't delivered a single compelling AI product. Hell, yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, the CapEx is crazy.
Speaker 1:No. The whole thing, though, is true.
Speaker 2:$200,000,000,000 in revenue in 2025. That's so revenue. It's a lot of ads. Now they're going to plow $135,000,000,000 according to The Wall Street Journal. The New York Times said $115 But either way, it's like more than half of the revenues
Speaker 1:going I think posts like this are funny. Mhmm. And I think you can definitely agree that Meta has not shipped a a super compelling AI product
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yet. Even though Meta Vibes has traction, not necessarily in our world, but certainly has some traction. Like this is the guy that owns the world's largest trough or one of the world's largest troughs. Yes. Right?
Speaker 1:And so he has He knows that it's working. Yes. Like he knows he can see the future. Right? He has all the data.
Speaker 1:Yeah. He knows that people say they don't like AI content. But
Speaker 2:They do.
Speaker 1:In reality, they actually do. They engage with it. They watch it. They make it.
Speaker 2:The engagement must be growing exponentially. Even though it's very small it started at a base of zero, and then you got Harry Potter, Balenciaga. And now you have So 10 videos a week that are going so far.
Speaker 1:So I look at this different than some of the metaverse bets just because Zuck is one of the biggest beneficiaries of Gen AI. And so it's totally warranted to say, hey, we should invest an obscene amount of money in this. This is clearly the future.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Let's talk about Tesla.
Speaker 2:Tesla reported revenue at $24,900,000,000 And this beat the consensus estimate just slightly. Consensus was $24,780,000,000
Speaker 1:But down? 11.4% from the previous
Speaker 2:quarter, revenue was 28.13% decline year over year. There's just no denying that the Model S and X sales have slowed, and there's a whole bunch more competition at the high end EV market from Lucid, Rivian. And so Elon is fully thinking about what's next. He broke out subscriptions for Autopilot self driving for the first time. He was talking a huge amount about cybercabs and robotaxis.
Speaker 2:He's making that cash investment in x AI. And of course, he's really focused on optimist humanoid robots. And it seems like he could be scaling up production there very, very quickly.
Speaker 1:Million subs of full self driving.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Not
Speaker 2:bad. How much is it?
Speaker 1:I think it's 100.
Speaker 2:100 a month? Yeah. Yeah. So, you you got a billion dollars a year coming in from that. Analysts thought Tesla was gonna be cash flow negative for the quarter, but they actually were positive.
Speaker 2:They generated $1,400,000,000 in free cash flow, and this was down just 30%. So there's plenty of cash to keep the aggressive aggressive investments going, especially as Elon shifts the business towards autonomy.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's a little I think it's a little jarring for some people just because historically car companies have thrived by creating the perfect car in each category for every different consumer. And Elon is basically saying, actually, I know I know what you want, and I'm gonna give you it.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's you know, you don't need that many options Yeah. Where you're gonna be able, like you said, to just leverage the different trim levels Yep. And spec out the car to satisfy.
Speaker 2:And probably, I do think over time, like less and less trim levels. And then eventually it's just cybercabs and no one's buying cars anymore. Elon's certainly thinking in decades and not afraid to cut an entire business line that is still popular with a lot of people. I mean, was just talking to somebody yesterday who was singing the praises of his Tesla Model X and how much he loves that and how he would never get a Y because the X is so much more premium. Everything about it's better.
Speaker 2:It costs a lot of money when he bought it. He still loves it. But Elon's thinking to the future.
Speaker 1:Pull up this video of Optimus learning it has to make up for S slash X sales after they were canceled.
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah. This one's this is such a crazy video. Taking off the VR headset and just smashing
Speaker 3:it down. I love that.
Speaker 2:This is really a Tesla, the Optimus, isn't it? The force with which the Optimus just smashes
Speaker 1:the water bottle open is crazy. It's amazing. This thing is gonna be super powerful.
Speaker 2:The insurance business that will be built around having a humanoid in your home is going to be remarkable. Remarkable.
Speaker 1:One of the standout moments of the earnings call for me Please. Elon and Tesla are transitioning their Fremont facility to make Optimus. Yeah. And they plan to scale that facility up to be able to make a million Mhmm. A million of these things a year Mhmm.
Speaker 2:On a
Speaker 1:relatively near term time horizon. Mhmm. Very, very significant. He talked about how the robot would be able to basically learn on the job. It's gonna be able to do a number of valuable tasks.
Speaker 1:And yeah, I think, I mean, the big question for me is like Will they have ads?
Speaker 2:That's the big question for me.
Speaker 1:Will they have an ad support?
Speaker 2:You have the Tesla walking around your house, and it sees you pull out some sort of random credit And it's like, are you not on a ramp? Like, what's going on here?
Speaker 1:Or it sees you like having Sir,
Speaker 2:would you like a smoothie from Athletic Greens?
Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly. Is it valuable enough to actually replace a human? Optimist is gonna be competing with jobs that are maybe like forty, fifty, 60 Yeah. A year. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Like somewhere in that range. Yeah. And so that's a pretty high bar to clear. Totally. So we'll see.
Speaker 1:Some breaking news Yes. From Reuters twenty one minutes ago. Exclusive Musk's x AI and merger talks with x AI ahead of planned IPO.
Speaker 2:SpaceX and x AI?
Speaker 1:SpaceX and x AI
Speaker 2:Wow.
Speaker 1:Ahead of planned IPO.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So this was something that we obviously were talking about predicting months ago at this point. But so no huge surprise here. This always felt like it made sense. So they're in discussions ahead of a blockbuster IPO planned for later this year.
Speaker 1:The combination would bring Musk's rockets, Starlink satellites, and x social media platform, and the Grok AI chatbot under Imagine one owning x, the Internet's dive bar Yeah. And space in one ticker.
Speaker 2:Flashing back to 2007, 2010, being like, yeah, Twitter and that space company that hasn't successfully launched anything, they're gonna be part of the same company one day.
Speaker 1:Expected this to happen. Yeah. I think it it it builds a, you know again, some people will be frustrated with the narrative, the data centers in space narrative.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:But No. It's real. It's real and We saw this sort of like Unbelievable. Sort of organized Yeah. Narrative shift around SpaceX being the data centers in space play.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That was a Like, without that, it didn't make any sense. Then and then once if you can get behind, okay, data centers in space is maybe possible, maybe
Speaker 1:Maybe you want some on land too. Right?
Speaker 2:Then then it starts to make sense that the merger fits a little bit more.
Speaker 1:We have to talk about Genie. Genie.
Speaker 2:The genie is out of the lamp.
Speaker 1:Logan says, introducing Project Genie, a frontier world model product powered by Genie three and available to G1 Ultra users in The US starting today. Mhmm. You G one Ultra user? This morning. We're playing This got We're playing around with this this morning.
Speaker 1:Is absolutely wild. Can basically prompt an entire world. Yeah. It instantly turns into effectively a simple video game. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And you can create some really funny scenarios. And We will show you.
Speaker 2:They added the jump button. They added the jump button. You get to pick if it's third person or I guess what if you don't check that, it's first person. Sometimes you even if you do check even if you don't check that, you can still wind up in a third person game if it's obviously a third person request.
Speaker 3:They need to
Speaker 1:add this
Speaker 2:the crouch button. Dog.
Speaker 1:They need to add the crouch button.
Speaker 2:Crouch button next and then the flash bang button probably. Woah. Yeah. You're jumping. This is so it's so fast.
Speaker 2:I mean, the the the previous Genie launch was still called Genie three.
Speaker 3:Right? It Well, no. I mean, yes. So this is not like a new product. This is just making it public.
Speaker 3:Yes. Like, so so I think it was in August when Genie three was like originally Yeah. But it was basically just the papers Sure. And there
Speaker 2:were some demos. But no one could actually see So cool. I yeah. I mean, it it feels like more directable than v o three in some ways and it's certainly more stable as you
Speaker 1:move Well, it's just way cooler too because it's a world you could move around in. It's not like it's not like v o three where you're just creating a video. Yeah.
Speaker 3:The the memory is really good too.
Speaker 2:Oh, can upload an image. Turn back. You can upload an image. That's I mean, get ready to play Dinosaurs' Do
Speaker 1:you have the clip of
Speaker 2:we we access. We we generated some. Now it's in such high demand that you might not be able to generate these worlds yourself immediately. There might be some rate limits going on. I'm sure the GPUs are on fire.
Speaker 2:It is gonna be Genie three day on the timeline for sure.
Speaker 1:Do you have John's first prompt?
Speaker 2:You can't access the videos?
Speaker 3:No. Because
Speaker 2:Oh, no. We didn't download them? No.
Speaker 3:Because I think I think the site is being overloaded so much.
Speaker 2:Shane. Wow.
Speaker 1:Hey, Tyler. Take some responsibility. Take some You're 21 years old now. Take some ownership. You could have downloaded the video.
Speaker 1:I'll try
Speaker 3:to As the show goes on, I'll try to make a new one.
Speaker 2:We are gonna move the goalposts. This is AGI, but it's not sufficient AGI because my definition is not just the jump button. I want mechanics. I want We generated a video of Maybach driving on the Nurburgring. It was remarkably high fidelity.
Speaker 2:It was a little sluggish, but that might just be the think dynamics. That's just Oh, you give the driver.
Speaker 1:Tyler Tyler's this thing on the road.
Speaker 2:Was just
Speaker 1:body roll. I was like, Just put it in a straight line, Tyler.
Speaker 2:Yes. But I want I'm waiting. I'm moving the goalpost because I want Genie three or Genie four to be able to generate game mechanics. If I say I'm racing on the Nerberg Ring, I want a track timer. I want to be able to stop change my tires.
Speaker 2:I want to be able to get a refuel overtakes. I want overlays. I want boost pedals. I want DRS. I want DRS.
Speaker 2:I want shifting. I want the whole Forza simulation.
Speaker 1:Do you think this is bullish for platforms like Roblox and Fortnite that have the existing network and they can integrate world models so that the players can that are already a part of these ecosystems and these economies can generate new worlds quickly, generate new games, new characters, etcetera? Or is it as these world models get better, do they become Competitive. A bigger threat because anybody can just I'm sure there's infrastructure providers that can say, like, yeah, we're going handle everything from account creation to in game currency to things like that.
Speaker 2:Definitely competitive in the long term. In the medium term, like super good for prototyping and communication. And this is a key flow to, Okay, you have an idea and you don't just want generate a basic image of the game that you're trying to build. You generate a demo, a prototype. And then you go from here into, Okay, let's wire it up in Unreal Engine or Roblox or Minecraft or whatever we want to do.
Speaker 2:And then you have the full
Speaker 1:game I think I think Roblox and Fortnite will prove that they have real network effects. Yeah. And it's gonna still make sense to create new games
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Within these existing ecosystems.
Speaker 2:Google DeepMind created this short film, AI is going to disrupt Hollywood sooner than most might expect. It's their short film, Dear Upstairs Neighbor. It's previewing at Sundance Festival. It's a story about noisy neighbors, but behind the scenes, it's about solving a huge challenge in generative AI control. Developed by Pixar alumni, an Academy Award winner, researchers and engineers, here's how it came together, says DeepMind.
Speaker 2:This is disruptive. Who knows if it's completely disrupting? There's demand for movies that are shot on film still, So how quickly will all this roll out? But if you have a vision these days for an animated movie, you should just go try and make it at least. You have to imagine that even if you want to use a more traditional process and go through the traditional Hollywood pipeline, showing up to a pitch meeting at an agency with a pretty much polished AI version of your film is going to resonate in a way that a script might just get sent back in the mail room.
Speaker 1:Sean Frank says TikTok views are down. People are blaming the new owners. I think this is just proof that TikTok was botting views the whole time. Your 100,000 view video is probably reaching 25,000 real people. No surprise here for me.
Speaker 1:I always felt like it was always obvious that there were very real people on TikTok. But TikTok had every incentive to just bought all the views because what happens if somebody's getting way more views on TikTok versus Instagram? They're gonna lean in. Yeah. They're gonna say like, I have more followers on TikTok.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I should be creating content there and that created a a flywheel. Yeah. And so you can imagine as things shifted over, who knows. Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Like basically the new product.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, The new owners,
Speaker 1:they had some system
Speaker 2:that I was like different formats. I liked Vine back in the day. At one point, I did set up a TikTok and I uploaded like two or three videos. I was just trying to see like what it felt like to use that platform. And I noticed even though I came to the platform with zero followers, the three or two or three videos that I uploaded immediately got 500 views each.
Speaker 2:And I thought that the model was you get more of an opportunity to sort of audition your content in the algorithm, and then if it works, it can blow up very quickly. And I think that that's somewhat true. Like when I started my YouTube channel, the first videos that I put up got 100 views. And for like a year, if I broke 1,000 views a video, I was like, this is amazing. Like crazy.
Speaker 1:You're really grinding. I'm But
Speaker 2:on TikTok, you post and you immediately get 500. And I've talked to some folks years ago who would set up a new TikTok account for a brand, and they would launch one video that was so polished and so designed to go viral, like they'd blow up a car and they'd spend all this money shooting this. And it would actually just they knew it would go viral and it would just immediately go viral, even though it's a fresh because they just knew it was good content. It would get shared. TikTok would audition it to like a 100 people Yeah.
Speaker 1:Remember when TikTok launched, it was a period where it was so difficult to grow Yeah. On Instagram. Like, that there was a huge challenge. If you're a new creator, you go on Instagram and be really frustrated because your stuff just wasn't getting shared with people that didn't already follow you. Totally.
Speaker 1:Maybe they were views from Chinese users which are gone now. Yeah. It also could be international users. Remember, there's like, if you have a new US app under US ownership Mhmm. Is it getting shared with with with international users Yeah.
Speaker 1:That are using other versions of TikTok? Yeah. Unclear.
Speaker 2:Anyway, leave us five stars on Apple Podcast and Spotify. Thank you. Goodbye.