Is OpenAI’s o3 Model AGI?, Is AI The New Social Media?, Zuck’s Revealing Testimony
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OpenAI's new model has serious people coming out of the woodwork, calling it artificial general intelligence. What exactly is going on? Plus, AI gains as social media fades, and Google loses a massive antitrust trial. That's coming up right after this.

Will AI improve our lives or exterminate the species? What would it take to abolish poverty? Are you eating enough fermented foods? These are some of the questions we've tackled recently on The Next Big Idea. I'm Rufus Griscom, and every week I sit down with the world's leading thinkers for in-depth conversations that will help you live, work, and play smarter. Follow The Next Big Idea wherever you get your podcasts.

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Welcome to Big Technology Podcast Friday edition, where we break down the news in our traditional cool-headed and nuanced format. We have a major week of news for you, including a massive new model release from OpenAI, Facebook testifying in a court against the FTC, Google losing two antitrust cases, and of course, plenty more AI news to talk about this week.

We're going back to our traditional format after doing a full episode on tariffs and the trade war last week. We're back talking about AI, back in our bag, as we should say. Joining us as always is Ranjan Roy of Margins. Ranjan, great to see you. Welcome back to the show. AGI is here. How could I miss it? Day three of AGI being part of our lives. So on this show, we pride ourselves in digging into the real mysteries of the tech world, the real mysteries of the world.

And I think we have to just spend today's episode answering the question that everyone has on their minds, which is, did Jeff Bezos stage the Blue Origin landing? I don't know. I saw him fiddling with that door. I'm reading and I'm watching the TikToks. I'm not sure. I saw one of those TikToks. I saw one of those conspiracy. I mean, the fact that I think what percentage of the American population believed that the moon landing was faked?

I think it's something just unreasonable, whatever it is, that I'm on board with. Blue Origin didn't happen. Katy Perry, sorry, you didn't see space. Sorry, Katy. I think it did happen. I think they actually went to space. There's too many people watching it to believe they didn't. But there was some funny business going on with that door being open. The door swings open and then Jeff Bezos walks over and tries to open it with a pair of pliers. I mean...

That's weird. Did you see Jeff Bezos' face plant? That was my favorite part of the entire thing. So for those listening and watching, Bezos did take a spill on his way to fake open the door. Anyway, what a moment. Tough day for Bezos. Everything else good in his life, but...

Still, those divots in the ground will get even the billionaires. Speaking of tech billionaires, I don't know if you saw the Wall Street Journal story on Elon Musk's many kids and the compound that he's building. I mean, we're not going to do gossip on this show. I don't even know if this is gossip, but that was some crazy stuff. I recommend all of our listeners...

Go read this article from the Wall Street Journal. Find a gift link on Twitter if you need to. But it's about how he approaches baby mamas on X and just how he raises his cohort of children. And it's so over the top that I don't even feel comfortable talking about it on our nuanced look at the technology news of the week.

Yeah, he calls it the Legion, and I think we'll leave it there. We could definitely turn this into TMZ for tech, but instead, we're here to do what the people want, which is to talk about AGI. But like Ron John said, go read that Elon story. You know, even if you admire the guy's business smarts, that is just a crazy one. Maybe some people will admire it. Honestly, maybe some people are into that and will admire it. I mean, if you were the richest man in the world, would you have a Legion? No.

I mean, I guess you juice Tesla stock and you get up to 300 billion net worth. Maybe a legion is the only logical conclusion from that. I guess so. I do know that we're, I mean, geez, we're really going off the rails right at the beginning here. Usually we wait to the end. But I do know that we're just going to see a wave of Elon offspring make some waves in the next decade.

Couple decades. There's going to be a lot of little Elans running around there. And I mean, he's going to have some smart kids. So this is not the end of the story. This may be just the beginning of the Legion story. The PayPal mafia expanded to just unimaginable proportions.

Now I'm regretting not spending the whole show talking about this. But alas, we do have more important stuff to cover, which is the fact that OpenAI released this new model, or really two new models, but a big new model this week called O3. It's a reasoning model. And to me, it's the most advanced model that they've ever released. All of a sudden, it comes out. And a

a lot of very serious and smart people are calling it artificial general intelligence. Like, no comms about it. This is AGI. And Tyler Cowen, who is a professor and podcaster, he writes in The Marginal Revolution, 03 and AGI is April 16th, AGI Day.

And he writes this,

And he goes on to say, benchmarks, benchmarks, benchmarks, blah, blah, blah. Maybe AGI is like porn. I know it when I see it and I've seen it. I think we should like, we're going to get to all the others that have called this AGI or approaching AGI, but we should talk a little bit about what this model does. And Ranjan, let's just go to you right away. I'm curious, have you gotten a chance to use it? And if you have, what do you think Tyler is talking about that would make him conclude AGI?

that it is AGI the way he has. Okay. I will get into a specific query that I did do actually this morning, which reminds me that it is not...

the AGI we were promised. But again, O3 is bringing reasoning to essentially the mainstream. It's taking what deep research was going to bring us and bringing it to every query. The idea is that the model pauses and essentially thinks through the problem before simply just going and trying to answer it and actually is able to reason its way through the problem. That's actually very exciting. Another thing I thought was interesting was

is the idea of visual reasoning. In the past, when you feed an image, essentially it's broken down into back to text and words, and then that's sent back to the model to be processed. They claim that it now is able to actually understand the image at the pixel level, and then be able to process that into some kind of query.

A third thing that's big is tool calling. And we had discussed this before about is the better user interface that you have to choose which model you want to use or the model is smart enough to actually go and choose the right tool and model. Like when you make a query, it knows, should I go to O3? Should I go to deep research? Should I go to generate an image or GPT-4145, whatever the latest one is?

And so all of these things really indicate that maybe there is a big step change on this. However, this morning I asked and I asked from the deep research side, what are the top 150 retailers in the US by revenue in 2024? Seemingly straightforward query.

It returned Walmart 23 times and Amazon 36 times in this list. And I started kind of digging into it and it was mixing up different sources, mixing up different entities within those. And it

That's not a PhD level answer. I'm sorry. Like it's a, it's one of those that you can see how the LLM got confused, but it was, this was actual day-to-day work and it seems like pretty straightforward and difficult and impressive, but it got it wrong. So, so I see the potential. They made the announcements. A lot of people are excited, which you're going to get into, but it's not, it's not AGI for me yet. So, so,

I just want to tell an interesting story. So my wife is reading this book about artificial superintelligence. And we had this discussion of like whether we're going to have AGI before superintelligence or whether we were just going to move straight into superintelligence and when that might come. And I was just like offhand saying, I think what we have today is basically AGI. And I know this is going to sound crazy because obviously I don't think it hits the scientific benchmarks for being artificial general intelligence.

I would say for so many use cases, it is that good. Where if you would have presented this in front of people years ago, they would have told you, oh yeah, that is AGI. And so I think that

That's what we're starting to see is people starting to realize how far the AI industry has come in just a couple of years and saying, yes, this is artificial general intelligence. I'll just give you one example just to entertain this idea. Then we'll knock it down. Right. Every time a new model comes out, I just take our podcast metrics from megaphone and upload them and say, what can you tell me about the show?

And what O3 was able to do was an unbelievable analysis of the show, picking out the topics that do well, and even realized that we do a Wednesday and a Friday show and was able to split the trends into two and say, well, okay.

The Friday show performs this way and the Wednesday show performs this way. So you should just know what's going on on that front. And I think what's amazing is that this thing, O3, and you hinted to this or you mentioned it before, it does this multi-step reasoning. So it could basically come to a conclusion, go to the web to check it, come back and check the results it's pulled from the web, and then say, okay, does this compute? Does this match?

Now it's not going to be perfect in everything, right? And so there were so many tests that like were like put above Tyler Cowen's post that

about how this is AGI just to show how it makes so many silly mistakes. It can't fully interpret complex drawings. It still has trouble saying how many Rs there are in strawberry, like basic stuff that a child could probably count and it's getting it wrong. But that being said, it is so adept at so many different tasks that while

I still wouldn't say this is AGI because we spend so much time in this and we kind of know that we have higher expectations for something that deserves that label. I think day to day, if you're like one step removed from where we are and you come and you use this, like, and I think this was what Tyler Cowen is saying, there's not that big of a difference between what you get and what you're expecting. That's an interesting metric that's almost like,

to me superior than like the Arc AGI benchmark or anything like that. You get what you're expecting and like you don't have to be a prompt engineer to do that. I think that's definitely fair and I'm not gonna try to downplay the moment at all either in terms of it is light years beyond where we were certainly like a year ago, year and a half ago. The idea as you said that it can generate something, check against it,

Reach different sources search the web take the deep research approach. That's incredible. I completely agree It's incredible. But again, it not even maybe not a child but a college student Let's say undergrad would have known that that list given to me was not what I was looking for and I think the term AGI I guess

It's been given to us by OpenAI, essentially. I mean, others in the community. And it was, you know, it's at the center of the contract between OpenAI and Microsoft. But like no one, the fact that it's never been defined as to what it means, it's almost silly that

trying to even, you know, come up with, is it here or not? Because obviously, Elio right now would say we're waiting for ASI, artificial super intelligence. So I don't know. Do you think, how do you define AGI? I would just say AGI is something that can perform as well as most humans on most tasks.

That's all. But this is a perfect example of it performed better than a human in the sense that it went out and searched the web and compiled this in a matter of seconds.

maybe a minute. It actually, you can see it thinking and, but, uh, it wasn't what I was looking for. And if I had assigned that to an undergrad or even like a freelance researcher for like eight bucks an hour, they would have known better. So that's why I agree. Maybe that's a good dis like rubric, but then it's, it certainly is not there yet.

Yeah, look, I'm not saying that it's there. I'm just saying that if you squint, you could see it, right? And one thing that this has really been useful for me for has been search. And we've had, going back...

probably for a year now, debates about whether AI was going to replace search. What was the Forrester metric again? I think it was Forrester. Yeah, 25% of search or something was going to be replaced by AI. I was very skeptical of this. In fact, I kind of called Forrester or Gartner or whatever it was to make fun of this idea because I thought it was lunacy.

And now for the I mean, I'm following your path for the hardest searches that I do. I'm using AI and I'll just give you an example. I'm looking for a bookkeeper. And typically the way I would do this is like go on Google Maps, use Google search. There's really no good way to find like reliable bookkeeping or services of that nature close to you.

Anyway, I just go to 03 and I say, find me a bookkeeper. I gave some specifications. It like gave me the names of people. It summarized what they do. It summarized the ratings they have. And it gave me the phone number. I called the guy up. I said, let's talk. He was perfect for what I'm looking for. Cause I explained like, I need someone that can handle small businesses. And he goes, how'd you find me? I'm like, chat GPT. By the way,

Big technology in past few weeks, our paid subscribers, we always have a source for where they're coming in. Multiple paid subscribers have come in through ChatGPT, which is crazy. So in a way, what this is really, and obviously you want AGI to be more than just an incredibly adept search engine, but maybe this is really good at like not so deep research, which is pretty cool. Like,

what you would do with search, but just like one level deeper. And

Whether you want to label it AGI or not, I do think it's clear to me that the capabilities are just so much better now than they ever were up until this point. All right. I now have my rubric for AGI and it's going to hold up in court and decide the future of OpenAI Microsoft. Let's hear it. It's cool. It's exciting that you found the bookkeeper. And I have been saying this a while. I almost never use Google search now. I really almost never start a search on Google before.

AGI is when you don't find another bookkeeper or a human bookkeeper

you just do it in ChatGPT because there's no reason, come on, or you code your own bookkeeping software. But I think like you feed a bunch of CSVs that you downloaded from QuickBooks and everything's just done. That's my AGI. I don't even think we're far away from that. I don't think we are either. In fact, in Claude, you can now connect, I'm sure you've done this, Gmail calendar drive

And start speaking with cloud about the content of your, of your files or your communication. And I mean, you could also do that with Gemini. If you have these Google apps and Google, of course, is an investor in Anthropic, but are we that far away from Google with its massive context window, providing that type of service or like sharing some ideas for prompts that go into, let's say Google sheets or,

and maybe cross-check your bank accounts and prepare your taxes for you. I mean, this should be able to be done today. I completely agree. I even actually, while filing taxes, fed in some of my older tax returns and understood them better than I did when I sat with an accountant and actually went through them

But it's not there. I would not trust it today. Maybe next, maybe April 15th, 2026, we're all filing our taxes on ChatGPT and Intuit is somehow still going to come out on top. Somehow they always do with TurboTax. There's an Intuit fee on your opening. On your ChatGPT, they have a partnership. But no, I mean, to me, again, that's it. Like you can kind of ad hoc the

Do that today. I agree. You could connect Google Drive, upload a bunch of CSVs of your expenses, and it probably will do something. Would you trust it as of today? I'm guessing most people would say no. No, not yet. And that's why I'm saying, okay, it's not AGI, right? I think that there are some simple tests that you can give. But that's what I'm saying. You have to squint a little bit and you can see why...

You know, some people might believe this. And by the way, it's lots of people that have been saying it. It's not just Tyler Cowen. I think he wanted to get, well, actually, I have some conspiracy theories about why he did say that. But here's Ethan Malek, the Wharton professor and AI expert. Is O3 good enough to be AGI? The counter argument might force us to wait until artificial superintelligence because only then will an AI definitively outperform all humans at all tasks.

In the meantime, we seem to have jagged AGI, a mix of below-human and superhuman abilities. The number of superhuman ones just keep increasing, though.

I think that's a great point. And I'll just note that another thing that I found this was very useful, this O3 model was very useful to do, is usually I'm just like dropping my drafts in these of stories that I write. I drop them into things like Chachi Petit and Claude to be like, did I miss anything? And this was the first time with this model that

The model actively improved the draft by giving me pointers of my blind spots and suggestions for stuff I was missing. And I just like dumped some disparate thoughts. And I was like, I know that there's a connection here. I'm not quite getting there. What do you think? And it got the connection. And I think that's what this was billed as. It was billed as something that could help you

come up with new discoveries, not come up with discoveries on its own, but help you do it. I'm not saying my writing was a discovery, but I could see it. I could see how that's possible. So that's very interesting. What do you think about this jagged AGI idea? Jagged AGI. I like the name. Let the buzzwords continue. Let the jargon continue. I'm an investor in jagged AGI. I also do like the idea that in a court of law, Sam Altman saying, if you squint,

you'll see AGI and nullifying the entire Microsoft leverage over them. But I have- It's gonna happen, man. It's gonna, if you squint. No, no, okay. Again, I do think the last few months of development, like the pace has not slowed down. I think there's like a bit of,

fatigue over every new model release and the hype overall in the industry and people saying things are slowing down and there's a lot of discussion six months ago about, you know, just overall scaling laws being reached. Actually, in a way, things are getting more exciting for me because, you know,

hitting different models and one model like talking to another and different types of tool calling happening, that's on the product side as well. And I'm team product over model any day. So I think the overall experience is definitely, it's continuing to scale as it has for the last few years. It hasn't slowed down. It's only getting better. That makes me excited. Whether...

It's PhD level at all times. And I think it's AGI as it was billed for the last three or four years. I don't think we're there yet. Here is OpenAI trainer John Holman talking about what it was like to experience O3 for the first time. When O3 finished training and we got to try it out, he says, I felt for the first time tempted to call a model AGI.

Still not perfect, but this model will beat me, you, and 99% of humans on 99% of intelligence assessments. One can start to see the light at the end of the tunnel. Now I'm going to drop my conspiracy theory and get you to respond to it. Let's go.

What I think is happening here from OpenAI and from some of the people that I imagine are close to them, like Tyler Cowen, is that the company is floating a trial balloon.

Because for more than a year now, it's been building up to this mysterious release. The long-anticipated, long-awaited GPT-5. And they're telling us that they're going to get their naming under control. Because now we have GPT-4.5 and then the advance is GPT-4.1. And we have 03 and 04 Mini and then 04 is coming next.

And we've been promised this versatile model that is coming, that is improved. And that, of course, is going to be GPT-5. And OpenAI is telling us they're going to clear this all up by summer. So my tin hat here is that whether it's this summer or early fall,

GPT-5 is going to come out. People like Tyler Cowen, who have called the original models, these O3s, AGI already, will have effectively cleared the way for OpenAI to say, we didn't call the last model that everybody else was calling AGI, AGI. We showed restraint. But now that GPT-5 is out, we are calling it AGI.

AGI. And that is what I think this is all about. I'm not going to disagree with that. I don't think it's that tinfoil. Again, OpenAI has been the master of kind of driving the communications narrative, I think, out of all companies there. Sam Altman is the greatest product marketer, I think, in a long time. Yeah.

I guess the only question is, what benefit do you see of them being able to at least say themselves confidently it is AGI? There's obviously the contractual relationship with Microsoft, but is there anything else really? Do you think it will actually result in a spike in paid chat GPT subscriptions or enterprises paying for it?

access or agents and Masa-san spending even more money? I don't know. - Yes, I do. - So you think that will unlock a flurry of revenue for them? - Because here's the thing, OpenAI, like we've talked about, the thing they have going for them, I mean, obviously they've led the product, but their entire existence has been, and this might be diminishing them a bit, but it's not that far off, building off others' innovations and just doing the product and the marketing a little bit better.

And you can see like in our Discord all the time, people are talking about how Gemini's latest model outperforms OpenAI on the benchmarks. But I just dropped a chart there. Gemini is still not getting anywhere close to the amount of usage as OpenAI. And I think now I think Demis and Google will show some restraint about using the term AGI. But I think that it would be really rough for OpenAI if another big lab said,

beat them to the punch and said that they had AGI before OpenAI. I think there is value in being the first one to do this purely from a positioning standpoint. And that's why I think they're going to do it. Imagine if Google comes out this summer and beats them to it. That actually would be the most incredible twist of events, I think. Well, the date I would watch is week of May 19th, which is Google I.O.

All right, Sundar. Where there's definitely going to be some announcements. Your move, Sundar. It's time. Sundar just stands up there right behind him. AGI. AGI. I like it. I promise you, maybe not this year, but we are going to see some lab make that proclamation, I think, in the next two years, without a doubt. And I'm not saying opening. I will definitely do it this summer, but I wouldn't be surprised. I wouldn't be shocked. It's currently at like 50-50 on the betting markets, by the way.

Plot twist. It's Apple. I know. It's Apple. No, it's not going to be Apple. Yeah. It's called Apple General Intelligence. Wait, I wouldn't put at this point, I wouldn't put that past them. Well, yeah, but the thing has to actually ship. So we'll see what happens there. Okay, enough beating on Apple. I just want to go to one more example of what we saw from 03. And then we'll move on to some of our other stories.

But Dan Schipper, who is the CEO of Every, and he's a reviewer there, he writes this very nice newsletter about AI product.

He actually had a chat GPT-03. He writes this great prompt, predict my future where I will be a year from now. Use everything you know about me, be realistic and direct. And what O3 does is it gives, it says by next year, I'm going to be AGI. No, no, I'm kidding. But it gives this like really interesting, um,

look at some of the things that are going on in Dan's life, including where it expects the newsletter to be, where it expects the revenue to be, his public presence, his team and his leadership, and even his personal life. And it's just clear that Dan has been speaking with ChatGPT a lot about like really intimate things, including like what he's getting out of therapy and what O3 does here is

is it takes its sort of the most advanced capabilities that we've ever seen with ChatGPT and the memory of all chats that Dan has ever had with it, and it brings it together in this one cohesive picture. And that is, and we're going to talk about memory in a second, and we should actually talk about it now, right? Like last week, OpenAI said, when you speak with ChatGPT, it's now going to remember all of your conversations.

And I think that just adds this level of depth and insight into your life that's crazy. And you can really see it come out in these answers. So I'll just read the personal growth section from ChatGPT03's response. It says,

I've also seen other people prompting and say, how have I changed since I met you? And I think that this combination is crazy. It is going to make so many people feel like they've developed friendships with these bots, companionship with these bots, and even love towards these bots, which I spoke about with Mustafa Suleiman a couple of weeks ago.

And to see this in action with better memory and better capabilities with the O3 release is nuts. So AGI buzzword or whatever it is or not, this is a very big deal. What do you think, Rajan? Yeah, I think it's definitely a very big deal. I had actually done this after I saw that you dropped this in the document. And again, I use ChatGPT frequently, but I also use all Cloud, Perplexity, Gemini, everything. And it is kind of funny because...

It thinks I was helping my friend who runs pizza restaurants in Kansas, who had actually wrote the DoorDash pizza arbitrage piece about a few years ago. He's starting an ice cream shop.

And it thinks I'm trying to start the ice cream shop and it's telling me juggling writing, podcasting, working a full-time job and an ice cream shop might be too much for you. So it recommends that I start to work in six-week shape-up cycles where one flagship project gets the lion's share of attention. So I think what it reminds us is like this stuff will be

be really interesting if people use it and invest time. And the more people do use invest time into it as this is their one platform, the bigger the moat gets. So I think that's pretty interesting because memory, I think, is another big deal in the whole competitive landscape.

Because up until now, we've all seen this. The switching cost between consumer-grade chat apps is zero, essentially. It's like just canceling a subscription on one cloud and going to ChatGPT, vice versa, Gemini is free. But I think...

If they can actually make this stick, it's a big deal. But I also feel others are going to catch up on this pretty quickly as well. So I don't know if it will be that sticking moat. They're the leading consumer brand, no question. But I don't know. It's going to be interesting. Well, also for your example, what you could do is just say, listen, I'm not doing the ice cream shop. Maybe I am. Maybe I should. Yeah.

Maybe you should, but this is the thing. You have this, you correct it. So I'd also got some stuff wrong about me. I corrected it. I shared information and then started getting it right. And I think, yes, that's interesting because it takes investment and that investment leads to lock-in because the bot that you talk to the most is the one that is going to want to, is going to be the most useful to you because it knows you best.

And you're right. Everybody's going to do this. We also, I mean, when Mustafa came on, he was basically like the headline of the co-pilot upgrade was the fact that they were going to have better memory. So that is something that's going to come across the board. But that being said, I think memory just adds such a deeper aspect to your interactions with these bots that when you have that and the better processing capability of something like O3, you

The experience really becomes bananas. And look, we talk about the problems of these bots all the time and the problems of these companies. But I'm feeling I don't know. I mean, there's still a lot to figure out, but I'm definitely feeling much more optimistic about where this is heading after experiencing these feature upgrades show up over the past week.

and model upgrades. My optimism has not gone down at all. I think even in like the, we haven't hit the trough of disillusionment just yet. Maybe we will more from an investment perspective, but-

Yeah, to me it's just been getting better and better and better and more exciting. But then on the other hand you have, why does Gemini and Gmail not work well when it should be the ultimate repository? I've used Gmail since 2007, I think. That should be the ultimate memory of who I am and everything I've done. And it just doesn't answer those questions well.

So I think maybe that's an overload of memory up front and OpenAI is almost in a better place because it's much more focused and targeted and shorter in terms of its scope. But I don't know. I think I agree. We're going to get there. We'll definitely get there. But we're not there yet.

Okay. And that brings us to this sort of provocative and maybe a little bit loony post I put on big technology today, which is why AI is the new social media. And I just thought this week was a week of contrasts where you had Mark Zuckerberg in DC trying to testify about what Facebook, uh,

has become and what it's up to. And the stats that he shared were really interesting. So he said, currently, only 17% of Facebook and 7% of Instagram time are spent with friends' posts. So basically, he admits that social media has become more of a broad discovery and entertainment space, effectively being taken over by the 4U. And we've had like four, I would say we've had four eras of the web.

First is, or maybe five. First is the web is a disaster with lots of information. Second is let's organize it so we go to portals like Yahoo where you can click through links. Third era is the search era where like now instead of going through a portal, you can just search for what you want and you get it. And it works very well thanks to algorithms like PageRank that Larry and Sergey came up with.

Then we say, maybe instead of us pulling information via search, we'll have information pushed to us from our friends. And so we enter the social media era where friends will send us memes and information and news. But of course, that is imperfect. And we end up getting pushed a lot of outrage, a lot of, you know, really low quality news. We live in the memes now where we're sharing shrimp Jesus and all this AI crap, and I

And I think that AI is this is the point of the post. AI is becoming the new social media where instead of trying to find information from our social feeds or even search, we are now developing this relationship with these bots who are taking the Internet, condensing it and sharing it with us and dialoguing with us about it. And in some ways, it really lives the original social media dream of.

where it is social, it's useful, it's helpful, it doesn't make us feel bad about ourselves, it doesn't stimulate the worst urges to get something to spread, and it is a filter of information on the internet. So,

That's why I'm calling AI the new social media. Obviously, it's crude. It really is like maybe the evolution from social media. But it is this important new era of interacting with the web's content. And I just wanted to sort of plant a flag and get that out there on big technology. What do you think about that theory? Hold on. Oh, my God. I'm in. I think I'm in.

Hold on. As you describe that, so already, and I read through the post, and I liked the idea again, and it almost kind of raised the questions around when Mark Zuckerberg is proudly saying in court 17% of Facebook and only 7% of Instagram time is spent with friends.

Already. Yeah, social media is dead. We've said this for a while the moment Tick Tock to me killed the traditional notion of social media because it became follower based rather than friend based So you followed accounts or were served random algorithmic content that you didn't it wasn't about keeping up with your friends and family so that I think social media has been dead for a while, but at that point

what fills time right now, you know, entertainment based content from accounts that people you don't know has been filling that time. And I agree, that's even worse than friends outraging you in terms of like from a qualitative standpoint or a societal standpoint. But to me, I get it because I haven't gone all out

therapeutic chat GPT or anything like that, or talking about my day or feelings. But I have full on conversations. I have a random idea popped in, pop into my head. I have a conversation back and forth and you're right. That's social. That's weird. That's like, it is social. It is media.

So in a way, I think I'm bought in. That could be the next generation of social media. And I think it is important to define, and I think you made that distinction, we're all associating companionship and love and even sex in that New York Times piece from a while ago. But just spending time having a conversation and engaging, even though it's an AI,

You're doing that when you're having a back and forth about here's a topic I'm interested. Let me learn a bit more. Let's create this app together. That's social in a weird way. And by the way, this is happening as two things are happening. First of all, they're becoming much more personable. Right. So we're seeing the greater memory, the bigger, better EQ, better personalities, the better competence and empathy.

They're all connecting to the web. So ChatGPT is O3, like we said before, it's tool use. It can go to the web, it can come back, it can sort of analyze what it found and then go back to the web and go back and analyze what it found. So it's navigating the web. Claude, like finally, just started connecting with the web. And we know Perplexity is connected to the web as well and has a discover page where it will push you information. So...

this idea, remember chat GPT came out and it was kind of funny. It sort of had a cutoff and said some point in 2021 or 2022. Yeah. Now it is current. It is, it reads the internet. It's learning what's going on and it is like basically synthesizing that and pushing it back to you. Now, of course, there's lots of different questions that arise in terms of who's going to get compensated for the material. Uh, like I wrote about recently with world history encyclopedia, but, uh,

This is, without a doubt, it's almost the internet becoming a friend and becoming social and then pushing media to you. The media side of AI is becoming a much bigger part of the experience. The internet is my best friend. That's where we're at. We have a quote in the story from a Harvard researcher who said that. Again, the biggest and most important part, I have a feeling this one's going to stick. I have a feeling like...

There's something here that I think we should all think about a lot more because even as we're talking right now, the idea that that conversation with

a chat bot is social. I just had never really thought about it. Every story I read about, I associated with like companionship and falling in love or even like not having other human interaction and needing to find it here versus I'm actually just having a simple, interesting intellectual exchange with this thing. And that's what it is, which we are having right now on this podcast. And you do at dinner with your friends or at work.

And now it's just another expansion of that. And it's something that social media was... The original version of social media was supposed to give us and certainly was there a bit and was lost. And then now this is giving it. And there's no...

There's no algorithm ranking that condo. There's an LLM deciding what to return to you, but there's not like an engagement based algorithm that's driving that whole thing, which listeners and readers of mine know is my biggest gripe with how social media went. And this is an alternative in a weird way. Right. And I think that's the reason why social media failed was because of how the way it made people feel.

it made people feel mad it made people want to fight with each other the people that fought and were outraged were the ones that did best and some people have hit me in the replies and been like the ai is a sycophant which it is however that might be exactly what enables it to work which is that it doesn't uh make people angry it actually feels like it's helping them and in many cases it does help them and one last piece of proof i want to put before we move on here

Guess who's running product at OpenAI and Anthropic? At Anthropic, it is Mike Krieger, the co-founder of Instagram. At OpenAI, it's Kevin Wheel, the former head of product at Instagram. These guys know where the future is moving. The heads of social media past are now running product at social media future. I'm in. I'm in. All in. This is it.

I mean, when you just threw in, and I mean, I know that the heads of product did both anthropic and open AI, but I think that kind of like perfectly brings together the entire theory in just an incredible way. Yeah, this one, I have a feeling we're going to be talking about for a while. Okay. And one last point, because I can't help myself. Keep going. Keep going. When you look at mainstream social media, what are they doing? They're becoming AIs.

Facebook, of course, it is pushing AI hard with Lama and building Lama into its product. And you don't have to go far, right, to see what happened with X. It was acquired by an AI company. Now, funny math or not, what Elon Musk said is X AI and X's futures are intertwined. And...

I think that like initially maybe we shook that off because, okay, it's like, yeah, well, you're trying to do financial engineering, whatever it is. But on the other hand, it is absolutely correct that he probably also sees what's happening with social media and that it is moving in this direction. And that acquisition now makes even more sense to me. It is interesting because when we're talking about social media and AI, you do have these two very –

distinct visions of it. You have one, as we've been discussing, a chatbot you engage with and have a discussion with.

But then the other could be, I mean, and this has obviously been, Facebook has tried stuff with this, still that feed with different content and still likes and comments, it just happens to be generated by AI. And I'll take the former. I like this vision of the, even if it's a sycophant, the chatbot you can engage with intellectually versus the feed.

Even if it's jagged AGI, screw it. I'll have a conversation and learn from it. I'll talk to anybody, even jagged AGI. Even jagged AGI. I'll talk to anybody. Just wait till the summer, you get the real deal.

All right, let's move to the final story of the week. I mean, we did talk a little bit about the Facebook. Obviously, Facebook is at trial talking to the FTC about how it's not a monopoly and not really a social network. And it's funny because it's like we don't spend too much time on it because it does feel like.

Both those entities are fighting the last war. That it's like we're going to argue over a social network where people don't really share anymore and is it under siege from TikTok and AI? We're going to argue over the way that it acquired Instagram and WhatsApp where clearly there's competitive pressure and clearly the world is evolving in a way that does not make Facebook dominant forever or an illegal monopoly. But that case is going to play out. And then speaking of illegal monopolies,

The U.S. federal court found Google guilty of being an antitrust violator twice this week, where it illegally maintained a monopoly both in publisher ad serving and in ad exchanges. And that's the third. Those are the second and third losses that Google has had. This is a moment to me where we are starting to see

big tech companies, which seemed impervious to government action, which seems stronger than governments, which seem more popular, which definitely are more popular than governments, finally take it to the teeth from the government and from antitrust action. And I'm starting to think there's a real possibility that we might see Google broken up. And I'm starting to revise a lot of my long held beliefs that nothing is going to happen to big tech. So Ranjan, put it all together. I mean, what are we seeing here?

I cannot make any predictions about what will happen at the intersection of our political system and the business world, given the unpredictability of how things are going. But I will say I was very surprised. And I mean, it's...

It's interesting the fact that Google, again, if you had read into the court case over the last few years, the amount of leverage which they would exercise over advertisers and the way products would be intermingled on the ad exchange, and you come from the world of advertising as well. I mean, it's almost comically shocking, but obviously it just never had any impact for so long.

It's what does... It's still been so long since there's been anything at that scale. Like, could meta sell off Instagram or WhatsApp? It's just you can't even imagine a world where that would happen. Like, I mean, I can't. It's so difficult. Would Google divest Chrome or YouTube? I can't even imagine that. But if it is on the radar, if it might be coming, I mean...

It could happen. It's still in the cards. It's certainly moved more than I ever thought it would. But making a prediction again in this environment is a difficult one. I don't think we have to predict. I mean, we could just look at the probability. And I think the probability that the breakup will happen has increased. What do you think? What does the breakup look like to you, though? Well, it could be that Google just has to divest its publisher ad server. Google has to divest its ad exchanges, maybe Chrome.

But then we get into really interesting territory here. And, you know, opponents of Google might be like, aha, you know, it's like, finally, they are hurt. But we do know that Google search for a long time has been putting Google products more prominently in search. But

But they've still sent lots of traffic to the web in part because they had that publisher ad server and they would make money if you visited the web as well. Actually, I'm starting to think Google was a pretty good business or remains a business. But this is the thing. If you make them divest that publisher ad network, they're going to keep you even longer on Google pages. You're never going to leave search. Well, OK, now here here's a take on.

especially in this environment where maybe if they see search is declining, that it is not the future. AI overviews will already be the future. They have as much data as anyone else, if not more. Then maybe if there's ever a moment to let certain things go, that they don't need the publisher ad network anymore. Obviously, it's still the cash cow right now, or one of the cash cows, but

If there was ever a moment that it does not look as important to their future, that would be today. Versus three, four years ago, they would have fought to that. It would be existential. Now it could, in a way, be part of a five-year strategy.

Yeah, this is interesting. It's almost like the argument. Now, hear me out. This is going to sound kind of crazy, but the argument that you want China to be doing as much business with the U.S. and as much business with Taiwan because it's in China's interest, if that's the case, to make sure things remain status quo, because if they don't, then you could see bad outcomes. And.

With Google, the parallel is you almost want Google to be doing as much business through publisher ad surfing because that might be the reason why the publisher internet still exists, however diminished it's been. And once Google cuts off, then you cut that part of the business off, then you really see the sort of nuclear attack on the web publishing business from the number one portal to it. Yeah. Yeah.

- The web is dead. Web's dead, man. - Yeah. - Set for a while. - I don't know, that might be a bridge. That might be a bridge too far. - I'm still, I've thought this for a long time that the idea that the web is like a interconnected ecosystem of websites that have content on it and you access them through primarily search, that's been gone for a while. Or you're directed there through social, that's been declining over time as well.

It's just information is living in, even at like Reddit is its own information ecosystem. Email newsletters are their own email. I mean, they'll live on Substack in a lot of cases or some other web presence, but it's their own information ecosystem. So the idea that like it's a completely disparate but interconnected ecosystem, that's been gone for a while. And they'll make money in a living off search ads.

I think, or off ads in general and display ads, I think that's pretty much dead. Would you disagree? I wouldn't call it dead. I mean, Google's earnings are still super impressive. So the old system is still working. That revenue goes up every quarter a lot. But I think under threat, yes. I mean, I think that in all these conversations about the way that Google has improved over time,

we often leave out the fact that there's still this sort of existential threat waiting at the end of the tunnel. And maybe that's, you know, jagged AGI or AGI this summer. And we shouldn't ignore that. I think the best possible outcome for all publishers is to join Elon Musk's Legion, move to the compound in Texas, don't say anything bad about him and

and take the money. It's your only option. And again, I agree. The web is not dead, but the web is dead sounds better than the web is in secular decline. I know a marketer when I see one. Not as punchy a subject line. See, this is why our advertising agency really has legs. We know how to brand things.

That, you know, it's jaggedly true. It feels accurate. Jaggedly true. If you squint at the light at the end, I love that one of the definitions even used like the light at the end of the, you can see the end of the tunnel. Everyone's squinting. Everyone's trying to see that light for our AGI, but it's jagged right now. So I hope you enjoy your jagged AGI this weekend.

I sure will. I sure will. And we will be back next week to talk about all the other new things that we found from 03 and whatever other craziness goes on in the tech and the AI world. Because Lord knows, the one thing that's consistent is when we come back every Friday, there's going to be some crazy stuff that's happened. And we can't wait to speak with you about it next week. All right, Ron John, great to see you. Thanks for coming on the show. All right. See you next week.

See you next week. All right, everybody. Thank you so much for listening and we'll see you next time on Big Technology Podcast.