Apple Eyes AI Acquisitions to Boost Siri

Sometimes we have just so much interesting news. And Jaden and I just sort of run out of time and we're like, can we just talk about all of this stuff at once? So this we're kind of treating this as if we were all sitting together in a cafe and be like, and did you hear this? Did you hear this? Because like literally Jaden and I could not decide on which of these stories was most interesting. So we will leave it up to you, our favorite listener. Just a few things that kind of like popped out. I'm going to Jaden and I will go back and forth on a couple of these things. So, Jaden, I'll name one of the stories that I found really interesting, and then you can either comment on it, kind of like taking a different direction. This is not like a new format for AI applied, but we were just sort of struggling with which one of these things was most interesting. The one that I just was listening to about was character AI and the fact that character AI is now going to restrict usage for kids. And that probably flagged, you know, for me as it would for Jaden. Jaden and I are both dads. Jaden's kids are a little younger than mine. But this is something that we are constantly hearing about. What's going to happen with this? How is this going to play out? And with Character AI, it's going to be limited sort of access. In the same way YouTube has YouTube kids and things like that, what does this look like? Because they're going to restrict it to, I think, it's like two hours a day. For people under the age of 18, they only have access to certain things, all that kind of stuff. Jaden, did you see this story? And as a dad, it hit you how? So actually, I'm not surprised by this at all. I have been very curious how character I has been able to get away with a lot of the stuff that they do. And and it reminds me of a famous episode from Silicon Valley. Have you seen that TV show? I did. Yeah, that's great. So there's like one part in Silicon Valley where they one of the pivots of their company, I think of Pied Piper, is that it's like a chat app for like teenagers. And then they find out or for people. But then anyways, they go sell it and they find out that like all of the conversations are like underage kids. And there's like all of these like red flags and issues. And they just like shut down the whole company because of it. And so I've always kind of had that in my mind. And ever since Character AI obviously exploded as a big company, that was no shock to anyone. But Google actually came in and I don't think they actually fully acquired Character AI, but they pulled out their leadership team and there was some sort of acquit hire. They fully acquired the company? No, no, no. They acquit hired Norm. I can't remember his name. Norm Shazir or something like that. And I always found that kind of curious. It's such a popular asset. I was like, why didn't they just buy the whole company? And I think that there's a little bit of this, quote unquote, radioactive content on there where there's some of these chats that are questionable. Maybe kids shouldn't be on there. There wasn't really any age verification. There's all this weird stuff. OpenAI, Anthropic, everyone's getting absolutely roasted right now. Meta, especially for this kind of kids being able to chat with chatbots about things that are not age appropriate. And so, yes, I always wondered where Character AI would fall on this. And so this change here just makes sense. This is something that I would have expected them to do sooner, honestly. And so, yes, not surprised by this at all. Yeah, I was just double checking. It was Norm Shazier. That's the guy who was – he started at Google. He went over to Character, and they hired – Google hired back like 30 of their researchers. And I think they're a licensing character more and more now. But, yeah, this has to be a protection issue. I mean because if the numbers are real about how much young people are using chatbots it something that I a huge AI enthusiast obviously but it something that kind of like really I don know it just makes me nervous as well And speaking of young people using this in another story that you and I were talking about was like Grammarly which I kind of thought about as a young person's thing. Although I know a lot of people were using Grammarly, but Grammarly was early days of AI, right? And Jaden, you have been in the AI game for a while now. And Grammarly was, I don't want to say first out of the gate, they probably weren't, but they were definitely, and continue to be one of the big players. It's just going to check your grammar. It's using AI technology to do that. But now, and by the way, let me lump in another story just to sort of confuse us all, is Harvey on the legal tech side. They're probably the big legal partners just like raised a bunch more money. And, you know, there was some criticism like, oh, Harvey's just an AI rapper. I don't think that's true. I like the Harvey people a lot. I think user interface goes a much, much longer way and fine tuning goes much longer than people think it does. but Grammarly, Harvey, these things that are trying to be, you know, kind of getting bigger and bigger and bigger. The question around, and I don't know which way you want to take this one, Jayden, but Grammarly is, it's sort of like how Facebook became meta. They're like, okay, it's going to be bigger than just people checking their papers. You know, we already have a giant user base. We already have paying customers. How do we make this bigger? And then with Harvey, it's one of these things where they are trying to convince investors, and I think doing a good job that this is not just a wrapper. Thoughts on those? Yeah. Okay. So Harvey, amazing story. They just raised $150 million in $8 billion valuation. So they're a serious player in this. I actually talked to a lot of people in the legal space who say that they use Harvey. And that is interesting to me. What I'll say, though, on the Grammarly front is, you know, Grammarly actually existed long before the whole AI boom was happening. It was something that I I remember in college, they would they pay. I think they paid for everyone to have free access to Grammarly or maybe I just paid for it. I can't remember if my grammar was definitely not fantastic. So it was a big help for sure. One thing that I'll say is long before I was helping Grammarly was kind of just I mean, I guess you could call it their own AI, but they had their own technology that would help look at your grammar like spell check on word. I mean, it's not it's not that far off. And it was a great tool. What's interesting, though, I feel like it was never really branded as I mean, this is coming from me who used it like pre AI and I haven't used it since. It never really felt like a very AI tool to me because it was just like, oh, it's like spellcheck. It's just going to tell me my own and suggest some edits. And so I think they probably saw a significant drop off in usage, I'm guessing, with people that are writing and basically just get ChatGPT to write or they copy and paste their essay into ChatGPT. instead of asking Grammarly to highlight things that could improve, they would just send it to ChatGPT and say, just improve these things, fix the grammar and punctuation. I mean, I know I have done that many times. I'll just upload something to ChatGPT and say, fix the grammar and punctuation. Except nowadays I do that less because I feel like people like my bad grammar. They know it's real and not ChatGPT writing them. So there's a weird thing there. Yeah. But I think because they didn't, I don't feel like they had that really strong AI branding. Now they go and they're actually acquiring AI companies. So Superhuman is one of those that they acquired and they're actually rebranding. There will be a Grammarly app that still exists called Grammarly and stuff but they rebranding their whole parent company to be called Superhuman almost like grabbing this famous AI company And that kind of their new poster child because they want people to really associate them with AI And I think we gonna see that across a lot of different startups and companies in the future If you were pre AI boom and you not really known for AI per se, go and acquire an AI company and make that your parent company. And all of a sudden you have lots of revenue, lots of users and AI focus, and you'll be able to raise a lot of money from it. Words of wisdom from the master himself. By the way, guys, if you haven't tried AI AIbox.ai, you have to do this. Jaden's AI company is absolutely unbelievable. It's killing it. This is where you can sort of test out models against each other for 19 bucks a month as opposed to the $400 a month I spend. I'm not even lying, $400 a month. And you can create your own workflows. No code needed, super easy, drag and drop. You're listening to AI Applied already. You're halfway there. Go over to AIbox.ai. It's absolutely phenomenal. Jaden, last kind of thought on this, on the stories that I was looking at. was one that you had texted me about, I think this morning or whenever you had, but it was all about Apple and Tim Cook in that fourth quarter earnings report being like, and let me actually find the quote. Hold on, Jayden, bear with me for a second. He says, Tim Cook stated that Apple continually surveils the market on M&A and is open to pursuing M&A if we think that will advance our roadmap. Jayden, you and I, I don't remember how many emojis you used, but we're like, yeah, please. I mean, Apple, just buy. I mean, I think Amazon probably has the inside track to try to buy Anthropic. Anthropic is going to be expensive now. Holy. Oh, they're doing well. Good luck on that one, yeah. But my gosh, there's so many companies out there that just have great large language models. Please, please, Apple, just buy something. I don't care what it is. Just make Siri better. I know that you were excited about this one. What were you thinking about this? Oh, yeah. I mean, basically, I just have the same sentiment where I have an iPhone. I don't want to go and get a different phone. I'm used to this ecosystem at this point now. So, like, I'm just begging Apple, please make some good AI updates in there. Go buy Anthropic. Go buy basically literally anyone. I think they could buy Mistral, and that's not the number one AI company. But grab Mistral and embed that into the iPhone. Like, I don't really care. I just want something good. It definitely feels like I have the FOMO of all the cool Android phones that have all the AI embedded. Google did a great job. I'm not going to lie. Google are doing a great job there. And it's not even brand new. I mean, this is years old. My brother, he's got this new Samsung and he shows me all the cool AI features he can do on there that are promised features of Apple intelligence someday when Apple gets some intelligence. But it's also one of these things where this is the path into people's brains. You know, I mean, we talk about adoption and what will sway adoption. I think part of it is going to be the device market. And when people can see and they just have their phone with them all the time and all of a sudden, like, you know, on a photo, it can say, hey, do you want to change this? Do you want to erase this person? Do you want to do this? Or, you know, you're taking a photo or you're starting to look up something as you might Google something. And then all of a sudden your phone can be like, hey, listen, I can actually like just tell you instead of you looking this up. I think that it's almost like pushing it into people's brains. I think that that's kind of the big story here. So, yeah, please, Apple, you got to do this, especially Apple with sitting on tons of cash. And now Apple seeing NVIDIA, Jayden, last story here, five trillion dollars. We almost at the end of this episode Jaden I mean is anybody stopping this I mean we know that all these other companies are building chips right We know this now I mean Amazon builds chips OpenAI is building chips. Google builds their chips. There's all these companies are building their own chips. What's the deal? Can they just not compete with NVIDIA? Are the NVIDIA chips just way too good? How are we at $5 trillion? Honestly, NVIDIA is going to be really hard to catch up to because anyone that says they're building their own chips, they have to design their own chips. And then, and so like in the case of like Meta, I've been hearing about Meta building their own chips for years. And Google actually, I think might be one that's making a lot of progress. I think they are. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, Google's doing some good progress. But like Meta's been building, quote unquote, their own chips for years. They're designing their chips. They're really useful. And when they design their chips, they're like, this is 10% better than what NVIDIA has. And then do you know what they have to do? They have to go build out their production. And by the time they finish building out their production, five years later, like no one even thinks about their chips anymore. So I think the thing that NVIDIA really had going for them was they just had all of the production nailed down. I mean, some people call NVIDIA a wrapper for TSMC because they're grabbing a lot of a lot of components and chips from there and putting them together in their own ecosystem. But but like really, they just had they were they were all set from kind of the crypto craze and they were supplying hardware for that. And then it just switched. Well, so when gaming, crypto and then AI. And it was just this perfect three-step process that set them up to build out all the infrastructure. And the beautiful thing in my mind, too, is that when crypto crashed, the quote-unquote crypto winter, the crypto crash, people were, like, shocked by the crash. And so NVIDIA also had built up a lot of, like, they were expecting things to keep growing and keep going. So they built up a lot of, like, I can't even think of the word, but the ability for them to continue to produce at a high level. And when that quote unquote crashed, it just perfectly moved into moved into AI and they just took off like a rock. They got very, very lucky. Yeah, they got they got unbelievably lucky. But I mean, but still, it's in video. I mean, like there's still the 100 pound gorilla. Yeah. Jane, any any final thoughts as we close out? Final thoughts. The AI bubble, as we all are, I think, adequately calling it these days, I don't think is going to slow down anytime soon. and it's just going to keep creating a lot of incredible things. Is this financial advice on NVIDIA? Absolutely not. But I would say look at all of the robotics companies that have been coming out lately, all of the humanoid robots, all of that has to be powered by chips and by AI, which is going to need a ton more training and new training, not just the training where you feed in an article, an essay, a book, or a picture. Now we're going to have to start feeding in 3D environments and it's just insane how much training is going to happen. So do I think NVIDIA will slow down? Personally, no, not financial advice, but I think that this industry has a lot of room to grow in front of it. 100 percent. Listen, guys, if you have enjoyed this episode, you know what to do. If you could leave us a rating and review, we'd be unbelievably grateful. And listen, we will catch you on the next episode. But check out – this is the thing. There's all this news. All you have to do is just skim it. Know what's happening. You don't have to go deep on any of this that you're not interested in, but just keep skimming the news and keep listening with us. We will keep it here and we will keep trying to inform you of it as best we know. Thanks for tuning in. Would love a rating and review and we will see you next time.