Down Round

Several years ago, Down Round listener Tim Stewart submitted a question to one of our Q&A mailbag episodes: when is the new rugby league video game for PlayStation 5 coming out?

We couldn't answer him, because we didn't know what the hell he was talking about. But now, years later, it has come out, and everyone seems to agree it's really not very good. So we decided to bring Tim on to finally answer his own question.

What follows is an odyssey into the world of Australian sports video games, and the virtues of pestering CEOs on Twitter.

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Tea, the app which offers what it describes as "dating safety tools which protect women", has been hacked. It follows a couple of weeks where it went viral and led the app charts in the US.

For those not familiar, it is basically an app version of those 'are we dating the same guy' Facebook groups, where women share pics, tips and intel on bad dates and dangerous men.

In this ep, we talk about the hack, the app's surge in popularity, and where it fits in range of social surveillance and trust tools that have emerged to serve an increasing scaled social ecosystem where you can no longer be sure who you're talking to.

(We actually recorded this ep for release just before the hack, and our recording was corrupted — maybe a good thing, given that it would have been immediately irrelevant.)

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Microsoft slashed 9,000 jobs a few weeks ago, with the Xbox division taking a hit including some studio closures. What about that $70 BILLION Activision Blizzard acquisition just a couple of years ago?

It sounds like fertile ground for of Raph's largest victory laps to date, after he suggested Microsoft should have ditched Xbox years ago.

But first, an update on xAI after last week's ep. Grok 4 has arrived, and its big feature is... AI anime waifus. Uncensored and backed by a million GPUs... what could this possibly mean for the birth rate?

And are OpenAI's sycophantic personal assistants really that different from an AI girlfriend at the end of the day?

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Elon Musk's AI chatbot, Grok, went "Kanye Mode" — becoming openly Nazi, seemingly out of nowhere.

The boys get to the bottom of the root cause, and muse on the big question: what is the point of Grok anyway?

Out: Platforms spending millions on content moderation to root our hate speech.

In: Spending billions to have your platform literally spew hate speech.

Also: an unprecedented Down Round Triple W. 

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For a few weeks, we've been talking about Meta's revenge tour in Silicon Valley, throwing massive bonuses at AI talent at rival companies in order to tempt them over to Zuck's domain. Well, it seems to have paid off now — and the company has announced its Superintelligence team, packed with talent they managed to poach.

Then, we go into a Bloomberg story which suggests that Apple could be ready to throw in the towel on AI and work with OpenAI and/or Anthropic to power their next-generation Siri. Which would be big!

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After the fanfare of the OpenAI/Jony Ive multibillion-dollar device partnership, io, all references were scrubbed from the internet as if it never happened. After rampant speculation, it was revealed that it was over a claim the whole thing was stolen. From some guy named Jason, no less.

Seems like OpenAI is a real drama magnet. We discuss the case, including some screenshots of emails that Sam Altman posted.

Additionally, Kiwi accounting software powerhouse Xero is making some moves. We talk about that too.

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Canva has made another acquisition: MagicBrief, the advertising command centre founded by a dear friend of the pod. In this ep, we talk about the acquisition, where it fits in Canva's strategy, and wind off into a bigger chat about the ad market.

Then, for some reason, we talk about Apple Music and Spotify. Real smorgasbord here folks.

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Apple had its software development conference this week. It announced a whole new design language filled with organic movements and over-the-top animations, serving as the perfect distraction from the company's very public missteps in AI.

We go through everything you need to know. Well, at least 60% of it.

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Remember Grammarly? Of course you do. The briefly ubiquitous piece of software that made sure you were using your possessive apostrophes correctly. Well, guess what? They just received $1 billion in nondilutive investment from General Catalyst to become an all-in-one AI platform?

Sounds like bullshit? Well, probably. But it's a business model we'll be seeing more of. We chat through the rise of zombie AI platforms, before digressing into a chat about Perplexity.

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It's been a while since we've done of these. We answer your burning questions on topics including but not limited to:

• Jony Ive's partnership with OpenAI
• Apple after Tim Cook
• Atlassian and Immutable, two Australian unicorns
• Ranking the Magnificent 7 tech stocks by aura/swag

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.