Down Round

We've been saying for a little while that Google has caught up in AI, and is now trying to deploy the full force of its product range and scale to the problem of achieving domination. Dunno if they're there yet, but the I/O conference shows that they're still got a few tricks up their sleeve.

In this ep, we go into what they announced, including some interesting movements on our recent chats about search and the monetisation of AI.

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Airbnb is in a mid-life crisis. Founder Brian Chesky is undergoing one of his routine meltdowns where he suddenly decides that the short-stay rental platform should actually be a ticket-clipping mediator of literally all human experience.

The platform has been redesigned and relaunched, with both 'services' and 'experiences' living in separate tabs and hoping to tempt you to open the app more than once or twice a year. A tall order indeed. We discuss.

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Last week we gave some cursory attention to Apple's legal troubles in its battle with Epic Games and every other developer who chafes at paying the 30% Apple tax on everything. This time, we give it a little more attention and thought.

Plus, the company's services boss Eddy Cue popped up in another trial, and gave us some intriguing insight into Apple's relationship with Google. Insight which caused Alphabet stock to crater nearly 9%.

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Australia's graphic design unicorn is yet to go public, and find themselves in an intersting position. As we all know infinite growth means you can't just be a really nice graphic design platform, you have to be Microsoft.

The boys ask the question, are Canva an enterprise company or for SMEs? Are they for pros or amateurs? What the hell is AI?

And also an update on Apple's App Store issues.

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Stacked deck today folks. First we return briefly to Tesla to talk about a Wall Street Journal story which reported the company opened a CEO search to replace Elon Musk.

Then we move on to the big tech news story of the week: OpenAI rolling out a ChatGPT update that made it too sycophantic. It was funny, but also shows how these big AI firms are thinking about what their product actually is.

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Tesla turned in an absolute shocker of an earnings result, which may be related to why Elon Musk announced he would be turning more of his attention to the electric carmaker and less on being Trump's friend.

In this ep, we go into the earnings, give a little update on what the EV market is looking like and what Tesla says it wants to do — and a little detour into talking about a Down Under business, GoGet.

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Raph has returned from the land of the free, and we're back in the regular studio for some more Down Round.

Nvidia has just been slapped with a new restriction on exporting its slightly less than cutting edge H20 chip, which cost it a $5.5 billion charge. We talk about chips and continue our chat from last week's premium episode about how Trump's trade war is affecting tech.

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We talked about the new OpenAI image generation platform last week briefly, but we recorded on the day it released and therefore missed the massive amounts of discourse it generated. We're sorry. We'll never miss the discourse again.

But it was a great opportunity to take stock of the AI art conversation, which has only become more heated and baroque over the past three to six months. Over this episode and the premium, we dive into the current state of computer pictures and the politics around them.

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The chickens have come home to roost for 23andme, the consumer genetic testing company which has gone from making people feel nice about being 4% Italian to languishing in bankruptcy. With the vultures circling the carcass, we reflect on its very weird business model and why it should never have gone public.

Then we talk about Google, which has been cooking on the AI front recently, and how it looks like their overall strategy in that space is coming into focus. 

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HR SaaS is probably the least sexy topic in the world, but fortunately two of the bigger players have made it interesting through bizarre corporate warfare. Rippling has launched a lawsuit against competitor Deel alleging that they placed a spy deep within.

The saga contains a honey-pot Slack channel, a mole in the top ranks, and trying to flush a phone down a toilet.

It’s good stuff folks. We get into it.

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