Big Tech Conference Season

In the midst of Big Tech conference season, Alex Kantrowitz and I used our monthly discussion on his Big Technology Podcast to mainly go over Google I/O and preview WWDC.

Google I/O

Basically, it felt like I/O underwhelmed because it centered around a lot of stuff that wasn't ready to roll – namely, their new flagship model, Gemini 3.5 Pro. But there wasn't a risk this would be like Apple two years ago at WWDC with vaporware galore, it was more just strange to have a big event with many of your announcements not yet ready. Perhaps it's time to re-think such events in the Age of AI as the cadence of releases is just different, clearly.

Alex is worried that Google is once again falling behind in AI, and Sundar Pichai sort of admitted as much at least when it comes to the all-important coding capabilities at the moment. This matters because it could be the key to powerful agents and perhaps even AGI eventually thanks to recursive self-improvement. I mean, Google doesn't even have a "Super App" yet. What are they doing?

The answer seems to be working on "Omni Models" – read: "World Models". But those too aren't quite ready to roll, so... Instead, we got a lot of updates to Google Search, which are interesting, but there's a real concern that Google won't be able to fully push into uncharted AI territory because of their myriad legacy products. Is the PM on Gmail going to let their product die in favor of Gemini simply doing email on your behalf? No. While Google has done an incredible job righting there ship after the Bard stumbles out of the AI gate, Big Company issues will always persist on some level...

WWDC

Meanwhile, with WWDC also now in the rearview, our preview and discussion seems to hold up well. I noted we weren't likely to see any hardware and that a lot of people would view the event as underwhelming because it would basically be a do-over – or mulligan – of the WWDC AI promises from two years ago.

I was curious how they would play up (or not) the new Google partnership, and to the surprise of many, it did get a nice, juicy mention during the keynote. As did Visual Intelligence, which may be the key to Apple's AI future on the iPhone and beyond. For now though, it will be more about voice, which again, the keynote made clear.

Alex is very interested in the iPhone Fold/Ultra and while I didn't think there was any chance they'd show that off early – which they didn't, the first betas of iOS 27 do actually give some major hints about it in the code. But we'll have to wait until early September for John Ternus' first keynote to actually see and hear about the device and it's perhaps funky new form-factor.

Maybe the most wild part of the entire show is that Ternus wasn't a part of it, at all! Instead, Tim Cook signed off one final time with a nice message. So if Ternus is going to pull a Satya Nadella and do something big to signal the start of his era – like, say, changing the App Store fees? – that will have to wait until the Fall as well.

Meta+

For the last segment, we talked a bit about Meta's messy new premium tiers for their social networks and what the strategy is here (hint: operation diversify from their ads business, which is 98% of Meta's revenues, as we move towards the AI future). Will they actually roll out some sort of cloud offering as Mark Zuckerberg has suggested, or was that simply to throw Wall Street a bone amidst all the continued CapEx? I mean, if SpaceX is now a "neocloud"...

One More Thing...

But wait, there was one more thing for us as well. While we were recording, news broke that Anthropic had filed confidentially to go public. This was a legitimate surprise since the word has already leaked out that OpenAI was about to file, but their rival beat them to the punch! And that's potentially a big problem for OpenAI as it makes for a very tricky narrative on their own would-be roadshow. They're now behind in both top-line and bottom-line numbers versus Anthropic, and Google has pulled even in terms of Gemini monthly active users.

Maybe the SpaceX listing goes so well that it raises all AI boats, as it were.¹ But we're a long way from when Anthropic and/or OpenAI would list. A lot can happen between now and then. We'll see!

¹ While we did talk about inclusion in the indicies almost immediately boosting these stocks, I did note that "maybe not the S&P 500" – and sure enough, they later rejected the notion of fast-tracking companies for inclusion (which is a good call). ↩