Welcome to Stuff I Thought About Last Week, a personal collection of topics on tech, innovation, science, the digital economic transition, the finance industry, and whatever else made me think last week.

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In today’s post: some impressive new AI demos show us a clear path to the shape and timing of the next technology platform shift – whether the incumbents of today dominate the future is an open question; Waymo is ramping rapidly across multiple cities; AI is overwhelming scientific journals and HR recruiters alike; a boat painting; a disappearing band; and, much more below.

Stuff about Innovation and Technology
“Magic and technology
Voodoo dolls and chants, electricity
We're makin' weird science
Fantasy and microchips
Shooting from the hip, something different
We're making weird science, ooh” -Oingo Boingo
According to Google’s Android Ecosystem president, Sameer Samat, AI represents a “once-in-a-generation moment to reinvent what phones can do,” stating that Google is “going to seize that moment”. The shift from a multitouch UI to a conversational, multimodal, AI interface for operating systems/apps will be as momentous as when Apple ushered in the current multitouch era with the first iPhone 17 years ago. Last spring, in Discovery Engines, I wrote:
The first generation of massive discovery platforms, like Google, have dominated the Internet for years; however, with the arrival of AI chatbots, the way we discover and connect with everything will evolve. Chatbots are rapidly becoming platforms, e.g., with ChatGPT’s embedded “plugins”. I’ve been preoccupied with this transition from search- to chatbot-enabled discovery since I wrote AI Companions over a year ago: “As aware agents that know you well and have access to your accounts, messages, and apps, chatbots are ideally positioned to displace the tools we use today like Google search and other habitual apps.” And, given their ability to function as full platforms, I now believe chatbots could take over as the dominant mobile operating system and app store in the near future (or, if that does not happen, they will be entirely embedded in iOS and Android). 

OpenAI and Google both showcased their latest AI products at events last week. I would characterize OpenAI’s new ChatGPT-4o – which has more conversational, real-time, multimodal (images, video, etc.) processing capacity – as an evolution within the current state of AI that makes it easier to interact with but not a leap forward in intelligence. Most of the ChatGPT-4o demos felt very much like Pi, which Microsoft (aka OpenAI’s bank) recently acquired. In contrast, Google I/O showcased a far more impressive set of applied AI for various practical use cases. Google also demonstrated its multimodal, conversational AI interface using augmented reality glasses. It certainly seems as though this new form of human-computer interaction will benefit from an always aware hardware platform, which does seem to dictate a form-factor shift to intelligent glasses – or perhaps earbuds with a camera in them (which Meta is rumored to be working on). OpenAI’s demos felt more like the 1985 John Hughes movie Weird Science, where two teenage boys create an artificial girlfriend (even if you don’t remember the movie, you might be familiar with the eponymous Oingo Boingo song), while Google’s demos felt more visionary and practical.
 
Technology platform shifts begin slowly, but eventually become inevitable. If the smartphone is indeed reinvented as an always-on, multimodal, conversational AI interface integrated into AR glasses (or other form factors), Apple may maintain dominance in hardware, or suffer obsolescence – either outcome seems equally likely over the next decade. Initially, the smartphone will be the central processing unit for AI, but the AI itself will supersede the mobile OS and the current multitouch hardware interface. Whereas the mobile OS and app store were the fabric of the last major innovation cycle, the new development platform will be the LLM. In this scenario, Apple will need to lean more heavily on the innovation of other companies, given that they continue to squander their resources by buying back a record amount of stock instead of keeping ahead of the AI technological curve. Imagine staring down at what’s likely to be the largest technology platform shift ever and choosing to spend your money buying shares back!? Bloomberg has reported separate rumors that Apple is indeed looking to partner more deeply with Google’s Gemini and OpenAI. And, of course, we cannot discount Meta, which is uniquely positioned as the conversational nexus in the daily lives of billions of people and continues to innovate on hardware form factors and open-source AI models. 
 
Regardless of how it all plays out, last week’s unveilings were impressive. In case you missed the announcements, here are some clips from Google I/O of real-time multimodal Gemini using either a smartphone or AR glasses. There are more such examples from Google’s Project Astra on its website. Google also demoed real-time, on-device AI speech analysis to detect fraudulent phone callers. And, here is a demo of the new ChatGPT-4o multimodal interface as well as a demo where two different GPT-4os end up singing to each other. 
 
It’s been six years since I first experienced an early version of the virtual AI assistant Mica in an augmented reality headset. At the time, it took a little imagination to see what the future had in store. Today, however, we’ve reached that rare moment in a phase shift where it no longer requires much imagination to determine what the next software/hardware platforms will be and when they will arrive for the mass market. If there is going to be a shift away from the incumbents (as has happened in every prior tech shift but is not guaranteed), it will be led by the software developers – whatever platform they embrace to create the next generation of blockbuster apps will dictate the winners. It’s a wide range of outcomes, and I think it’s a coin toss whether today’s tech winners remain dominant 5-10 years from now or are entirely displaced by something different.
 
Problematic Paper Mills
AI is particularly good at creating written content, which is causing an arms race that’s overwhelming recipients. In the case of recruiting, AI has made it easy for job applicants to apply to 100x the number of openings as they could in the past, flooding HR departments, who, in turn, have to use AI to handle, respond to, and even interview applicants. Meanwhile, in the field of scientific research, journals are shutting down after being inundated with AI papers. Journal publisher Wiley is shelving 19 journals after retracting more than 11,300 fraudulent papers. 
 
Way Mo’ Waymo
Google’s autonomous taxi service Waymo is now serving 50,000 rides per week in Arizona and California. This number is up five-fold from a reported 10,000 rides last year, and the service has a stated aspiration of growing 10x annually. Some extrapolation: if growth does proceed at that pace, it would yield a run rate somewhere in the ballpark of 25M annual autonomous rides in a year or two. That would be an amazing feat, but they would still have only a tiny fraction of the rideshare market. For context, Uber completed 26M daily trips in 2023 (including both rideshare and food deliveries). Uber also partners with Waymo to provide rides and autonomous food delivery.

Miscellaneous Stuff
Letter of the Law
A Seaside, California man was ordered by the city to build a fence to obscure the view of his boat from the street. So, he did. And, on that fence, he had his graphic artist neighbor create a beautiful painting of the boat, which blends seamlessly with the top of the real boat peeking out from behind the fence. It’s a perfect protest of local bureaucracy. Seaside’s city manager responded: “The only action I’m going to take is a high five, and that’s it.”
 
Chuck’s Out
The Chuck E. Cheese kid-oriented restaurant chain has been through some tough times. While it may not be familiar to our international readers, the once popular destination for arcade gaming and consuming bad pizza has long been an institution in the US. Often described as creepy, the locations feature an animatronic band of musical critters (and a pizza chef on drums). If you caught the movie Five Nights at Freddy’s (or the game series it was based on), you might have some sense of what I am talking about. Apparently, times have changed, and kids now want to stare at screens instead of nightmarish puppets. The company is removing all of the mechanical members from over 400 locations, leaving just two spots where the band will play on. Farewell to a childhood memory.

✌️-Brad

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The content of this newsletter is my personal opinion as of the date published and is subject to change without notice and may not reflect the opinion of NZS Capital, LLC.  This newsletter is an informal gathering of topics I’ve recently read and thought about. I will sometimes state things in the newsletter that contradict my own views in order to provoke debate. Often I try to make jokes, and they aren’t very funny – sorry. 

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