Hi everyone! It’s been quite a few weeks on the podcast recently and I thought I’d send a quick update. Bill McDermott, CEO of ServiceNow, joined Big Technology Podcast last Wednesday to discuss his unique career path, from owning a Long Island delicatessen to now managing a $113 billion, publicly-traded…

Mark Zuckerberg will have to overindex on openness, and hang in tightly, if he wants his big Metaverse bet to pay off. — Hi everyone, Apple’s Vision Pro announcement generated a lot of buzz last week; not all of it positive. And while we’re years away from learning whether the doubters or boosters were right, we can at least make some informed predictions. On Big Technology Podcast, I dig into the new device…

Hi everyone, I’m sharing a quick note this week as we get back in action following Memorial Day weekend. On Big Technology Podcast, Ranjan Roy and I spoke with New York Magazine contributing editor John Herrman about Temu and Shein, the fast-rising, China-based retailers that are threatening U.S. mainstays including…

For less than $1 per hour, workers in Nairobi, Kenya trained OpenAI’s GPT models. They walked away shaken. — This is an excerpt from my weekly newsletter, Big Technology, published on Substack. Check it out here and sign up to receive it each Friday. Richard Mathenge felt he’d landed the perfect role when he started training OpenAI’s GPT model in 2021. After years of working in customer service in…

Digging through a bunch of websites to find information is annoying, but we’re in trouble if the primary sources go away. — The demo was beautiful. At Google’s IO developer conference this week, the company showed an experimental version of its search engine handling an almost unimaginably difficult query. Asked whether a family with kids under three years old and a dog would prefer Arches National Park or Bryce Canyon, Google scoured…

Forget the technology’s capabilities, there’s money to be made and points to score. — Allow me, for a moment, to take you inside my inbox. The normal smattering (okay, deluge) of public relations pitches has completely given way to a category-five storm of artificial intelligence PR. It’s getting so windy in there that CNN may have to send a camera crew. I am *always*…

Twitter alternative is taking off thanks to hilarious memes and the fact that it is not Twitter. — Bluesky, the Jack Dorsey-funded, invite-only Twitter clone, has been brimming with frenetic energy this week. Shitposters, sex workers, technologists, journalists, and whoever else have flooded the new service, all at once trying to reimagine Twitter from scratch. With a looseness not seen since Twitter’s early days, they’ve been tweeting (or…

A bizarre profile, stock underperformance, and big executive pay packages stand out as the ride-hailing company tries to find a way forward. — Something was just a bit off in the Wall Street Journal’s profile of Dara Khosrowshahi last week. The Uber CEO had been driving and delivering for the first time in his tenure and wanted to make the point on record. The Journal portrayed Khosrowshahi as a hands-on CEO learning the…

And if not, why won’t the AI just build the businesses itself? Like many of you, I’ve been wondering whether there’s a real business opportunity in this new wave of generative artificial intelligence, or whether it’s mostly hype. So I invited two venture capitalists — people who bet on business…