We know that OpenAI is targeting a roughly September IPO, but according to some reports from Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, they could be filing as soon as next week for this IPO.
In addition, Google AI mode has just hit 1 billion monthly users.
Their usage has doubled every quarter, which is insane.
And Stability AI has just released Stable Audio 3.0.
It has six minute long song generation as a new capability, which is really impressive.
I love all of the competition in the music space, as someone that has been putting music on Spotify for almost 10 years.
Iris Go has just raised 28 million in a seed round to build a proactive AI desktop automation agent.
That sounds like a lot of words, but it's actually a very useful tool as we're getting more and more of these kind of like cloud, co-work and other computer use things.
I want to break down exactly what Iris Go is doing.
In addition, more Google news.
And to be fair, they just did Google IO yesterday.
So we have a ton of Google news that came out, but they are embedding AI generated product descriptions inside of search ads.
They're doing a ton of other stuff.
So we'll have kind of a Google news roundup as well at the end.
I want to kick this episode off with a bit of the job markets.
We have some reports that Intuit is cutting their global workforce by 17%.
A lot of this is due to what they're calling AI restructuring.
17 of their global workforce is about 3000 people, and that's a bunch of office closures in Reno, Nevada and Woodland Hills, California.
Their CEO, who is Susan Gudarzi, told all of the staff that the strategic reset and streamlined structure is going to help the TurboTax parent deliver better products.
What a lot of people are pointing out and I have been saying for my last two weeks of podcast episodes, because I seem to cover job closures every single day almost, or layoffs.
What people are kind of pointing out here is that Intuit actually just had a stronger than expected third quarter earnings.
They had 10% year-over-year growth, which lifted their forecast for the fiscal year.
So financially, the company's actually doing really well.
The reason why they're doing all this apparently, is to focus on simplifying their operations and focus on AI integration.
Now, to be fair, I've actually used a bunch of tools.
I actually run tools directly onto my like Claude co-work.
I will tell it to do things inside of my website.
QuickBooks account.
And even inside of TurboTax, I had Claude co-work do a ton of work helping me with TurboTax.
I actually spoke with my accountant recently and told him not to bother doing all of the classification of all of our expenses for a few of my businesses, because I'll just run Claude co-work on that.
It does a great job of going and deciding what category different expenses go into.
If it doesn't know what a company does, it can go and research the company and then it will be able to figure it out.
It does it really quickly.
And I don't have to pay a person to manually do that.
Now the reason I bring that up is because I do think that There's so much happening with a company like Intuit, where there are shifts going on right.
Like we're able to do a lot of stuff with AI that used to have to be manual.
I think a lot of companies are going through a moment right now where they are doing layoffs.
They are reprioritizing.
They are perhaps making their companies more streamlined.
I would predict in two or three years we're going to see moments where most of these companies are much larger than they are today.
It's not like the workforce keeps getting laid off or cut down.
I think we're going to see a lot of growth even in headcount.
But I do think we're just at this weird moment where people have to make shifts to to make a lot of these investments.
Another big one that's in the news right now is that Mark Zuckerberg has actually come out and he can put out a memo and talk to talk to employees over at Meta about what he said are consequential AI moves that they're making right now because they're also doing a bunch of layoffs.
Meta is laying off 8,000 people.
It's about 10% of their workforce.
I've already covered this on the podcast, but this new memo came out.
I think most of the staff in Asian Europe got this a little bit earlier, but there's going to be about 8000 employees that are cut or laid off.
What I do appreciate from Meta is that there's an additional 7000 employees that are going to be reallocated to AI-related roles.
This is what I would love to see from most startups that are saying, hey look, we're doing layoffs to like invest in AI or focus on AI.
We've even seen companies like General Motors, that is, you know, laying off 800 people in IT or 600 people in IT, but simultaneously they have open job roles for IT people that are quote unquote AI, native or something like that right.
So it's like they're hiring people that are AI skilled where, at the end of the day, I love what Meta is doing here.
And they're just reallocating workers like 7000 workers to AI related roles.
Like there's no such thing as a person that I mean.
There is such thing as a person that you know their job is all about AI.
But I think anyone can.
You can learn how to use AI in their role and can learn how to use AI to accentuate their role.
So I like this direction a lot more where we're just moving.
If you really are having kind of a realignment of priorities and what you think is important to AI related roles, Move some of your workers over there, because I think that anyone can learn it, and this is, you know, a phenomenal time to do that.
You also save yourself a lot of.
You know, a company would save itself a lot of money if it's not just laying off workers to save, you know, a literal dollar amount, which I feel like is basically what a lot of these companies are doing.
They just don't want to say it out loud.
But if that's not the case, then just move them there.
You're not going to have to pay severance and you're not going to have to pay all of the money to recruiters to hire people.
So anyways, I appreciate that coming from what Meta is doing.
And Zuckerberg, I mean, the whole thing was like a lot of drama, I think.
I'm just calling out one positive silver lining here.
But in the memo that Zuckerberg put out, he called AI quote the most consequential technology of our lifetimes.
And he said that it will, quote, define the next generation.
So we're seeing this from a lot of people.
We're seeing a lot of shifts.
I'm preaching to the choir if you're listening to this podcast.
We are seeing a lot of changes and things happening there.
All right, let's get into what's going on with the OpenAI IPO.
We know that they've been working with Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley.
I've reported on this a couple times.
Apparently, they're going to be filing this paperwork within the next week or weeks.
This is going to put them in direct and basically a race with SpaceX, because SpaceX now owns Elon Musk's XAI.
And they are also trying to get this filed as soon as possible.
I actually got a really great comment when I was posting about Elon Musk and SpaceX and Elon Musk's lawsuit of OpenAI and how he quote unquote like lost the lawsuit or whatever.
I got a really great comment from someone named Raphael Straffanello-Gisleini over on LinkedIncom.
And so I appreciate this comment, but he said talking about you know the quote-unquote Musk losing, he said after 15 trading days forcing index funds to buy regardless of valuation.
That forced passive inflow is worth far more if it isn't competing with another trillion dollar AI IPO in the same window.
He said the lawsuit achieved its purpose the moment it was filed.
The procedural knockout changes nothing.
So I actually thought that was a really interesting perspective I hadn't thought of before.
As far as trying to get SpaceX and their IPO to be as successful as possible.
And that seems to be perhaps the strategy that Elon Musk was playing at when he did the lawsuit against OpenAI because, at the end of the day, while some people would have defended his lawsuit on quote unquote moral grounds,
It was outside of the statute of limitations.
That's ultimately why it was struck down.
And so it's just.
You know, if he really cared about it that much or if he really wanted that outcome, he should have filed the lawsuit much sooner, when OpenAI made these kind of intentions clear.
And then potentially he would have been successful in doing that.
But because he didn't, they're just kind of throwing it out.
So bringing it back to OpenAI's IPO that they're looking at, apparently they have just crossed 38 billion in annualized revenue.
They did that in Q4 of last year.
Most of that was API sales and ChatGPT subscriptions.
They didn't say how profitable they were, so we'll find that out very soon.
The SpaceX IPO filing are expected as soon as.
So we have a lot of AI news, a lot of stuff happening today and around this time.
And one of the big announcements we've also got today is that Google AI mode has just hit 1 billion monthly active users.
Their usage has doubled quarterly, which is really impressive as of this month.
Every quarter since they launched, their usage has actually doubled.
So apparently right now they are overhauling search.
I've seen our friend of the podcast, Logan Kilpatrick, posting about it on LinkedIn, showing what they've done.
He said this is the biggest change they've made to search in 25 years.
So I think Google has a lot of messaging around that.
There's gonna be a completely redesigned search box, AI overviews on most queries and they're gonna have agentic features launching this summer that are gonna generate custom apps and a bunch of dashboards instead of traditional web links, which is a really interesting concept to see where they're gonna go there.
This is a pretty big and controversial move.
Essentially, what's going to be happening is you get the AI overview at the top and below that used to have the blue link.
So it was kind of like they were there, you know, keeping the legacy Google results and they had that.
But now they're actually going to have an AI overview box that is going to sit right below the AI overview like a chat box, which is basically going to make it so you can't see the top organic results as much.
It's going to be steering people away from these kind of traditional web listings that we are so used to.
So things are really going to be shifting quite a lot.
We have some news that Stability AI has just released Stable Audio 3.0.
And what's interesting here is we had a really cool music release a while back from Eleven Labs.
And when it came out I was like guys, it's basically nothing, because Eleven Labs let you create music, but it could only be 30 seconds long.
I mean, this is basically useless.
Stability has come out and you can actually create songs that are up to six minutes and 20 seconds long.
That's more than double the three minute limit that they had in last year's version and much higher than something like 11 Labs.
Apparently they've trained all of this on licensed data from warner music group and universal music group.
They basically sidestepped the entire lawsuit.
Uh, you know fiasco that is currently hammering.
I think suno and yudio are both getting hit with this, and so they got around that by just going directly and getting the licensing.
So big kudos to stability.
They have four models released at 459 million, 14 billion and 27 billion parameters.
The small, medium versions are shipping with open weights for commercial use under a million dollars in revenue.
So if you have under a million dollars in revenue, you could be using this with open weights for commercial use, which is really impressive.
The large model is available only on their paid API or self-hosting.
They have enterprise licenses that are gonna be required for companies that are making above a million dollars in annual revenue.
I actually love how they're doing this, right?
Small companies are gonna get a benefit If you make a lot of money, you gotta pay for it.
This is like a lot of open source software, but I do yeah, I really do appreciate this for smaller companies.
This is gonna be phenomenal.
They recently hired Ethan Kaplan, who is the former chief engineer digital officer at Universal Audio and Fender, and he's leading the professional music product suite around this new model.
Right off the bat, I'm really impressed by the way that they are currently doing their licensing.
All right.
So a company called Iris Go has just raised 28 million in a seed round, and they're doing this to build a proactive AI desktop automation agent.
Okay, sounds like a big mouthful, but this is backed by Andrew Nagui's AI fund, and they're going to build a desktop agent that learns workflows by watching you perform a task once, and then it's going to automate it forever and you don't have to write a prompt.
This is actually literally something my wife was telling me.
She's vibe coding.
She's completely redoing the first app we ever created.
It's called Self Pause.
It's an AI affirmation recorder.
You can record yourself saying affirmations and you can put all like these sounds in the background, like meditation sounds.
You can make like a mix and listen to them.
Some people like to listen to their you know, personally recorded affirmations in the morning, or listen to them all night.
Anyways, this is the first product we ever made out of college.
We grew it to about 150,000 users.
And then I kind of have been working on AI Box and this podcast for the last three years and haven't really put any time or attention on that uh startup, but it continues to chug along.
And you know I think every month we get over 300000 listens to audio on that um, on that platform, on that, on that app.
And, in any case, my wife has been recently um using cloud code and cloud cowork to completely basically redo the whole thing, add all the features she ever wanted uh, build it native in swift so it's like a native ios app, because before we had it on react, which is kind of both.
Anyways, she's rebuilding the whole thing.
It took us years to make it and we spent hundreds of thousands of dollars and now she's, you know, being able to recreate it in a couple weeks, vibe coding um, she did study computer science, so she, you know she's, she's uh pretty pretty good at this kind of stuff, but still um, it's phenomenal.
And just recently she was telling me she's like man, i wish i could just do do this task and have co-work, watch me do it and then do it for me so i don't have to tell it to do xyz.
Like a lot of the things i think she's recently like redesigning all of the icons inside of the app.
And she was using ChatGPT to help her redesign all the icons.
But she got to like crap out the backgrounds and put them on a black box and whatever.
She has this whole workflow, right?
She's got a hundred icons and she was getting co-work to do it, but she had to do these really descriptive prompts.
Anyways, this is exactly what Iris Go is going to solve.
And I love this.
The co-founder is Jeffrey Lai.
He built the Chinese version of Siri at Apple and then he basically demonstrated the system ordering a coffee by recording one transaction and then it repeated it autonomously.
I think a lot of...
Processing for this is going to be happening on device for privacy, which is amazing.
The cloud tasks are going to require the user to actually authorize it.
There's going to be end-to-end encryption.
Basically, I think this is a big differentiator against a lot of cloud-heavy competitors.
They shipped their beta Mac OS and Windows apps and they secured a pre-install agreement with Acer to distribute the agent on new devices.
So they're not going to have to spend any money acquiring users with that particular deal.
So All in all, I think this is a really cool tool.
They already have some good distribution.
They've raised some money.
I'm excited to see what happens with Iris Go.
And I'm sure my wife will be their biggest fan once this thing rolls out.
I'll see you next time.
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Okay, Google has embedded AI-generated product descriptions inside of the search ad.
This is kind of one of the big things that came out of Google I.O. they've been talking about.
I just wanted to cover it quick on the podcast, but basically...
Google's now using Gemini to write custom product descriptions for ads.
Inside search results.
They're going to be embedding sponsor items directly into the conversational AI mode responses.
So I think right now the AI mode is taking over more of Google's screen.
It's going to be kind of blocking out the traditional search results.
And because of that, they, you know, they still need to make money.
So they're putting ads directly inside of their responses which, to be fair, is exactly what ChatGPT is doing.
So, you know, Google is the ad king of the entire market.
If they weren't putting ads in their AI model and ChatGPT was, I'd think that was pretty strange.
And basically all that expanded ad real estate is going to, you know, get them more views beyond just whatever the traditional sidebar ads that are now appearing.
I think this is good.
I think the ads are going to be more specific.
I know maybe some people will complain like oh no, I don't want you know ads inside of my, inside of my results.
Well, of course you could go and pay 20 a month for Claude or ChatGPT or probably Gemini 2 and not get those ads.
So that's one option.
Or if you want to use all this stuff for free, you're just going to get ads.
I mean, that's just how the internet works.
You pay or you get ads.
And so I'm not too mad about this.
And I think they'll be quite specific.
Again, people can be concerned about privacy, but with everything that Google and Facebook already do for targeting ads, I mean anyone that's complaining about it today has been complaining about it for the last 20 years.
So not too much has changed in that.
That's the show for today, but if you guys want to know a very strange number, it is that this show over on Spotify has 286 reviews and on Apple it only has 160.
What's crazy is Apple accounts for about 70% of all of the listeners on the podcast.
So of the 70 of listeners over on Apple, a way smaller percentage has dropped a review, which means that if you're listening and you're on Apple, this is a special request.
If you could leave a review, we got to keep up with the Spotify folks.
They're putting us to shame.
I listen on Apple Podcasts.
And I don't drop reviews on every show.
But if you drop only one review on only one show, make it this one.
Spotify's got 286 and we got to catch up.
So if you haven't left a review, you're listening on Apple Podcasts, do it.
If you're on Spotify, you can just keep destroying the number.
But actually, maybe if you're on Spotify, don't.
We don't want the...
We don't want it to look too bad, right?
We don't want Spotify to beat us too bad.
So if you're listening on Apple and you could leave a review, that would help out a ton.
Let's catch up to Spotify.
All right, talk to you guys all later.
