Former Microsoft Executive Explains Where We Are in the AI Cycle w/ Anish Acharya & Steven Sinofsky

1. 0:00 – 0:35

   Introduction

   1. SSSteven Sinofsky0:00

      We're at the sixty-four K IBM PC era of the microcomputer. People are still trying to figure out how everything works.

   2. AAAnish Acharya0:08

      We have to relearn how to use this type of tool before we know how to be productive with it.

   3. SSSteven Sinofsky0:12

      Vibe writing is absolutely a thing.

   4. AAAnish Acharya0:15

      It's a place in which full autonomy can be fulfilled today.

   5. SSSteven Sinofsky0:18

      We've changed our view of excellent because we wanted more access.

   6. AAAnish Acharya0:22

      Is the bar for success what people can do today, or is the bar for success just something that's better than the alternative? Of course, this is dramatically better.

2. 0:35 – 2:17

   Discussing the Andrej Karpathy Talk

   1. ETErik Torenberg0:35

      Anish, Steven, we were having such a good conversation offline that I wanted to, to, to get this on the podcast. There are a few c- uh, topics we wanted to, to discuss. First, we were all fascinated by Andrej Karpathy's talk at, at, at Startup School. Steven, what did you find so interesting or what were your takeaways or, or reactions from it?

   2. SSSteven Sinofsky0:53

      Well, I totally love the, the talk. He did an unbelievable... Like, a philosopher king version of, of where we are, and I just found his, his metaphors really compelling. In fact, what, what I might do is even take it further back and just say, since he used an analogy of, like, where we are in computing, and lots of people are talking about the Windows 3 era and stuff like that, and having lived through all of them, I tend to think we're at the sixty-four K IBM PC era of the microcomputer. And the reason I think that is, is, is actually a technical one, which is that we're at the point where people are still trying to figure out how everything works, and all the coding and all of the energy is working around, like, these very basic working problems. Like, with the PC, it was like, okay, we have sixty-four K of memory, and our programs are all too big, and we have no display, and all these problems. And with AI, you know, people are like, "It's gonna replace Search, it's gonna replace Excel, and it's gonna replace all these things," but it, it doesn't add very well. It gives you a lot of errors. Like, the thing that you say it's gonna do, it just doesn't even do yet. So I feel like we're at a point that is just so, so early, and he did a fantastic job of sort of making that arc.

3. 2:17 – 3:23

   The Early Stages of AI and Tools

   1. AAAnish Acharya2:17

      You know, the thing that struck me the most was he talked a lot about our relationship with this new tool. You know, and in a sense, we, we wanna use it, like, in the same way that we've used all the other computing tools and technologies we've used in the past. But he really talked about this kind of inversion of the relationship of LLMs as people spirits, the fact that they have jagged intelligence. So to me, that sort of meta point he made was one of the most interesting. We have to relearn how to use this type of tool before we know how to be productive with it.

   2. SSSteven Sinofsky2:45

      A- and I, I think tools is a super interesting point because it... the talk is anchored in tools, but the world is, itself is anchored in tools, and the early stages of a platform are always about tools. And, and so you kinda could get, get a little confused. Like right now, of course, for- he was talking about vibe coding, clearly 'cause he, he pioneered the term, invented the concept, and is living it. And it, it's very interesting 'cause I actually think, um, coding is one domain that always works best early in a platform because, well, all the customers of the platform are developers, and they're gonna make their tooling kinda work and, and come along. But, but I really

4. 3:23 – 7:33

   Vibe Writing and Vibe Coding

   1. SSSteven Sinofsky3:23

      think that the most interesting thing for me, what's being underestimated in the near term is sort of vibe writing. And I j- and I, I mean, it seems weird to say anything with AI is underestimated 'cause-

   2. AAAnish Acharya3:34

      [laughs]

   3. SSSteven Sinofsky3:34

      ... Lord knows that's not where we are.

   4. AAAnish Acharya3:36

      Mm-hmm.

   5. SSSteven Sinofsky3:36

      But the thing is is that vibe writing is, is so here. Like, if you're in college, you're already vibe writing, and, you know, businesses are still working through the, "Well, can we use this? This doesn't seem appropriate." And that's a thing I've definitely lived through with word processors, with the micro- I, you know... I had to get permission from the dean in college to use a computer to write papers. And so, so, but this vibe writing is absolutely a thing, and it is really, really no different than when calculators showed up and all of a sudden just doing math homework involved using a calculator. And people were like, "Well, you're not gonna know how to do math in the future." And it's like, "I won't have to know how to do math." That's, like, the whole point-

   6. AAAnish Acharya4:17

      [laughs]

   7. SSSteven Sinofsky4:17

      ... of a tool. Like, I have a power drill, so I do not know how to use, like, one of those Amish drill things.

   8. AAAnish Acharya4:23

      [laughs]

   9. SSSteven Sinofsky4:23

      Like, I, you know, and the world moves up the stack. And so that's where we are, and it's just super exciting.

   10. AAAnish Acharya4:29

       What I love about the vibe writing concept actually is it's a place in which full autonomy can be fulfilled today. So you can ask the model to vibe write something, you know, really detailed and compelling, and it'll do a great job. Whereas with vibe coding, I think there's a ton of constraints as to what the model can actually do versus what it can conceptually do, and understanding those boundaries and constraints is gonna define a lot of the text to code stuff for the next two years.

   11. SSSteven Sinofsky4:54

       Well, I'd push back a, a little bit on that because I, of course, I agree on the coding side-

   12. AAAnish Acharya4:58

       Yeah

   13. SSSteven Sinofsky4:58

       ... and I think there's a lot of develop- One of the things developers do early in a platform is they, they love to tell you that they're doing something every day and it's working, but it, it actually just isn't, and that's just what happens early in a platform. They tell you all these things that they say are easy, and-

   14. AAAnish Acharya5:14

       [laughs]

   15. SSSteven Sinofsky5:14

       ... they're actually not, and they, they spent 86, 18 hours struggling with something that didn't work. But on the vibe writing side, it also hits a point that I just think is so, so important which is, yeah, you can prompt it to spew out a bunch of stuff, but, like, if you have a job and your salary depends on you submitting that or you're a student and your grade depends on you submitting that, it, it actually better be right, and you can't just, like, say, "Look, I vibe wrote this, and here you go." And, and, and I think people don't get confused when it comes to, like, math. Like, everybody knows you have to go check the math if you ask it-

   16. AAAnish Acharya5:49

       Mm-hmm

   17. SSSteven Sinofsky5:49

       ... to do a table and then add a column that does math. But we're gonna just see endless, endless human wasn't in the loop vibe writing things, and it's just that with programs you can't really see that right away because in order to actually distribute it or get someone to use it, you have to at least fix the initial bugs.We'll only see them later when there are security bugs, authentication bugs, passwords stored in plain text, or a zillion other problems that are gonna happen from vibe coding.

   18. AAAnish Acharya6:17

       I mean, in w- in a sense, we've seen this already, right? We saw a bunch of lawsuits that were citing case precedent from cases that don't exist. So maybe this is actually the operative point, which is there's full autonomy, there's partial autonomy. Maybe partial autonomy in writing is moving us from writer to editor, but you still have to be the editor.

   19. SSSteven Sinofsky6:33

       Yeah. We should also give him credit. I mean, he... Many people have talked about this, but he did a fantastic job using the Iron Man analogy of, of how we're gonna have, you know, a s- a, a autonomy, partial autonomy, and a slider to control what you want. I actually think that's a fantastic a- analogy and a way of thinking it that gives you a very clear picture from the movies if y- you live through the movies. And but it... at the same time, it, it's still, uh, people are very, very aggressive on their timeline of agents.

   20. AAAnish Acharya7:04

       Yes.

   21. SSSteven Sinofsky7:04

       And there's a very, very long history in trying to automate things that turn out to be very, very difficult to automate. And so I, I think that one, it, he... And he did a fantastic job. He, he said, "People are talking about, like, the year of agents." Yeah, that's a good consultant phrase. We're a, just like he said, we're in the decade of agents, and it's gonna take a decade for things to be anywhere near living up to agentification as a meme.

   22. AAAnish Acharya7:31

       You know, it, it's an interesting point.

5. 7:33 – 15:13

   Automation and Human Judgment

   1. AAAnish Acharya7:33

      I think a lot about agents as applied to financial services, and I think there's a set of problems in financial services that are high friction, low judgment. So for example, when I wanna go refinance my personal loan, I don't really feel attached to any sp- specific brand of a personal loan provider. I just want the cheapest rate. So it's actually a very low judgment decision. But going and researching and applying for a personal loan is a high friction process. That's something I would love to delegate to an agent. I think it can do a nice job. Whereas doing my taxes, wow, like, Steven, how much risk do you wanna take on your taxes? How many things do you wanna report or not report? That requires an enormous amount of judgment, and of course, it also is high friction. So when I think of the two by two of where is automation gonna come first, I think a lot about high friction, low judgment.

   2. SSSteven Sinofsky8:16

      I, I wanna build on that 'cause I, I actually think it's super important to also consider that for anyone to offer the alternatives to, to the market, there has to be an ability to differentiate, to explain. And, and so you end up with this kinda thing where, like, I just want the cheapest flight. And of course, for 20 years, all the flight ch- searches and stuff has worked on the cheap... But it turns out that's not actually what you want.

   3. AAAnish Acharya8:40

      That's right. [laughs]

   4. SSSteven Sinofsky8:40

      Plus, a lot of people wanna intervene in presenting your choices to you.

   5. AAAnish Acharya8:45

      Yes.

   6. SSSteven Sinofsky8:45

      And so I don't... Like, this idea that all choice in life is gonna be reduced to some headless API-

   7. AAAnish Acharya8:52

      Right

   8. SSSteven Sinofsky8:52

      ... I don't understand. People have to go build that and make a living building those things. So to your, to your example of, like, refinancing a home-

   9. AAAnish Acharya9:00

      Yes

   10. SSSteven Sinofsky9:00

       ... like, the only reason that it, it can exist as a search problem today-

   11. AAAnish Acharya9:04

       Yeah

   12. SSSteven Sinofsky9:04

       ... is because the different people who wanna refinance you can target you with an ad and attract you as a customer and differentiate themselves on that offering.

   13. AAAnish Acharya9:13

       Right.

   14. SSSteven Sinofsky9:13

       And if you can't do that, then your ability to actually automate that task isn't gonna exist 'cause there's no economic incentive to just be, "Hi, I'm the headless, faceless, nameless, low price mortgage leader."

   15. AAAnish Acharya9:26

       That's right. [laughs]

   16. SSSteven Sinofsky9:26

       It's not really a business.

   17. AAAnish Acharya9:27

       That's right.

   18. SSSteven Sinofsky9:28

       Like, there's no, nothing there. Just like, you know, headless, faceless, nameless food isn't a thing. It doesn't show up in a white can labeled food.

   19. AAAnish Acharya9:36

       [laughs]

   20. SSSteven Sinofsky9:37

       And then you consume it, and you're, "Okay, all good. I have food now."

   21. AAAnish Acharya9:40

       Well, maybe Soylent, but yes. [laughs]

   22. SSSteven Sinofsky9:42

       Now, in the future, in the dystopian future of Repo Man, that's where we end up. But that's not gonna happen.

   23. AAAnish Acharya9:46

       I want the cheapest flight as long as it's not on Spirit Airlines.

   24. SSSteven Sinofsky9:49

       Right. I want the cheapest flight, but I'm traveling with a family of three. I don't wanna leave at 5:00 AM.

   25. AAAnish Acharya9:53

       No red-eye. [laughs]

   26. SSSteven Sinofsky9:54

       I... Yeah, like, it's just, I want miles on this airline.

   27. AAAnish Acharya9:57

       Yes. Yes. Yes.

   28. SSSteven Sinofsky9:57

       You know? A lot of things don't add up to that. And I, I have a s- this is a real thing in business. It's a thing on the producer and the consumer side. Consumers really, really want much more choice than they often think they do, and anyone who's bought anything on Amazon knows they complain about the choice, but they really don't want just, you know, like, phone case to show up as the thing 'cause it was $6.

   29. AAAnish Acharya10:21

       I think this is a real through line t- through the talk, um, you know, which is partial autonomy, jagged intelligence. Karpathy is just talking a ton about the constraints of the technology, which I think is the right thing for us to be thinking through trade-offs around as builders.

   30. SSSteven Sinofsky10:36

       And he does a great job, very much as this philosopher that I love. His delivery, his tone, e- he really, really... Don't just go read the summaries. Don't read a post. Go just watch the video-
6. 15:13 – 15:55

   The Future of Product Management

   1. AAAnish Acharya15:13

      You know, a field in which this question comes up a ton is product management. I've had so many conversations with product managers over the last two years about the death of product management, it's the end of the field, why do we need PMs? And I think, you know, our sort of developer generation has developed a real resentment towards product managers, which is a different conversation. With that said, I think that the product management job is the job of addressing ambiguity, and it's ambiguity that prevents progress from being made. Sometimes it's execution, decision-making, product design. That will not change. The nature of business and human interaction in companies is these complex adaptive systems where there will always be ambiguity. I think you'll always need judgment, and you'll always need somebody who looks like a product manager.

7. 15:55 – 17:54

   Platform Transitions and Vibe Coding

   1. SSSteven Sinofsky15:55

      Yeah, I think that really gets to the sort of the vibe coding sort of challenge we're dealing with, which is, like, how fast can we go text to app? Uh, and I think, you know, here what's so interesting in, in the long arc of platform transitions is that we're also having this platform transition happen not just on the, on, out in the open. We, you know, we've had that before, like back when in the earliest days of computing, these platform transitions happened in user group meetings, like at the Cubberley Community Center down the street-

   2. AAAnish Acharya16:24

      Mm-hmm

   3. SSSteven Sinofsky16:24

      ... or in magazines or in newsletters, and then with news groups, then the internet, and so on. You know, the whole internet was all ICQ, and it was all in the open. But now it's, like, happening on CNN, on the nightly news. You're, you know, everyone knows about the platform transition that, that's happening, in particular on social and on, in Discord. And so what's happening is you're getting a lot of, like, vibe coding for clout.

   4. AAAnish Acharya16:48

      Mm-hmm.

   5. SSSteven Sinofsky16:48

      And so you're getting a lot of this, like, "I had an idea, I prompted it, and it worked, and here I am."

   6. AAAnish Acharya16:55

      [laughs]

   7. SSSteven Sinofsky16:56

      "And, and, and I..." You know, at some point, I just go, like, "I, I'm calling BS on that. That's, like, not a thing." And then I sound like an old person-

   8. AAAnish Acharya17:02

      [laughs]

   9. SSSteven Sinofsky17:02

      ... and because some people think I am, it... I don't, but some people think I am.

   10. AAAnish Acharya17:06

       I don't either.

   11. SSSteven Sinofsky17:07

       You know, it looks like, hey, you know, you're just being old.

   12. AAAnish Acharya17:11

       Yes.

   13. SSSteven Sinofsky17:11

       But then you, you dig in and you find out, like, wow, you're prompting. Although it's English-like, it turns out you're just programming.

   14. AAAnish Acharya17:21

       Yes.

   15. SSSteven Sinofsky17:21

       And you're just programming in prompts.

   16. AAAnish Acharya17:23

       Yes.

   17. SSSteven Sinofsky17:23

       And people are like, "Oh, this is... What we're gonna do is we're just gonna get the model to require a little bit more structure." And I'm like, "You're writing a new programming language."

   18. AAAnish Acharya17:32

       Yes.

   19. SSSteven Sinofsky17:32

       And we're just... Like, this path of text app and vibe coding is just developing a new language, which is super cool.

   20. AAAnish Acharya17:39

       Yes.

   21. SSSteven Sinofsky17:40

       Like, Lord knows, like, the world is built on programming languages. In the '80s, if you drove slowly past a computer science department trying to get a PhD, they would just invent a new programming language right then and there-

   22. AAAnish Acharya17:51

       [laughs]

   23. SSSteven Sinofsky17:51

       ... if you stood outside the building for too short a time.

8. 17:54 – 23:07

   The Evolution of Programming Languages

   1. SSSteven Sinofsky17:54

      But we, we can't lose sight of the fact that the arc of programming has been one of, of basically overpromise and underdeliver. You know, when I was in college, like, the theory was the market was gonna need so many programmers that the whole employment force would be, the whole workforce would just be software people.

   2. AAAnish Acharya18:12

      Mm-hmm.

   3. SSSteven Sinofsky18:12

      And, and that never happened. And now here we are, we're not gonna need any. They're all just gonna go away. And I think it was extreme in 1990, and it's extreme today.

   4. AAAnish Acharya18:21

      Yes.

   5. SSSteven Sinofsky18:22

      And, and I think that the, the, the big thing is this overpromising at each transition. You know, even just most recently, low code.Who, like, who does any- who even says that word anymore? Like, it's a... Like, we're not allowed to even mention it. And it's because, like, it's always the same thing, which is, yes, if all you're doing is a very straightforward app that looks like all the other straightforward apps, but with, like, a domain spin-

   6. AAAnish Acharya18:46

      Mm-hmm

   7. SSSteven Sinofsky18:46

      ... or a branding logo-

   8. AAAnish Acharya18:46

      Mm-hmm

   9. SSSteven Sinofsky18:46

      ... or something, you know, we see this with, with Wix and with website templates.

   10. AAAnish Acharya18:50

       Mm-hmm.

   11. SSSteven Sinofsky18:51

       Like, it's possible. But you're not gonna run a company on any of those.

   12. AAAnish Acharya18:56

       I totally agree. Where I disagree, actually, is I think that the, the language, the language model in this case, but the language in your metaphor is improving at a dramatic rate underneath these things. So while I think almost all these products today, they sort of... They're good at prototyping, they're trying to push into refinement. They're not really usable as things that you can actually deploy to production at all. In fact, most of the cool demos you see on Twitter don't work three days later. So they're very much in the prototyping phase, but the programming language and the metaphor is improving dramatically. I think we'll, we'll get there, or at least make more progress than we think, uh, versus a traditional programming language like object-oriented that didn't feel like it 100x the number of programmers or 1/100 the amount of time to ship something to production. We just got, you know, new tools, uh, and, and sort of new problems to solve.

   13. SSSteven Sinofsky19:44

       Well, of course, you- you're benefiting from hindsight.

   14. AAAnish Acharya19:47

       Yes. Yes.

   15. SSSteven Sinofsky19:47

       And that's a key, a key thing. First, I obvio- I agree. Like, y- we're in an exponential improvement cycle-

   16. AAAnish Acharya19:55

       Yes

   17. SSSteven Sinofsky19:55

       ... with the models.

   18. AAAnish Acharya19:56

       Yes.

   19. SSSteven Sinofsky19:56

       So any predictive power goes out the window.

   20. AAAnish Acharya19:58

       Correct.

   21. SSSteven Sinofsky19:59

       And anyone who says, like, something negative is just gonna be, like-

   22. AAAnish Acharya20:03

       [laughs]

   23. SSSteven Sinofsky20:03

       ... you're gonna be the next person who says the internet is gonna be-

   24. AAAnish Acharya20:05

       Fax machine

   25. SSSteven Sinofsky20:05

       ... a passing fad like a fax machine.

   26. AAAnish Acharya20:07

       [laughs]

   27. SSSteven Sinofsky20:07

       And that's a bad... You just don't wanna be there. And it turns out also, that's a case where having lived through them, you get very shy about, like, making predictions because you see how foolish people look for a long time.

   28. AAAnish Acharya20:19

       [laughs]

   29. SSSteven Sinofsky20:19

       But, like, like, take something like object-oriented. I mean, this thing was hyped to the moon-

   30. AAAnish Acharya20:25

       Mm-hmm
9. 23:07 – 28:06

   AI in Creative Writing

   1. SSSteven Sinofsky23:07

      now.

   2. AAAnish Acharya23:07

      Do you think there will be best-selling novels that are, you know, entirely AI-generated or nearly entirely g- in, in the next few years?

   3. SSSteven Sinofsky23:13

      Abs- 100%. 100... And, and I think, I don't think Stephen King is gonna do that, and, but I think there'll be some new writer who will probably write it under a pseudonym, and a year after the novel is written and has been made into a movie, they'll say, "Oh, by the way, I got the plot idea from a prompt, and then I just started having writing, and I was editing it along the way." Uh, absolutely. And the copyright suit that follows from training models and stuff, that's a different issue.

   4. AAAnish Acharya23:39

      [laughs] I, I think there's two things on this actually that are really interesting. So one is, you know, these language models are these averaging machines, and you don't... Uh, with art, you almost definitionally don't want the average of all the novels or all the writing or all the authors. You want something that's at the edge. So how do we actually point them in a direction such that they can be at the edge of culture, which I think is important for making great art? I think the other thing is a lot of the artists don't yet know how to use the new tools, and we're gonna see artists that are native in the technology. Instead, what we're seeing a lot, you know, out there, what's called the slop, has just been a lot of this low barrier to entry art that's being created, which is great because it gives people the sort of fulfillment of creative generation. I think what we're talking less about is, "Hey, how is the ceiling being raised for artists because they have access to these technologies?"

   5. SSSteven Sinofsky24:27

      You know, without going all Duchamp on what is art-

   6. AAAnish Acharya24:30

      Yes

   7. SSSteven Sinofsky24:30

      ... I mean, you know, we all, like, b- bad sitcoms are part of society too, but I, I think it's important. We tend to focus on, like, the very, very best of things, but most everything isn't only the very best. In business writing-It's all slop.

   8. ETErik Torenberg24:46

      [laughs]

   9. AAAnish Acharya24:46

      Yeah.

   10. SSSteven Sinofsky24:46

       I mean, this is why-

   11. ETErik Torenberg24:47

       [laughs]

   12. SSSteven Sinofsky24:48

       I-- look, I've written a lot of business writing, so I can say this confidently a-about what I've written and what gets written. But like, like take something completely mundane that a lot of people in Silicon Valley spend a lot of time working on, like the enterprise software case study.

   13. ETErik Torenberg25:04

       Mm-hmm.

   14. SSSteven Sinofsky25:05

       Uh, like I'm telling you, GPT generates a better enterprise-

   15. ETErik Torenberg25:10

       [laughs]

   16. SSSteven Sinofsky25:10

       ... case studies faster than the typical marketing associate does at a company in like one-millionth the effort. And it... Uh, do you need the... Does the content need to exist? It actually does. Like there... Like, it's just an important part of the selling process.

   17. AAAnish Acharya25:25

       Yes.

   18. SSSteven Sinofsky25:25

       And, and so we... Yeah, just like with, with so- at the extreme, like with something like medical diagnosis. The-- We, we tend to think about the most obscure diseases, the most difficult to understand problems with the finest hospitals with the most resources. But you have to remember, like eighty percent of the world has no access to anything.

   19. AAAnish Acharya25:47

       Yes.

   20. SSSteven Sinofsky25:47

       So, so whatever, wherever you think of medical LLM is as in the slop scale-

   21. AAAnish Acharya25:55

       Yes

   22. SSSteven Sinofsky25:55

       ... most people don't have access to anything average. So y-you have to... We, we, we have to just make sure that the whole debate does not center around, you know, like what is the Francis Ford Coppola using as the book, and who are-

   23. AAAnish Acharya26:11

       Yes

   24. SSSteven Sinofsky26:11

       ... the actors-

   25. AAAnish Acharya26:12

       Yeah

   26. SSSteven Sinofsky26:12

       ... and who is the cinematographer? 'Cause like, you know, 'cause that corporate case study, well, they often go and interview the person and film it. Well, like all of a sudden we see it today, those things are done over Zoom.

   27. AAAnish Acharya26:25

       Yes.

   28. SSSteven Sinofsky26:25

       So suddenly flying in with this... We're getting a satellite and booking a stu- We, we've changed our view of excellent because we wanted more access, and, and I think that that's absolutely gonna happen. Should you get graded on slop in school? That's a different problem. But m-most stuff is pretty average.

   29. AAAnish Acharya26:44

       The world needs more slop, says Steven.

   30. SSSteven Sinofsky26:46

       I, I, I feel like this isn't a press interview where you can put words in my mouth like that.
10. 28:06 – 30:32

    Google's Position in the Tech Industry

    1. AAAnish Acharya28:06

       There was a lot of conversation around Google and how Google had sort of fallen behind and lost their ability to make new things. They released a ton of new software at every part of the stack in IO. You know, what do you think that says for Google, about Google? Do you think the sort of demise of Google is overstated?

    2. SSSteven Sinofsky28:22

       Well, of course, I think the demise of Google is an absurd proposition.

    3. AAAnish Acharya28:25

       [laughs]

    4. SSSteven Sinofsky28:26

       The demise of a giant company is, is a crazy thing to say. Um, they will... I mean, like I was just, uh, driving in, I was listening on CNBC, someone, some investor or whatever, talking their book, talking about, um, about IBM and is the one to buy. I, I almost wanted to pull over to the side of the road and think-

    5. AAAnish Acharya28:48

       [laughs]

    6. SSSteven Sinofsky28:48

       ... what, what universe am I in where, where this company that has died like nine times in my career?

    7. AAAnish Acharya28:55

       Right.

    8. SSSteven Sinofsky28:56

       And so death of is just such a dumb thing. Losing a position of influence, however, is a very real thing.

    9. AAAnish Acharya29:01

       Mm-hmm.

    10. SSSteven Sinofsky29:02

        In, in these platform transitions, big companies have an enormous asset, which is the, the shock and awe asset. And so they have the ability to j-- to, to tell the story called, "We're pivoting our whole company around this, and we're a zillion-dollar company, and here is like a full assault across the board for every single asset we have and every single category the world is talking about-

    11. AAAnish Acharya29:32

        Mm-hmm

    12. SSSteven Sinofsky29:33

        ... that matters." And that's what, that's what you could do. And so, uh, it was totally predictable that Google would show up with like literally the B2 bombers of, of software.

    13. AAAnish Acharya29:45

        Mm-hmm.

    14. SSSteven Sinofsky29:46

        But the question is really much deeper than that, and it's really will they alter their context of how they build products and their go-to-market? Because that's really what undermines the big technology companies. And so what I'm looking at with, with Google is not like can they present all the technologies in the context of Google search and ads-

    15. AAAnish Acharya30:10

        Mm-hmm

    16. SSSteven Sinofsky30:10

        ... but can they transform the way they think to something new? Because that's really where the disruption is gonna happen.

    17. AAAnish Acharya30:18

        I love that point.

    18. ETErik Torenberg30:19

        Awesome. Uh, Anish, Steven, thanks so much for this week in, uh-

    19. SSSteven Sinofsky30:22

        Sure thing.

    20. ETErik Torenberg30:22

        This Week in Consumer AI.

    21. SSSteven Sinofsky30:22

        Thank you. Super fun. [outro music]

Episode duration: 30:43