Paul Ford: Hi, I’m Paul Ford.

Rich Ziade: And I’m Rich Ziade.

Paul: We are the co-founders of Aboard, and this is our podcast. Aboard is software that builds amazing business applications with AI. Very, very soon, you’ll be able to use a live demo on our website. And this is our podcast about how AI is changing the world of software.

[intro music]

Paul: Richard.

Rich: Yo.

Paul: I got a big thing I want to talk with you about.

Rich: Okay.

Paul: And so, let’s just get straight to it.

Rich: Let’s talk about it.

Paul: So, first of all, I should note, we’re both home.

Rich: We are.

Paul: And if there’s any stuff in the background, I’m sorry, I do not keep a tidy home office. It is what it is.

Rich: Yup.

Paul: But our studio is literally being assembled at the office right now. And we’re gonna, we’re gonna have just—we’re gonna be so shiny going forward. It’s going to be really exciting. You know, we’re experimenting with video here. I got a picture of an apple from the moon. Okay? What do you think that represents?

Rich: It looks like that famous shot of the moon where you’re looking out and it’s sort of a, almost like a crescent silhouette of the Earth, except it’s an apple. Like a Red Delicious apple.

Paul: Apple Rise.

Rich: Apple Rise. Yeah, exactly. So I’m guessing we’re gonna talk about the company Apple, that makes iPhones, and the Vision Pro Loneliness Device, also.

Paul: I don’t know why you’d even bring the Vision Pro up. Like, this is about about—

Rich: Somebody’s gotta bring it up, man.

Paul: This is a successful, proactive software podcast, not a depressing hardware podcast.

Rich: Fine.

Paul: Okay. Apple does a thing. It’s called WWDC. It stands for Worldwide Developers Conference.

Rich: Yes.

Paul: Okay. And I don’t, I shouldn’t have to explain much more, but it’s kind of a big deal. It’s been going on for decades. And it’s, it’s where Apple really kind of, like, locks in what its technology is, who’s going to use it, and it talks to the developers and says, “Aren’t you glad that you make apps for the iPhone? Wouldn’t you like to do this as well?” It’s that kind of thing.

Rich: Yeah, I mean, let’s explain what it is. It’s Apple’s developer ecosystem. I mean, the app world is massive for Apple. And also they use it as an opportunity to introduce the next version of their OS.

Paul: Mmm hmm.

Rich: So iOS for Mac, they’ll usually pick, like, a town in California and name it after that. And they have SDKs, essentially software tools that are made available to these developers. They want to get ahead of that, right? Because what they want to do is have the latest game capabilities or camera capabilities, so that when they launch their next device, which will look a lot like their last device, they’ll showcase apps that take advantage of where Apple’s going. It’s a community that they nurture, and that actually brings enormous value back to them as well.

Paul: That’s the thing. It’s the best way to know where they’re going. It’s when they actually first start to kind of open up and share where they’re headed. Because without developers doing things with them, they don’t get more apps. They want more apps, they want more programs.

Rich: That’s right. That’s right.

Paul: They want people to build on top of Apple. Apple’s more kind of foundational, for a lot of people, than you might think about, because you think about the iPhone and you think about Tim Cook—

Rich: Yes.

Paul: —and a new feature on your Apple Watch. So this is when they bring all that together. And the big subject, obviously this year, was AI. There was another one, which is they’ve made Glass, which is their new liquid glass interface.

Rich: Oh, goodness gracious.

Paul: I don’t even have the energy in me to talk about another Apple design pivot. Like, they just, every few years are like, “We got to refresh this. Let’s come up with something. Make it translucent.” And then every design nerd on the internet has this real strong opinion, and nothing matters.

Rich: Nothing matters. I mean, look, this one is inspired by mom’s Tupperware, mostly.

Paul: Mmm hmm.

Rich: Essentially. It’s kind of neat. Anyway, I will make an observation, that I think is very real for Apple. I think it’s really hard to distinguish the advances in hardware year to year. And Apple really wants you to upgrade. Like, that’s their business, essentially. Like, “Oh, you only have iPhone 14? You should get 16 and 17, and so on.”

Paul: I’m on an older one. I’m like two years in on this iPhone and I have no desire to get a new one. Like, they, it’s unfortunate for them, right, because it’s just, Moore’s Law got to a point where the software and the needs and the bandwidth—

Rich: It’s very good.

Paul: It’s really good.

Rich: Yeah. So, but I think what they do is, Paul, what they do is they have advances in software that they only make available to later models. They do it, it’s very subtle. Like, Apple Intelligence, which has been out about a year, my son has an Apple, I think 14?

Paul: Mmm hmm.

Rich: Which is about three years old, and he can’t use, like, the Siri Apple intelligence stuff. His phone is probably capable of it. They just locked it out, because they want to nudge you towards newer models and they’re using software more and more to do it because hardware, like you said, it’s just hard to differentiate anymore. Hardware is really good and it’s utterly capable.

Paul: I got to tell you, in that case, I think the Apple Intelligence stuff is really dependent on their neural AI chip frameworks.

Rich: That, I think you’re right. I think some of the newer cutting-edge AI stuff I think actually needs the hardware. Like it’s doing a lot of work on that phone. I’m talking about things like Dynamic Island?

Paul: Mmm hmm.

Rich: Or as I like to call it, Dark Phone Hole, but that was a working title, but it didn’t stick.

Paul: I gotta tell you, I have Dynamic Island. Whatever version I have. [laughter] I was like, “This is the goofiest thing. Who cares?”

Rich: And probably billions in differentiated revenue.

Paul: Because a son of a friend saw it over my shoulder and went, “Oh my God, you have Dynamic Island.”

Rich: Yeah, exactly, exactly. So they know how to, like, package that stuff up. Liquid Glass is probably not supported on, like, last week’s iPhone. [laughing]

Paul: No, that’s right, that’s right. So, you got—

Rich: Now, the AI stuff’s another story. That actually needs real horsepower and they’re tying it to the newer models.

Paul: So we’re at WWDC, we’re a bunch of developers.

Rich: Yep.

Paul: And Apple’s telling us about all the new stuff, the pretty pictures and whatever. Now, do you know what a framework is, if I say framework?

Rich: I do, but I think you should define it for our audience.

Paul: Okay, so a framework is like, okay, so let me give you an example. I use Apple Watch, and whenever I ride a Citi Bike around New York City it says, “Hey, it looks like you’re on a bike.”

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And I have a calorie-tracker app. I have a bunch of different health apps. And they can pull in some of that data—

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: About my bike ride.

Rich: Mmm hmm.

Paul: They can’t just help themselves. They can’t come in, jam an app onto my iPhone without anybody knowing and say, “Give me all their health and location data.” Right?

Rich: Correct.

Paul: You know how when you install an app and it’s like, okay, this one wants your, wants your location, it wants you to turn this on, it wants you to turn that on, that sort of thing?

Rich: Mmm hmm.

Paul: That’s built into the operating system. And the thing with, like, compared to desktop, like phones know where you are, they know your heart rate, they know who you’re with.

Rich: Mmm hmm.

Paul: Like, phones know a lot.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: So Apple has really locked that down. And they have these things called kits, like HealthKit, which tracks your health and it saves your heart rate and it does all that stuff.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: If you’re a developer and you want to build a health application, the code that you write uses HealthKit code that they provide.

Rich: Correct.

Paul: To access that data. So that’s health. When Apple said, “I want to do health,” that’s what they did.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: They said, “We’re going to create HealthKit, and you developers over there can go ahead and use it to build your own health apps.”

Rich: Correct.

Paul: “But you can’t go away, you can’t do stuff unless we let you do it.” And there’s a million kits.

Rich: Sure.

Paul: There’s like, ActivityKit for tracking your activities. I’m like, looking at—

Rich: Camera stuff, and phone stuff, and…

Paul: If you look at the list, it’s like…

Rich: Yeah, it’s nuts.

Paul: 100 of them before you even get out of the A’s.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Like, just hundreds and hundreds of ways to do things on the Mac. And so then they created this thing, Apple Intelligence. Okay? It’s about a year or two ago. They’re like, “Hey, we’re going to kind of make our own AI. We’re going to start embedding it in the phone, the chips are going to get smart and so on.” And everyone for a while has been a little underwhelmed by Apple’s AI moves.

Rich: Mmm hmm.

Paul: And I’m going to tell you why I think that is. And then you, you can push back. I just think it’s because they don’t have to move fast. This is a new thing. The new thing has a ton of risk. They see Sam Altman and OpenAI getting a lot of heat in the press, and there’s a lot of drama and a lot of cultural confusion. And they go, “We’ll take little bits of this and we’re not going to risk any aspect of our business on this stuff until we’re good and ready.”

Rich: Yeah, yeah, I think, by the way, this is their M.O. They’ve always been like this. They’re always a little slower.

Paul: Mmm hmm.

Rich: If you look at, like, bizarro innovations that come out either through apps or through other phones, Apple kind of takes its time.

Paul: With one exception—the iPhone was the exception there.

Rich: The iPhone itself. Yes, yes.

Paul: Yes.

Rich: That was a huge leap forward. But, like, as, I’ll give you an example, like, for a long time you couldn’t crop videos in Apple, in photos, in Apple, in Apple’s native photo app, right?

Paul: Mmm hmm.

Rich: Like, you couldn’t cut the edges off of a video. And a bunch of apps popped up that let you do it, right? And these were homegrown apps. They weren’t doing anything—it was like, “Wow, that’s ridiculous.” And then one day Apple just said, “Oh, we added that.” Like it just comes in a little bit later. They watch everyone. They sort of let this community and let these, this population of engineers and designers and app builders do their thing, and then they decide what graduates into a first-class citizen in the software.

So it’s actually pretty typical. They kind of take their time. They always have because they’re so guarded and so conservative about their own operating system and ecosystem. It’s just always been the move for them.

That’s why since the beginning on Android you could do anything. You could almost go down to, there were apps that let you turn your phone into crazy stuff, right? Like, they didn’t care. Android was like, “Yeah, go for it, knock yourself out.” And Apple was very guarded from, for a very long time. You could, you had a very small sort of surface area to play around in. Which is typical.

And I think here, same thing they watched. You called it. They’re sort of observing what’s going on. They also, I mean it’s worth saying, they don’t want an absolute AI catastrophe on their hands, with either bad information or adult content somehow surfacing on a kid’s phone. Like, they didn’t want any of that. There’s too much to lose for them.

Paul: So WWDC comes out and now they announce a thing, and everyone’s a little bit underwhelmed, but I kind of doubt the developers were. They announced a thing and it is called the On Device and Server Foundation Language Models. Okay? Let me just explain what they’re doing real fast and then we can discuss what it means.

So if you’re a developer, you use a programming language, and Apple would prefer you use the programming language Swift. So you use the programming language Swift.

Rich: Take a second and define Swift.

Paul: It’s a programming language. It sort of solves a lot of problems of the past around managing variables and writing apps and so on and so forth.

Rich: Managing memory. Yeah.

Paul: Mmm hmm.

Rich: Okay.

Paul: And if you use Xcode, which is their tool for writing code, it’s got a lot of Swift support. It’s very helpful. So if you’re a developer building apps, you’re using Swift. And if you want to use AI in your app, you want to generate a picture or create a prompt for somebody or something like that?

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: You write a couple lines of Swift where you put the prompt in the programming language, like, three or four lines.

Rich: Okay.

Paul: Pretty easy. If you’ve used ChatGPT, this will make intuitive sense to you. Then you compile it. And Apple, Apple trusts you know, it has a lot of these sort of, you’ve signed the application, you do all these things and you send it to Apple. Now your user can access AI either that’s on the phone using the neural chips with their own little tiny model, a 3-billion parameter model, just a little baby—

Rich: Mmm hmm.

Paul: That will still do all sorts of AI things, it just won’t do them as well as ChatGPT. And then if you need a little more horsepower, Apple has their own, like, total private cloud all set up, good to go secure, away from everything else.

Rich: Mmm hmm.

Paul: A sort of big-boy model that you can talk to that’s pretty close to ChatGPT.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: So now you’ve made an app, you’ve put it in the App Store, Apple approved it, you’re starting to make some money. It’s using AI and when it needs to do bigger AI things, it goes and talks to Apple’s AI. And Claude and ChatGPT and none of these guys, they don’t exist anymore as far as Apple’s considered.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: They’re not going to block the ChatGPT app. It’s not like that. So you can still use, like, Google on your phone, right?

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: But what they’re saying is, “Why don’t you do this our way? It’ll be safe, it’ll run on the phone, and you never have to go anywhere. Programming language all the way to user experience, Apple’s got AI built in, all that LLM goodness. Stop even looking anywhere else.”

Rich: A couple thoughts come to mind. Apple spent an ungodly amount of money creating their own Maps.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: The reason they did, the reason they did that—and it’s really good. Like, if you use Maps now, it took them, like, three to five years to get really good.

Paul: There were some big, there were big firings over Maps.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Like, it was—

Rich: Yeah, that was a big project. And why would they do that? They did that because they’ll be damned if their fate, like, Maps is a first-class app on any phone. Every phone, you need Maps. And they’d be damned if they’re going to rely on Google and you know, have Google hold their fate in their hands. And they, they just said, “Just do it, get hundreds or thousands of people and get it done. Because we can’t allow—we can’t be that vulnerable to having this critical piece of the phone experience be in someone else’s hands.”

And what you’re seeing here is them applying that same philosophy and saying, “No, no, no, no, no. Yeah, it’s real easy to latch onto one of these things. But we’re Apple, we have the resources, and we’re going to do it ourselves.”

So I think that from a, from a business-strategy perspective, that had to happen. Like, it was going to happen. And they were like, you know what, why not do it now rather than worry about it five years from now? Like what happened with Maps. And then scramble.

The other is, I think there’s obviously, you know, the controversy around copyright and privacy and all the issues that come with the insatiable appetite of AI, are coming. Coming for everybody. Like, it’s early days and it’s a free-for-all right now. It’s like, it’s the Nathan’s Hot Dog eating contest of technology right now. It’s just wieners getting stuffed into people’s mouths and, [laughter] and then they’re not really eating anymore. They’re sort of using water as sort of, as sort of a fluid to get the, get the hot dogs down. And no one’s enjoying it. And everybody’s disgusted, but everyone’s clapping for some reason. That’s AI.

Paul: I lost track of the metaphor, but I don’t want to interrogate it any further. Let me just leave that there and never return to it.

Rich: We’re in the carnival phase of [laughing] AI. I’m not even kidding. It’s like, “Hey, did you try the deep-fried Twinkies? Like, we’re in the deep-fried Twinkies phase of AI, let’s be honest.”

Paul: Well, and I think this is the future you’re looking at. Like, their demo app is as boring as can be. It’s a journaling app. And you know—

Rich: Yep.

Paul: The AI on the phone says things like, “Hey, how’d the family pizza-making night go?” And you think about it, like, maybe, maybe it can look at your calendar, because it’s not going to a server.

Rich: Yup, yup.

Paul: You can just look at the calendar and you know, and so it’s, Apple, they always like, they like things to be sweet and personal and friendly. Right? So I think—

Rich: Yeah. The level of unseen dysfunction in every Apple ad and case study is staggering. [laughing]

Paul: It’d be amazing. Like, yeah, those families never fight. Everybody just—

Rich: No, no, no. Yeah, exactly, exactly.

Paul: Apple’s—

Rich: I want that, I want, like, Veo 3 to continue the ad and just have everything unravel in the household, like, just in a really bad way. [laughing]

Paul: It’s wild that they make their own media, and it’s very telling that they made, like, Ted Lasso, because literally, in Apple world it’s, like, “Honey, I want a divorce. Let’s dance it out.” Right? Like that’s just—

Rich: Yeah, yeah.

Paul: You put on your iPod. Anyway—

Rich: It’s the modern-day version of, like, 1950s household, where mom’s popping Valiums and dad just never comes home.

Paul: Yes. Except everyone’s perfectly equal with, with, like, sort of cool global, like, hairstyles and—

Rich: Yeah, yeah, yeah. The outdoor gear. Lots of outdoor gear, always.

Paul: They love to put people, like, on a paddle board. That, to Apple, a paddle board is the native habitat of a typical human. [laughter] Not, like, in the basement watching Netflix and then scrolling their phone.

Rich: Yeah, well that’s the end of Apple partnering with us. We took care of Oracle last time. I called the dude—I said he looked like my aunt. And now we’re taking a shit on Apple. So this is going really good.

Paul: Apple doesn’t worry about things like us. That’s not Apple’s concern.

Rich: They also don’t buy anything. So we’re good, we could, we could have a good time. [laughing]

Paul: So here you’ve got this world.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: It’s very Apple world, and it’s very constrained, and I kind of like, okay, I think this is the pattern for how it goes, right? If you want to work with us, you’re going to work with our, we’re going to give you our LLMs, we’re going to give you our world, and you’re going to behave and we’re going to behave—

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: —and everything’s going to be just like it used to be. And I think this is very credible. Like, if I was building apps I would take this as a bit of a relief, because there’s a lot of drama and confusion and sort of broken technologies that come with LLMs and sort of the current crop of things, like, they just don’t always work, and they don’t work in sort of old-school classic software ways. And I know that Apple’s going to just give me a data object that I can use in my code, et cetera, et cetera. So now—

Rich: Honestly, man, there’s a real benefit to it. My mom refuses to get off Windows, just because she understands it.

Paul: I get it.

Rich: And, I mean, the Russian servers, she is a node on, like, some horrible network. [laughter] Like, she just clicks on everything. She has toolbars from like 2005 on her browser. The thing you have to get, you know, we’re giving Apple a lot of shit here. But the truth is they are extremely protective of their customer. They want the customer to have a safer experience. I mean that and that’s real. Look, we don’t have to get into the motives behind it. Obviously they’re a money making machine. But the truth is you’re going to be much more comfortable and safe, and they are more aggressively transparent about privacy and whatnot. And this is, I think, a lot behind a lot of this.

Paul: I mean, the proof is in the pudding, right? Like you don’t, there isn’t news on a regular basis about how they screwed up your privacy. They say they do, and they pretty much do. And there, there are modes on your phone to, like, really lock things down if you’re a journalist.

Rich: It’s a feature.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: It’s a feature of getting an iPhone is that you don’t really have to worry about vulnerabilities. It’s just, it’s a much more buttoned-down environment. Now, is it a little more, like we were joking before, generic and sort of predictable? Yes, that’s the point. It’s not an experimental ground to play on, right? That’s not what they are.

Paul: No, no. As a middle-of-the-road dad in America, like, predictable is okay, I’m gonna take it. Like, it’s just—

Rich: Exactly, exactly.

Paul: So now let me, let me throw this at you. This is the conversation I want to have for a few minutes because, okay, Apple went and did this. Obviously. This is what Apple does. We’re going to, you know, it’ll be on the phone in private and you’ll talk to our private server and it’ll behave in a certain way. And over on the other side you have all these LLMs but like a few big players.

Rich: Sure.

Paul: You know, DeepSeek in China and Mistral in France, but really, like, Anthropic and ChatGPT and, like, you know, Facebook kind of continually stirring the pot with its stuff.

Rich: Yup.

Paul: But, but here we are. And so I see an Apple and I’m, you know, Google is setting up all of its various things with Gemini and you can sort of see how every time you open a Google application on Drive or whatever—

Rich: It’s all glued on.

Paul: It’s like, oh my God, I gotta tell you, I gotta tell you, it’s kind of frustrating because I have, like, five accounts and it just—

Rich: Yeah, it’s a lot.

Paul: It won’t stop selling me AI features. Apple’s a little better at just kind of burying them and being like, “This will be cool when you find it.”

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Google has to tell you. Microsoft is starting to embed stuff. It’s a big investor in OpenAI. They’ve really focused on sort of cloud parts of this, like making everything available through Azure.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Amazon’s kind of lurking in the background. Where do you see this? Do you see this, in a couple of years, just landing as a technology that is part of the suite of cloud and operating-system services at a substrate, kind of like a, you know, it’s a piece of infrastructure, everybody starts to take it for granted? Or do you think that these weird players like Anthropic and ChatGPT sort of get to keep growing? I mean I feel, you know, we’re going to hit a point where they kind of either have to become operating systems or shrink.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Meanwhile they’re up against companies that are worth multiple trillions each.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: So you have a good brain for this. Get me—we’re 2025 now. I just looked at my calendar to check that and… [laughter] We’re—let’s say it’s 2027. It’s June 2027. Where are we?

Rich: When I look at this change, and it’s a massive one, right? Like, AI landing? No one had talked—like, AI was thrown around, but no one saw it coming. Like, everyone was like, “There’s AI research going on and there’s interesting stuff happening at Google,” but no one saw it coming.

And when it landed it landed into everyone’s laps. Like, it didn’t just land and it’s like, it was a video, and of something that’s coming in three years. Like, everyone had it, like, instantly, right?

Paul: Mmm hmm.

Rich: And so all of a sudden, like a tsunami, this thing just, it’s in students hands, it’s in—everyone at work is using it, everyone at home is using it. I don’t think it’s insinuated itself so deeply into, like, our lives where it’s like everything we do yet. But my God, it’s everywhere. Right?

And so I think what’ll happen, and who the—I may be completely wrong obviously, but what I think is going to happen is the consumer use of these tools is headed towards commoditization. The idea of typing something in and then getting a pretty thoughtful, accurate response? We’re kind of there. Like, it’s better than Google search because I don’t have to read the websites. It’s putting a paragraph together for me. It did the work for me. That is everyone’s—

Paul: In that case, it may not be accurate, but it does, like, the summarization. So we’re learning—

Rich: Yeah, that’s right, that’s right. And I think Google’s going to cover that. And they’re all doing it. And I’ve been using the tools recently to get some stuff done, and the truth is I interchange between them and they’re pretty much the same. And that’s very telling in terms of that capability, right?

Now what Apple has done is they’ve said, “Look, you have millions of pictures on your phone. You’ve got all these conversations on your phone. Why don’t we make that useful for you without ever taking it to the cloud, right?” And that’s good.

Paul: Or you already are taking to the cloud through iPhoto and—

Rich: Exactly, you are, you actually are. But we’re going to make sure it’s multi-tenant and it’s not going to be polluted, and we’re not selling your data. That’s like, you know, part of their whole offering.

So where are things going? I think the idea of going to an app, like, going to a website or downloading an app. Let’s jump ahead here. You’re not installing ChatGPT to ask AI stuff. You’re just not in five years. Like, you may have deals. And what is ChatGPT’s moat? If an Android phone, like, a future version like, you know, of Android that Google’s gonna put out, that box, I think it’s probably already doing it. I don’t have an Android phone. It’s just gonna do Apple, it’s gonna do Google AI, period. Like, it’s just what you get. It’s in the phone, it’s free. That’s like asking, “Hey, do you need another camera app?” Some people are into camera apps, but nobody downloads the camera app. Let’s face it, the camera app, the best one, is the one that’s on the phone.

And that’s going to be the case with AI. Asking questions, that’s going to be the case with AI, there’s no doubt about it. Why? Because these monster players are in the mix. They’re just playing. You mentioned Microsoft and OpenAI. The truth is it’s starting to get a little cold there. And it’s been in the press that Microsoft is starting to try to figure out its own way because they cannot, similar to Apple and Google Maps, they cannot be too dependent on a third party. They’re too big to allow that to happen.

Now, we could have another podcast and talk about AI and work and business. And I think that is, we’re in the infancy of that journey. I think the consumer part exploded and now they’re going to get appropriated by the players that are in your pocket. That is just life. And good luck, honestly. Good luck. I think Anthropic is better positioned because they seem to be skewing towards professional use more so. But this whole vision around like, “Oh, this is it, it’s we’re in your life and blah, blah.” Yeah, well, guess what’s in my life? My phone is in my life right now, and that’s going to become a first-class citizen. Now, will people go and get Perplexity for shits? Maybe. But man, when it’s the first box in your phone and that’s where it’s starting, it’s over. Right?

Paul: Well there’s another way to look at this and, and then I think we’ll leave it there, right? But the… So Anthropic and OpenAI have been working on all these tools that kind of use your computer for you, steered by AI. So you tell it what to do and literally it kind of moves the mouse around and opens the web browser and so forth.

Rich: Yeah. Yeah.

Paul: Because they don’t have control of the operating system.

Rich: That party’s going to end. That will end.

Paul: Apple, when it dropped this, right?

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: It kind of said, “Hey, that’s cool. You’re, like, messing around with the screen.”

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: We have the whole operating system in every single possible kit in a safe way for that to interact with AI that’s completely controlled. So—

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Health data, documents files, photos—

Rich: That’s right.

Paul: Music, images. We can process all of that either locally or remotely, and we know exactly where the mouse is at all times. We know where the user is, we know what they’re saying. We have their fingerprint. Like—

Rich: Paul, take it even further. You ever try installing apps that, like, control your screen, and that control your mouse, and, like, can have access to the desktop and all that? Apple makes you flip, like, 12 switches before you can do it.

Paul: Oh, it’s brutal. There’s one, there’s a loopback tool for recording audio and you have to, like, go in to, like, at kernel level.

Rich: Exactly. I would even argue that—and so that barrier, we’re cool with it because we’re nerds. But for most people, like, what the heck’s going on? Right? And so I think these are going to be native tools, and I think the keeper of that operating system like you’re talking about on the phone is going to take advantage of it. It’s natural and it’s normal. That’s what’s going to happen.

Paul: So what is, here’s my last question for you. What is ChatGPT three or four years from now?

Rich: They’re buying companies like Aboard. I’m not even kidding.

Paul: Yeah, you’re right.

Rich: They’re buying companies that give higher-order capabilities and have inroads into other more niche use cases and more specific cases. I mean look, this is a big world. Just government alone, and their ability to make it more efficient. Or pick your industry. Health research and medical research and drug innovation and drug research. I mean, it just goes on and on. Right?

And so I think what happened was a massive wave hit consumers, and there are already entrenched players that are going to capture that, those interactions. And then there is the rest of the world. Like, I don’t know, I don’t know the breakdown of software, but I think business software and, like, infrastructure is bigger than consumer software if you add it all up. So there’s plenty, plenty of places to go. I just think, I just think it’s going to be real hard to negotiate ChatGPT. I mean, there may be a partnership, I don’t know, between OpenAI and Microsoft where it’s on every, you know, Windows build or something like that. Maybe, I don’t know. I’m going to guess that that’s not going to be the case.

Paul: I mean maybe they’re more like Salesforce, right, where they buy Tableau and Slack and kind of assemble their ecosystem around research.

Rich: No one needs a GoFundMe here. Everybody’s going to be okay. But the old players are going to reclaim their land.

Paul: I don’t see enough of a moat. Right?

Rich: Correct.

Paul: Like, I see like a 5% moat.

Rich: Correct.

Paul: Yeah. And it so, so that’s coming. We’ll watch it, we’ll keep talking about it. It’s interesting to be playing in this world because, now, the thing I’ll leave on is, you know, you and I built a product with—we didn’t build much of it. We worked with people who built it. And in a, in a funny way we only, we use a lot of OpenAI stuff but only because their data is pretty clean coming out.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: But ultimately, we could switch to another—

Rich: It’s interchangeable.

Paul: Yeah, it’s, we’re not, we’re not really—there’s no huge moat. There’s no difference.

Rich: That’s right. And I think, you know, look people, that’s why, I mean there’s a rabid chase right now for data, specific data, tag data. Like, there’s a whole, like, arms race around getting information. Right?

Paul: Reddit is suing Anthropic because it’s like, “You didn’t have the right to take all of our stuff.”

Rich: Yup.

Paul: Because Reddit has so much valuable information.

Rich: Of course. Exactly. So—

Paul: All right, here we are. This is the future we’re entering. What are we building?

Rich: We’re building a tool, a platform, actually, that lets you ship custom software really, really fast with AI—like, really fast. Which means that the costs go down, the pain goes down, the time required goes down. Most people are still grappling with bad tools at work. And we can make it better really, really quickly. Follow this podcast, because we’re going to do a lot of show and tell. We think we’ve earned the right to have a full-blown tour of Aboard in a future podcast. So we hope you’ll enjoy that one. We’ll try to make it funny, we’ll make some jokes.

Paul: No, you have to apologize for this. People would be glad to know we’re not frauds.

Rich: Gosh, they really would, right? I hope so.

Paul: Yeah, no, it’s good. Everybody—no one listening to this is against the idea of a product demo.

Rich: [laughing] Like, the brutal comment thread that kicks in?

Paul: I’m done apologizing for my enterprise sensibilities.

Rich: Anyway, keep tabs on aboard.com. We’re not sure when this podcast will air, but you’ll be able to play with the tool right there on the site very soon.

Paul: No, I think right after this. Here it’s so keep an eye.

Rich: Keep an eye, keep an eye.

Paul: All right.

Rich: Demoing it, too. Have a great week, everyone.

Paul: We’re gonna be in our studio next week.

Rich: Hell yeah.

Paul: All right.

Rich: Bye.

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