Techstrong Gang – January 9, 2025

Hey, everyone. What's that giant sucking sound you're hearing? Well, it's all the dollars flowing into ai.

You're watching Text On Gang. Hey, everyone. Happy Thursday.

It's Alan Shimmel here in our Boca Raton Techstrong headquarters, and you're watching another episode of Text on Gang. As usual, we've got a great group of people here in the gang and some interesting topics to dive into. Let me start off by introducing our gang members today.

I think making his first appearance in the new year. He took a regal couple weeks off as any royalty member Wood. It's our, you know, resident SAR of Silicon Valley, John Schwartz.

Hey, John. How are you, man? Happy New Year.

I hap Happy New Year everyone. Um, uh, yeah, we spent a few days in Scottsdale, Arizona for smart NR, but I'm, I'm happy to be back. I couldn't help myself during the time I was off.

I actually, I'll admit I wrote a couple things. Did. You just can't help it.

Scottsdale was nice. It was nice. It was, uh, in the seventies.

I haven't been to Arizona a few years, um, but it was good. It was all good and ready to go. Excellent, excellent.

Joining us, I, I assume, well, you know what, Anne, I gotta give you kudos, man. You, your, your backgrounds are always tuned into the upcoming holiday. So is this still a bit of a Happy New Year thing behind you there, or, Yes.

Yes. Only because it feels seasonally inappropriate to go to Valentine's right from Christmas. Yeah.

It might be a little early for Valentine's. Yeah. So I just wanted, you know, it's kind of a gloomy time right now of your, so I thought a little sparkle.

Look, it's a great time to buy Christmas and New Year decorations. They're basically 50% off. Um, Oh, yeah, Yeah, yeah.

I, I stocked up on my Hanukkah decorations right after the first of the year. Of course, we'll put them away for next year, but hey, 50% the deal's a deal. Um, anyway, that's pretty funny.

Uh, and we're gonna work like heck to get your name right this year. Thank you. And a whole award.

Yes and no. I know. And, and a whole award.

You got it. Okay. Thanks, Anne.

Thanks for joining us. You know, ed, people, you know, we have you on here once a week. People may not know a lot about what you do when you're not, you know, supporting your gang colors.

Why don't you tell us a little bit? Well, I go into companies and I help them grow through data and, uh, analytics, basically. Um, I am a growth expert.

This here is the book I wrote in 2017, O'Reilly book, the, uh, SEO battlefield. Um, and I love going and helping companies grow, uh, whether it's organic, paid search, search is my game, and I love it. I have an agency with a team of six, uh, that I've been running since 2009 on my own.

Wow, that's great. What's the name of the agency? Circle Click.

Very cool. Mike, you should take note of that. Okay.

Jumping from Anne to one of our regular, I think Mike, I don't know if Mike's frozen or what, jumping from Anne to one of our regular gang members joining us from, uh, frigid, frigid Colorado. It's our own. Mitch Ashley.

Hey, Mitch. How are you? Man, it's In the single digits this morning.

So, yes, it's a little cold, a little cold in here in Colorado, but, you know, we have her, we have her sprints in January where we get some cold weather. It'll warm up, I tell you. It makes me feel better.

I'm, I'm more bundled up here in my sweater. It's 50 degrees. Um, what am what am I I'm soft.

I've gone soft. Um, Florida soft. Florida soft.

Anyway, Mitch, thanks for being on. And then joining us today from Harrison, New York with the state-of-the-art DSL connection on his internet. It's our one and only Chief Content officer, Mike Ard.

Hey, Mike, how are you? I'm doing well. I think my internet connection may be frozen, though.

That seems to be what the issue is, so we'll see how it Goes. Okay. Let's hope it unfreezes or thaws out as they say, and we'll go from there.

So, as I mentioned for today's show, Thursday's show, we're gonna start off with that giant sucking sound. You may be hearing it's actually AI soaking up investment dollars at an unprecedented pace. Um, Mike, I don't know if you want to kick it off or we're going over to John on that, but why don't we, we, Mike, let's see how it works with your connection.

Yeah, let's, let's just go right to John on that and the internet connections and see how it goes. Okay, John, what? That sounds good.

Well, it's free flowing money. It is. This is a gold rush.

This is a land grab. I mean, to me, in a sense, there are a number of things that are happening, and we'll go up, we'll go first with the news and then more for a broader context. But basically what's happening is philanthropic just said they need to raise more funding to get to a $60 billion evaluation.

OpenAI, which is moving to a for-profit model, needs more capital than we'd imagine. Now, within context, think about this. Anthropic alone has raised $8 billion from Amazon.

OpenAI has raised at least $13 billion from Microsoft. They're pouring money into operations because in a sense, there is so much at stake in a sense now, not the only ones. There's this gold rush, as I said, a land grab, money's pouring into these.

I, I keep hearing the phrase, trillion dollar industries being bandied about buildings are sprouting. Even out here, I, I was, uh, at a cybersecurity event a couple days ago, and a, a guy there was saying to me, who are all these new buildings that are cropping up along Highway 1 0 1? There?

A lot of them are startups. A lot of 'em are expansion of companies. Money's being just injected by the billions into these companies like OpenAI, which want to go public.

Nvidia just hit a record stock price. Uh, it, it's, and it's, and basically, to put it really bluntly, if we took a shot at tequila every time someone said trillion in AI in the same sentence, we'd all be extremely happy. It's, it's crazy.

4 billion into AI next year. 6 billion. This is a, this is, this is crazy, and I've never seen anything like this, or I haven't seen anything like this in at least 25 years, because this is considered the go-to year for AgTech ai and beyond that physical ai.

So, and again, as you, so what put it so well, Alan, this is a money sucking sound, but I think it's necessary, or these companies think it's necessary for the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. I, I totally agree with you, John, and I think it's interesting. And philanthropic seems to be a favorite among my data scientists, decision scientist friends, philanthropic is sort of viewed as the underdog, but looking at those numbers, they obviously are not much of an underdog.

The company that I've been watching in the space is perplexity, obviously as an seo O I'm interested in them because they're a search engine. But I mean, just a year ago they were valued at a billion. And now that that investment from SoftBank in the middle of the year last year took them to 3 billion.

And then all of a sudden this year, uh, January, they come out strong in a $9 billion valuation in a $500 million round, which sounds like chump change compared to Anthropic. But I mean, think about that. In about 12 months, 13 months, you go from one to 9 billion.

Um, it, it's, it almost seems like play money. You know, it's staggering. One thing I was gonna, I I, I should have mentioned as well, is that I think there is this incredible rush and this no coincidence that it has something to do with a change in the political climate.

Also, the economy is doing fairly well. So these companies see this opportunity to not only go public 'cause we've had a down IPO markets, but they see opportunity of merger and acquisition activity with the new administration, which might allow more of that. At least that's what I, we, that's the indication we're getting.

Um, and I, I mentioned, uh, we mentioned philanthropic. A 60 billion open is about 160 billion. And, um, it's, this is this, I mean, it's go time.

And if you listened, and you guys talked about the CES Nvidia keynote speech by Gen said, but he, he mentioned every industry that they were getting into with AI and the amount of money that was at stake. And he talked about manufacturing with Keon and Accenture. He talked about, uh, autonomous avs with Toyota.

He mentioned perplexity, and, and, and, and it's just, it, it, to me, it's staggering. And when you see every big tech company just chasing this as aggressively as I've ever seen them, it is, it's a game changer. com or the nineties, or the, you know, the, uh, cloud.

And it's interesting, I was talking with, um, one of our analysts who heads up the CIO insights, uh, practice at future. And he mentioned to me, which I, I've kind of forgotten about, in focusing on the, on the, uh, fortune 500 companies for large companies, they're definitely investing in ai. But because, uh, because, uh, um, agenda of AI came on so quickly, they don't, they don't quickly change their budget cycles and, and suddenly reallocate a whole bunch of money to AI quickly.

It takes a couple of years, and in the meantime, they sort of rob Peter to pay Paul to get some AI projects done while they cut back and kind of play the budget games. Meanwhile, they're putting more and more budget against ai. Um, but if you look at the numbers, it's really small compared to like, security and data and, um, you know, some of, so networking things like that.

But it, it'll catch up. So I feel like we are at the bottom of that hockey stick. I always worry, are we over rotating on building so much infrastructure?

But I think about, you know, the large enterprise and what they could potentially spend on AI in the next two to three years really can step up to what the market's building. So it's, the timing may be right for that, but it's interesting just the pace of how it's happened, sort of outstripped, at least large enterprise ability to really fund the projects they want to fund. You know, the really weird thing was when Jensen was talking about, uh, AI at CES, he kinda lumped it all together in a sense.

He talked about generative ai, but then he, he made a segue into, um, ag agent ai, which he's talked a lot about the digital workforce that we keep hearing about. Then he puts it in even farther and said, now we're, we're, we're about to start robots. Yeah.

Physical ai. Um, and they brought the robots on, on stage. He mentioned all the possibilities.

It was kind of staggering. It was a little overwhelming to me because I think we're, we're, we're like looking at three different movements or waves at the same time. But, um, I guess that's the way these companies are interpreting it.

Um, usually they kind of transition from one thing to another. I remember Microsoft was behind on the internet. They, they rushed into it.

It seems like this, everybody's in this go-to now mo mo movement. And if they don't, they feel they're gonna be left behind. Well, you know, I'm curious, Sean, your thoughts on Apple.

Because Apple, if you can hear Me, the one thing we can hear you, Mike. Well, apple keeps saying, Hey, we're in AI too. Ai, ai.

But do you really think, John, that they're the player that they normally are in the space? No. That's a great, that is, that is a tremendous point.

I was thinking the same thing when I was watching Jensen. You know, the one thing that I kept having these eerie comparisons to is watching Jensen and how he's, in a sense, assumed the Steve Jobs role. He has this elaborate, uh, presentation flawlessly executed.

It's like a Broadway show, right? They're, they're bringing the props on. He's mentioning everything they're moving into.

He does it extremely well. Very slick video presentations with him as the narrator. And, and I'm thinking in the back of my head, okay, we have Google's involved, Microsoft, Amazon, they've all hedging their bets.

Apple's playing ketchup in a sense, but they're kind of the forgotten. You're That's so right, though. They're the forgotten name.

They, it's just, meanwhile, this guy is wearing his black jacket. It's, it's, you gotta know the Apple way though. This is typical of Apple.

Oh, yeah, That's true. So First, I, I, I got some thoughts on here. I wanted y'all to join in before I jumped in.

You know, normally I would tell you that all this money's rushing in. 'cause if you're not in the top three, get the hell out. Right.

Lesson we learned from Brad Feld, Mitch and I, and, and normally that is true. If you're not in the top three, get the hell out. But I think we're looking at this wrong.

We're lumping this all under those two letters. AI as if all AI is the same. That Agentic is just the next phase of generative and physical is the phase that's gonna come after.

No, the, there's, there's, AI is not a monolith of, of, you know, of just ai. There's different aspects of ai. There's different markets, there's different products.

There's different, there's gonna be different winners and losers in each one. You mentioned perplexity specializing AI search, AI search in and of itself. Look, they're gonna fight Duke it out with Google.

'cause Google's not seeding that. Let's be clear. Right?

And your reviews are weak at best, and they're only ruled out to 20% of users. Yep. But, so, but there will be three winners in AI powered search.

There will be three winners in CRM empowered ai, there will, you know what I mean? AI itself is gonna spawn so many separate markets and separate product things that there's room for a lot of of winners. However, I do believe that at the end of the day, when we talk about large language models and cutting edge, cutting edge AI breakthroughs, it's gonna be a big boys game.

And that's why these guys are bulking up the same way. You know, you have hyperscalers today, it's very hard for startups to compete with Google and Microsoft and Apple and Meta. I used to say Twitter before Elon cut it to, I'm gonna call it Twitter till the end of time.

I refuse to say no, I'm not. Well, but it's not, it doesn't have the infrastructure that Twitter had. It does it.

I I don't consider Twitter a, a hyperscaler anymore, right? Because they're running on bubble gum and spit. But in order to really play in the AI game at that level, you are going to need those kinds of resources.

Now, philanthropic, we've been talking a lot about philanthropic this week. They're making a lot of noise. I clearly, I think they are, you know, emerging as a two three at worst to, to open AI and, and, uh, Google.

Um, but where would they be without Amazon's money, right? That's, that's their ACE card, right? That, Hey, where are the guys Amazon's betting on You should bet on us too.

'cause they're not stupid over there. Um, so I, I do think you're gonna see at that level, it's a big man's game. It's a hyperscalers game, and we'll, we'll ha we'll have the hyperscalers.

But that's not to say that there aren't huge niches within the AI landscape where there will be winners and losers and fortunes made. Fortunes made. Like Yeah.

I think the fear, yeah, the fear among a lot of companies out here, at least in Silicon Valley, is that if you're not closely aligned or at least, uh, thought of as a company with some sort of AI present, you're irrelevant. Well, that, But that's, Thats just the mindsets. That's pro fomo part it carville at Valley.

What? I'm the uber of computers. I'm the uber of guitar makers.

I'm the cloud version of this. What's my cloud story? What's my security story?

What's my, you know, that's how Silicon Valley rolls. Well, Yeah, that's what I mean, though. I mean, it's, habits are hard to break.

I mean, Yeah, that's typical secure Culture. Let me, so that's why you're seeing this kind of paranoia mounting as well to, so, To, to your point, Alan, though, I think all of those are applications or uses of products built with, with ai, right? It's a technology.

If, if I look at the macro view, I, I think, you know, we, we like to say Nvidia is what, they're a GPU company. They're a consumer gaming company. They're a, Nvidia wants to company stack.

Nvidia wants to be The Google of ai. That's, they want the whole stack Pilot at the, you know, at the desktop. They, you know, building foundational models.

No Doubt. They want, they want to. And they also are pulling kind of the Google game of we want, well really the Microsoft game, we want you to build on Kuda.

We want you to build on our mm-hmm. Our drive, uh, the platform, API platforms, right? That's what they're trying to do, is they're kind of playing the Apple game, if you will.

Yes, they are. Let's build this whole ecosystem. But, But let's talk about Apple a sec, Mitch.

com days, I did a big deal with, uh, company. I helped start, uh, we did a big deal with Dell, Dell host, and we were Dell host. We were in OEM for Dell host at the time.

Dell had just gotten into the server market about a year or two before. Dell didn't do servers, they only did laptops and desktops. Then they got into servers in a big way.

Why did, and and a lot of people said, oh, they're so late to this game. It's so late. They'll never, never be a player in servers too late.

But Dell's philosophy was they didn't get into a market till it was mature enough to be worthwhile jumping in with two feet. And when they did, they immediately sought to dominate that market. And they did, in the case of servers, that became, you know, probably one of the top three server companies.

Apple's the same way. Yeah. Yeah.

Like, there may be a lot of money going in to AI right now, but Apple's sitting, Apple's got a few shackles in the bank that they're sitting on and they haven't deployed, You know, and also, yeah, sorry Alan, you know, the other thing too is a lot of consumers, a lot of people who don't really know what AI is, are wary about it. They're waiting to see what Apple does, like they did with Smart Market and other Markets. Well, Apple's saying, how big is this market today?

And 'cause I'm gonna make a big bet 'cause I'm Apple. I'm gonna come in here with both feet and try to dominate something. But is this market mature enough for me to put that kind of resources into it?

'cause as soon as it is, damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead, get lost in Today, they get lost in the mix between all the announcements by Microsoft. You know, everybody, everybody, um, you know, in NVD, Amazon, et cetera. So, I mean, that's, Apple looks at, that's not the time for Apple.

How much money is AI generating, not how much investment. Right. That's generating, and that's, that's what Apple's All about.

Yeah's something to be said, said for letting the, the trailblazers spend the money. Apple's the only corporation I've ever worked for. And let me tell you, they, they know how to save a dollar.

They really like, they're thrifty on a, on a level you would not even imagine. Uh, and I think that they're, you know, I think about all their successes, and then I think about the Newton message pad and the Apple vision mm-hmm. Sitting in my closet.

Yes. They learned lessons. Yes, they learned lessons on that.

The hard apple's sort of like the Old Bull. And a lot of these other companies are the young bull, if you know that story. And, um, don't, don't count them out on this.

Don't count 'em out. Just Because you don't see it doesn't mean they're not, they don't have teams on. Right.

Right. They, they're very secretive until they know that they're gonna come out Yep. And they're gonna dominate.

Yeah. So that, that's my, my word on that. I think we've, uh, we've made the point here.

John, you have an article, a couple of articles on this, up on Techstrong ai, right? We could send I Do. Yes.

Yes. Um, so, and every time I turn around, there seems to be a study I showing the amount of money being just being thrown at this. And you're right, Alan, this, until we start seeing the revenue, we're we we're gonna event inevitably go through a couple of years of, of, of this we're early market growing and Yeah, no, Exactly.

If you wanna be a first mover, especially if you're a startup and you are aligning yourself with a hyperscaler, this is the time. If you don't have Apple type of resources, hyperscaler resources, now is the time where you gotta grab, you know, you gotta set your homestead up, right? You gotta claim your homestead and, you know, and grab, grab your picks and shovels.

And there's gold in them, our hills, right? I wanna be the guy selling picks and shovels, but I don't Exactly. That's, that's where the money.

Yes, exactly. That's, that's the, that's the sweet spot, really for a lot of the startups and a lot of the smaller companies here to but to sell the picks and shovels. Exactly.

Yep. Mike, I, it, California, right? The Gold rush.

Yeah. No, the 49 ERs. Mike, I feel like we're, we're missing you on this one.

I I, I'm sorry. Your internet is troublesome. I don't know if you can hear me, but, um, I would say ooey and there's just a lot of money being poured into this space in a way that, as the old saying goes, a fool on their money or soon parted.

And I think you should keep an eye on what's going on with these various knowledge graphs out there. 'cause I think that you'll be able to use those for about half the things that we're using LLMs for. And I think small LLMs are gonna be the things that drive agentic ai.

So I'm not gonna need these massive foundational LLMs other than to build small LLMs. And I kind of look at all this right now, and I scratch my head and I go, where's the revenue model for all this stuff gonna be? 'cause I can see a future where these things are not gonna be nearly as important as we think.

All right. You heard it there from, uh, the, the, uh, where, where was Rip Van Winkle? Where did he go to sleep?

Sleepy Hollow. Not far from Harris in New York. Alright.

Hey, let's take a break here on text Trump Gang. We're gonna come back and talk about a recent announcement, one of several announcements that we will say, a controversial with a capital C. This one's around a, uh, $20 billion data center investment pledge.

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Visit the builder community hub to learn more. Alright, folks, we're back and we're talking about, well, Donald Trump says that there's gonna be $20 billion investments from his friends in the Middle East into data centers that are gonna be in the us. This seems to be part of his quid pro crow program where he says that he will, uh, help companies navigate these regulations if they tune up to invest in the country with, uh, his assistance, as it were.

And I guess his family's involved in this whole thing. But Alan, what's your take on this? Do we need more data centers?

Is there $20 billion worth of investment to be had here? And are other folks gonna get mad? Well, maybe we should build them in Greenland, our newest estate.

Or, or maybe in the Gulf of America offshore. Oh, better yet, let's keep them in the US canal that runs through Panama. Come on.

Wow. Canada's got good cooling. I think we could go after Liquid cooling in Canada.

Our newest territory. Come on. First of all, $20 billion is drop in the bucket.

Look at how much money Google, Microsoft, apple, all the usual suspects are spending on data centers. This got publicity. So just what I need.

Some Middle Eastern Sheik from Abu Dhabi owning data centers here in the us What happened to Made in America? Built in America, owned in America, is that what is, are we for sale? Are we for sale?

We have a chips act. We have so many resources that we put in to trying to build out foundries and data centers and everything like that, that we haven't even begun to spend that money. Let's focus on that before we put up the for sale side to, to the sheex to come in here and, and spend a pit and some money on some data centers somewhere to, to massage this guy's ego.

I say pledge, I'll throw it out to you. I Say pledge smidge. We've heard this, we've seen this movie before, right?

Yeah. Until we're breaking ground on a data center and building stuff. Yeah.

Pledging is, I mean, where's those, where those chip manufacturer in today's, in today's world, $20 billion doesn't buy as many data centers as it's crazy. 2 million Alone. I mean, just one company.

So to your I that was my first reaction. 20 billion. Is that all drop in the bucket?

Yeah. Yeah. That's like two That I think, oh, sorry.

Go ahead, John. Oh, yeah. Oh, I'm sorry.

Just quickly. Yeah, for context, Blackstone estimates that the US is gonna see investments of a trillion dollars in data centers over five years with another trillion Exactly. Committed to other types of facilities internationally.

So in, in other words, uh, what properties commitment accounts for just like 2% of the total expected domestic investment in the sector? I'm sorry, go ahead Ann. No, no, no.

I, I just always think when I see these announcements, I always think, okay, great. How are you powering it? That's like, where my head always goes is who, who's paying the bill?

Right? Who, who's gonna be powering this? And I think we're gonna start to see, you know, Amazon companies like that.

They're gonna have, and they already do their own nuclear plants that That's, well, no, we, we reported on this, right? Microsoft, Microsoft made a deal with the L three mile Island, and they're gonna build a huge data center right out there. Uh, another big utility in the Midwest basically signed, I forget if it was Google or Amazon or whoever it was, um, a deal where they're going to like basically build plants just to power data centers there.

And they're putting damn near a billion dollars into that alone. So, you know, this makes interesting fodder for press. I personally, I didn't realize we wrote about it on Text Strong, ITSM.

Um, I, I, it's not news to me. It's, it's publicity. It's, it's, it's, it's, it's, yeah, it's a publicity stu, you know, and also within context, I looked into this, uh, organization that works with the Trump family.

And for every project that they completed, there were several others that never went anywhere. There's always talk about it going back to 2016. This isn't the first time he's mentioned working with them as, as a, as a member, as the president.

Well, We should be clear. It's one company, one, it's basically one family, One company from UAE in The United Arab Emirates. Right?

Right. Soman the family own, right. Family owned Business.

Private development. Yeah. It, it's also, you know, you mentioned Nuclear Anna, you're right.

I mean, Amazon, Microsoft, Google. There's, I think they're pouring billions of dollars into these nuclear energy facilities. And they're looking into building small modular, uh, reactors.

Just Fusion baby cult fusion. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

So, um, yeah, this, this whole thing was like the, uh, sock bank, uh, pledge as well, which is a couple of weeks earlier. Um, we've all seen this before, as Mitch said. And, uh, when the rubber hits the road, when something really actually happens, that's when I pay attention.

And for now, it's just a, it's a nice, uh, press release from the, uh, incoming administration. You know what you gotta give him credit for though? This is a nothing burger.

Mm-hmm. Right? But everybody and their mom is reporting on it, talking about it.

And it's a nothing burger. There's bigger things for us to talk about. So I'm, I'm given this.

It's 15 minutes. It's over. We're going on a break here.

Texture and gang. We're gonna come back and talk about a m and a deal between Getty and, uh, Shutterstock. Images.

Images. You're watching. Textron Gang.

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Hey everyone, we're back here. You know, big news in a usual, very actually quiet, uh, neighborhood in the internet. And that's the, uh, the, uh, image royalties and image licensing business.

Uh, and what you want to tell us about this Getty Shutterstock deal. Absolutely. 7 billion acquisition.

And I think that, you know, when I think Getty, a lot of people in my industry, internet marketers, I think of Getty, I think of the image scam. I think of the letters you get if they find something on your website and they'll threaten you with legal. But this, this, they've grown out of these sort of games and they're recognizing where the industry is.

Essentially. They've gotta unify to fight AI images. People can now generate images on the fly on demand.

They recognize obviously that they're dying breed or they could be. And so I think that this signals, uh, you know, the combined company will have nearly 2 billion in revenue. I think they have, they see it as a greater chance of survival, obviously, and will save them costs on overhead and other things by merging.

Um, I don't know that this is gonna go through though. I think there's gonna be some antitrust scrutiny, um, because this is, this is making them an even bigger player. Uh, already both are dominating.

But I think this is signals a sort of insecurity of, and it's a sign of the times to some degree. And I think we're gonna see more of these. Um, especially as, you know, AI's run out of easy data, right?

So we're gonna start to see these mergers just for the data. And I think that this is one of assigned to come. So I I, I don't think you're gonna see any antitrust scrutiny from the, uh, incoming administration.

They don't care. This is wild west. But that being said, I think someone earlier said a fooling his money are quickly separated.

To me. This is, this is, uh, Winchester stage coaches buying a bunch of horseless carriages, uh, uh, buying a bunch of, of carriages for, you know, buggy and whip horses right around 1910 while a guy named Henry Ford is figuring out how to mass produce. Uh, I, I, I wouldn't give two dimes for an image library in the age of AI generated images.

I, I mean, I, I will tell you here a text I right before doing this show, um, we were looking for a nice background to use. 'cause I'm gonna be live, uh, next Tuesday for, for, um, our Predict 2025 conference. I'll be doing the live kickoff at 8:45 AM and I'm, I wanted to have a nice background image.

And normally in years past, I would go to Shutterstock or Getty or one of those and, and look for a, you know, a high res image for that. I went in, you know, went into, uh, one of my favorite ais and said, this is the image I'm looking for. I want something immersive.

I want it in 4K. I, I uploaded an image of the hero image from the website and said, make me a stage that looks like this. Two, one or two tweaks.

Yeah, I mean, Go ahead. No, no, you're right. I mean, Ann Ann beautifully laid this out and I, I just think it's just almost an exercise in futility, honestly.

Um, it, with this on rushing competition from images generated by ai, it's just, um, it kind of almost reminds me of the old media just trying to compete with the internet. It's Just exactly. That's, it's inevitable exactly what it is.

And so the let's get big, let's get bigger. Yeah, exactly. They're not be packaging themselves up with a bow for open AI or Google who will be buying them for parts later.

Right, Right, right, right. For for input. Yeah.

7 billion for it? Yeah. Well, No, something tells me someone's gonna take a a hit on that one.

Absolutely. Yes. There we're gonna see more of these acquisitions though, because the training data needs to be, you know, of a certain quality.

The internet is generating so much data every day, but it's kind of garbage data for purposes of training, right. So I think we're gonna see more and more of these acquisitions coming that are purely for the data because these models are hungry, they're hungry for more, they're consuming, you know, all this money's gonna go to something. And I think a lot of it is gonna, once we get the GPU power, everything we need to, to actually crunch the data, then they're gonna be hungry for more actual data.

And so companies like this are gonna see themselves on the chopping block, is the reality. We need more data centers. Just kidding, right.

Data. Sure. Right.

Um, That's a solution for everything. Just just build them. Yeah.

Build them. Yeah. Especially as you said in our, in our new territories.

Yeah, but let me ask a question though. Seriously, guys, I remember didn't Getty so get, you're right. Ann Getty was sort of the stuff, shirt of the image licensing crowd for a long time.

Right. But they also were good quality. To be fair.

I always thought Getty had the best quality. Um, but I thought Getty like set free of a good part of their library a few years ago where you could use it as long as you attributed or something. You didn't have to pay for a lot of the images.

Is that, am I wrong about that or am I hallucinating? I think, I think that you're right. Um, I mean, would that be like a, like a copy Lefting?

No, like a Richard Salman style? Yeah. Yeah.

No, But I didn't they didn't they like ease up on, on their licensing a bit? I think they did. I think, I think, I think that they did release a bunch.

I know the Library of Congress has released a bunch. I mean, there have been these large swaths that have come, uh, as an effort to get people to come back, right? Mm-hmm.

Uh, the loss leader. Yeah. You, you, you get some free and then, oh, I want this paid one.

Well, I guess I got, you know, it's just a perception of value like a grocery store does with their specials in the week, right? It could be. I mean, it's gonna be interesting.

It Just, it just seems as if we're following the same path that we did with content, you know, the written content and in terms of arts, it's just, it's, it's, they're trying to adapt to this, to technology. And it's kind of like a, it's a, it's a slippery slope. It's a, it's in a sense they're, we're rolling the rock up the hill, and I don't, I'm not sure it's really gonna make much of a difference in the end.

Well, I'll give you, this might be something they're thinking about. They own the data instead of selling that data to the AI people, to who, why not create their own AI based on their own LLMs. And then, and then, you know, it's to meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

They're still out there. You know, you, you pay a subscription to use their AI to generate images that are pulled or, you know, that use their data to, to get a superior image, uh, library to use for it. This should give them the capital to do that because would think Right?

But, but then it goes back to our first categories. If you're not in the top three, get out. So has this become a sub-sector of the larger AI market, the AI image market, and then they could dominate that AI image market?

Or do they, because they don't have a hyperscaler partner, an Amazon of Meta or Apple, um, do they not, are they not able to compete at at that hyperscaler? I mean, they're gonna have to do some smart partnering and they're gonna have to do it quickly because Adobe Canva, there are a lot of very easily access tools. They're doing this and doing a pretty decent job.

Um, but if they do some smart partnering, I'll tell you something, Getty's the kind of marquee, uh, brand name that Apple loves. Yes. That's that's a great point.

Yes. Mm-hmm. It's a Tiffany name.

A Tiffany brand name Yeah. That Apple gravitates towards. Yeah.

So keep that in mind. You heard it here first. I mean, it is, it does, there's prestige associated with the name for sure.

Mm-hmm. So I do think there's something to that. I think we might see that in the coming months and years.

I mean, it's gonna be very interesting. The acquisitions this year, I think are gonna be, Oh, it's gonna, it's, I think it's gonna go through the roof. I think there's gonna be a rubber stamp at the FTC from now.

Weeks. Yeah. You're not couple weeks.

I don't think they're, Speaking of land rushes, we can have an m and a land rush. Yeah, no, it's a good time to be doing m and a Fire up the engines. All right.

Mm-hmm. Uh, guys, I, I feel like we've discussed a lot of it, and I feel like we're putting poor Mike here. It's, it's hard to Oh, take the mic out.

I, I, I feel, I feel Mike's I feel Mike's pain. I've been through this. Yeah.

He's sitting by Stoically. Isn't that a good word to describe him today? Stoic.

Um, Mike Is a very stoic guy though. Yeah. Mike, I'm sorry.

We hope your internet's working better for tomorrow. Show rumor has, it was Mitch who sabotaged your, your internet. Wow.

Wow. Throw him under the bus. Jesus.

Well, he left. Damn. Call my neighbor Elon and get his starlink.

Yeah, you could do that, Mike. You could do that. Um, anyway, you and Happy New Year.

Thanks for joining us on your first show of 2025 on the Gang. We'll have you back on soon, right Next week. Yes, John, it is always good to see you.

See you back on the throne, Mike. Well, oh, sorry. Speaking figuratively, but Mike Yeah.

Better luck with the internet. Thank you everyone for watching today's Textron Gang. As usual, we'll have a, we have a full Textron tv, uh, schedule immediately following.

So stay right here on your favorite channel, Textron tv. But for now, this is Alan Shimel. On behalf of Textron Gang, we're out.