My AI Bot Can Beat up Your AI Bot
The billionaires are at it again.
Also in this issue: what do you call a human GPT, there are no rules when offering to buy companies, and Threads might have more users than Twitter soon.
The Girls Are Fighting: AI Edition
If you’re stronger than me and muted Elon Musk on Twitter/X, you may have missed a lot yesterday. It kicked off with Elon claiming he’s going to sue Apple because he thinks they’re preventing the Grok app from climbing to number one in the App Store rankings.
ChatGPT has been in the top spot for at least the past month, and Grok has been trailing it, but generally still remained in the top 20. This seems, well, fine, because according to Sensor Tower, ChatGPT has had 28 million downloads in the past 30 days and Grok has had 6 million. Ranking higher does help you get more downloads, so there’s a flywheel in effect, but still, big difference. And anecdotally, almost everyone I know uses ChatGPT in some capacity, and no one has ever mentioned (admitted to?) using Grok.
The accusation of Apple rigging their platform to benefit their own partners (Apple announced a partnership with OpenAI a year ago) is particularly rich coming from Elon, as Sam Altman was quick to highlight, and things escalated from there, which they are prone to do because as they say, It’s All Happening on X, The Everything App.
Apple sent out a very Apple response to all of this, stating: “The App Store is designed to be fair and free of bias. We feature thousands of apps through charts, algorithmic recommendations, and curated lists selected by experts using objective criteria.” If you read that and thought, “that doesn’t seem to really say anything,” you’re correct.
So a quick cheat sheet for you: Is Elon right that Apple is actively preventing other AI apps from reaching the #1 spot? No. Is Apple highlighting ChatGPT and pretty clearly selecting which of its competitors to include in a lot of its more curated callouts in the App Store? Totally. Is this all very ironic coming from a man who routinely ensures that his posts are blasted into the feeds of every user of the social app he bought (as well as regurgitated by the AI that runs on the app)? Yes. But finally, does Apple deserve a lot of scrutiny for being one of the most anti-competitive companies in the world? Also yes. Literally as all of this unfolded, a judge in Australia ruled against Apple in a case brought by Epic Games, stating that Apple “engaged in conduct… that had the purpose or is likely to have or had the effect of substantially lessening competition.”
Elon and Sam Altman have had bad blood ever since Elon’s departure from OpenAI, which has mostly manifested in the occasional on-brand insult from Elon, such as calling Sam “Scam Altman” or telling OpenAI to rename itself to ClosedAI. Meanwhile, Altman is preparing to found a company that will rival Elon’s Neuralink. Layers! Billionaires are just like us: when they fight, there’s often a whole lot going on under the surface. Unlike us, those things are sometimes entire companies that want to put a computer chip in your brain.
What Should We Call People That Talk Like GPTs?
Today in VICRQ (Very Important Context Rot Questions): we need a new term for people who use ChatGPT to do everything for them, including telling them how to think, act, or speak. This TikTok puts forth the suggestion “Sloppers,” which I think is pretty good. Some notable nominations from the comments: Botlickers, Prompstitutes, and ChatNPCs. I enjoyed finding the term Promptcel among the many dunks on Justine Moore the other day. It turns out there actually is a word for this from all the way back in 2014: Echoborgs. Sloppers just seems to hit way harder though. Let me know your favorite in the comments and we can crown a winner.
Threads Now Has 400 Million Monthly Users
Threads, the Twitter competitor from Instagram launched two years ago, is still growing. It now has about 115 million daily active users, while Twitter/X has roughly 130 million—and the number of X users has been declining, so it may get flipped soon. This feels surprising, since Threads seems to have roughly zero cultural relevance (here’s a recent, fun read from Rachel Karten about how unwell the state of brandposting is over there). Personally, the only thing that would be more surprising than finding out a friend of mine is dating an AI would be finding out that a friend of mine is a daily active Threads user.
Perplexity Made an Offer to Buy Google Chrome
Perplexity, the “AI search” company that has been trying to take on Google since its inception, offered $34.5 billion for Google Chrome, which is not actually for sale. What’s also confusing is that the company does not currently have enough money to pay that. They also recently released their own web browser. But publicly offering to buy something that isn’t for sale at a price that is 2x your latest valuation yet still comes off as a massive lowball is what marketing is now. (If you’re using Perplexity’s new Comet browser and have things to say about it, I’d love to hear from you.)
Doomscrolls
You can book hotels through TikTok now.
Quantum computers are coming soon maybe.
“AI hedge funds” are now a thing. (Guess how old this founder is.)
Watch the trailer for The Social Network: Dating App Edition.
We already live in a world of (plastic) slop.
See you on the Slurm training webinar tomorrow.
A Peek Into the Future
All em dashes added organically by me. All typos are Grok’s fault.
Thanks for reading.