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Traditional AdTech is Dead. Long Live AdTech For AI

The rebirth of advertisements and AdTech in the age of AI

AdTech used to matter. In the early 2000s, it was one of the hottest areas in tech – hundreds of startups, billions in VC funding, genuine innovation in targeting and formats. Then Google bought DoubleClick in 2007 for $3.1 billion, Facebook launched its ad platform, and the game was over. The duopoly that emerged didn’t just dominate—at their peak, Google and Meta controlled nearly 80% of U.S. digital ad growth. Everyone else was left fighting for scraps. For the past 15 years, „AdTech startup“ became practically an oxymoron as the industry consolidated into irrelevance.

But now, in the age of AI, we are starting to see a resurgence of advertising as a booming revenue source for companies. OpenAI announced last week that they would be testing ads in ChatGPT in a “bid to boost revenue”, and the healthcare AI startup OpenEvidence recently surpassed $100M annualized run-rate revenue (and doubled their valuation to $12B!), largely on an ad-supported revenue model. And around this, the market for AI tools in advertising optimization is growing quickly.

So why are we seeing such a sharp resurgence in a field that just a few years ago was essentially dead?

Three fundamental shifts are driving this renaissance:

First, AI platforms have created the first genuinely new advertising surface since social media. ChatGPT’s 800+ million weekly active users and Claude’s ~20 million monthly active users represent massive, engaged audiences that didn’t exist two years ago. Unlike the incremental improvements of the past decade – slightly better targeting, marginally improved attribution – these platforms represent entirely new real estate where the old duopoly rules don’t apply.

Second, intent signals are dramatically more sharply defined than anything we’ve seen before. When someone types “best CRM for startups” into Google, you get a decent intent signal. But when someone has a 20-message conversation with ChatGPT about their specific sales team structure, pain points, budget constraints, and technical requirements? That’s intent data at a resolution advertisers have only dreamed about. The conversational nature of AI interactions creates a richness of context that search queries simply can’t match.

Third, entirely new infrastructure is required—and being built at breakneck speed. The old AdTech stack was built for display ads, search results, and social feeds. None of it works for conversational AI. How do you measure attribution when there’s no “click”? How do you bid on inventory that’s generated dynamically in response to natural language? What does “viewability” even mean in a text-based conversation? This infrastructure gap is spawning entirely new categories like Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), with dozens of startups raising millions to solve problems that didn’t exist 18 months ago.

So should we be heralding the rebirth of AdTech in the age of AI?

Let’s dig in.

AI is Creating New Real Estate for Ads

The rapid growth of foundation models with “chatbot-style interfaces” has brought forward what we believe is the first new real estate for advertisements since the emergence of social networks. Google and Meta were able to establish dominance in ad models by aggregating eyeballs; Google in search and Meta in social. (And to a lesser extent other social media platforms like Snap, Pinterest, etc.). As an advertiser, why would I place my ads anywhere other than where consumers are aggregating to get most bang for my buck?

Now in the Age of AI, consumers are no longer flocking to the traditional platforms but increasingly to places like ChatGPT (>800M WAUs) and Claude (~20M MAUs). And these consumers are not just making simple search queries but having full-blown conversations on every topic under the sun. This is an advertiser’s dream: a wide-scale canvas with rich, user-generated intent. And advertisers are no longer limited to traditional search displays with sponsored results but can embed more natural advertisements within AI-generated responses. While the consumer may not love this (more on that below), it certainly makes sense for the advertisers.

Beyond consumer-facing platforms, AI development tools are creating a quieter but equally significant advertising opportunity. When developers use tools like Lovable, Replit, or Cursor to build applications, these platforms make dozens of architectural decisions on their behalf—which database to use, where to host, which payment processor to integrate.

Each of these decisions represents potential advertising inventory. Supabase could sponsor recommendations in database selection flows. Vercel could appear as a ‘suggested deployment option’ when a developer’s app is ready to ship. Stripe could surface contextual offers when payment processing code is being written.

The key difference from traditional developer advertising (think Stack Overflow banner ads) is that these aren’t interruptions—they’re recommendations at the exact moment of intent. A developer isn’t being shown a database ad while reading about React hooks; they’re being offered database options precisely when their AI agent is about to scaffold database code. The conversion potential is orders of magnitude higher.

Vertical AI Is Creating Specialized Inventory

It’s not just the large model providers themselves that are benefiting from ads.

The rise of vertical AI providers is creating a new, specialized inventory for high-intent, high-value ads. Verticals like healthcare, legal, finance, real estate, and other professional services are becoming the new adtech frontier, offering advertisers direct access to high-value audiences outside the Google-Meta duopoly for the first time in over a decade.

One great example here is OpenEvidence, which has quickly grown into the leading “AI-powered medical search engine” for clinicians. The company recently said that 40% of physicians across the US across 10K hospitals and medical centers now use OpenEvidence on a daily basis. What else is interesting and unique is its business model: OpenEvidence is free to use for verified medical professionals, and generates revenue largely through advertising.

Per a great business breakdown from Contrary Research:

Given that pharmaceutical companies spent approximately $20 billion annually on marketing to healthcare professionals in the US as of 2019, capturing a portion of this market through digital channels could generate substantial revenue for the company. OpenEvidence’s advertising focus on contextual advertising and sponsored content while maintaining trust. For example, if a doctor submits a query about diabetes treatments, a sponsored summary from a pharmaceutical manufacturer may appear, or a banner for relevant clinical webinars could be displayed.

This advertising model has allowed OpenEvidence to reach >$100M annualized run-rate revenue in just a few short years.

We believe that other vertical AI tools will also embed this type of model, giving away the product to end users for free while generating revenue from charging advertisers. In vertical AI, the intent signals are clearer than ever—and unlike the generic search box, users are getting AI agents that actually solve their specific problems, creating a sustainable value exchange that justifies the ad-supported model.

Measurement Primitives are Changing and New Infrastructure is Emerging

Attribution in AI-native experiences is fundamentally different. The old AdTech stack was built for discrete surfaces where ads could be served, clicked, and tracked, but in conversational and agentic interfaces, there’s often no obvious “ad slot” and no click at all. Instead, influence is embedded inside multi-turn workflows: what the model recommends, what the user accepts, and what gets generated.

In next-gen AI apps, advertising is moving into the flow of work. When a developer scaffolds an app in Cursor, Lovable, or Vercel, the inventory isn’t a banner but it’s the moment an agent suggests a database, auth provider, or cloud service. In vertical AI tools, the same pattern holds: the “ad” looks like a contextual recommendation for a pharmaceutical brand, clinical resource, or specialized service. These touchpoints are integrated into the utility itself.

This shift is spawning an entirely new measurement rail. If clicks disappear, the new primitives become telemetry and adoption: logging multi-turn conversations, mapping model outputs to downstream actions, and tracking “acceptance events” like tab-to-insert, install, purchase, or integration. And because influence in a conversation is cumulative, the real challenge isn’t just attribution but it’s incrementality: did the recommendation actually change what the user would have done otherwise?

As a result of this shift, we are starting to see new ad networks emerge to serve these “in-flow” moments.

On the measurement side, companies like Profound and Bluefish are building the GEO observability layer, tracking share-of-response, competitive displacement, and brand presence across models.
On the distribution side, a new generation of AI-native ad platforms is forming across multiple surfaces: platforms like ZeroClick, OpenAds, and Nex.ad are beginning to monetize dynamic, contextually relevant recommendations inside or alongside AI conversations, while publisher-centric AI engagement platforms like Linotype.ai help site owners retain users and surface native monetization opportunities.

But unlike the old web, the “auction” can’t just pick the highest bidder. It has to operate inside generation loops, ranking units based on contextual relevance, quality, and bid while navigating trust and policy constraints in sensitive domains like healthcare and legal. Pricing models may shift as well, away from CPM/CPC and toward outcomes like cost-per-accept, cost-per-embed, or cost-per-adoption.

The biggest wildcard is walled gardens. If OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and vertical copilots control the interface, they may also control the inventory and measurement rails, turning AI advertising into a handful of closed ecosystems rather than an open programmatic market. Time will tell!

Conclusion / Challenges

There’s one clear challenge in all of this: people generally dislike advertisements. A recent report found that 81% of young people hate ads, and 60% find them intrusive. And who’s to blame them? Most people find ads annoying and not beneficial to them, and now nearly half the internet uses an ad blocker.

Another key challenge is whether people will feel that the answers they are served by the LLMs are influenced by the advertisements that appear. If I ask Claude for the best recommendations for hotels in Switzerland, will I know it showing me what the model says is “best”, or which hotel is spending the most on advertising for this query result?

But here’s the interesting part: in the same study referenced above, only 28% of respondents wanted fewer ads. Which suggests that its not the brands or products being peddled they dislike, but how the ads are actually served.

This could actually be a boon to the new platforms like OpenAI and Anthropic, as well as the emerging AI Adtech tools. By finding creative, non-intrusive, intent-based, transparent, and beneficial ways to reach consumers, a new form of advertising could actually flourish.

So we’re left with the thought…

“Traditional AdTech is Dead…Long Live AdTech For AI“.

Source: https://aspiringforintelligence.substack.com/p/traditional-adtech-is-dead-long-live

Kids in China Are Using Bots and Engagement Hacks to Look More Popular on Their Smartwatches

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In China, parents are buying smartwatches for children as young as 5, connecting them to a digital world that blends socializing with fierce competition.

Photo-Illustration: WIRED Staff; Getty Images

At what age should a kid ideally get a smartwatch? In China, parents are buying them for children as young as five. Adults want to be able to call their kids and track their location down to a specific building floor. But that’s not why children are clamoring for the devices, specifically ones made by a company called Xiaotiancai, which translates to Little Genius in English.

The watches, which launched in 2015 and cost up to $330, are a portal into an elaborate world that blends social engagement with relentless competition. Kids can use the watches to buy snacks at local shops, chat and share videos with friends, play games, and, sure, stay in touch with their families. But the main activity is accumulating as many “likes” as possible on their watch’s profile page. On the extreme end, Chinese media outlets have reported on kids who buy bots to juice their numbers, hack the watches to dox their enemies, and sometimes even find romantic partners. According to tech research firm Counterpoint Research, Little Genius accounts for nearly half of global market share for kids’ smartwatches.

Status Games

Over the past decade, Little Genius has found ways to gamify nearly every measurable activity in the life of a child—playing ping pong, posting updates, the list goes on. Earning more experience points boosts kids to a higher level, which increases the number of likes they can send to friends. It’s a game of reciprocity—you send me likes, and I’ll return the favor. One 18-year-old recently told Chinese media that she had struggled to make friends until four years ago when a classmate invited her into a Little Genius social circle. She racked up more than one million likes and became a mini-celebrity on the platform. She said she met all three of her boyfriends through the watch, two of whom she broke up with because they asked her to send erotic photos.

High like counts have become a sort of status symbol. Some enthusiastic Little Genius users have taken to RedNote (or Xiaohongshu), a prominent Chinese social media app, to hunt for new friends so as to collect more likes and badges. As video tutorials on the app explain, low-level users can only give out five likes a day to any one friend; higher-ranking users can give out 20. Because the watch limits its owner to a total of 150 friends, kids are therefore incentivized to maximize their number of high-level friends. Lower-status kids, in turn, are compelled to engage in competitive antics so they don’t get dumped by higher-ranking friends.

“They feel this sense of camaraderie and community,” said Ivy Yang, founder of New York-based consultancy Wavelet Strategy, who has studied Little Genius. “They have a whole world.” But Yang expressed reservations about the way the watch seems to commodify friendship. “It’s just very transactional,” she adds.

Engagement Hacks

On RedNote/Xiaohongshu, people post videos on circumventing Little Genius’s daily like limits, with titles such as “First in the world! Unlimited likes on Little Genius new homepage!” The competitive pressure has also spawned businesses that promise to help kids boost their metrics. Some high-ranking users sell their old accounts. Others sell bots that send likes or offer to help keep accounts active while the owner of a watch is in class.

Get enough likes—say, 800,000—and you become a “big shot” in the Little Genius community. Last month, a Chinese media outlet reported that a 17-year-old with more than 2 million likes used her online clout to sell bots and old accounts, earning her more than $8,000 in a year. Though she enjoyed the fame that the smartwatch brought her, she said she left the platform after getting into fights with other Little Genius “big shots” and facing cyberbullying.

In September, a Beijing-based organization called China’s Child Safety Emergency Response warned parents that children with Little Genius watches were at risk of developing dangerous relationships or falling victim to scams. Officials have also raised alarms about these hidden corners of the Little Genius universe. The Chinese government has begun drafting national safety standards for children’s watches, following growing concerns over internet addiction, content unfit for children, and overspending via the watch payment function. The company did not respond to requests for comment.

I talked to one parent who had been reluctant to buy the watch. Lin Hong, a 48-year-old mom in Beijing, worried that her nearsighted daughter, Yuanyuan, would become obsessed with its tiny screen. But once Yuanyuan turned 8, Lin relented and splurged on the device. Lin’s fears quickly materialized.

Yuanyuan loved starting her day by customizing her avatar’s appearance. She regularly sent likes to her friends and made an effort to run and jump rope to earn more points. “She would look for her smartwatch first thing every morning,” Lin said. “It was like adults, actually, they’re all a bit addicted.”

To curb her daughter’s obsession, Lin limited Yuanyuan’s time on the watch. Now she’s noticing that her daughter, who turns 9 soon, chafes at her mother’s digital supervision. “If I call her three times, she’ll finally pick up to say, ‘I’m still out, stop calling. I’m not done playing yet,’ and hang up,” Lin said. “If it’s like this, she probably won’t want to keep wearing the watch for much longer.”

This is an edition of Zeyi Yang and Louise Matsakis’ Made in China newsletter. Read previous newsletters here.

Source: https://www.wired.com/story/kids-in-china-are-scheming-and-buying-bots-to-win-clout-on-their-watches/

Why Google Chrome could be a far better product if it wasn’t beholden to Google’s other business interests?

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Googles search engine and the Browser Google Chrome could have been far better products if it wasn’t beholden to Google’s other business interests:

They allege that Google blocked the introduction of user-friendly features because they would have harmed the company’s advertising revenue, which depends on people clicking ads in their search results. “Why isn’t autocomplete better? Why isn’t the ‘new tab’ page more effective? Why isn’t browser history better?” says the ex-leader, who also spoke on the condition of anonymity. The answer: “There’s all these incentives to get users to search.”

Read the whole story: https://www.wired.com/story/doj-google-chrome-antitrust/

Google Selling Chrome Won’t Be Enough to End Its Search Monopoly

To dismantle Google’s illegal monopoly over how Americans search the web, the US Department of Justice wants the tech giant to end its lucrative partnership with Apple, share a trove of proprietary data with competitors and advertisers, and “promptly and fully divest Chrome,” Google’s browser that controls more than half of the US market. The government also wants approval regarding who takes over Chrome.

The recommendations are part of a detailed plan that government attorneys submitted Wednesday to US district judge Amit Mehta in Washington, DC, as part of a federal antitrust case against Google that started back in 2020. By next August, Mehta is expected to decide which of the possible remedies Google will be required to carry out to loosen its stranglehold on the search market.

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But the tech giant could still appeal, delaying enforcement of the judge’s order years into the future. On Wednesday, Google president Kent Walker characterized the government’s proposals as “staggering,” “extreme,” “a radical interventionist agenda,” and “wildly overbroad.” He wrote in a blog post that the changes being sought “would break a range of Google products—even beyond Search—that people love and find helpful in their everyday lives.” He also asserted the privacy and security of Google’s users would be put at risk.

Among people who have worked for Google or partnered closely with the company, there’s little agreement on whether any of the proposed remedies would significantly shift user behavior or make the search engine market more competitive. Four former Google executives who oversaw teams working on Chrome, Search, and Ads told WIRED that innovation by rivals, not interventions by the government, remains the surest way to unseat Google as the nation’s dominant internet search provider. “You can’t ram an inferior product down people’s throats,” says one former Chrome business leader, speaking on the condition of anonymity to protect professional relationships.

But a former Chrome engineering leader acknowledged that the search engine could have been a better product if it wasn’t beholden to Google’s other business interests. They allege that Google blocked the introduction of user-friendly features because they would have harmed the company’s advertising revenue, which depends on people clicking ads in their search results. “Why isn’t autocomplete better? Why isn’t the ‘new tab’ page more effective? Why isn’t browser history better?” says the ex-leader, who also spoke on the condition of anonymity. The answer: “There’s all these incentives to get users to search.” Google didn’t respond to a request for comment on the assertion.

Still, competitors that stand to benefit from even a minor reduction in Google’s power are optimistic about the expected remedies. “I can see strong benefits in putting [Chrome] back in the hands of the community,” says Guillermo Rauch, CEO of Vercel, a company that develops tools for websites, many of which depend on search traffic and advertising revenue controlled by Google. “Moderating that relationship to the corporate overlords is always going to be a healthy thing,” Rauch says.

Gabriel Weinberg, CEO of the rival search engine DuckDuckGo, said in a statement that the government’s proposed remedies “would free the search market from Google’s illegal grip and unleash a new era of innovation, investment, and competition.”

Google’s antitrust battle with the Department of Justice began under the first Trump administration in 2020. The federal government, as well as a number of states, accused the tech giant of using anticompetitive tactics to dominate the search market, suppressing Americans’ access to other search providers. The Biden administration moved forward with the case and filed another of its own—accusing Google of illegally monopolizing advertising technologies that millions of websites and apps use to generate revenue. Closing arguments in that case are scheduled for Monday.

Both cases remain unresolved, and it’s unclear to what extent the Justice Department will keep up the pressure on Google after Donald Trump returns to the White House. On the campaign trail, Trump made mixed comments about the tech giant. In October, he expressed concerns about its power, but suggested that imposing onerous conditions on the company could hamper US efforts to achieve tech supremacy over China.

Judge Mehta has set aside nearly two weeks starting in April to hear arguments from the government and Google about the proposed punishments. The new Trump administration’s approach toward Google should become more apparent at that point, and it’s possible that government attorneys will be less willing to defend the proposals released Wednesday.

Walker’s blog on Wednesday highlighted possible ramifications of the proposals that Trump may view as concerning, including the chilling of AI investment and the appointment of a five-expert Technical Committee to monitor Google’s compliance with remedies. “And that’s just a small part of it,” Walker wrote about the proposed panel. “We wish we were making this up.”

The government is seeking to provide users with more choice over what search engines they use. It wants to end Google’s partnership with Apple, which receives tens of billions of dollars in search ad revenue for making Google the default search engine on iPhones. Google has similar deals with other companies, which also would be scuttled.

Google would also have to make changes to how it preferences its own services on Android or else sell, or be forced to sell, Android. The proposals call for Google to give advertisers a stream of data to help them study their purchases.

To give competitors a leg up, the government wants Google to share its search index and the data it collects about users when determining which results to show. The argument is that potential rivals would then be able to match the information advantage Google has amassed over decades studying the behavior patterns of its billions of users. In addition, Colorado’s attorney general proposed in Wednesday’s filing that Google fund “reasonable, short-term incentive payments” to users who opt for non-Google default search engines.

On top of having to divest of Chrome, Google would be banned from launching a new browser or investing in search, ad tech, and AI rivals for five to 10 years. The government says the restrictions would enable “fostering innovation and transforming the general search and search text ads markets over the next decade.”

Rauch, the Vercel CEO, believes that Google is unfairly using Chrome to direct people toward its AI chatbot, Gemini, as well as other services it owns, such as Google Docs, through a mix of nudges and incentives built into its search engine. “Google is stacking every advantage that they can by monopolizing this very important piece of software infrastructure,” Rauch says.

Turning over Chrome to a neutral steward like a nonprofit organization or an academic institution, Rauch says, would burst open the search box on the world’s most popular browser and give people access to a plethora of alternatives. Chrome already allows users to change their default search provider, but Google still nudges users back through alerts as they browse. “I could imagine, in a world where people are more equipped to choose rather than default, a lot of consumers might end up choosing Perplexity or ChatGPT, whereas today it’s a very roundabout thing,” Rauch says.

But financial and legal analysts have expressed doubts about how much the government’s proposals could really achieve. The former Google executives who spoke with WIRED are just as skeptical. Rajen Sheth, who oversaw parts of the Chrome business and now runs a software startup for building online courses, says users are gravitating toward what they are used to in what he believes is already an open marketplace. “Given the technology landscape and the different levers, are there things that will make a difference? It will be tough,” he says.

Getting access to Google’s proprietary data and having the opportunity to court iPhone users may help increase the odds that people turn to alternative search engines. But Google also has unmatched computing infrastructure, unique data from sibling services such as Maps, and more than a quarter-century of brand recognition with consumers. “No matter how much you level the playing field, people are going to go to the best product for the job,” the former Chrome business leader says.

Former Google executives say that what will supplant the company one day isn’t another traditional search engine, but something akin to ChatGPT that presents content to users in a more interactive way. That new technology isn’t fully developed yet, but it might be by the time the government’s lawsuit against Google is finally settled. That means Google’s place in the market could look vastly different before enforcement of the judge’s order even begins.

I Stared Into the AI Void With the SocialAI App

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SocialAI is an online universe where everyone you interact with is a bot—for better or worse.

Robot Hands Adults in a Crowd Glitch Effect

The first time I used SocialAI, I was sure the app was performance art. That was the only logical explanation for why I would willingly sign up to have AI bots named Blaze Fury and Trollington Nefarious, well, troll me.

Even the app’s creator, Michael Sayman, admits that the premise of SocialAI may confuse people. His announcement this week of the app read a little like a generative AI joke: “A private social network where you receive millions of AI-generated comments offering feedback, advice, and reflections.”

But, no, SocialAI is real, if “real” applies to an online universe in which every single person you interact with is a bot.

There’s only one real human in the SocialAI equation. That person is you. The new iOS app is designed to let you post text like you would on Twitter or Threads. An ellipsis appears almost as soon as you do so, indicating that another person is loading up with ammunition, getting ready to fire back. Then, instantaneously, several comments appear, cascading below your post, each and every one of them written by an AI character. In the new new version of the app, just rolled out today, these AIs also talk to each other.

When you first sign up, you’re prompted to choose these AI character archetypes: Do you want to hear from Fans? Trolls? Skeptics? Odd-balls? Doomers? Visionaries? Nerds? Drama Queens? Liberals? Conservatives? Welcome to SocialAI, where Trollita Kafka, Vera D. Nothing, Sunshine Sparkle, Progressive Parker, Derek Dissent, and Professor Debaterson are here to prop you up or tell you why you’re wrong.

Screenshot of the instructions for setting up the Social AI app.

Is SocialAI appalling, an echo chamber taken to the extreme? Only if you ignore the truth of modern social media: Our feeds are already filled with bots, tuned by algorithms, and monetized with AI-driven ad systems. As real humans we do the feeding: freely supplying social apps fresh content, baiting trolls, buying stuff. In exchange, we’re amused, and occasionally feel a connection with friends and fans.As notorious crank Neil Postman wrote in 1985, “Anyone who is even slightly familiar with the history of communications knows that every new technology for thinking involves a trade-off.” The trade-off for social media in the age of AI is a slice of our humanity. SocialAI just strips the experience down to pure artifice.

“With a lot of social media, you don’t know who the bot is and who the real person is. It’s hard to tell the difference,” Sayman says. “I just felt like creating a space where you’re able to know that they’re 100 percent AIs. It’s more freeing.”

You might say Sayman has a knack for apps. As a teenage coder in Miami, Florida, during the financial crisis, Sayman gained fame for building a suite of apps to support his family, who had been considering moving back to Peru. Sayman later ended up working in product jobs at Facebook, Google, and Roblox. SocialAI was launched from Sayman’s own venture-backed app studio, Friendly Apps.

In many ways his app is emblematic of design thinking rather than pure AI innovation. SocialAI isn’t really a social app, but ChatGPT in the container of a social broadcast app. It’s an attempt to redefine how we interact with generative AI. Instead of limiting your ChatGPT conversation to a one-to-one chat window, Sayman posits, why not get your answers from many bots, all at the same time?

Over Zoom earlier this week, he explained to me how he thinks of generative AI like a smoothie if cups hadn’t yet been invented. You can still enjoy it from a bowl or plate, but those aren’t the right vessel. SocialAI, Sayman says, could be the cup.

Almost immediately Sayman laughed. “This is a terrible analogy,” he said.

Sayman is charming and clearly thinks a lot about how apps fit into our world. He’s a team of one right now, relying mostly on OpenAI’s technology to power SocialAI, blended with some other custom AI models. (Sayman rate-limits the app so that he doesn’t go broke in “three minutes” from the fees he’s paying to OpenAI. He also hasn’t quite yet figured out how he’ll make money off of SocialAI.) He knows he’s not the first to launch an AI-character app; Meta has burdened its apps with AI characters, and the Character AI app, which was just quasi-acquired by Google, lets you interact with a huge number of AI personas.But Sayman is hand-wavy about this competition. “I don’t see my app as, you’re going to be interacting with characters who you think might be real,” he says. “This is really for seeking answers to conflict resolution, or figuring out if what you’re trying to say is hurtful and get feedback before you post it somewhere else.”

“Someone joked to me that they thought Elon Musk should use this, so he could test all of his posts before he posts them on X,” Sayman said.

I’d actually tried that, tossing some of the most trafficked tweets from Elon Musk and the Twitter icon Dril into my SocialAI feed. I shared a news story from WIRED; the link was unclickable, because SocialAI doesn’t support link-sharing. (There’s no one to share it with, anyway.) I repurposed the viral “Bean Dad” tweet and purported to be a Bean Mom on SocialAI, urging my 9-year-old daughter to open a can of beans herself as a life lesson. I posted political content. I asked my synthetic SocialAI followers who else I should follow.

The bots obliged and flooded my feed with comments, like Reply Guys on steroids. But their responses lacked nutrients or human messiness. Mostly, I told Sayman, it all felt too uncanny, that I had a hard time crossing that chasm and placing value or meaning on what the bots had to say.

Sayman encouraged me to craft more posts along the lines of Reddit’s “Am I the Asshole” posts: Am I wrong in this situation? Should I apologize to a friend? Should I stay mad at my family forever? This, Sayman says, is the real purpose of SocialAI. I tried it. For a second the SocialAI bot comments lit up my lizard brain, my id and superego, the “I’m so right” instinct. Then Trollita Kafka told me, essentially, that I was in fact the asshole.One aspect of SocialAI that clearly does not represent the dawn of a new era: Sayman has put out a minimum viable product without communicating important guidelines around privacy, content policies, or how SocialAI or OpenAI might use the data people provide along the way. (Move fast, break things, etc.) He says he’s not using anyone’s posts to train his own AI models, but notes that users are still subject to OpenAI’s data-training terms, since he uses OpenAI’s API. You also can’t mute or block a bot that has gone off the rails.

At least, though, your feed is always private by default. You don’t have any “real” followers. My editor at WIRED, for example, could join SocialAI himself but will never be able to follow me or see that I copied and pasted an Elon Musk tweet about wanting to buy Coca-Cola and put the cocaine back in it, just as he could not follow my ChatGPT account and see what I’m enquiring about there.

As a human on SocialAI, you will never interact with another human. That’s the whole point. It’s your own little world with your own army of AI characters ready to bolster you or tear you down. You may not like it, but it might be where you’re headed anyway. You might already be there.

Source: https://www.wired.com/story/socialai-app-ai-chatbots-chatgpt/

OpenAI Announces a New AI Model, Code-Named Strawberry Step – ChatGPT o1

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The ChatGPT maker reveals details of what’s officially known as OpenAI o1, which shows that AI needs more

OpenAI made the last big breakthrough in artificial intelligence by increasing the size of its models to dizzying proportions, when it introduced GPT-4 last year. The company today announced a new advance that signals a shift in approach—a model that can “reason” logically through many difficult problems and is significantly smarter than existing AI without a major scale-up.

The new model, dubbed OpenAI o1, can solve problems that stump existing AI models, including OpenAI’s most powerful existing model, GPT-4o. Rather than summon up an answer in one step, as a large language model normally does, it reasons through the problem, effectively thinking out loud as a person might, before arriving at the right result.

“This is what we consider the new paradigm in these models,” Mira Murati, OpenAI’s chief technology officer, tells WIRED. “It is much better at tackling very complex reasoning tasks.”

The new model was code-named Strawberry within OpenAI, and it is not a successor to GPT-4o but rather a complement to it, the company says.

Murati says that OpenAI is currently building its next master model, GPT-5, which will be considerably larger than its predecessor. But while the company still believes that scale will help wring new abilities out of AI, GPT-5 is likely to also include the reasoning technology introduced today. “There are two paradigms,” Murati says. “The scaling paradigm and this new paradigm. We expect that we will bring them together.”

LLMs typically conjure their answers from huge neural networks fed vast quantities of training data. They can exhibit remarkable linguistic and logical abilities, but traditionally struggle with surprisingly simple problems such as rudimentary math questions that involve reasoning.

Murati says OpenAI o1 uses reinforcement learning, which involves giving a model positive feedback when it gets answers right and negative feedback when it does not, in order to improve its reasoning process. “The model sharpens its thinking and fine tunes the strategies that it uses to get to the answer,” she says. Reinforcement learning has enabled computers to play games with superhuman skill and do useful tasks like designing computer chips. The technique is also a key ingredient for turning an LLM into a useful and well-behaved chatbot.

Mark Chen, vice president of research at OpenAI, demonstrated the new model to WIRED, using it to solve several problems that its prior model, GPT-4o, cannot. These included an advanced chemistry question and the following mind-bending mathematical puzzle: “A princess is as old as the prince will be when the princess is twice as old as the prince was when the princess’s age was half the sum of their present age. What is the age of the prince and princess?” (The correct answer is that the prince is 30, and the princess is 40).

“The [new] model is learning to think for itself, rather than kind of trying to imitate the way humans would think,” as a conventional LLM does, Chen says.

OpenAI says its new model performs markedly better on a number of problem sets, including ones focused on coding, math, physics, biology, and chemistry. On the American Invitational Mathematics Examination (AIME), a test for math students, GPT-4o solved on average 12 percent of the problems while o1 got 83 percent right, according to the company.

The Catch of Temu in Europe – July 2024

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The Catch of Temu in Europe

Temu, the Chinese e-commerce platform, offers products at remarkably low prices, which raises concerns about its business practices. One significant issue is the undervaluation of parcels entering the EU. Estimates suggest that around 65% of parcels are deliberately undervalued in customs declarations to avoid tariffs, which undermines local businesses and creates an uneven playing field [1]. Additionally, Temu employs a direct-to-consumer model, sourcing products directly from manufacturers in China, allowing them to benefit from bulk discounts and reduced shipping costs [2].

Benefits for the Chinese State

The low pricing strategy of Temu serves multiple purposes for the Chinese state. Firstly, it helps expand China’s influence in global e-commerce by increasing the market share of Chinese companies abroad. This can lead to greater economic ties and dependency on Chinese goods. Secondly, by facilitating the export of low-cost products, Temu contributes to the Chinese economy by boosting manufacturing and logistics sectors. Lastly, the data collected from users can be leveraged for insights into consumer behavior, which may benefit Chinese businesses and potentially the state itself in terms of economic planning and strategy [1].

Overall, while Temu’s low prices attract consumers, they also raise significant regulatory and ethical concerns in Europe, prompting scrutiny from authorities regarding compliance with local laws and standards.

Deeper Analysis of Future Benefits for the Chinese State

Temu’s aggressive pricing strategy in Europe not only serves immediate commercial interests but also aligns with broader strategic goals of the Chinese state. Here are several potential future benefits for China:

Economic Expansion and Market Penetration:
By establishing a strong foothold in European markets through low prices, Temu can facilitate the expansion of Chinese goods into new territories. This not only increases sales volume but also enhances brand recognition and loyalty among European consumers. As more consumers become accustomed to purchasing Chinese products, it could lead to a long-term shift in buying habits, favoring Chinese brands over local alternatives.
Strengthening Supply Chains:
Temu’s model emphasizes direct sourcing from manufacturers, which can help streamline supply chains. This efficiency can be replicated across various sectors, allowing China to become a dominant player in global supply chains. By controlling more aspects of production and distribution, China can mitigate risks associated with international trade tensions and disruptions, ensuring a more resilient economic structure.
Data Collection and Consumer Insights:
The platform’s operations will generate vast amounts of consumer data, which can be analyzed to gain insights into European consumer behavior. This data can inform not only marketing strategies but also product development, allowing Chinese manufacturers to tailor their offerings to meet the specific preferences of European consumers. Such insights can enhance competitiveness and drive innovation within Chinese industries.
Geopolitical Influence:
By increasing its economic presence in Europe, China can leverage its commercial relationships to enhance its geopolitical influence. Economic ties often translate into political goodwill, which can be beneficial in negotiations on various fronts, including trade agreements and international policies. This strategy aligns with China’s broader goal of expanding its influence globally, as outlined in its recent political resolutions emphasizing the importance of state power and common prosperity.
Promotion of Technological Advancements:
As Temu grows, it may invest in technology to improve logistics, customer service, and user experience. This could lead to advancements in e-commerce technologies that can be exported back to China, enhancing domestic capabilities. Moreover, the emphasis on technology aligns with China’s ambitions to become a leader in areas such as artificial intelligence and data analytics, as highlighted in its national strategies.
Cultural Exchange and Soft Power:
By making Chinese products more accessible and appealing to European consumers, Temu can facilitate a form of cultural exchange. As consumers engage with Chinese brands, they may also become more receptive to Chinese culture and values, enhancing China’s soft power. This cultural integration can help counter negative perceptions and foster a more favorable view of China in the long term.

In conclusion, Temu’s low pricing strategy is not merely a tactic for market entry; it is a multifaceted approach that can yield significant long-term benefits for the Chinese state. By enhancing economic ties, gathering valuable consumer data, and promoting technological advancements, China positions itself to strengthen its global influence and economic resilience in an increasingly competitive landscape.

Why Elon Musk should consider integrating OpenAI’s ChatGPT „GPT-4o“ as the operating system for a brand new Tesla SUV – Here are the five biggest advantages to highlight

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Revolutionary User Interface and Experience:
- Natural Language Interaction: GPT-4o’s advanced natural language processing capabilities allow for seamless, conversational interaction between the driver and the vehicle. This makes controlling the vehicle and accessing information more intuitive and user-friendly.
- Personalized Experience: The AI can learn from individual driver behaviors and preferences, offering tailored suggestions for routes, entertainment, climate settings, and more, enhancing overall user satisfaction and engagement.
Enhanced Autonomous Driving and Safety:
- Superior Decision-Making: GPT-4o can significantly enhance Tesla’s autonomous driving capabilities by processing and analyzing vast amounts of real-time data to make better driving decisions. This improves the safety, reliability, and efficiency of the vehicle’s self-driving features.
- Proactive Safety Features: The AI can provide real-time monitoring of the vehicle’s surroundings and driver behavior, offering proactive alerts and interventions to prevent accidents and ensure passenger safety.
Next-Level Infotainment and Connectivity:
- Smart Infotainment System: With GPT-4o, the SUV’s infotainment system can offer highly intelligent and personalized content recommendations, including music, podcasts, audiobooks, and more, making long journeys more enjoyable.
- Seamless Connectivity: The AI can integrate with a wide range of apps and services, enabling drivers to manage their schedules, communicate, and access information without distraction, thus enhancing productivity and convenience.
Continuous Improvement and Future-Proofing:
- Self-Learning Capabilities: GPT-4o continuously learns and adapts from user interactions and external data, ensuring that the vehicle’s performance and features improve over time. This results in an ever-evolving user experience that keeps getting better.
- Over-the-Air Updates: Regular over-the-air updates from OpenAI ensure that the SUV remains at the forefront of technology, with the latest features, security enhancements, and improvements being seamlessly integrated.
Market Differentiation and Brand Leadership:
- Innovative Edge: Integrating GPT-4o positions Tesla’s new SUV as a cutting-edge vehicle, showcasing the latest in AI and automotive technology. This differentiates Tesla from competitors and strengthens its reputation as a leader in innovation.
- Enhanced Customer Engagement: The unique AI-driven features and personalized experiences can drive stronger customer engagement and loyalty, attracting tech-savvy consumers and enhancing the overall brand image.

By leveraging these advantages, Tesla can create a groundbreaking SUV that not only meets but exceeds consumer expectations, setting new standards for the automotive industry and reinforcing Tesla’s position as a pioneer in automotive and AI technology.

Real World Use Cases for Apples Vision Pro + Version 2 – with the new operating system ChatGPT „GPT-4o“

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The integration of advanced AI like OpenAI’s GPT-4o into Apple’s Vision Pro + Version 2 can significantly enhance its vision understanding capabilities.
Here are ten possible use cases:

1. Augmented Reality (AR) Applications:
– Interactive AR Experiences: Enhance AR applications by providing real-time object recognition and interaction. For example, users can point the device at a historical landmark and receive detailed information and interactive visuals about it.
– AR Navigation: Offer real-time navigation assistance in complex environments like malls or airports, overlaying directions onto the user’s view.

2. Enhanced Photography and Videography:
– Intelligent Scene Recognition: Automatically adjust camera settings based on the scene being captured, such as landscapes, portraits, or low-light environments, ensuring optimal photo and video quality.
– Content Creation Assistance: Provide suggestions and enhancements for capturing creative content, such as framing tips, real-time filters, and effects.

3. Healthcare and Medical Diagnosis:
– Medical Imaging Analysis: Assist in analyzing medical images (e.g., X-rays, MRIs) to identify potential issues, providing preliminary diagnostic support to healthcare professionals.
– Remote Health Monitoring: Enable remote health monitoring by analyzing visual data from wearable devices to track health metrics and detect anomalies.

4. Retail and Shopping:
– Virtual Try-Ons: Allow users to virtually try on clothing, accessories, or cosmetics using the device’s camera, enhancing the online shopping experience.
– Product Recognition: Identify products in stores and provide information, reviews, and price comparisons, helping users make informed purchasing decisions.

5. Security and Surveillance:
– Facial Recognition: Enhance security systems with facial recognition capabilities for authorized access and threat detection.
– Anomaly Detection: Monitor and analyze security footage to detect unusual activities or potential security threats in real-time.

6. Education and Training:
– Interactive Learning: Use vision understanding to create interactive educational experiences, such as identifying objects or animals in educational content and providing detailed explanations.
– Skill Training: Offer real-time feedback and guidance for skills training, such as in sports or technical tasks, by analyzing movements and techniques.

7. Accessibility and Assistive Technology:
– Object Recognition for the Visually Impaired: Help visually impaired users navigate their surroundings by identifying objects and providing auditory descriptions.
– Sign Language Recognition: Recognize and translate sign language in real-time, facilitating communication for hearing-impaired individuals.

8. Home Automation and Smart Living:
– Smart Home Integration: Recognize household items and provide control over smart home devices. For instance, identifying a lamp and allowing users to turn it on or off via voice commands.
– Activity Monitoring: Monitor and analyze daily activities to provide insights and recommendations for improving household efficiency and safety.

9. Automotive and Driver Assistance:
– Driver Monitoring: Monitor driver attentiveness and detect signs of drowsiness or distraction, providing alerts to enhance safety.
– Object Detection: Enhance autonomous driving systems with better object detection and classification, improving vehicle navigation and safety.

10. Environmental Monitoring:
– Wildlife Tracking: Use vision understanding to monitor and track wildlife in natural habitats for research and conservation efforts.
– Pollution Detection: Identify and analyze environmental pollutants or changes in landscapes, aiding in environmental protection and management.

These use cases demonstrate the broad potential of integrating advanced vision understanding capabilities into Apple’s Vision Pro + Version 2, enhancing its functionality across various domains and providing significant value to users.

After ruining Android messaging, Google says iMessage is too powerful

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Google failed to compete with iMessage for years. Now it wants Apple to play nice.

Source: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/01/after-ruining-android-messaging-google-says-imessage-is-too-powerful/

Google took to Twitter this weekend to complain that iMessage is just too darn influential with today’s kids. The company was responding to a Wall Street Journal report detailing the lock-in and social pressure Apple’s walled garden is creating among US teens. iMessage brands texts from iPhone users with a blue background and gives them additional features, while texts from Android phones are shown in green and only have the base SMS feature set. According to the article, „Teens and college students said they dread the ostracism that comes with a green text. The social pressure is palpable, with some reporting being ostracized or singled out after switching away from iPhones.“ Google feels this is a problem.

„iMessage should not benefit from bullying,“ the official Android Twitter account wrote. „Texting should bring us together, and the solution exists. Let’s fix this as one industry.“ Google SVP Hiroshi Lockheimer chimed in, too, saying, „Apple’s iMessage lock-in is a documented strategy. Using peer pressure and bullying as a way to sell products is disingenuous for a company that has humanity and equity as a core part of its marketing. The standards exist today to fix this.“

The „solution“ Google is pushing here is RCS, or Rich Communication Services, a GSMA standard from 2008 that has slowly gained traction as an upgrade to SMS. RCS adds typing indicators, user presence, and better image sharing to carrier messaging. It is a 14-year-old carrier standard, though, so it lacks many of the features you would want from a modern messaging service, like end-to-end encryption and support for non-phone devices. Google tries to band-aid over the aging standard with its „Google Messaging“ client, but the result is a lot of clunky solutions that don’t add up to a good modern messaging service.

Since RCS replaces SMS, Google has been on a campaign to get the industry to make the upgrade. After years of protesting, the US carriers are all onboard, and there is some uptake among the international carriers, too. The biggest holdout is Apple, which only supports SMS through iMessage.

Apple's green-versus-blue bubble explainer from its website. — Enlarge / Apple’s green-versus-blue bubble explainer from its website.

Apple

Apple hasn’t ever publicly shot down the idea of adding RCS to iMessage, but thanks to documents revealed in the Epic v. Apple case, we know the company views iMessage lock-in as a valuable weapon. Bringing RCS to iMessage and making communication easier with Android users would only help to weaken Apple’s walled garden, and the company has said it doesn’t want that.

In the US, iPhones are more popular with young adults than ever. As The Wall Street Journal notes, „Among US consumers, 40% use iPhones, but among those aged 18 to 24, more than 70% are iPhone users.“ It credits Apple’s lock-in with apps like iMessage for this success.

Reaping what you sow

Google clearly views iMessage’s popularity as a problem, and the company is hoping this public-shaming campaign will get Apple to change its mind on RCS. But Google giving other companies advice on a messaging strategy is a laughable idea since Google probably has the least credibility of any tech company when it comes to messaging services. If the company really wants to do something about iMessage, it should try competing with it.

As we recently detailed in a 25,000-word article, Google’s messaging history is one of constant product startups and shutdowns. Thanks to a lack of product focus or any kind of top-down mandate from Google’s CEO, no division is really „in charge“ of messaging. As a consequence, the company has released 13 half-hearted messaging products since iMessage launched in 2011. If Google wants to look to someone to blame for iMessage’s dominance, it should start with itself, since it has continually sabotaged and abandoned its own plans to make an iMessage competitor.

Why Apple’s iMessage Is Winning: Teens Dread the Green Text Bubble

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The iPhone maker cultivated iMessage as a must-have texting tool for teens. Android users trigger a just-a-little-less-cool green bubble: ‘Ew, that’s gross.’

Source: https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-apples-imessage-is-winning-teens-dread-the-green-text-bubble-11641618009

Soon after 19-year-old Adele Lowitz gave up her Apple AAPL 0.51% iPhone 11 for an experimental go with an Android smartphone, a friend in her long-running texting group chimed in: “Who’s green?”

The reference to the color of group text messages—Android users turn Apple Inc.’s iMessage into green bubbles instead of blue—highlighted one of the challenges of her experiment. No longer did her group chats work seamlessly with other peers, almost all of whom used iPhones. FaceTime calls became more complicated and the University of Michigan sophomore’s phone didn’t show up in an app she used to find friends.

That pressure to be a part of the blue text group is the product of decisions by Apple executives starting years ago that have, with little fanfare, built iMessage into one of the world’s most widely used social networks and helped to cement the iPhone’s dominance among young smartphone users in the U.S.

How that happened came to light last year during Apple’s courtroom fight against “Fortnite” maker Epic Games Inc., which claimed the tech giant held an improper monopoly over distribution of apps onto the iPhone. As part of the battle, thousands of pages of internal records were made public. Some revealed a long-running debate about whether to offer iMessage on phones that run with Google’s Android operating system. Apple made a critical decision: Keep iMessage for Apple users only.

“In the absence of a strategy to become the primary messaging service for [the] bulk of cell phone users, I am concerned the iMessage on Android would simply serve to remove [an] obstacle to iPhone families giving their kids Android phones,” Craig Federighi, Apple’s chief software executive, said in a 2013 email. Three years later, then-marketing chief Phil Schiller made a similar case to Chief Executive Tim Cook in another email: “Moving iMessage to Android will hurt us more than help us,” he said. Another warning that year came from a former Apple executive who told his old colleagues in an email that “iMessage amounts to serious lock-in.”

When Adele Lowitz, left, experimented with using an Android smartphone instead of an iPhone, one friend asked: ‘Who’s green?’ PHOTO: STEVE KOSS FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

When Adele Lowitz, left, experimented with using an Android smartphone instead of an iPhone, one friend asked: ‘Who’s green?’ PHOTO: STEVE KOSS FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

From the beginning, Apple got creative in its protection of iMessage’s exclusivity. It didn’t ban the exchange of traditional text messages with Android users but instead branded those messages with a different color; when an Android user is part of a group chat, the iPhone users see green bubbles rather than blue. It also withheld certain features. There is no dot-dot-dot icon to demonstrate that a non-iPhone user is typing, for example, and an iMessage heart or thumbs-up annotation has long conveyed to Android users as text instead of images.

Apple later took other steps that enhanced the popularity of its messaging service with teens. It added popular features such as animated cartoon-like faces that create mirrors of a user’s face, to compete with messaging services from social media companies. Apple’s own survey of iPhone holders made public during the Epic Games litigation found that customers were particularly fond of replacing words with emojis and screen effects such as animated balloons and confetti. Avid teen users said in interviews with The Wall Street Journal that they also liked how they could create group chats with other Apple users that add and subtract participants without having to start a new chain.

How Apple’s iPhone and Apps Trap You in a Walled GardenYOU MAY ALSO LIKEUP NEXT 0:00 / 6:21 How Apple’s iPhone and Apps Trap You in a Walled GardenApple’s hardware, software and services work so harmoniously that it is often called a “walled garden.” The idea is central to recent antitrust scrutiny and the Epic vs. Apple case. WSJ’s Joanna Stern went to a real walled garden to explain it all. Photo illustration: Adele Morgan/The Wall Street Journal

The cultivation of iMessage is consistent with Apple’s broader strategy to tie its hardware, software and services together in a self-reinforcing world—dubbed the walled garden—that encourages people to pay the premium for its relatively expensive gadgets and remain loyal to its brand. That strategy has drawn scrutiny from critics and lawmakers as part of a larger examination of how all tech giants operate. Their core question: Do Apple and other tech companies create products that consumers simply find indispensable, or are they building near-monopolies that unfairly stifle competition?

Apple in its fight against Epic Games denied it held improper monopoly power in the smartphone market, pointing to intense competition globally with other phone makers and Android’s operating system. “With iMessage we built a great service that our users love and that is different from those offered by other platforms,” the company said in a statement.

Apple and other tech giants have long worked hard to get traction with young users, hoping to build brand habits that will extend into adulthood as they battle each other for control of everything from videogames to extended reality glasses to the metaverse. Globally, Alphabet Inc.’s Android operating system is the dominant player among smartphone users, with a loyal following of people who are vocal about their support. Among U.S. consumers, 40% use iPhones, but among those aged 18 to 24, more than 70% are iPhone users, according to Consumer Intelligence Research Partners’s most recent survey of consumers.

Shoppers at an Apple store in November.

PHOTO: NIYI FOTE/ZUMA PRESS

Apple is not the first tech company to come up with a must-have chat tool among young people, and such services sometimes struggle to stay relevant. BlackBerry and America Online were among the popular online communication forums of past decades that eventually lost ground to newer entrants.

Yet grabbing users so early in life could pay dividends for generations for Apple, already the world’s most valuable publicly traded company. It briefly crossed $3 trillion in market value for the first time on Jan. 3.

“These teenagers will continue to become consumers in the future and hopefully continue to buy phones into their 40s, 50s, 60s and 70s,” said Harsh Kumar, an analyst for Piper Sandler. The firm recently found that 87% of teens surveyed last year own iPhones.

Never date a green texter

Apple’s iMessage plays a significant role in the lives of young smartphone users and their parents, according to data and interviews with a dozen of these people. Teens and college students said they dread the ostracism that comes with a green text. The social pressure is palpable, with some reporting being ostracized or singled out after switching away from iPhones.

“In my circle at college, and in high school rolling over into college, most people have iPhones and utilize a lot of those kinds of iPhone specific features” together, said Ms. Lowitz, the Michigan student.

She said she came to realize that Apple had effectively created a social network of features that keeps users, such as her and others, locked in. “There was definitely some kind of pressure to get back to that,” she said.

Many of the new iMessage features—such as the 3D-like digital avatars known as memojis—exist fundamentally as a reason to own an iPhone and don’t make money for Apple directly. Last year Apple also made it possible to share FaceTime connections with Android users—a slight crack in Apple’s self-reinforcing ecosystem as video calling became more prevalent during the pandemic. In recent years, however, it has incorporated some moneymaking elements including Apple Pay and e-commerce links to other businesses such as Starbucks.

“We know that Apple users appreciate having access to innovative features like iCloud synching across all their Apple devices, Tapback and Memoji, as well as industry-leading privacy and security with end-to-end encryption—all of which make iMessage unique,” Apple said in a statement.Youthful ExuberanceThe share of Apple iPhones in the U.S. has swelleddramatically among young smartphone owners. Source: Consumer Intelligence Research PartnersNote: Annual survey conducted each September of 2,000 U.S. peoplewho purchased a smartphone in the previous 12 months. Age 18-24Older than 242014’15’16’17’18’19’20’2120304050607080%

Apple’s iMessage uses the internet to send text, video and photo messages, while iPhone users communicating with non-Apple users use old-school cellular channels such as SMS and MMS. Apple said its closed, encrypted system ensures messages are protected from hackers. Apple also disputes the idea that users are locked in to iMessage, saying users can easily switch to other smartphones.

A Google executive said Apple could make it easier for iMessage and Android users to communicate. “There are no real technical or product reasons for this issue,” Hiroshi Lockheimer, Google senior vice president of platforms and ecosystems, said. “The solutions already exist and we encourage Apple to join with the rest of the mobile industry in implementing them. We believe people should have the ability to connect with each other without artificial limits. It simply doesn’t have to be like this.” TECH NEWS BRIEFING What Apple’s Texting App Tells Us About Its Strategy to Attract Users 00:00

IPhone users switch among a variety of apps to communicate. But if you use an iPhone, it is likely you’re also using iMessage. Apple’s internal research made public during the Epic Games litigation found that a survey of U.S. iPhone users, some as young as 14, overwhelmingly use iMessage. Among those who used an instant messaging app at least once a month, 85% of those surveyed said they used iMessage compared with 57% and 16% using Meta’s Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp, respectively, the Apple research showed. Meta’s messaging apps are widely used globally. WhatsApp, for example, topped 2 billion users in 2020.

In the pitched battle for messaging, Facebook executives in recent years became interested in capturing users at a younger age, according to documents reviewed by the Journal that formed the basis of a series of articles, called the Facebook Files, published in recent months.

One Facebook study, shared internally in 2019, aimed to understand why iMessage and SnapInc.’s Snapchat were the primary messaging apps for 10- to 13-year-olds. The research focused attention on a popular game played through iMessage called “Game Pigeon.”

The third-party game, acquired through Apple’s App Store and designed to operate in the messaging app, illustrates just one of the ways iMessages connects with young people. The game consists of users taking turns playing activities, such as checkers or word games, and allows for texting back-and-forth among players. “Game Pigeon” can’t be played between iPhone and Android users.

Miles Franklin, a longtime Android loyalist, was left out of rounds of a popular online game in high school. He switched to an iPhone two years ago.

PHOTO: MILES FRANKLIN

Facebook researchers concluded the appeal revolved around the social aspect of the games, helping younger people initiate conversations. “Game Pigeon generates amusement through digital interaction without the pressures of finding topics of conversation by enabling tweens to send games as content interactions and to use shared activities as a way to connect when they feel there is nothing to talk about,” according to the study.

Rounds of “Game Pigeon” in high school among friends were the first time Miles Franklin said he realized he was left out with his Android phone. “That’s my first taste of it,” said Mr. Franklin, now a 22-year-old senior at the University of Florida in Gainesville.

He said he long considered himself an Android loyalist going back to when he got his first phone at age 13 for his birthday. That changed, however, two years ago when he switched to an iPhone because he preferred it for making TikTok videos.

While it seems simple enough to shift to another messaging service, it isn’t in real life, according to Mr. Franklin. “I personally would do that,” he said. “But I’m not everyone else. I can’t convince other people to switch over to another app because they’re not gonna want to do that unless you’re really close to them.”

Grace Fang, 20-years-old, said she too saw such social dynamics among her peers at Wellesley College in Massachusetts. “I’ve had people with Androids apologize that they have Androids and don’t have iMessage,” she said. “I don’t know if it’s Apple propaganda or just like a tribal in-group versus out-group thing going on, but people don’t seem to like green text bubbles that much and seem to have this visceral negative reaction to it.” Ms. Fang added that she finds the hubbub silly and that she prefers to avoid texting all together.

‘I’ve had people with Androids apologize that they have Androids and don’t have iMessage,” said Grace Fang.

PHOTO: ASHLEY PANDYA

Jocelyn Maher, a 24-year-old master’s student in upstate New York, said her friends and younger sister have mocked her for exchanging texts with potential paramours using Android phones. “I was like, `Oh my gosh, his texts are green,’ and my sister literally went, `Ew that’s gross,’” Ms. Maher said.

She noted that she once successfully persuaded a boyfriend to switch to an iPhone after some gentle badgering. Their relationship didn’t last.

Such interactions have made fertile ground for memes on social media. During the pandemic, Jeremy Cangiano, who just finished up his MBA at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, dealt with his boredom on TikTok, quickly noticing that blue-bubble-green-bubble memes were popular among young people. He tried to cash in on it last year by selling his own merchandise that touted, “Never Date a Green Texter.”

‘Serious lock-in’

The blue iMessage bubble was born out of a simple engineering need, according to Justin Santamaria, a former Apple engineer who worked on the original feature. At first, Apple engineers just wanted to be able to easily identify iMessages when working with other texting formats as they developed their system, he said. The effect just stuck as it moved forward for consumer rollout.

“I had no idea that there would be a cachet or like, `Ugh green bubble conversations,’” he said. The idea that it would keep users locked in to using Apple devices wasn’t even part of the conversation at the time, he said.

The idea of opening iMessage to Android users arose in 2013, according to some of the internal records made public during the courtroom fight with Epic Games. As a market rumor circulated that Google was considering the acquisition of the popular messaging app WhatsApp, senior Apple executives discussed how such an acquisition might roil competition and how they might better compete.

Eddy Cue, who oversees Apple’s services business, told his colleagues he had some of his team investigating how to make iMessage available on Android phones, according to an email that surfaced as part of the Epic Games litigation. “We should go full speed and make this an official project,” he advised. “Google will instantly own messaging with this acquisition.”

How has the blue-green bubble battle played out in your own social circle? Join the conversation below.

Mr. Schiller, the executive who at the time oversaw marketing, wrote: “And since we make no money on iMessage what will be the point?” Mr. Cue responded: “Do we want to lose one of the most important apps in a mobile environment to Google? They have search, mail, free video and growing quickly in browsers. We have the best messaging app and we should make it the industry standard. I don’t know what ways we can monetize it but it doesn’t cost us a lot to run.”

Others weighed in. Mr. Federighi, Apple’s chief software executive, said in an email that he worried that making iMessage an option on Android could have a serious downside by removing an obstacle for iPhone families to get their children Android phones.

In the end, Google didn’t buy WhatsApp and Apple didn’t make its iMessage available to Android users. Facebook ultimately acquired WhatsApp in 2014 for $22 billion, ratcheting up competition with Apple.

In just a few years, the value of iMessage’s blue texts had become more clear to Apple execs. After an executive left the company and began using an Android, he wrote former colleagues in 2016 and said he had switched back to iPhones after just a few months.

His family resorted to using Facebook products to message him, former Apple Music executive Ian Rogers said in the email. “I missed a ton of messages from friends and family who all use iMessage and kept messaging me at my old address,” he wrote, adding that “iMessage amounts to serious lock-in.”

The note, which became public during Apple’s litigation with Epic Games, eventually made its way to Mr. Cook through then-marketing chief Mr. Schiller, who added his own two cents: “Moving iMessage to Android will hurt us more than help us, this email illustrates why.”

As for Ms. Lowitz, the Michigan college student, she was glad when her switch to Android—brought about by her participation in a paid research study—came to an end. She was ready to get back to her iPhone. “There’s too much within the Apple network for me to switch,” she said.

Anna Fuder, 19, a friend at Michigan who had declined to participate in the study for fear of giving up her iPhone, was overjoyed. “As soon as she switched back to her iPhone, it was like hallelujah,” Ms. Fuder said. “Blue again.

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Real World Use Cases for Apples Vision Pro + Version 2 – with the new operating system ChatGPT „GPT-4o“

After ruining Android messaging, Google says iMessage is too powerful

Google failed to compete with iMessage for years. Now it wants Apple to play nice.

Reaping what you sow

Further Reading

Why Apple’s iMessage Is Winning: Teens Dread the Green Text Bubble

The iPhone maker cultivated iMessage as a must-have texting tool for teens. Android users trigger a just-a-little-less-cool green bubble: ‘Ew, that’s gross.’

Shoppers at an Apple store in November.

Never date a green texter

Miles Franklin, a longtime Android loyalist, was left out of rounds of a popular online game in high school. He switched to an iPhone two years ago.

‘I’ve had people with Androids apologize that they have Androids and don’t have iMessage,” said Grace Fang.

‘Serious lock-in’

AI is Creating New Real Estate for Ads

Vertical AI Is Creating Specialized Inventory

Measurement Primitives are Changing and New Infrastructure is Emerging

Conclusion / Challenges

Status Games

Engagement Hacks

Google Selling Chrome Won’t Be Enough to End Its Search Monopoly

AI Lab Newsletter by Will Knight

The Catch of Temu in Europe

Benefits for the Chinese State

Deeper Analysis of Future Benefits for the Chinese State

Google failed to compete with iMessage for years. Now it wants Apple to play nice.

Reaping what you sow

Further Reading

The iPhone maker cultivated iMessage as a must-have texting tool for teens. Android users trigger a just-a-little-less-cool green bubble: ‘Ew, that’s gross.’

Shoppers at an Apple store in November.

Never date a green texter

Miles Franklin, a longtime Android loyalist, was left out of rounds of a popular online game in high school. He switched to an iPhone two years ago.

‘I’ve had people with Androids apologize that they have Androids and don’t have iMessage,” said Grace Fang.

‘Serious lock-in’

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