Michael and Johnny look at Tiktok, the history of its parent company and its founder, what makes it work, how it compares to its Social Media competitors like Instagram and Facebook, and the potential impact the US and India bans may have on it and its growth.
In the News of the Week, we discuss the new GPT-3 NLP model, what it represents, and the related trends; also we debate the potential impacts of the US government's recent policies towards international students on the tech and startup space.
Recorded Date: Sunday, July 26, 2020
Ideas of the Week:
- The Canadian and US government will approach Michael and Johnny to build a TikTok alternative
- Johnny will take the money and go on vacation (aka treason)
- How can you take out TikTok? What are its shortcomings? What would be the next consumer-facing social media interface that comes after TikTok?
- A streaming company could come after this space that TikTok occupies
- Go after all video consumption on the internet and put it into your system -> you go back to the age of the Television!
- Take government money, create a TikTok clone on AWS - guaranteed instant success!
Time Stamps
- 00:00:20: GPT-3
- 00:03:03: Student Visas and impact on tech?
- 00:08:14: TikTok
- 00:13:34: What makes TikTok Work?
- 00:37:55: Rich Tech Poor Tech
- 00:43:50: Ideas of the week
Rich Tech Poor Tech
- Industry: Entertainment -> Rich Tech
- Product: Democratization of Entertainment like other Social Media companies -> Rich Tech
- Labor: Mainly Software Engineers, Product, Designers, Mobile, AI Engineers; No manual labor; Upwards mobility exists -> Rich Tech
- Customers: Creators unable to make money directly on the platform but indirectly do via the fame and opportunities -> Rich Tech
- Society: Consumers gain entertainment, it generates wealth for founders, employees, ads, not so much rest of society -> Poor Tech
- Verdict: Tiktok is a Rich Tech Company
Highlights
- With the continued evolution of the GPT models and other advances, is the barrier of entry to doing machine learning becoming so low, it will be commoditized?
- Will this lead to No Code tools incorporating some ML capabilities?
- Will the US government's continued unfriendly policies against international students lead to long term impacts?
- Which countries' students will lose out if we move to remote only schools?
- How would you describe TikTok?
- TikTok became the video memes generator
- Tiktok introduced a new user interface experience with the constant loading of videos right after the other powered by their AI relevance engine
- The existing social media companies can't change their main interface to become more like TikTok
- USSR was unable to make an alternative to Coca-Cola and Pepsi, so had to resort to making a deal with them
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