Marissa Mayer

Anthropix S1 finally dropped, but one Apollo economist says AI has delivered a zero financial payoff outside of tech.

So who's really benefiting from the AI boom? Also this week, Marissa Mayer's new AI assistant has sparked a wave of backlash over what tech leaders think people want from AI.

And we're keeping an eye on a couple of deals, including a $600 million funding round for a startup that's building self-driving excavators.

Stick around.

Yes.

So I've been noticing that AI executives, I think, are bad at promoting their products.

And most recently, we've seen people get a little up in arms about The way that Marissa Mayer, who was one of the earliest Google engineers, former Yahoo CEO, with her new AI company Dazzle, the way that she portrayed it made people kind of mad because...

The way she described it was that she was very impressed with this tool, which looks at your camera roll and then acts as an AI assistant that learns about you based on the pictures you take on your phone, which is an interesting idea because, yeah, you're learning way more about a person than maybe just looking at their email or their work life.

So I think that's a real thing.

We were talking about Marissa Mayer's new startup, Dazzle, that apparently uses metadata from phones in your photo library in order to personalize the AI better.

It's like, okay, we'll train on this and then give you better home recommendations.

So it is...

They're all extremely sensitive to being abstracted away, and that's why these big tech companies maintain armies of engineers so they can institutionalize any emerging technology, they hire these massive account teams to lock in the Fortune 500 clients, and they fund these giant M&A divisions that are ready to absorb promising startups before they ever become full threats.

And in Silicon Valley, no CEO wants to be remembered as the one who screwed the pooch, like Marissa Mayer at Yahoo, Carly Fiorina at HP, Steve Ballmer at Microsoft, or John Scholey at Apple.

This is why Meta, Google, Microsoft, and Apple are all forcing AI into every product and service without a clear user need or endgame.

They would rather subsidize adoption and accelerate this uncertain future towards commoditization than give up an inch to a newcomer.

Reliably reduce my mental load.

Like I know that that's what Marissa Mayer's new company, right? Like she wants that to happen, right? It's like targeted toward women like me, like mothers with jobs, right? Who have like 18 different things in their heads all the time.

But I've yet to see something that can stay true enough to who I am and like come up with ideas that feel interesting to me.

Okay, that's a pretty good definition.

Reliably reduce my mental load.

Like I know that that's what Marissa Mayer's new company, right? Like she wants that to happen, right? It's like targeted toward women like me, like mothers with jobs, right? Who have like 18 different things in their heads all the time.

But I've yet to see something that can stay true enough to who I am and like come up with ideas that feel interesting to me.

Okay, that's a pretty good definition.

What do you got? What's your winner?

My winner is Marissa Mayer.

Do you remember Marissa Mayer?

Oh, come on.

Of course.

No one else, no other women seem to be running AI companies.

Yeah, go ahead.

So Marissa Mayer, who was sort of a laughingstock because she paid herself so much money at Yahoo, it was a massive failure.

We'll talk about why immigration is causing a problem for Anthropic.

The story everybody has been talking about in my group chats this week, the Marissa Mayer AI dazzle story in The Times this weekend.

Have you been hearing all about that, Peter? Talking about it?

You know, I was just at the Cheesecake Factory for lunch and everybody there was talking about it as well.

And she seems shocked at the response that it's gotten.

Peter, what was the freakiest thing about the conversation about Dazzle for you?

Well, I'll say this before I sort of launch into a series of criticisms of Marissa Mayer, but I will say she's obviously very intelligent and very talented and skilled.

No one is questioning that.

Okay, I'm glad nobody grabbed this one because I had RFK on my list too.

Marissa Mayer, who is the former CEO at Yahoo and also a former big mocker at Google.

She now has her own startup, which involves, of course, AI, because that's what apparently the entire economy is now in Silicon Valley is now based on AI.

But there was a profile of her in The New York Times on Sunday.

I just want to read you the first four paragraphs because they're beyond belief.

Late last year, Marissa Mayer was struggling with what felt like an impossible task.

Her daughter, Marielle, was turning 10, and Marielle's teacher wanted three bullet points summarizing what made her special.

Mayer likes cracking a hard problem, but she felt overwhelmed by the range and complexity of potential answers.