What could Siri do for you--if Apple ever got it right?
Meet me where I am--that's the whitespace that Apple can fill up with a genuine personal assistant. I thought about that as I thought about where my weekly nextNYC newsletter fits into everyone's content consumption stack and even my own--and whether AI will mark the end of human driven curation.
Do NYC founders really need me in between you and the event calendar? Couldn't AI just figure out who you are and suggest events for you?
I asked ChatGPT to summarize Sunday night's Techmeme lessons for founders:
"Here are five sharp, founder-relevant takeaways from today’s Techmeme:
AI isn’t optional: Multi-agent systems (Anthropic), AI-native SaaS (Abacum, Zorro), and AI-heavy M&A (75% of tech deals) show that investors and acquirers are all-in—your product should be, too.
Regulation is real: New York is moving fast on AI safety laws. If you're building with frontier models, expect scrutiny and plan for transparency from day one.
Jobs are shifting: BT’s CEO says AI could deepen 40K+ job cuts. That’s a green light for tools that replace, not just assist, human workflows.
Copyright lawsuits are heating up: LLaMA 3.1’s memorization of copyrighted content highlights risks for anyone relying on large public models.
Consumer UX is evolving: Apple’s “Liquid Glass” and visionOS changes signal a shift toward spatial, immersive interfaces—design accordingly."
What does this mean for Techmeme's ad-driven model?
While we've seen massive advancement in the power of AI tools over the last year or so, we're clearly still just in the early innings of this shift. Reading through the tea leaves of Joanne Stern's interview with Apple software chief Craig Federighi and marketing head Greg Joswiak, I was actually a little hopeful.
It feels like Apple hopes Siri will evolve into a highly reliable and integrated AI companion, deeply embedded across its operating systems rather than functioning as a standalone chatbot. It's something that feels like Apple is uniquely suited to do given continued consumer loyalty to its hardware and operating system. They have unparalleled ecosystem control (iPhone, Watch, AirPods, Mac), on-device intelligence, user trust, and deep OS integration.
Alphabet, on the other hand, has a best-in-class knowledge graph, search, calendar, email, maps, YouTube-- the raw data of your life--but has historically failed at building good assistants and Gemini doesn't seem the least bit promising to me. Basic queries like, "Summarize all the responses to my e-mails about "[Subject line I just sent to a bunch of people]" completely fail.
Amazon could be the best home assistant — but weak as a full personal assistant unless you live in Amazon’s ecosystem, which most people don't. If you're not in my e-mails and texts, you're really out of touch with my life.
Could Meta do an end around with its glasses--creating wearables that are made better by plugging your social graph into them, therefore giving Meta access to your full communications stack? Maybe, but I don't see this hardware as much of a moat when Google knows far more about the parts of me I want to make more productive through AI. Make fun of Google Glass all you want, now that the Ray-Bans are out there, it wouldn't be that difficult for anyone to figure out what they did right and copy it.
As for ChatGPT, Claude, etc… To be honest, they feel pretty limited in what they can do for me—like standalone apps when what I’m really looking for is a new OS. ChatGPT may have unseated Google in terms of my goto search platform, but Google still knows far more about me. They’re just not that plugged into my life and will be limited without a better partnership with someone who owns and sees far more of my data.
Here's what I ultimately want my AI personal assistant to do for me:
Stay on top of all inbound communications, prioritize it for me, and rout it to me across relevant devices in contextually aware ways that take into consideration what I'm likely thinking about and working on and where. Today, this is too siloed across e-mail, text, Slack, etc., and it all lacks action and follow up.
Manage my home finances in both the long and short term. This should be far easier and I fully expect to be running off a Family CFO platform within the next 12-24 months.
Sit in between me and all my content sources, figuring out where and when to present me new information and insights in multiple mediums, saving, researching and inspiring me to think about things I'm interested in along the way--while helping me publish my best thinking. The best version of this will actually center sources, not disaggregate from them. It will help me make more of my Thesis Driven real estate/urban development content subscription, for example, by turning insights into little location aware podcast snippets when I walk around my neighborhood and see new developments going up.
Suggest new people for me to meet. Finding techie or sporty Park Slope parents that we like whose kids are likely to go to PS 282 for Pre-K is harder than it needs to be.
What do you want AI to do for you that it doesn't already and which company is most well positioned to do it?
