Answering reader questions about AI, smart glasses, TikTok, and more

As promised, I have a special mailbag issue this week. Thanks to everyone who sent in questions. Just like last yearI’ve chosen a handful that touch on some of the topics I plan to continue covering in 2025.

I am really concerned/concerned/curious about the near future. 10 years from now, I think it’s very clear that AI will replace many job functions. What are we all going to do?

The leaders of AI laboratories say that, yes, there will be job losses, but this does not mean catastrophe. The optimist is that humans are creative and will invent new jobs, as they always do when technology changes things. At the moment, there is also a macro belief among CEOs who drive much of the infrastructure spending for AI that its impact will be deflationary and lead to GDP growth.

Job displacement will always be painful, of course. Sam Altman and others believe that some form of universal basic income will be needed to offset the economic impacts of AGI. Altman has his other startup, Tools for Humanity, already scanning eyeballs and distributing cryptocurrency. But I think it’s too early to be seriously worried. Like Altman he himself said recentlyAGI will be announced soon and we will probably not notice.

How much better is the reasoning on AI models, and is it really something I should care about?

I know people who have tried the o1 pro mode of ChatGPT and notice a difference. But I haven’t seen anything amazing from o1 or that Noam Shazeer in Google right out, though maybe I’m a little jaded by the last couple of years of AI hype. My advice would be to play with what you can access/afford and see for yourself.

The expense of running these cutting edge “reasoning” models is now kept at bay for many people. I hope access expands significantly in 2025. Knowing how to send these different types of models effectively remains a struggle, and I would like to see more interface improvements in apps like ChatGPT to help teach people why they should use a reasoning model. An even better move would be to abstract all these definitions and focus on what the tools can do for people.

What kind of outlook do you see for Snap in 2025 and beyond?

Snap’s biggest problem going into 2025 is the same problem it had in 2024: its business isn’t growing fast enough. The app itself is bigger than ever and growing fast, but annual revenue growth last quarter was less than Meta. This is not a compelling pitch to Wall Street when you are already seen as the underdog. Even with the announcements placed in the Chat tab and the new Spotlight redesign that is slowly developing, the jury is out on whether the business can recover at the pace it needs to this year.

A depressed stock price makes it harder to recruit and retain talent, which has become more of a problem for Snap over the past two years. I think the atmosphere could change quickly if TikTok ends up being banned in the US or severely hindered by a new ownership structure.

I remain skeptical by Evan Spiegel commitment to hardware with Spectacles. As I wrote beforeHis foresight and ambition to build AR lenses is admirable. But Snap seems increasingly bogged down in hardware.

What do you expect from Meta glasses in 2025?

There have been a couple of reports recently saying that Meta plans to ship a pair of smart glasses with a heads-up display this year. First I informed this was to happen in February 2023. Hypernova, as the product is referred to internally in Meta, will have a viewer to interact with things like Meta AI and notifications.

In my writing of the Orion prototypeI spent a lot of time on the neural bracelet because it has to ship with Hypernova as a way to control it (while the commercial successor of Orion is still a couple of years away at least). I expect this band to be the part of the glasses that surprises people the most. Using it for the first time feels like magic. As I reported in 2023, Meta is also planning a separate smartwatch as an optional upgrade with neural capacity and more functions for health tracking, etc. It will be a very interesting year for Meta on the hardware front.

Will TikTok really be banned?

No one I’ve spoken to who is in a position to know thinks China will let TikTok be completely taken over by ByteDance. The algorithm will certainly not be sold, but as I explained earlierwhich is not as important a factor as the last time TikTok was facing a ban.

At the same time, there is too much money and power at stake for TikTok to just disappear. President-elect Donald Trump he wants to make a deal. The most likely result is a different version of the Frankensteinian joint venture proposal “TikTok Global” that ByteDance agreed to return in 2020.

I can see Oracle getting involved this second time around by Larry Ellison ongoing influence at Mar-a-Lago. ByteDance will likely continue to run TikTok on a day-to-day basis while divesting some of its ownership stake. The real wild card in all of this, however, is Elon Muskwho has had serious TikTok envy since he bought X…

Are you more bullish or bearish on Google than a year ago?

Honestly, bullish. It will be difficult to achieve Sundar Pichai Mandate 2025 to make Gemini a serious rival to ChatGPT on the consumer side, but Google has a fountain of money, technical talent and unrivaled distribution.

The company’s challenge is more cultural. The more you have, the more you have to protect. It is difficult to get such a large and sprawling conglomerate to move quickly and not care about the risk of reactions. Pichai seems well aware of this and the threats he makes, though.

Even if Google were to end its default search payments to Apple (which I predict will be the most likely outcome of the DOJ antitrust case), doing so would likely hurt Apple’s bottom line more than Google’s, as Eddy Cue he himself argued last week.

Then there’s Waymo, which may end up paying for all of Google’s failed “other bets” over the years — and then some.

What is a good book that you recommend that falls in line with the things you report?

One curse of already reading so much for my job is that I rarely want to spend time on a book. The last book I read in full was The biggest bluff from Maria Konnikovawhich has nothing to do with technology, but is super valuable if you’re into poker. I liked how his story of becoming a professional is interwoven to explain the techniques of the game.