Live show: Amazon, Meta and the fight over the future of AI; Plus, is Seattle still the place to build?

Todd Bishop (0:03)

What happens here matters everywhere. You know what?

I'm going to start over, because I didn't ask you to applaud. And this is how the podcast works.

John Cook (0:12)

This is why it is going to be a four-hour podcast.

Todd Bishop (0:23)

Hello, and welcome to GeekWire.

No coaching at all on that reaction. I'm GeekWire co-founder Todd Bishop.

John Cook (0:35)

And I'm GeekWire co-founder John Cook.

Todd Bishop (0:36)

We are coming to you from Seattle, where we get to report each day about what's happening around us in business, technology and innovation. What happens here matters everywhere. And every week on this show, we get to talk about some of the most interesting and important stories and trends in the news. We are recording this week's show live on location at Daniel's Broiler in downtown Seattle, in front of a room of founders and CEOs in everything from space to defense, to robotics and logistics and AI. It is great to have all of you here. We are here in partnership with our longtime partner at Northern Trust, hosting this podcast and dinner, who've worked with us on this dinner program for many years and who helped bring this group together tonight. Thanks again to all of you for being here. And thanks to Northern Trust for hosting us.

You know, John, I was saying before we started looking around this room, I mean, this is such a powerhouse group of folks. And I'm a little bit self-conscious about opining in front of them, when really I want to be talking to them. And in fact, later on we are going to be bringing up Mike Fridgen, who has been starting companies in this town for almost 30 years to get into a question that I suspect everybody in this room has an opinion on, whether Seattle is still a place to build a great startup.

John Cook (1:58)

Yeah, it's a great room. In fact, I think many of the people sitting at the tables here would be great interview subjects for GeekWire Stories or future GeekWire podcasts.

Todd Bishop (2:06)

Absolutely. Coming up on this week's show, get your bot out of my store. Amazon fights Meta over agentic commerce and gives us a sense of what promises to be a major future battle line across the tech industry.

We'll close, of course, with the GeekWire Trivia Challenge, which tonight, I will say, based on the topic has a few of you at an unfair advantage.

Stick around for that in the final segment. But first, John, let's get into this story of Amazon versus Meta. This was one of the most remarkable pieces of news that I think I've run across in quite a while. I got a tip on Sunday night that something big was happening and that I might want to stick around for a phone call. And it turns out, in fact, that Amazon is blocking Meta's new chatbot and agent, Muse. And at first, it seemed a little trivial. And I have to say that as I dug into this story, it really became clear that this is one of the major fault lines, one of the major battle fronts emerging in tech. And it ends up being much bigger than a lot of people would have thought.

John Cook (3:19)

Todd, were you a board game player growing up?

Todd Bishop (3:21)

A little bit, yeah.

John Cook (3:22)

Did you ever play the board game Risk?

Todd Bishop (3:24)

Yes.

John Cook (3:24)

That's what came to mind when I saw this story emerge. It seems that these new lines are forming. People are grabbing power.

And that's what this story said to me.

Todd Bishop (3:36)

So the gist of this story, for people who didn't follow it, is that Amazon has decided that it does not want the Muse bot, Meta's bot, shopping on behalf of users in the Amazon store. And what they did on Sunday night was they put up a pop-up saying that any continued access by an unauthorized AI agent violates Amazon's conditions of use. And it was kind of a case of Meta going rogue. Amazon says Meta never disclosed Muse.

They would never access the site, that the agent doesn't identify itself, and that it appears to capture customer credentials. But the amazing thing is, the next day, Meta's stock was up 11 percent. And so it felt like one of those very Silicon Valley versus Seattle moments, where you kind of have this Seattle company sticking with the status quo, saying, hey, these are the rules. We're going to live by these rules. Old rules.

And you have Meta, kind of the epitome, and actually the company that coined the phrase, in many ways, move fast and break things, doing something where they moved fast, and they didn't necessarily break anything, but obviously they saw the reward, at least in their stock price, and the reaction to this new chatbot.