Brian O’Malley

When I was tracking the company down in 2004, unsuccessfully, unfortunately, I had to get a .edu email address from my old college in order to even be able to access the product.

And that meant that the company actually tapped out at around 4 million users for some period of time.

The growth slowed and flatlined.

And so there were some questions about it.

But what people didn't understand is there was still so much pent up demand for people outside of colleges that it was really about Zuck being very deliberate about when he moved into new areas and the way that he ultimately moved into those areas.

When we last chatted, you said that we were in the toy phase of AI.

What did you mean by that?

It's been a couple of weeks since we chatted and I would even argue that we're starting to move out of that.

So much changing so quickly.

But if you think about the early cases when ChatGPT first came out, I remember when the first thing I did would be write like a silly song and have it sung in a pirate voice or something like that.

There was a lot of this playing around because it was so different than what you would experience with any other product online.

But from there, people started moving into more serious queries.

There's obviously a lot of usage in and around education, maybe less monetizable, but people using AI for more serious endeavors.

You now have more people asking AI questions about more monetizable events, which you could see from an advertising platform would have real intrinsic value going back to these platform model companies.

But at the end of the day, it takes a couple things for AI to really move out of this toy phase.

And I look at it in two ways.

The first of which is trust from the user to be able to share more about both their existing preferences as well as their existing third party profiles.

So how does AI not just give me a recommendation, but actually go ahead and execute that recommendation with my dollars?

So I'm trusting the system with my hard earned cash.

But also the second thing is that 85% of purchases still take place in the offline environment.