030 The Gregory and Paul Show - OpenAI Ads, Apple's Gemini Deal & Elon's Dilemma

Описание: On the Gregory and Paul Show, we break down the latest in startups, SaaS, AI, and whatever the internet is fighting about this week.

🔗 Connect with Gregory & Paul

Gregory Kennedy
🌐 Website – https://www.vibeyoursaas.com
💼 LinkedIn –   / gregorykennedy  
🐦X (Twitter) –   / gregorykennedy  

Paul
🌐 Website – https://karmic.buzz
💼 LinkedIn –   / pxue  
🐦 X (Twitter) –   / pxue  

🎙️ Episode 030. Highlights

A fast-paced grab bag episode that starts with OpenAI rolling out ads and a cheaper tier, swings into Apple choosing Gemini over ChatGPT for Siri, then goes deep on the new commerce protocols that could turn AI chat into a checkout layer. The back half is classic Gregory and Paul. Elon Corner with Tesla as a potential mega conglomerate, a quick rant about the metaverse as a dead end, a reality check on economists who bet wrong on Argentina, and a closing riff on AgentCraft as the Starcraft UI for orchestrating agents.

🤝 OpenAI launches ads and a new low-cost tier
OpenAI announces an $8 per month “Go” plan and confirms ad testing is coming. The core question is not whether ads arrive. It is how they change the product. Will ads shape answers, or just sit adjacent to them? Either way, incentives shift toward retention, time spent, and monetizable conversations.

📣 The ad product implications, brand safety, and who loses
The conversation moves from marketer excitement to user anxiety. A new ad channel could create a short-term arbitrage window if pricing starts cheaply. Long term, the losers are intermediaries and aggregators. Search ads, travel booking layers, and review-driven commerce sites get squeezed if buying becomes a chat flow.

🛒 Commerce is the first obvious AI ad category
Retail and travel come up as the most natural fit because chat is already full of purchase intent. The dream scenario is voice-driven shopping. Ask for a product, ask follow-up questions, then buy without leaving the conversation. The point is not facts, it is satisfaction.

🍎 Apple chooses Gemini, not ChatGPT, for Siri
Google and Apple enter a multi-year collaboration with Gemini, positioned to power Siri-style intelligence. The show frames it as Apple admitting it did not win the model layer, and betting on its real advantage. Hardware distribution, consumer trust, and default placement.

📱 The OpenAI plus Jony Ive device theory
Gregory argues Apple may be avoiding OpenAI because Jony Ive is building a potential iPhone adjacent competitor with OpenAI. Paul pushes back with a supply chain reality check. Designing a beautiful device is not the same as shipping millions.

🧠 Google personal intelligence and the end of email as we knew it
Google previews a Gemini experience that can chat against personal data like Gmail, Photos, and YouTube history. The marketing implication is big. If the inbox becomes summarized and algorithmic, traditional email marketing gets degraded. Newsletters may get compressed into machine summaries, and fewer people will visit the original source.

🧾 UCP and agentic shopping as the next interface war
Google announces Universal Commerce Protocol, a commerce and checkout layer that can sit on top of AI protocols and connect to platforms like Shopify. The bet is that AI becomes the unified shopping layer across fragmented stores. The open question is adoption. Will users want a super chat app for commerce, or will they stay with familiar storefront flows?

🚗 Elon Corner, Tesla stock strength, and the SpaceX merger idea
Tesla stock is back near its highs despite slowing vehicle growth. Gregory floats a scenario where SpaceX never IPOs because everything consolidates into Tesla. Tesla becomes the umbrella for cars, Starlink, space, and AI adjacent bets. Paul asks the obvious question.

🏛️ Elon, politics, and the limits of engineering brain
Gregory argues that Elon’s political visibility damaged the brand equity and created distractions. The meta point is that some problems are not solvable with engineering alone. Marketing, reputation, and governance are not the same as rockets and manufacturing.

🥽 Meta layoffs and the metaverse as a failed bet
A blunt take. The metaverse still has no mainstream pull, no clear reason to exist versus games, and massive moderation problems if it ever did scale. AR glasses remain interesting. The cornball 3D world pitch does not.

🇦🇷 Argentina and the economist reality check
Gregory points to data on Argentina under Milei and calls out a large group of economists who publicly predicted failure and were wrong, at least on the timeline shown. The bigger critique is institutional distance from lived reality, and how confident consensus can still miss.

🕹️ AgentCraft, Starcraft UI for orchestrating agents
Paul shares AgentCraft, an RTS-style interface for managing multiple agents toward goals, with resources, tasks, and parallel execution.