(00:38) Meta AI launches a dedicated desktop app for Mac Meta's standalone Mac app targets business owners and creators who run on Facebook and Instagram. Meta AI can now tap into its own analytics and advertising tools, and professional accounts can connect Google Workspace to pull in documents and spreadsheets. Meta says users can ask questions about their business and get answers drawn from account engagement and ad performance data, plus publicly available insights on how comparable brands are building their presence.

(01:45) Daniel's take: analytics-aware AI is the real feature Daniel draws the parallel to YouTube's Ask Studio, where you can ask an AI to review your last ten videos and tell you what worked. Being able to ask why a suggestion will work is where the value shows up. His one complaint: no Windows version, at least not yet.

(02:51) Why do AI tools keep launching on Apple first? Ashley points to how the platforms are built from the ground up and the different exploit and remediation timelines. Daniel offers a complementary theory: fewer Apple users means fewer bad actors targeting them. Their conclusion is that it is probably multiple compounding reasons.

(04:08) 404 Media tracks rare books to an Amazon AI training facility Background: booksellers had reported a historic spike in bulk purchases, made anonymously, in seemingly random selections, by buyers who were not price sensitive at all. Printed books are prized training data because the text was never scraped from the web, it is cleanly organized, and anything printed before 2022 is guaranteed free of AI-generated text. Models trained on AI-generated text get worse.

(05:24) Inside the Las Vegas warehouse 404 Media planted a tracking device in a rare book and followed it through multiple stops to an Amazon warehouse in Las Vegas. Employees describe receiving enormous shipments, cutting the bindings off to scan faster, and destroying the books. Barcodes and serial numbers get scanned, consistent with a methodical effort to work through the world's ISBN list. Many of the books are rare, out of print, or in foreign languages, meaning few people would notice their hard copies disappearing.

(06:37) Ashley's take: history does not look kindly on this Ashley recommends the 404 Media podcast episode on the investigation (linked below). Her position: digitizing is good, destroying is not, and none of this addresses the fact that creators were never paid for the data sets behind today's models.

(07:28) Nobody is paying the authors Daniel agrees that digitization has real preservation value and notes that once a book is sold, the seller loses control of it. The unresolved problem is that the original writer gets nothing while their work trains an LLM.

(08:14) Until regulation forces a change, this continues Ashley's closing point on where this goes next.

• 404 Media's investigation into Amazon and the rare book shipments: https://archive.ph/70Hun
• 404 Media podcast episode on the investigation (Ashley's recommendation): https://pod.link/1703615331/episode/NTlmNDdlNGUtOWI1Ni0xMWYxLTlkYzUtMzcwNmUzNGZmZWMx
• Meta's post announcing the Meta AI desktop app: https://ai.meta.com/meta-ai/download/

• Ashley Coffey: @ashleyrcoffey89 on Instagram and Threads
• Daniel Hill: @danielhillmedia on Instagram, Threads, and YouTube
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