Podcasts about Skift

Airline retailing with ATPCO CEO Alex Zoghlin, IATA's New Distribution Capability, Offers & Orders, and the Elevate industry conference. In the news, AI transformation of the airline industry, cyber criminals stealing United FA login credentials, shark skin riblets on Delta 767s, first flight of a prototype hydrogen-powered helicopter, China's tailless 6th generation fighter jet, and a fatal helicopter crash in the Hudson River. Guest Alex Zoghlin is the CEO of ATPCO, a neutral industry partner that provides airline management tools, pricing data, and solutions that support airline retailing. Owned by the airlines, ATPCO blends data and systems with technology to create value for hundreds of commercial airlines around the world. The company turned 60 this year. IATA describes Airline retailing as a customer-centric approach in the airline industry that focuses on enhancing the shopping experience across various channels. It is enabled by the New Distribution Capability (NDC), which allows airlines to offer more personalized services and products directly to consumers. This modern retailing model emphasizes frictionless, intuitive, and personalized shopping experiences for travelers. The transition to this model provides airlines with opportunities to innovate their distribution strategies and create additional value. Alex explains how ATPCO provides value to airlines. We talk about continuous pricing and dynamically generated fares as well as some of the factors airlines use in their pricing strategies. He describes how airlines can have fixed price points for different offerings, then turn specific offerings on or off depending on the circumstances. We look at curated ticket pricing that can create the specific travel experience the customer wants - extra baggage, type of seat, lounge access, etc. With this capability, airlines could potentially compete for the flyer's travel business. ATPCO's Elevate 2025 airline industry conference was held April 7-10, 2025, in Chicago. Alex says the conference theme this year was data and AI: How airlines can use the wealth of available data and some AI tools to make win-win offerings for both the airlines and the consumers. In our conversation with Alex, we consider several other airline industry topics such as the 2050 industry carbon reduction goals and the current tariff situation in the United States. Alex is a long-time airline/travel industry veteran. He co-founded Orbitz, sold a distribution startup to Travelport, and worked as a VP at Hyatt for 6 years. Alex has several aviation-related pursuits: He's a pilot and a flight simmer, he has a Part 107 drone license, and he participates in launching large amateur rockets, specifically the LDRS (Large, Dangerous Rocket Ships), an annual gathering of rocket enthusiasts organized by the Tripoli Rocketry Association. Aviation News How AI is Transforming the Airline Industry The Promise of Travel in the age of AI, a 32-page Skift & McKinsey report (2023), claims that AI could generate an estimated US$45bn in potential value for the airline industry globally through operational efficiencies, revenue optimization, and customer service improvements.  AI is already impacting the airlines through organizational changes, predictive maintenance from aircraft health monitoring, AI-powered virtual assistants and chatbots, personalized in-flight entertainment options, and voice-cloning technology to provide a multilingual IFE system. In the future, look for flight path optimization for increased fuel efficiency, refined dynamic pricing models, and even autonomous aircraft. Cyber Criminals Are Going After The Paychecks Of United Airlines Flight Attendants Using Fake Websites That Look Legit Criminals are using website spoofing to steal the login credentials of United FAs. In addition to paychecks, Flexible Spending Accounts and Health Savings Accounts (HSA) are at risk.

Short-term rental operators are exploring new revenue streams beyond bookings while facing mounting pressure to track emissions. In this episode, we break down key findings from Phocuswright and Skift on how STRs can thrive through innovation and accountability.Are you new and want to start your own hospitality business?Join our ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Facebook group⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Follow Boostly and join the discussion:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠YouTube⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠LinkedIn⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Facebook⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Want to know more about us? Visit our ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠website⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Stay informed and ahead of the curve with the latest insights and analysis.

Special Monday Edition: Global travel stocks suffered steep declines on Monday, with major markets in Asia, the Middle East, and Europe seeing significant selloffs due to mounting fears over global tariffs and economic instability. The Hang Seng index dropped over 13%, its worst fall since 1997, while travel-linked stocks like Trip.com and Alibaba plunged by double digits. European airlines and hotel giants also took hits, with IAG, Lufthansa, Accor, and IHG all posting substantial losses amid concerns about falling transatlantic travel demand and trade war impacts. In the Middle East, markets continued a downward slide, compounded by plunging oil prices and significant losses in companies like Saudi Aramco, adding to fears about tourism investment in the region. Read the full story on Skift. Connect with Skift LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/skift/ WhatsApp: https://whatsapp.com/channel/0029VaAL375LikgIXmNPYQ0L/ Facebook: https://facebook.com/skiftnews Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/skiftnews/ Threads: https://www.threads.net/@skiftnews Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/skiftnews.bsky.social X: https://twitter.com/skift Subscribe to @SkiftNews and never miss an update from the travel industry.

Vrbo ramps up AI-driven promotions and quality control while tariffs shake the global travel market. Expedia's rental brand sharpens personalization, and Skift lowers 2025 travel growth forecasts as stocks dive. We unpack what it all means for the future of travel.Are you new and want to start your own hospitality business?Join our ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Facebook group⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Follow Boostly and join the discussion:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠YouTube⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠LinkedIn⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Facebook⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Want to know more about us? Visit our ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠website⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Stay informed and ahead of the curve with the latest insights and analysis.

Send us a textLinking the Travel Industry is a business travel podcast where we review the top travel industry stories that are posted on LinkedIn by LinkedIn members.  We curate the top posts and discuss with them with travel industry veterans in a live session with audience members.  You can join the live recording session by visiting BusinessTravel360.comYour Hosts are Riaan van Schoor, Ann Cederhall and Aash ShravahStories covered on this session include -International Airlines Group (IAG) launches IAGi Ventures, with a €200m fund to "invest in high potential companies over five years".

On this episode of Good Morning Hospitality, Wil Slickers, Brandreth Canaley, Michael Goldin, and Jamie Lane dig into Vrbo's bold billboard campaign taking aim at Airbnb—and Airbnb's sharp response in a recent Skift article. We explore what this marketing feud reveals about platform dynamics and traveler sentiment. Jamie also unpacks the latest hotel and short-term rental data from his presentations at the Hunter Hotel Advisors Conference. From shifting demand toward rural markets and larger STRs to the pause in supply growth, we analyze the signals pointing to where the market is headed. Plus, we break down key insights from Oxford Economics on macroeconomic headwinds, traveler behavior, and hotel performance trends. It's a data-packed conversation with real implications for anyone in hospitality. This episode is brought to you by our friends at Fido! No more headaches managing your vacation homes and asking your guests to take the trash bins to the curb! Want to execute great hospitality for your guests? Get with Fido today at getfido.com/gmh ---- Good Morning Hospitality is part of the Hospitality.FM Multi-Media Network and is a Hospitality.FM Original The hospitality industry is constantly growing, changing, and innovating! This podcast brings you the top news and topics from industry experts across different hospitality fields. Good Morning Hospitality publishes three thirty-minute weekly episodes: every Monday and Wednesday at 7 a.m. PST / 10 a.m. EST and every Tuesday at 8 a.m. CET for our European and UK-focused content. Make sure to tune in during our live show on our LinkedIn page or YouTube every week and join the conversation live! Explore everything Good Morning Hospitality has to offer: • Well & Good Morning Coffee: Enjoy our signature roast—order here! • Retreats: Join us at one of our exclusive retreats—learn more and register your interest here! • Episodes & More: Find all episodes and additional info at GoodMorningHospitality.com Thank you to all of the Hospitality.FM Partners that help make this show possible. If you have any press you want to be covered during the show, email us at goodmorning@hospitality.fm Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On this episode of Good Morning Hospitality, Wil Slickers, Brandreth Canaley, Michael Goldin, and Jamie Lane dig into Vrbo's bold billboard campaign taking aim at Airbnb—and Airbnb's sharp response in a recent Skift article. We explore what this marketing feud reveals about platform dynamics and traveler sentiment. Jamie also unpacks the latest hotel and short-term rental data from his presentations at the Hunter Hotel Advisors Conference. From shifting demand toward rural markets and larger STRs to the pause in supply growth, we analyze the signals pointing to where the market is headed. Plus, we break down key insights from Oxford Economics on macroeconomic headwinds, traveler behavior, and hotel performance trends. It's a data-packed conversation with real implications for anyone in hospitality. This episode is brought to you by our friends at Fido! No more headaches managing your vacation homes and asking your guests to take the trash bins to the curb! Want to execute great hospitality for your guests? Get with Fido today at getfido.com/gmh ---- Good Morning Hospitality is part of the Hospitality.FM Multi-Media Network and is a Hospitality.FM Original The hospitality industry is constantly growing, changing, and innovating! This podcast brings you the top news and topics from industry experts across different hospitality fields. Good Morning Hospitality publishes three thirty-minute weekly episodes: every Monday and Wednesday at 7 a.m. PST / 10 a.m. EST and every Tuesday at 8 a.m. CET for our European and UK-focused content. Make sure to tune in during our live show on our LinkedIn page or YouTube every week and join the conversation live! Explore everything Good Morning Hospitality has to offer: • Well & Good Morning Coffee: Enjoy our signature roast—order here! • Retreats: Join us at one of our exclusive retreats—learn more and register your interest here! • Episodes & More: Find all episodes and additional info at GoodMorningHospitality.com Thank you to all of the Hospitality.FM Partners that help make this show possible. If you have any press you want to be covered during the show, email us at goodmorning@hospitality.fm Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hva gikk galt med vindkraftutbyggingen i Norge – og hvordan påvirker det dagens grønne industrisatsing? Hvordan unngår vi å gjenta feilene når vi nå bygger ut havvind og ny, kraftkrevende industri?I denne podkastepisoden av Science4Impact møter Anne Husebekk, professor og tidligere rektor ved UiT, og Bjørn K. Haugland, adm.dir. i Skift, professor i samfunnsgeografi Mikaela Vasstrøm fra Universitetet i Agder. Hun forsker på hvorfor konflikter oppstår i den grønne omstillingen – og hvordan vi kan håndtere dem bedre. Vi får høre om hva som skapte motstand mot vindkraften, kommunenes rolle i energiprosjekter, hvordan vi kan bygge bredere samfunnsaksept – og hvilke lærdommer vi kan hente fra vannkraft- og oljeeventyret. – Erfaringene fra vannkraft og olje viser oss at energiutbygging må handle om mer enn bare økonomisk vekst og næringsutvikling – det må handle om samfunnsbygging, sier Vasstrøm. God lytting! 

This week on Good Morning Hospitality, Wil Slickers and Michael Goldin are rolling with a special guest host—Sam Dundas, co-founder of Besty AI—while Brandy is off traveling for work. And speaking of big moves, Sam's got some exciting news: Besty AI just closed a fresh round of funding. We dive into what that process was like, how investors are thinking about travel tech, and what this means for AI in hospitality. But raising money in travel isn't as easy as it used to be. A recent Skift article breaks down why investment in the industry has slowed, and we unpack what's really going on. Are investors getting cold feet? Is tech still the golden ticket? And what does it take to stand out in today's market? From startup struggles to the future of funding, this episode is all about the money behind travel. Tune in for a candid conversation on where things are heading and what it means for operators, founders, and anyone keeping an eye on the industry. This episode is brought to you by our friends at Fido! Get your bin-to-curb service by the best in the biz with Fido! Go to getfido.com to learn more! ---- Good Morning Hospitality is part of the Hospitality.FM Multi-Media Network and is a Hospitality.FM Original The hospitality industry is constantly growing, changing, and innovating! This podcast brings you the top news and topics from industry experts across different hospitality fields. Good Morning Hospitality publishes three thirty-minute weekly episodes: every Monday and Wednesday at 7 a.m. PST / 10 a.m. EST and every Tuesday at 8 a.m. CET for our European and UK-focused content. Make sure to tune in during our live show on our LinkedIn page or YouTube every week and join the conversation live! Explore everything Good Morning Hospitality has to offer: • Well & Good Morning Coffee: Enjoy our signature roast—order here! • Retreats: Join us at one of our exclusive retreats—learn more and register your interest here! • Episodes & More: Find all episodes and additional info at GoodMorningHospitality.com Thank you to all of the Hospitality.FM Partners that help make this show possible. If you have any press you want to be covered during the show, email us at goodmorning@hospitality.fm Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week on Good Morning Hospitality, Wil Slickers and Michael Goldin are rolling with a special guest host—Sam Dundas, co-founder of Besty AI—while Brandy is off traveling for work. And speaking of big moves, Sam's got some exciting news: Besty AI just closed a fresh round of funding. We dive into what that process was like, how investors are thinking about travel tech, and what this means for AI in hospitality. But raising money in travel isn't as easy as it used to be. A recent Skift article breaks down why investment in the industry has slowed, and we unpack what's really going on. Are investors getting cold feet? Is tech still the golden ticket? And what does it take to stand out in today's market? From startup struggles to the future of funding, this episode is all about the money behind travel. Tune in for a candid conversation on where things are heading and what it means for operators, founders, and anyone keeping an eye on the industry. This episode is brought to you by our friends at Fido! Get your bin-to-curb service by the best in the biz with Fido! Go to https://www.getfido.com/gmh to learn more! ---- Good Morning Hospitality is part of the Hospitality.FM Multi-Media Network and is a Hospitality.FM Original The hospitality industry is constantly growing, changing, and innovating! This podcast brings you the top news and topics from industry experts across different hospitality fields. Good Morning Hospitality publishes three thirty-minute weekly episodes: every Monday and Wednesday at 7 a.m. PST / 10 a.m. EST and every Tuesday at 8 a.m. CET for our European and UK-focused content. Make sure to tune in during our live show on our LinkedIn page or YouTube every week and join the conversation live! Explore everything Good Morning Hospitality has to offer: • Well & Good Morning Coffee: Enjoy our signature roast—order here! • Retreats: Join us at one of our exclusive retreats—learn more and register your interest here! • Episodes & More: Find all episodes and additional info at GoodMorningHospitality.com Thank you to all of the Hospitality.FM Partners that help make this show possible. If you have any press you want to be covered during the show, email us at goodmorning@hospitality.fm Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

– Høyere utdanning spiller en viktig rolle i den grønne omstillingen. Jo bedre studentene og universitetet forstår næringslivet, desto lettere blir det å sikre at utdanningene er relevante for fremtidens arbeidstakere og samfunnets behov, sier Sunniva Whittaker. I denne episoden av Science4Impact med Anne Husebekk, professor og tidligere rektor ved UiT og Bjørn K. Haugland, adm.dir. i Skift, får vi besøk av Sunniva Whittaker, rektor ved Universitetet i Agder og styreleder for Universitets- og høyskolerådet. Hun deler hvordan UiA, med samskaping som kjerneverdi, jobber tverrfaglig på tvers av blant annet teknologi, samfunnsvitenskap, filosofi og jus for å løse komplekse spørsmål innen havvind, kunstig intelligens og grønn omstilling. Vi får også høre hvordan UiA samarbeider tett med næringsklynger og om deres sterke mekatronikkmiljø med eget laboratorium, hvor bedrifter kan teste ut ny teknologi sammen med forskere.God lytting! 

Landbruket står daglig i dilemmaer hvor klima, natur, arealbruk og lønnsomhet blir satt opp mot hverandre. Hvordan jobber en av Norges største matprodusenter med bærekraft i alle ledd av verdikjeden? Anne Marit Panengstuen, konsernsjef i Nortura og Bjørn Kjærand Haugland, leder i Skift er ukens gjester i klimaspesialen av Finanslunsj. Episoden kan inneholde målrettet reklame, basert på din IP-adresse, enhet og posisjon. Se smartpod.no/personvern for informasjon og dine valg om deling av data.

Velkommen til ny valgspesial! I denne episoden av Klimaoptimistene har vi med oss Erna Solberg, leder for Høyre og tidligere statsminister. Verden er inne i en ny tid og en ny geopolitisk situasjon. Erna Solberg er også en av få nordmenn som har møtt Trump. Hvordan skal vi forholde oss til Trumps USA og Ukraina fremover? Kan valget i 2025 bli et klima- og naturvalg og hva er det viktigste for høyre frem mot valget? Vi snakker om omstillingsplaner, klimafloker og hvordan navigere i en ny, og mer uforutsigbar geopolitisk situasjon. Jens Ulltveit-Moe leder samtalen, og Bjørn K. Haugland (adm.dir i Skift) er stand-in for Erik Solheim.– Jeg tror dette valget kommer til å være et verdiskapingsvalg, og det dreier seg om å knytte klima til vår fremtidige konkurransekraft, forteller Solberg. God lytting!Episoden er spilt inn 28. februar 2025

Det er varslet stor omlegging av EUs regelverk for bærekraftig finans for å stimulere unionens konkurransekraft. Men kan forenkling av rapporteringskravene for næringslivet svekke fremdriften i det grønne skiftet? Og hva betyr Trump for klimaet? I klimaspesialen av Finanslunsj møter du Geir Holmgren, administrerende direktør i Gjensidige og Benedicte Bjerknes, seniorrådgiver for bærekraft i Finans Norge. Bjørn Kjærand Haugland fra Skift er som vanlig med. Episoden kan inneholde målrettet reklame, basert på din IP-adresse, enhet og posisjon. Se smartpod.no/personvern for informasjon og dine valg om deling av data.

Seth Borko, head of research at Skift, talks with Alan Fine of Insider Travel Report about Skift's megatrends report for 2025. Borko highlights a few big trends, including a slow and steady growth in travel demand, the rise of event-based tourism, and how consumer preferences are shifting toward authenticity and cooler climates. Borko also discusses emerging trends such as pet travel, the role of artificial intelligence in the industry and cultural shifts in destinations. For more information, visit www.skift.com. All our Insider Travel Report video interviews are archived and available on our Youtube channel  (youtube.com/insidertravelreport), and as podcasts with the same title on: Spotify, Pandora, Stitcher, PlayerFM, Listen Notes, Podchaser, TuneIn + Alexa, Podbean,  iHeartRadio,  Google, Amazon Music/Audible, Deezer, Podcast Addict, and iTunes Apple Podcasts, which supports Overcast, Pocket Cast, Castro and Castbox.  

Due to overwhelming demand (>15x applications:slots), we are closing CFPs for AI Engineer Summit NYC today. Last call! Thanks, we'll be reaching out to all shortly!The world's top AI blogger and friend of every pod, Simon Willison, dropped a monster 2024 recap: Things we learned about LLMs in 2024. Brian of the excellent TechMeme Ride Home pinged us for a connection and a special crossover episode, our first in 2025. The target audience for this podcast is a tech-literate, but non-technical one. You can see Simon's notes for AI Engineers in his World's Fair Keynote.Timestamp* 00:00 Introduction and Guest Welcome* 01:06 State of AI in 2025* 01:43 Advancements in AI Models* 03:59 Cost Efficiency in AI* 06:16 Challenges and Competition in AI* 17:15 AI Agents and Their Limitations* 26:12 Multimodal AI and Future Prospects* 35:29 Exploring Video Avatar Companies* 36:24 AI Influencers and Their Future* 37:12 Simplifying Content Creation with AI* 38:30 The Importance of Credibility in AI* 41:36 The Future of LLM User Interfaces* 48:58 Local LLMs: A Growing Interest* 01:07:22 AI Wearables: The Next Big Thing* 01:10:16 Wrapping Up and Final ThoughtsTranscript[00:00:00] Introduction and Guest Welcome[00:00:00] Brian: Welcome to the first bonus episode of the Tech Meme Write Home for the year 2025. I'm your host as always, Brian McCullough. Listeners to the pod over the last year know that I have made a habit of quoting from Simon Willison when new stuff happens in AI from his blog. Simon has been, become a go to for many folks in terms of, you know, Analyzing things, criticizing things in the AI space.[00:00:33] Brian: I've wanted to talk to you for a long time, Simon. So thank you for coming on the show. No, it's a privilege to be here. And the person that made this connection happen is our friend Swyx, who has been on the show back, even going back to the, the Twitter Spaces days but also an AI guru in, in their own right Swyx, thanks for coming on the show also.[00:00:54] swyx (2): Thanks. I'm happy to be on and have been a regular listener, so just happy to [00:01:00] contribute as well.[00:01:00] Brian: And a good friend of the pod, as they say. Alright, let's go right into it.[00:01:06] State of AI in 2025[00:01:06] Brian: Simon, I'm going to do the most unfair, broad question first, so let's get it out of the way. The year 2025. Broadly, what is the state of AI as we begin this year?[00:01:20] Brian: Whatever you want to say, I don't want to lead the witness.[00:01:22] Simon: Wow. So many things, right? I mean, the big thing is everything's got really good and fast and cheap. Like, that was the trend throughout all of 2024. The good models got so much cheaper, they got so much faster, they got multimodal, right? The image stuff isn't even a surprise anymore.[00:01:39] Simon: They're growing video, all of that kind of stuff. So that's all really exciting.[00:01:43] Advancements in AI Models[00:01:43] Simon: At the same time, they didn't get massively better than GPT 4, which was a bit of a surprise. So that's sort of one of the open questions is, are we going to see huge, but I kind of feel like that's a bit of a distraction because GPT 4, but way cheaper, much larger context lengths, and it [00:02:00] can do multimodal.[00:02:01] Simon: is better, right? That's a better model, even if it's not.[00:02:05] Brian: What people were expecting or hoping, maybe not expecting is not the right word, but hoping that we would see another step change, right? Right. From like GPT 2 to 3 to 4, we were expecting or hoping that maybe we were going to see the next evolution in that sort of, yeah.[00:02:21] Brian: We[00:02:21] Simon: did see that, but not in the way we expected. We thought the model was just going to get smarter, and instead we got. Massive drops in, drops in price. We got all of these new capabilities. You can talk to the things now, right? They can do simulated audio input, all of that kind of stuff. And so it's kind of, it's interesting to me that the models improved in all of these ways we weren't necessarily expecting.[00:02:43] Simon: I didn't know it would be able to do an impersonation of Santa Claus, like a, you know, Talked to it through my phone and show it what I was seeing by the end of 2024. But yeah, we didn't get that GPT 5 step. And that's one of the big open questions is, is that actually just around the corner and we'll have a bunch of GPT 5 class models drop in the [00:03:00] next few months?[00:03:00] Simon: Or is there a limit?[00:03:03] Brian: If you were a betting man and wanted to put money on it, do you expect to see a phase change, step change in 2025?[00:03:11] Simon: I don't particularly for that, like, the models, but smarter. I think all of the trends we're seeing right now are going to keep on going, especially the inference time compute, right?[00:03:21] Simon: The trick that O1 and O3 are doing, which means that you can solve harder problems, but they cost more and it churns away for longer. I think that's going to happen because that's already proven to work. I don't know. I don't know. Maybe there will be a step change to a GPT 5 level, but honestly, I'd be completely happy if we got what we've got right now.[00:03:41] Simon: But cheaper and faster and more capabilities and longer contexts and so forth. That would be thrilling to me.[00:03:46] Brian: Digging into what you've just said one of the things that, by the way, I hope to link in the show notes to Simon's year end post about what, what things we learned about LLMs in 2024. Look for that in the show notes.[00:03:59] Cost Efficiency in AI[00:03:59] Brian: One of the things that you [00:04:00] did say that you alluded to even right there was that in the last year, you felt like the GPT 4 barrier was broken, like IE. Other models, even open source ones are now regularly matching sort of the state of the art.[00:04:13] Simon: Well, it's interesting, right? So the GPT 4 barrier was a year ago, the best available model was OpenAI's GPT 4 and nobody else had even come close to it.[00:04:22] Simon: And they'd been at the, in the lead for like nine months, right? That thing came out in what, February, March of, of 2023. And for the rest of 2023, nobody else came close. And so at the start of last year, like a year ago, the big question was, Why has nobody beaten them yet? Like, what do they know that the rest of the industry doesn't know?[00:04:40] Simon: And today, that I've counted 18 organizations other than GPT 4 who've put out a model which clearly beats that GPT 4 from a year ago thing. Like, maybe they're not better than GPT 4. 0, but that's, that, that, that barrier got completely smashed. And yeah, a few of those I've run on my laptop, which is wild to me.[00:04:59] Simon: Like, [00:05:00] it was very, very wild. It felt very clear to me a year ago that if you want GPT 4, you need a rack of 40, 000 GPUs just to run the thing. And that turned out not to be true. Like the, the, this is that big trend from last year of the models getting more efficient, cheaper to run, just as capable with smaller weights and so forth.[00:05:20] Simon: And I ran another GPT 4 model on my laptop this morning, right? Microsoft 5. 4 just came out. And that, if you look at the benchmarks, it's definitely, it's up there with GPT 4. 0. It's probably not as good when you actually get into the vibes of the thing, but it, it runs on my, it's a 14 gigabyte download and I can run it on a MacBook Pro.[00:05:38] Simon: Like who saw that coming? The most exciting, like the close of the year on Christmas day, just a few weeks ago, was when DeepSeek dropped their DeepSeek v3 model on Hugging Face without even a readme file. It was just like a giant binary blob that I can't run on my laptop. It's too big. But in all of the benchmarks, it's now by far the best available [00:06:00] open, open weights model.[00:06:01] Simon: Like it's, it's, it's beating the, the metalamas and so forth. And that was trained for five and a half million dollars, which is a tenth of the price that people thought it costs to train these things. So everything's trending smaller and faster and more efficient.[00:06:15] Brian: Well, okay.[00:06:16] Challenges and Competition in AI[00:06:16] Brian: I, I kind of was going to get to that later, but let's, let's combine this with what I was going to ask you next, which is, you know, you're talking, you know, Also in the piece about the LLM prices crashing, which I've even seen in projects that I'm working on, but explain Explain that to a general audience, because we hear all the time that LLMs are eye wateringly expensive to run, but what we're suggesting, and we'll come back to the cheap Chinese LLM, but first of all, for the end user, what you're suggesting is that we're starting to see the cost come down sort of in the traditional technology way of Of costs coming down over time,[00:06:49] Simon: yes, but very aggressively.[00:06:51] Simon: I mean, my favorite thing, the example here is if you look at GPT-3, so open AI's g, PT three, which was the best, a developed model in [00:07:00] 2022 and through most of 20 2023. That, the models that we have today, the OpenAI models are a hundred times cheaper. So there was a 100x drop in price for OpenAI from their best available model, like two and a half years ago to today.[00:07:13] Simon: And[00:07:14] Brian: just to be clear, not to train the model, but for the use of tokens and things. Exactly,[00:07:20] Simon: for running prompts through them. And then When you look at the, the really, the top tier model providers right now, I think, are OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Meta. And there are a bunch of others that I could list there as well.[00:07:32] Simon: Mistral are very good. The, the DeepSeq and Quen models have got great. There's a whole bunch of providers serving really good models. But even if you just look at the sort of big brand name providers, they all offer models now that are A fraction of the price of the, the, of the models we were using last year.[00:07:49] Simon: I think I've got some numbers that I threw into my blog entry here. Yeah. Like Gemini 1. 5 flash, that's Google's fast high quality model is [00:08:00] how much is that? It's 0. 075 dollars per million tokens. Like these numbers are getting, So we just do cents per million now,[00:08:09] swyx (2): cents per million,[00:08:10] Simon: cents per million makes, makes a lot more sense.[00:08:12] Simon: Yeah they have one model 1. 5 flash 8B, the absolute cheapest of the Google models, is 27 times cheaper than GPT 3. 5 turbo was a year ago. That's it. And GPT 3. 5 turbo, that was the cheap model, right? Now we've got something 27 times cheaper, and the Google, this Google one can do image recognition, it can do million token context, all of those tricks.[00:08:36] Simon: But it's, it's, it's very, it's, it really is startling how inexpensive some of this stuff has got.[00:08:41] Brian: Now, are we assuming that this, that happening is directly the result of competition? Because again, you know, OpenAI, and probably they're doing this for their own almost political reasons, strategic reasons, keeps saying, we're losing money on everything, even the 200.[00:08:56] Brian: So they probably wouldn't, the prices wouldn't be [00:09:00] coming down if there wasn't intense competition in this space.[00:09:04] Simon: The competition is absolutely part of it, but I have it on good authority from sources I trust that Google Gemini is not operating at a loss. Like, the amount of electricity to run a prompt is less than they charge you.[00:09:16] Simon: And the same thing for Amazon Nova. Like, somebody found an Amazon executive and got them to say, Yeah, we're not losing money on this. I don't know about Anthropic and OpenAI, but clearly that demonstrates it is possible to run these things at these ludicrously low prices and still not be running at a loss if you discount the Army of PhDs and the, the training costs and all of that kind of stuff.[00:09:36] Brian: One, one more for me before I let Swyx jump in here. To, to come back to DeepSeek and this idea that you could train, you know, a cutting edge model for 6 million. I, I was saying on the show, like six months ago, that if we are getting to the point where each new model It would cost a billion, ten billion, a hundred billion to train that.[00:09:54] Brian: At some point it would almost, only nation states would be able to train the new models. Do you [00:10:00] expect what DeepSeek and maybe others are proving to sort of blow that up? Or is there like some sort of a parallel track here that maybe I'm not technically, I don't have the mouse to understand the difference.[00:10:11] Brian: Is the model, are the models going to go, you know, Up to a hundred billion dollars or can we get them down? Sort of like DeepSeek has proven[00:10:18] Simon: so I'm the wrong person to answer that because I don't work in the lab training these models. So I can give you my completely uninformed opinion, which is, I felt like the DeepSeek thing.[00:10:27] Simon: That was a bomb shell. That was an absolute bombshell when they came out and said, Hey, look, we've trained. One of the best available models and it cost us six, five and a half million dollars to do it. I feel, and they, the reason, one of the reasons it's so efficient is that we put all of these export controls in to stop Chinese companies from giant buying GPUs.[00:10:44] Simon: So they've, were forced to be, go as efficient as possible. And yet the fact that they've demonstrated that that's possible to do. I think it does completely tear apart this, this, this mental model we had before that yeah, the training runs just keep on getting more and more expensive and the number of [00:11:00] organizations that can afford to run these training runs keeps on shrinking.[00:11:03] Simon: That, that's been blown out of the water. So yeah, that's, again, this was our Christmas gift. This was the thing they dropped on Christmas day. Yeah, it makes me really optimistic that we can, there are, It feels like there was so much low hanging fruit in terms of the efficiency of both inference and training and we spent a whole bunch of last year exploring that and getting results from it.[00:11:22] Simon: I think there's probably a lot left. I think there's probably, well, I would not be surprised to see even better models trained spending even less money over the next six months.[00:11:31] swyx (2): Yeah. So I, I think there's a unspoken angle here on what exactly the Chinese labs are trying to do because DeepSea made a lot of noise.[00:11:41] swyx (2): so much for joining us for around the fact that they train their model for six million dollars and nobody quite quite believes them. Like it's very, very rare for a lab to trumpet the fact that they're doing it for so cheap. They're not trying to get anyone to buy them. So why [00:12:00] are they doing this? They make it very, very obvious.[00:12:05] swyx (2): Deepseek is about 150 employees. It's an order of magnitude smaller than at least Anthropic and maybe, maybe more so for OpenAI. And so what's, what's the end game here? Are they, are they just trying to show that the Chinese are better than us?[00:12:21] Simon: So Deepseek, it's the arm of a hedge, it's a, it's a quant fund, right?[00:12:25] Simon: It's an algorithmic quant trading thing. So I, I, I would love to get more insight into how that organization works. My assumption from what I've seen is it looks like they're basically just flexing. They're like, hey, look at how utterly brilliant we are with this amazing thing that we've done. And it's, it's working, right?[00:12:43] Simon: They but, and so is that it? Are they, is this just their kind of like, this is, this is why our company is so amazing. Look at this thing that we've done, or? I don't know. I'd, I'd love to get Some insight from, from within that industry as to, as to how that's all playing out.[00:12:57] swyx (2): The, the prevailing theory among the Local Llama [00:13:00] crew and the Twitter crew that I indexed for my newsletter is that there is some amount of copying going on.[00:13:06] swyx (2): It's like Sam Altman you know, tweet, tweeting about how they're being copied. And then also there's this, there, there are other sort of opening eye employees that have said, Stuff that is similar that DeepSeek's rate of progress is how U. S. intelligence estimates the number of foreign spies embedded in top labs.[00:13:22] swyx (2): Because a lot of these ideas do spread around, but they surprisingly have a very high density of them in the DeepSeek v3 technical report. So it's, it's interesting. We don't know how much, how many, how much tokens. I think that, you know, people have run analysis on how often DeepSeek thinks it is cloud or thinks it is opening GPC 4.[00:13:40] swyx (2): Thanks for watching! And we don't, we don't know. We don't know. I think for me, like, yeah, we'll, we'll, we basically will never know as, as external commentators. I think what's interesting is how, where does this go? Is there a logical floor or bottom by my estimations for the same amount of ELO started last year to the end of last year cost went down by a thousand X for the [00:14:00] GPT, for, for GPT 4 intelligence.[00:14:02] swyx (2): Would, do they go down a thousand X this year?[00:14:04] Simon: That's a fascinating question. Yeah.[00:14:06] swyx (2): Is there a Moore's law going on, or did we just get a one off benefit last year for some weird reason?[00:14:14] Simon: My uninformed hunch is low hanging fruit. I feel like up until a year ago, people haven't been focusing on efficiency at all. You know, it was all about, what can we get these weird shaped things to do?[00:14:24] Simon: And now once we've sort of hit that, okay, we know that we can get them to do what GPT 4 can do, When thousands of researchers around the world all focus on, okay, how do we make this more efficient? What are the most important, like, how do we strip out all of the weights that have stuff in that doesn't really matter?[00:14:39] Simon: All of that kind of thing. So yeah, maybe that was it. Maybe 2024 was a freak year of all of the low hanging fruit coming out at once. And we'll actually see a reduction in the, in that rate of improvement in terms of efficiency. I wonder, I mean, I think we'll know for sure in about three months time if that trend's going to continue or not.[00:14:58] swyx (2): I agree. You know, I [00:15:00] think the other thing that you mentioned that DeepSeq v3 was the gift that was given from DeepSeq over Christmas, but I feel like the other thing that might be underrated was DeepSeq R1,[00:15:11] Speaker 4: which is[00:15:13] swyx (2): a reasoning model you can run on your laptop. And I think that's something that a lot of people are looking ahead to this year.[00:15:18] swyx (2): Oh, did they[00:15:18] Simon: release the weights for that one?[00:15:20] swyx (2): Yeah.[00:15:21] Simon: Oh my goodness, I missed that. I've been playing with the quen. So the other great, the other big Chinese AI app is Alibaba's quen. Actually, yeah, I, sorry, R1 is an API available. Yeah. Exactly. When that's really cool. So Alibaba's Quen have released two reasoning models that I've run on my laptop.[00:15:38] Simon: Now there was, the first one was Q, Q, WQ. And then the second one was QVQ because the second one's a vision model. So you can like give it vision puzzles and a prompt that these things, they are so much fun to run. Because they think out loud. It's like the OpenAR 01 sort of hides its thinking process. The Query ones don't.[00:15:59] Simon: They just, they [00:16:00] just churn away. And so you'll give it a problem and it will output literally dozens of paragraphs of text about how it's thinking. My favorite thing that happened with QWQ is I asked it to draw me a pelican on a bicycle in SVG. That's like my standard stupid prompt. And for some reason it thought in Chinese.[00:16:18] Simon: It spat out a whole bunch of like Chinese text onto my terminal on my laptop, and then at the end it gave me quite a good sort of artistic pelican on a bicycle. And I ran it all through Google Translate, and yeah, it was like, it was contemplating the nature of SVG files as a starting point. And the fact that my laptop can think in Chinese now is so delightful.[00:16:40] Simon: It's so much fun watching you do that.[00:16:43] swyx (2): Yeah, I think Andrej Karpathy was saying, you know, we, we know that we have achieved proper reasoning inside of these models when they stop thinking in English, and perhaps the best form of thought is in Chinese. But yeah, for listeners who don't know Simon's blog he always, whenever a new model comes out, you, I don't know how you do it, but [00:17:00] you're always the first to run Pelican Bench on these models.[00:17:02] swyx (2): I just did it for 5.[00:17:05] Simon: Yeah.[00:17:07] swyx (2): So I really appreciate that. You should check it out. These are not theoretical. Simon's blog actually shows them.[00:17:12] Brian: Let me put on the investor hat for a second.[00:17:15] AI Agents and Their Limitations[00:17:15] Brian: Because from the investor side of things, a lot of the, the VCs that I know are really hot on agents, and this is the year of agents, but last year was supposed to be the year of agents as well. Lots of money flowing towards, And Gentic startups.[00:17:32] Brian: But in in your piece that again, we're hopefully going to have linked in the show notes, you sort of suggest there's a fundamental flaw in AI agents as they exist right now. Let me let me quote you. And then I'd love to dive into this. You said, I remain skeptical as to their ability based once again, on the Challenge of gullibility.[00:17:49] Brian: LLMs believe anything you tell them, any systems that attempt to make meaningful decisions on your behalf, will run into the same roadblock. How good is a travel agent, or a digital assistant, or even a research tool, if it [00:18:00] can't distinguish truth from fiction? So, essentially, what you're suggesting is that the state of the art now that allows agents is still, it's still that sort of 90 percent problem, the edge problem, getting to the Or, or, or is there a deeper flaw?[00:18:14] Brian: What are you, what are you saying there?[00:18:16] Simon: So this is the fundamental challenge here and honestly my frustration with agents is mainly around definitions Like any if you ask anyone who says they're working on agents to define agents You will get a subtly different definition from each person But everyone always assumes that their definition is the one true one that everyone else understands So I feel like a lot of these agent conversations, people talking past each other because one person's talking about the, the sort of travel agent idea of something that books things on your behalf.[00:18:41] Simon: Somebody else is talking about LLMs with tools running in a loop with a cron job somewhere and all of these different things. You, you ask academics and they'll laugh at you because they've been debating what agents mean for over 30 years at this point. It's like this, this long running, almost sort of an in joke in that community.[00:18:57] Simon: But if we assume that for this purpose of this conversation, an [00:19:00] agent is something that, Which you can give a job and it goes off and it does that thing for you like, like booking travel or things like that. The fundamental challenge is, it's the reliability thing, which comes from this gullibility problem.[00:19:12] Simon: And a lot of my, my interest in this originally came from when I was thinking about prompt injections as a source of this form of attack against LLM systems where you deliberately lay traps out there for this LLM to stumble across,[00:19:24] Brian: and which I should say you have been banging this drum that no one's gotten any far, at least on solving this, that I'm aware of, right.[00:19:31] Brian: Like that's still an open problem. The two years.[00:19:33] Simon: Yeah. Right. We've been talking about this problem and like, a great illustration of this was Claude so Anthropic released Claude computer use a few months ago. Fantastic demo. You could fire up a Docker container and you could literally tell it to do something and watch it open a web browser and navigate to a webpage and click around and so forth.[00:19:51] Simon: Really, really, really interesting and fun to play with. And then, um. One of the first demos somebody tried was, what if you give it a web page that says download and run this [00:20:00] executable, and it did, and the executable was malware that added it to a botnet. So the, the very first most obvious dumb trick that you could play on this thing just worked, right?[00:20:10] Simon: So that's obviously a really big problem. If I'm going to send something out to book travel on my behalf, I mean, it's hard enough for me to figure out which airlines are trying to scam me and which ones aren't. Do I really trust a language model that believes the literal truth of anything that's presented to it to go out and do those things?[00:20:29] swyx (2): Yeah I definitely think there's, it's interesting to see Anthropic doing this because they used to be the safety arm of OpenAI that split out and said, you know, we're worried about letting this thing out in the wild and here they are enabling computer use for agents. Thanks. The, it feels like things have merged.[00:20:49] swyx (2): You know, I'm, I'm also fairly skeptical about, you know, this always being the, the year of Linux on the desktop. And this is the equivalent of this being the year of agents that people [00:21:00] are not predicting so much as wishfully thinking and hoping and praying for their companies and agents to work.[00:21:05] swyx (2): But I, I feel like things are. Coming along a little bit. It's to me, it's kind of like self driving. I remember in 2014 saying that self driving was just around the corner. And I mean, it kind of is, you know, like in, in, in the Bay area. You[00:21:17] Simon: get in a Waymo and you're like, Oh, this works. Yeah, but it's a slow[00:21:21] swyx (2): cook.[00:21:21] swyx (2): It's a slow cook over the next 10 years. We're going to hammer out these things and the cynical people can just point to all the flaws, but like, there are measurable or concrete progress steps that are being made by these builders.[00:21:33] Simon: There is one form of agent that I believe in. I believe, mostly believe in the research assistant form of agents.[00:21:39] Simon: The thing where you've got a difficult problem and, and I've got like, I'm, I'm on the beta for the, the Google Gemini 1. 5 pro with deep research. I think it's called like these names, these names. Right. But. I've been using that. It's good, right? You can give it a difficult problem and it tells you, okay, I'm going to look at 56 different websites [00:22:00] and it goes away and it dumps everything to its context and it comes up with a report for you.[00:22:04] Simon: And it's not, it won't work against adversarial websites, right? If there are websites with deliberate lies in them, it might well get caught out. Most things don't have that as a problem. And so I've had some answers from that which were genuinely really valuable to me. And that feels to me like, I can see how given existing LLM tech, especially with Google Gemini with its like million token contacts and Google with their crawl of the entire web and their, they've got like search, they've got search and cache, they've got a cache of every page and so forth.[00:22:35] Simon: That makes sense to me. And that what they've got right now, I don't think it's, it's not as good as it can be, obviously, but it's, it's, it's, it's a real useful thing, which they're going to start rolling out. So, you know, Perplexity have been building the same thing for a couple of years. That, that I believe in.[00:22:50] Simon: You know, if you tell me that you're going to have an agent that's a research assistant agent, great. The coding agents I mean, chat gpt code interpreter, Nearly two years [00:23:00] ago, that thing started writing Python code, executing the code, getting errors, rewriting it to fix the errors. That pattern obviously works.[00:23:07] Simon: That works really, really well. So, yeah, coding agents that do that sort of error message loop thing, those are proven to work. And they're going to keep on getting better, and that's going to be great. The research assistant agents are just beginning to get there. The things I'm critical of are the ones where you trust, you trust this thing to go out and act autonomously on your behalf, and make decisions on your behalf, especially involving spending money, like that.[00:23:31] Simon: I don't see that working for a very long time. That feels to me like an AGI level problem.[00:23:37] swyx (2): It's it's funny because I think Stripe actually released an agent toolkit which is one of the, the things I featured that is trying to enable these agents each to have a wallet that they can go and spend and have, basically, it's a virtual card.[00:23:49] swyx (2): It's not that, not that difficult with modern infrastructure. can[00:23:51] Simon: stick a 50 cap on it, then at least it's an honor. Can't lose more than 50.[00:23:56] Brian: You know I don't, I don't know if either of you know Rafat Ali [00:24:00] he runs Skift, which is a, a travel news vertical. And he, he, he constantly laughs at the fact that every agent thing is, we're gonna get rid of booking a, a plane flight for you, you know?[00:24:11] Brian: And, and I would point out that, like, historically, when the web started, the first thing everyone talked about is, You can go online and book a trip, right? So it's funny for each generation of like technological advance. The thing they always want to kill is the travel agent. And now they want to kill the webpage travel agent.[00:24:29] Simon: Like it's like I use Google flight search. It's great, right? If you gave me an agent to do that for me, it would save me, I mean, maybe 15 seconds of typing in my things, but I still want to see what my options are and go, yeah, I'm not flying on that airline, no matter how cheap they are.[00:24:44] swyx (2): Yeah. For listeners, go ahead.[00:24:47] swyx (2): For listeners, I think, you know, I think both of you are pretty positive on NotebookLM. And you know, we, we actually interviewed the NotebookLM creators, and there are actually two internal agents going on internally. The reason it takes so long is because they're running an agent loop [00:25:00] inside that is fairly autonomous, which is kind of interesting.[00:25:01] swyx (2): For one,[00:25:02] Simon: for a definition of agent loop, if you picked that particularly well. For one definition. And you're talking about the podcast side of this, right?[00:25:07] swyx (2): Yeah, the podcast side of things. They have a there's, there's going to be a new version coming out that, that we'll be featuring at our, at our conference.[00:25:14] Simon: That one's fascinating to me. Like NotebookLM, I think it's two products, right? On the one hand, it's actually a very good rag product, right? You dump a bunch of things in, you can run searches, that, that, it does a good job of. And then, and then they added the, the podcast thing. It's a bit of a, it's a total gimmick, right?[00:25:30] Simon: But that gimmick got them attention, because they had a great product that nobody paid any attention to at all. And then you add the unfeasibly good voice synthesis of the podcast. Like, it's just, it's, it's, it's the lesson.[00:25:43] Brian: It's the lesson of mid journey and stuff like that. If you can create something that people can post on socials, you don't have to lift a finger again to do any marketing for what you're doing.[00:25:53] Brian: Let me dig into Notebook LLM just for a second as a podcaster. As a [00:26:00] gimmick, it makes sense, and then obviously, you know, you dig into it, it sort of has problems around the edges. It's like, it does the thing that all sort of LLMs kind of do, where it's like, oh, we want to Wrap up with a conclusion.[00:26:12] Multimodal AI and Future Prospects[00:26:12] Brian: I always call that like the the eighth grade book report paper problem where it has to have an intro and then, you know But that's sort of a thing where because I think you spoke about this again in your piece at the year end About how things are going multimodal and how things are that you didn't expect like, you know vision and especially audio I think So that's another thing where, at least over the last year, there's been progress made that maybe you, you didn't think was coming as quick as it came.[00:26:43] Simon: I don't know. I mean, a year ago, we had one really good vision model. We had GPT 4 vision, was, was, was very impressive. And Google Gemini had just dropped Gemini 1. 0, which had vision, but nobody had really played with it yet. Like Google hadn't. People weren't taking Gemini [00:27:00] seriously at that point. I feel like it was 1.[00:27:02] Simon: 5 Pro when it became apparent that actually they were, they, they got over their hump and they were building really good models. And yeah, and they, to be honest, the video models are mostly still using the same trick. The thing where you divide the video up into one image per second and you dump that all into the context.[00:27:16] Simon: So maybe it shouldn't have been so surprising to us that long context models plus vision meant that the video was, was starting to be solved. Of course, it didn't. Not being, you, what you really want with videos, you want to be able to do the audio and the images at the same time. And I think the models are beginning to do that now.[00:27:33] Simon: Like, originally, Gemini 1. 5 Pro originally ignored the audio. It just did the, the, like, one frame per second video trick. As far as I can tell, the most recent ones are actually doing pure multimodal. But the things that opens up are just extraordinary. Like, the the ChatGPT iPhone app feature that they shipped as one of their 12 days of, of OpenAI, I really can be having a conversation and just turn on my video camera and go, Hey, what kind of tree is [00:28:00] this?[00:28:00] Simon: And so forth. And it works. And for all I know, that's just snapping a like picture once a second and feeding it into the model. The, the, the things that you can do with that as an end user are extraordinary. Like that, that to me, I don't think most people have cottoned onto the fact that you can now stream video directly into a model because it, it's only a few weeks old.[00:28:22] Simon: Wow. That's a, that's a, that's a, that's Big boost in terms of what kinds of things you can do with this stuff. Yeah. For[00:28:30] swyx (2): people who are not that close I think Gemini Flashes free tier allows you to do something like capture a photo, one photo every second or a minute and leave it on 24, seven, and you can prompt it to do whatever.[00:28:45] swyx (2): And so you can effectively have your own camera app or monitoring app that that you just prompt and it detects where it changes. It detects for, you know, alerts or anything like that, or describes your day. You know, and, and, and the fact that this is free I think [00:29:00] it's also leads into the previous point of it being the prices haven't come down a lot.[00:29:05] Simon: And even if you're paying for this stuff, like a thing that I put in my blog entry is I ran a calculation on what it would cost to process 68, 000 photographs in my photo collection, and for each one just generate a caption, and using Gemini 1. 5 Flash 8B, it would cost me 1. 68 to process 68, 000 images, which is, I mean, that, that doesn't make sense.[00:29:28] Simon: None of that makes sense. Like it's, it's a, for one four hundredth of a cent per image to generate captions now. So you can see why feeding in a day's worth of video just isn't even very expensive to process.[00:29:40] swyx (2): Yeah, I'll tell you what is expensive. It's the other direction. So we're here, we're talking about consuming video.[00:29:46] swyx (2): And this year, we also had a lot of progress, like probably one of the most excited, excited, anticipated launches of the year was Sora. We actually got Sora. And less exciting.[00:29:55] Simon: We did, and then VO2, Google's Sora, came out like three [00:30:00] days later and upstaged it. Like, Sora was exciting until VO2 landed, which was just better.[00:30:05] swyx (2): In general, I feel the media, or the social media, has been very unfair to Sora. Because what was released to the world, generally available, was Sora Lite. It's the distilled version of Sora, right? So you're, I did not[00:30:16] Simon: realize that you're absolutely comparing[00:30:18] swyx (2): the, the most cherry picked version of VO two, the one that they published on the marketing page to the, the most embarrassing version of the soa.[00:30:25] swyx (2): So of course it's gonna look bad, so, well, I got[00:30:27] Simon: access to the VO two I'm in the VO two beta and I've been poking around with it and. Getting it to generate pelicans on bicycles and stuff. I would absolutely[00:30:34] swyx (2): believe that[00:30:35] Simon: VL2 is actually better. Is Sora, so is full fat Sora coming soon? Do you know, when, when do we get to play with that one?[00:30:42] Simon: No one's[00:30:43] swyx (2): mentioned anything. I think basically the strategy is let people play around with Sora Lite and get info there. But the, the, keep developing Sora with the Hollywood studios. That's what they actually care about. Gotcha. Like the rest of us. Don't really know what to do with the video anyway. Right.[00:30:59] Simon: I mean, [00:31:00] that's my thing is I realized that for generative images and images and video like images We've had for a few years and I don't feel like they've broken out into the talented artist community yet Like lots of people are having fun with them and doing and producing stuff. That's kind of cool to look at but what I want you know that that movie everything everywhere all at once, right?[00:31:20] Simon: One, one ton of Oscars, utterly amazing film. The VFX team for that were five people, some of whom were watching YouTube videos to figure out what to do. My big question for, for Sora and and and Midjourney and stuff, what happens when a creative team like that starts using these tools? I want the creative geniuses behind everything, everywhere all at once.[00:31:40] Simon: What are they going to be able to do with this stuff in like a few years time? Because that's really exciting to me. That's where you take artists who are at the very peak of their game. Give them these new capabilities and see, see what they can do with them.[00:31:52] swyx (2): I should, I know a little bit here. So it should mention that, that team actually used RunwayML.[00:31:57] swyx (2): So there was, there was,[00:31:57] Simon: yeah.[00:31:59] swyx (2): I don't know how [00:32:00] much I don't. So, you know, it's possible to overstate this, but there are people integrating it. Generated video within their workflow, even pre SORA. Right, because[00:32:09] Brian: it's not, it's not the thing where it's like, okay, tomorrow we'll be able to do a full two hour movie that you prompt with three sentences.[00:32:15] Brian: It is like, for the very first part of, of, you know video effects in film, it's like, if you can get that three second clip, if you can get that 20 second thing that they did in the matrix that blew everyone's minds and took a million dollars or whatever to do, like, it's the, it's the little bits and pieces that they can fill in now that it's probably already there.[00:32:34] swyx (2): Yeah, it's like, I think actually having a layered view of what assets people need and letting AI fill in the low value assets. Right, like the background video, the background music and, you know, sometimes the sound effects. That, that maybe, maybe more palatable maybe also changes the, the way that you evaluate the stuff that's coming out.[00:32:57] swyx (2): Because people tend to, in social media, try to [00:33:00] emphasize foreground stuff, main character stuff. So you really care about consistency, and you, you really are bothered when, like, for example, Sorad. Botch's image generation of a gymnast doing flips, which is horrible. It's horrible. But for background crowds, like, who cares?[00:33:18] Brian: And by the way, again, I was, I was a film major way, way back in the day, like, that's how it started. Like things like Braveheart, where they filmed 10 people on a field, and then the computer could turn it into 1000 people on a field. Like, that's always been the way it's around the margins and in the background that first comes in.[00:33:36] Brian: The[00:33:36] Simon: Lord of the Rings movies were over 20 years ago. Although they have those giant battle sequences, which were very early, like, I mean, you could almost call it a generative AI approach, right? They were using very sophisticated, like, algorithms to model out those different battles and all of that kind of stuff.[00:33:52] Simon: Yeah, I know very little. I know basically nothing about film production, so I try not to commentate on it. But I am fascinated to [00:34:00] see what happens when, when these tools start being used by the real, the people at the top of their game.[00:34:05] swyx (2): I would say like there's a cultural war that is more that being fought here than a technology war.[00:34:11] swyx (2): Most of the Hollywood people are against any form of AI anyway, so they're busy Fighting that battle instead of thinking about how to adopt it and it's, it's very fringe. I participated here in San Francisco, one generative AI video creative hackathon where the AI positive artists actually met with technologists like myself and then we collaborated together to build short films and that was really nice and I think, you know, I'll be hosting some of those in my events going forward.[00:34:38] swyx (2): One thing that I think like I want to leave it. Give people a sense of it's like this is a recap of last year But then sometimes it's useful to walk away as well with like what can we expect in the future? I don't know if you got anything. I would also call out that the Chinese models here have made a lot of progress Hyde Law and Kling and God knows who like who else in the video arena [00:35:00] Also making a lot of progress like surprising him like I think maybe actually Chinese China is surprisingly ahead with regards to Open8 at least, but also just like specific forms of video generation.[00:35:12] Simon: Wouldn't it be interesting if a film industry sprung up in a country that we don't normally think of having a really strong film industry that was using these tools? Like, that would be a fascinating sort of angle on this. Mm hmm. Mm hmm.[00:35:25] swyx (2): Agreed. I, I, I Oh, sorry. Go ahead.[00:35:29] Exploring Video Avatar Companies[00:35:29] swyx (2): Just for people's Just to put it on people's radar as well, Hey Jen, there's like there's a category of video avatar companies that don't specifically, don't specialize in general video.[00:35:41] swyx (2): They only do talking heads, let's just say. And HeyGen sings very well.[00:35:45] Brian: Swyx, you know that that's what I've been using, right? Like, have, have I, yeah, right. So, if you see some of my recent YouTube videos and things like that, where, because the beauty part of the HeyGen thing is, I, I, I don't want to use the robot voice, so [00:36:00] I record the mp3 file for my computer, And then I put that into HeyGen with the avatar that I've trained it on, and all it does is the lip sync.[00:36:09] Brian: So it looks, it's not 100 percent uncanny valley beatable, but it's good enough that if you weren't looking for it, it's just me sitting there doing one of my clips from the show. And, yeah, so, by the way, HeyGen. Shout out to them.[00:36:24] AI Influencers and Their Future[00:36:24] swyx (2): So I would, you know, in terms of like the look ahead going, like, looking, reviewing 2024, looking at trends for 2025, I would, they basically call this out.[00:36:33] swyx (2): Meta tried to introduce AI influencers and failed horribly because they were just bad at it. But at some point that there will be more and more basically AI influencers Not in a way that Simon is but in a way that they are not human.[00:36:50] Simon: Like the few of those that have done well, I always feel like they're doing well because it's a gimmick, right?[00:36:54] Simon: It's a it's it's novel and fun to like Like that, the AI Seinfeld thing [00:37:00] from last year, the Twitch stream, you know, like those, if you're the only one or one of just a few doing that, you'll get, you'll attract an audience because it's an interesting new thing. But I just, I don't know if that's going to be sustainable longer term or not.[00:37:11] Simon: Like,[00:37:12] Simplifying Content Creation with AI[00:37:12] Brian: I'm going to tell you, Because I've had discussions, I can't name the companies or whatever, but, so think about the workflow for this, like, now we all know that on TikTok and Instagram, like, holding up a phone to your face, and doing like, in my car video, or walking, a walk and talk, you know, that's, that's very common, but also, if you want to do a professional sort of talking head video, you still have to sit in front of a camera, you still have to do the lighting, you still have to do the video editing, versus, if you can just record, what I'm saying right now, the last 30 seconds, If you clip that out as an mp3 and you have a good enough avatar, then you can put that avatar in front of Times Square, on a beach, or whatever.[00:37:50] Brian: So, like, again for creators, the reason I think Simon, we're on the verge of something, it, it just, it's not going to, I think it's not, oh, we're going to have [00:38:00] AI avatars take over, it'll be one of those things where it takes another piece of the workflow out and simplifies it. I'm all[00:38:07] Simon: for that. I, I always love this stuff.[00:38:08] Simon: I like tools. Tools that help human beings do more. Do more ambitious things. I'm always in favor of, like, that, that, that's what excites me about this entire field.[00:38:17] swyx (2): Yeah. We're, we're looking into basically creating one for my podcast. We have this guy Charlie, he's Australian. He's, he's not real, but he pre, he opens every show and we are gonna have him present all the shorts.[00:38:29] Simon: Yeah, go ahead.[00:38:30] The Importance of Credibility in AI[00:38:30] Simon: The thing that I keep coming back to is this idea of credibility like in a world that is full of like AI generated everything and so forth It becomes even more important that people find the sources of information that they trust and find people and find Sources that are credible and I feel like that's the one thing that LLMs and AI can never have is credibility, right?[00:38:49] Simon: ChatGPT can never stake its reputation on telling you something useful and interesting because That means nothing, right? It's a matrix multiplication. It depends on who prompted it and so forth. So [00:39:00] I'm always, and this is when I'm blogging as well, I'm always looking for, okay, who are the reliable people who will tell me useful, interesting information who aren't just going to tell me whatever somebody's paying them to tell, tell them, who aren't going to, like, type a one sentence prompt into an LLM and spit out an essay and stick it online.[00:39:16] Simon: And that, that to me, Like, earning that credibility is really important. That's why a lot of my ethics around the way that I publish are based on the idea that I want people to trust me. I want to do things that, that gain credibility in people's eyes so they will come to me for information as a trustworthy source.[00:39:32] Simon: And it's the same for the sources that I'm, I'm consulting as well. So that's something I've, I've been thinking a lot about that sort of credibility focus on this thing for a while now.[00:39:40] swyx (2): Yeah, you can layer or structure credibility or decompose it like so one thing I would put in front of you I'm not saying that you should Agree with this or accept this at all is that you can use AI to generate different Variations and then and you pick you as the final sort of last mile person that you pick The last output and [00:40:00] you put your stamp of credibility behind that like that everything's human reviewed instead of human origin[00:40:04] Simon: Yeah, if you publish something you need to be able to put it on the ground Publishing it.[00:40:08] Simon: You need to say, I will put my name to this. I will attach my credibility to this thing. And if you're willing to do that, then, then that's great.[00:40:16] swyx (2): For creators, this is huge because there's a fundamental asymmetry between starting with a blank slate versus choosing from five different variations.[00:40:23] Brian: Right.[00:40:24] Brian: And also the key thing that you just said is like, if everything that I do, if all of the words were generated by an LLM, if the voice is generated by an LLM. If the video is also generated by the LLM, then I haven't done anything, right? But if, if one or two of those, you take a shortcut, but it's still, I'm willing to sign off on it.[00:40:47] Brian: Like, I feel like that's where I feel like people are coming around to like, this is maybe acceptable, sort of.[00:40:53] Simon: This is where I've been pushing the definition. I love the term slop. Where I've been pushing the definition of slop as AI generated [00:41:00] content that is both unrequested and unreviewed and the unreviewed thing is really important like that's the thing that elevates something from slop to not slop is if A human being has reviewed it and said, you know what, this is actually worth other people's time.[00:41:12] Simon: And again, I'm willing to attach my credibility to it and say, hey, this is worthwhile.[00:41:16] Brian: It's, it's, it's the cura curational, curatorial and editorial part of it that no matter what the tools are to do shortcuts, to do, as, as Swyx is saying choose between different edits or different cuts, but in the end, if there's a curatorial mind, Or editorial mind behind it.[00:41:32] Brian: Let me I want to wedge this in before we start to close.[00:41:36] The Future of LLM User Interfaces[00:41:36] Brian: One of the things coming back to your year end piece that has been a something that I've been banging the drum about is when you're talking about LLMs. Getting harder to use. You said most users are thrown in at the deep end.[00:41:48] Brian: The default LLM chat UI is like taking brand new computer users, dropping them into a Linux terminal and expecting them to figure it all out. I mean, it's, it's literally going back to the command line. The command line was defeated [00:42:00] by the GUI interface. And this is what I've been banging the drum about is like, this cannot be.[00:42:05] Brian: The user interface, what we have now cannot be the end result. Do you see any hints or seeds of a GUI moment for LLM interfaces?[00:42:17] Simon: I mean, it has to happen. It absolutely has to happen. The the, the, the, the usability of these things is turning into a bit of a crisis. And we are at least seeing some really interesting innovation in little directions.[00:42:28] Simon: Just like OpenAI's chat GPT canvas thing that they just launched. That is at least. Going a little bit more interesting than just chat, chats and responses. You know, you can, they're exploring that space where you're collaborating with an LLM. You're both working in the, on the same document. That makes a lot of sense to me.[00:42:44] Simon: Like that, that feels really smart. The one of the best things is still who was it who did the, the UI where you could, they had a drawing UI where you draw an interface and click a button. TL draw would then make it real thing. That was spectacular, [00:43:00] absolutely spectacular, like, alternative vision of how you'd interact with these models.[00:43:05] Simon: Because yeah, the and that's, you know, so I feel like there is so much scope for innovation there and it is beginning to happen. Like, like, I, I feel like most people do understand that we need to do better in terms of interfaces that both help explain what's going on and give people better tools for working with models.[00:43:23] Simon: I was going to say, I want to[00:43:25] Brian: dig a little deeper into this because think of the conceptual idea behind the GUI, which is instead of typing into a command line open word. exe, it's, you, you click an icon, right? So that's abstracting away sort of the, again, the programming stuff that like, you know, it's, it's a, a, a child can tap on an iPad and, and make a program open, right?[00:43:47] Brian: The problem it seems to me right now with how we're interacting with LLMs is it's sort of like you know a dumb robot where it's like you poke it and it goes over here, but no, I want it, I want to go over here so you poke it this way and you can't get it exactly [00:44:00] right, like, what can we abstract away from the From the current, what's going on that, that makes it more fine tuned and easier to get more precise.[00:44:12] Brian: You see what I'm saying?[00:44:13] Simon: Yes. And the this is the other trend that I've been following from the last year, which I think is super interesting. It's the, the prompt driven UI development thing. Basically, this is the pattern where Claude Artifacts was the first thing to do this really well. You type in a prompt and it goes, Oh, I should answer that by writing a custom HTML and JavaScript application for you that does a certain thing.[00:44:35] Simon: And when you think about that take and since then it turns out This is easy, right? Every decent LLM can produce HTML and JavaScript that does something useful. So we've actually got this alternative way of interacting where they can respond to your prompt with an interactive custom interface that you can work with.[00:44:54] Simon: People haven't quite wired those back up again. Like, ideally, I'd want the LLM ask me a [00:45:00] question where it builds me a custom little UI, For that question, and then it gets to see how I interacted with that. I don't know why, but that's like just such a small step from where we are right now. But that feels like such an obvious next step.[00:45:12] Simon: Like an LLM, why should it, why should you just be communicating with, with text when it can build interfaces on the fly that let you select a point on a map or or move like sliders up and down. It's gonna create knobs and dials. I keep saying knobs and dials. right. We can do that. And the LLMs can build, and Claude artifacts will build you a knobs and dials interface.[00:45:34] Simon: But at the moment they haven't closed the loop. When you twiddle those knobs, Claude doesn't see what you were doing. They're going to close that loop. I'm, I'm shocked that they haven't done it yet. So yeah, I think there's so much scope for innovation and there's so much scope for doing interesting stuff with that model where the LLM, anything you can represent in SVG, which is almost everything, can now be part of that ongoing conversation.[00:45:59] swyx (2): Yeah, [00:46:00] I would say the best executed version of this I've seen so far is Bolt where you can literally type in, make a Spotify clone, make an Airbnb clone, and it actually just does that for you zero shot with a nice design.[00:46:14] Simon: There's a benchmark for that now. The LMRena people now have a benchmark that is zero shot app, app generation, because all of the models can do it.[00:46:22] Simon: Like it's, it's, I've started figuring out. I'm building my own version of this for my own project, because I think within six months. I think it'll just be an expected feature. Like if you have a web application, why don't you have a thing where, oh, look, the, you can add a custom, like, so for my dataset data exploration project, I want you to be able to do things like conjure up a dashboard, just via a prompt.[00:46:43] Simon: You say, oh, I need a pie chart and a bar chart and put them next to each other, and then have a form where submitting the form inserts a row into my database table. And this is all suddenly feasible. It's, it's, it's not even particularly difficult to do, which is great. Utterly bizarre that these things are now easy.[00:47:00][00:47:00] swyx (2): I think for a general audience, that is what I would highlight, that software creation is becoming easier and easier. Gemini is now available in Gmail and Google Sheets. I don't write my own Google Sheets formulas anymore, I just tell Gemini to do it. And so I think those are, I almost wanted to basically somewhat disagree with, with your assertion that LMS got harder to use.[00:47:22] swyx (2): Like, yes, we, we expose more capabilities, but they're, they're in minor forms, like using canvas, like web search in, in in chat GPT and like Gemini being in, in Excel sheets or in Google sheets, like, yeah, we're getting, no,[00:47:37] Simon: no, no, no. Those are the things that make it harder, because the problem is that for each of those features, they're amazing.[00:47:43] Simon: If you understand the edges of the feature, if you're like, okay, so in Google, Gemini, Excel formulas, I can get it to do a certain amount of things, but I can't get it to go and read a web. You probably can't get it to read a webpage, right? But you know, there are, there are things that it can do and things that it can't do, which are completely undocumented.[00:47:58] Simon: If you ask it what it [00:48:00] can and can't do, they're terrible at answering questions about that. So like my favorite example is Claude artifacts. You can't build a Claude artifact that can hit an API somewhere else. Because the cause headers on that iframe prevents accessing anything outside of CDNJS. So, good luck learning cause headers as an end user in order to understand why Like, I've seen people saying, oh, this is rubbish.[00:48:26] Simon: I tried building an artifact that would run a prompt and it couldn't because Claude didn't expose an API with cause headers that all of this stuff is so weird and complicated. And yeah, like that, that, the more that with the more tools we add, the more expertise you need to really, To understand the full scope of what you can do.[00:48:44] Simon: And so it's, it's, I wouldn't say it's, it's, it's, it's like, the question really comes down to what does it take to understand the full extent of what's possible? And honestly, that, that's just getting more and more involved over time.[00:48:58] Local LLMs: A Growing Interest[00:48:58] swyx (2): I have one more topic that I, I [00:49:00] think you, you're kind of a champion of and we've touched on it a little bit, which is local LLMs.[00:49:05] swyx (2): And running AI applications on your desktop, I feel like you are an early adopter of many, many things.[00:49:12] Simon: I had an interesting experience with that over the past year. Six months ago, I almost completely lost interest. And the reason is that six months ago, the best local models you could run, There was no point in using them at all, because the best hosted models were so much better.[00:49:26] Simon: Like, there was no point at which I'd choose to run a model on my laptop if I had API access to Cloud 3. 5 SONNET. They just, they weren't even comparable. And that changed, basically, in the past three months, as the local models had this step changing capability, where now I can run some of these local models, and they're not as good as Cloud 3.[00:49:45] Simon: 5 SONNET, but they're not so far away that It's not worth me even using them. The other, the, the, the, the continuing problem is I've only got 64 gigabytes of RAM, and if you run, like, LLAMA370B, it's not going to work. Most of my RAM is gone. So now I have to shut down my Firefox tabs [00:50:00] and, and my Chrome and my VS Code windows in order to run it.[00:50:03] Simon: But it's got me interested again. Like, like the, the efficiency improvements are such that now, if you were to like stick me on a desert island with my laptop, I'd be very productive using those local models. And that's, that's pretty exciting. And if those trends continue, and also, like, I think my next laptop, if when I buy one is going to have twice the amount of RAM, At which point, maybe I can run the, almost the top tier, like open weights models and still be able to use it as a computer as well.[00:50:32] Simon: NVIDIA just announced their 3, 000 128 gigabyte monstrosity. That's pretty good price. You know, that's that's, if you're going to buy it,[00:50:42] swyx (2): custom OS and all.[00:50:46] Simon: If I get a job, if I, if, if, if I have enough of an income that I can justify blowing $3,000 on it, then yes.[00:50:52] swyx (2): Okay, let's do a GoFundMe to get Simon one it.[00:50:54] swyx (2): Come on. You know, you can get a job anytime you want. Is this, this is just purely discretionary .[00:50:59] Simon: I want, [00:51:00] I want a job that pays me to do exactly what I'm doing already and doesn't tell me what else to do. That's, thats the challenge.[00:51:06] swyx (2): I think Ethan Molik does pretty well. Whatever, whatever it is he's doing.[00:51:11] swyx (2): But yeah, basically I was trying to bring in also, you know, not just local models, but Apple intelligence is on every Mac machine. You're, you're, you seem skeptical. It's rubbish.[00:51:21] Simon: Apple intelligence is so bad. It's like, it does one thing well.[00:51:25] swyx (2): Oh yeah, what's that? It summarizes notifications. And sometimes it's humorous.[00:51:29] Brian: Are you sure it does that well? And also, by the way, the other, again, from a sort of a normie point of view. There's no indication from Apple of when to use it. Like, everybody upgrades their thing and it's like, okay, now you have Apple Intelligence, and you never know when to use it ever again.[00:51:47] swyx (2): Oh, yeah, you consult the Apple docs, which is MKBHD.[00:51:49] swyx (2): The[00:51:51] Simon: one thing, the one thing I'll say about Apple Intelligence is, One of the reasons it's so disappointing is that the models are just weak, but now, like, Llama 3b [00:52:00] is Such a good model in a 2 gigabyte file I think give Apple six months and hopefully they'll catch up to the state of the art on the small models And then maybe it'll start being a lot more interesting.[00:52:10] swyx (2): Yeah. Anyway, I like This was year one And and you know just like our first year of iPhone maybe maybe not that much of a hit and then year three They had the App Store so Hey I would say give it some time, and you know, I think Chrome also shipping Gemini Nano I think this year in Chrome, which means that every app, every web app will have for free access to a local model that just ships in the browser, which is kind of interesting.[00:52:38] swyx (2): And then I, I think I also wanted to just open the floor for any, like, you know, any of us what are the apps that, you know, AI applications that we've adopted that have, that we really recommend because these are all, you know, apps that are running on our browser that like, or apps that are running locally that we should be, that, that other people should be trying.[00:52:55] swyx (2): Right? Like, I, I feel like that's, that's one always one thing that is helpful at the start of the [00:53:00] year.[00:53:00] Simon: Okay. So for running local models. My top picks, firstly, on the iPhone, there's this thing called MLC Chat, which works, and it's easy to install, and it runs Llama 3B, and it's so much fun. Like, it's not necessarily a capable enough novel that I use it for real things, but my party trick right now is I get my phone to write a Netflix Christmas movie plot outline where, like, a bunch of Jeweller falls in love with the King of Sweden or whatever.[00:53:25] Simon: And it does a good job and it comes up with pun names for the movies. And that's, that's deeply entertaining. On my laptop, most recently, I've been getting heavy into, into Olama because the Olama team are very, very good at finding the good models and patching them up and making them work well. It gives you an API.[00:53:42] Simon: My little LLM command line tool that has a plugin that talks to Olama, which works really well. So that's my, my Olama is. I think the easiest on ramp to to running models locally, if you want a nice user interface, LMStudio is, I think, the best user interface [00:54:00] thing at that. It's not open source. It's good.[00:54:02] Simon: It's worth playing with. The other one that I've been trying with recently, there's a thing called, what's it called? Open web UI or something. Yeah. The UI is fantastic. It, if you've got Olama running and you fire this thing up, it spots Olama and it gives you an interface onto your Olama models. And t

The travel industry is poised for growth in 2025, with Skift Research predicting a 9% increase in global travel spending, led by a 14% surge in India. However, challenges such as rising labor costs and slow economic growth in Europe and China could temper progress. Meanwhile, Accor is expanding its luxury offerings, including launching the ultra-luxury Orient Express brand, and Casago's acquisition of Vacasa signals shifts in the vacation rental market, with plans to sell local operations and establish franchise agreements. Here's Skift's Global Travel Outlook 2025 Accor is beefing up its luxury portfolio  More details about vacation rental management company Casago's agreement to acquire Vacasa  Connect with Skift LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/skift/ WhatsApp: https://whatsapp.com/channel/0029VaAL375LikgIXmNPYQ0L/ Facebook: https://facebook.com/skiftnews Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/skiftnews/ Threads: https://www.threads.net/@skiftnews Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/skiftnews.bsky.social X: https://twitter.com/skift Subscribe to @SkiftNews and never miss an update from the travel industry.

En av de største misoppfattelsene om standarder er at de kun bevarer ting som de er. Tvert imot er standardisering et av våre viktigste verktøy for å bringe verden framover.Jacob Mehus, administrerende direktør i Standard Norge og Bjørn Kjærand Haugland, leder i Skift er ukens gjester i klimaspesialen av Finanslunsj. Episoden kan inneholde målrettet reklame, basert på din IP-adresse, enhet og posisjon. Se smartpod.no/personvern for informasjon og dine valg om deling av data.

Send us a textHello, passionate cruisers! This is Paul and this week on The Joy of Cruising Podcast, I am delighted to welcome a special guest, Colleen McDaniel. Among the global cruise personalities, we are blessed to host, today, I am honored to welcome another one of those Googleable individuals (is that a word...yes) we occasionally have the honor to host. Colleen McDaniel is Editor-in-Chief of Cruise Critic. She considers cruising to be a true passion, having traveled the world by water – from Alaska, the Caribbean and Hawaii, to Europe's rivers, Antarctica and Africa – on ships of all shapes and sizes. I first “met” when I featured her husband John Roberts of In the Loop Travel in my book Cruising Interrupted  amzn.to/3seFU8y.When not cruising, Colleen loves running, biking, hiking or anything that keeps her moving. Living in Colorado makes it easy to get outside and stay active. She's also a fan of craft beer, and science fiction movies and TV. Trying craft beers in cruise ports all over the world has become a passion. She'll talk your ear off about hair bands from the '80s and anything related to "Doctor Who." A Wisconsin native, Colleen roots for the Green Bay Packers – she's a team owner. (As I am a football fan, I definitely want to ask her about that.)She's regularly quoted as a cruise expert in media outlets across the country, including The Associated Press, Good Morning America, TODAY, CNN, FOX Business, CNBC, The New York Times, Travel + Leisure and Skift.Relying on ship wifi is slow, unsecure, sometimes not available & at foreign ports travelers don't want to pay their carriers' high fees. Save $ with GigSky! Get a data package usable on the ship & in ports. Link to GigSky: https://gigsky.pxf.io/nloxor. For a 10% discount use code: joyofcruisingSupport the showSupport thejoyofcruisingpodcast https://www.buzzsprout.com/2113608/supporters/newSupport Me https://www.buymeacoffee.com/drpaulthContact Me https://www.thejoyofcruising.net/contact-me.htmlBook Cruises https://bit.ly/TheJoyOfCruisingPodcast-BookACruiseUS Orders (coupon code joyofcruisingpodcast)The Joy of Cruising https://bit.ly/TheJoyOfCruisingCruising Interrupted https://bit.ly/CruisingInterruptedThe Joy of Cruising Again https://bit.ly/TheJoyOfCruisingAgainIntl Orders via Amazon

Skift's annual Megatrends highlight key shifts in the travel industry. The rise of “quiet luxury” reflects affluent travelers' preference for personal and understated experiences, prompting owner-operated hotels to cater to this demand with curated stays. Meanwhile, hotels are enhancing their direct booking platforms with AI, predictive analytics, and immersive tools to compete with online travel agencies. Lastly, cool destinations like Norway and Greenland are gaining popularity, driven by social media and climate-conscious travelers, though sustainable infrastructure remains crucial. Story links: Hotels are playing catch-up Cool destinations in hot demand The rise of “quiet luxury” Connect with Skift LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/skift/ WhatsApp: https://whatsapp.com/channel/0029VaAL375LikgIXmNPYQ0L/ Facebook: https://facebook.com/skiftnews Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/skiftnews/ Threads: https://www.threads.net/@skiftnews Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/skiftnews.bsky.social X: https://twitter.com/skift Subscribe to @SkiftNews and never miss an update from the travel industry.

Skift highlights the rise of "Live Tourism," where major events like concerts and sports championships drive economic growth for destinations, benefiting local businesses and boosting travel demand. Meanwhile, Southwest Airlines raises its revenue guidance for Q4, citing strong travel demand and efficiency measures. Lastly, a federal judge rejected Boeing's plea deal regarding the 737 Max crashes over diversity concerns, giving the company and the Justice Department 30 days to revise their agreement. Southwest is getting back on track A federal judge struck down Boeing's plea deal Major events and experiences are driving tourism Connect with Skift LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/skift/ WhatsApp: https://whatsapp.com/channel/0029VaAL375LikgIXmNPYQ0L/ Facebook: https://facebook.com/skiftnews Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/skiftnews/ Threads: https://www.threads.net/@skiftnews Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/skiftnews.bsky.social X: https://twitter.com/skift Subscribe to @SkiftNews and never miss an update from the travel industry.

Travel tech leaders are optimistic about the incoming Trump administration, expecting reduced AI regulation, potential federal privacy standards, and extended tax cuts to benefit startups, while the TSA reported record-breaking passenger screenings during Thanksgiving. Additionally, Saudi Arabia is leveraging cricket's popularity to attract Indian tourists as part of its broader strategy to increase international visitors. Connect with Skift LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/skift/ X: https://twitter.com/skift Facebook: https://facebook.com/skiftnews Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/skiftnews/ WhatsApp: https://whatsapp.com/channel/0029VaAL375LikgIXmNPYQ0L/ Threads: https://www.threads.net/@skiftnews  Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/skiftnews.bsky.social Subscribe to @SkiftNews and never miss an update from the travel industry. Podcast written by Rashaad Jorden and produced by Skift.

In this episode, Brandreth Canaley, Jamie Lane, and Wil Slickers explore fundamental shifts in global tourism. We discuss Hawaii's push to limit short-term rentals while promoting climate resilience and sports tourism. Then, we examine Venice's expansion of tourist entry fees after a successful trial, tackling the challenge of overtourism. We also examine AirDNA's latest insights, revealing how U.S. short-term rentals adapt to fluctuating demand and new market trends. Tune in for a deep dive into the evolving travel landscape and the future of tourism policies! Mentioned in this episode: Hawaii Article by Skift: ⁠https://skift.com/2024/10/25/hawaii-governor-fewer-short-term-rentals-more-climate-resilience-and-sports-tourism/ Venice Article by Skift: https://skift.com/2024/10/25/venice-to-charge-entry-fees-more-often-the-experiment-worked/ Good Morning Retreat: Winter Edition Sign up! — Good Morning Hospitality is part of the Hospitality.FM podcast network and a Hospitality.FM Original. If you like this podcast, then you'll also love Behind The Stays with Zach Busekrus, which comes out every Tuesday & Friday, wherever you get your podcasts! This show is structured to cover industry news in travel and hospitality and is recorded live every Monday morning at 7 a.m. PST/10 a.m. EST. So make sure you tune in during our live show on our social media channels or YouTube and join the conversation live! Thank you to all of the Hospitality.FM Partners that help make this show possible, and if you have any press you want covered during the show, fill out this form! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It's FII week in Riyadh!

This Week in Startups is brought to you by… Squarespace. Turn your idea into a new website! Go to https://www.Squarespace.com/TWIST for a free trial. When you're ready to launch, use offer code TWIST to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. LinkedIn Jobs. A business is only as strong as its people, and every hire matters. Go to https://www.linkedin.com/twist to post your first job for free. Terms and conditions apply Kalshi. The largest regulated predictions market—now lets you trade on US elections. Visit kalshi.com/twist to see live odds, trade, and get $20 when you deposit $100. * Timestamps: (0:00) Jason and Alex kick off the show (4:10) Heritage Foundation's stance on election integrity and fraud (11:18) Squarespace - Use offer code TWIST to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain at https://www.Squarespace.com/TWIST (12:48) Technological improvements for secure elections (21:07) Hans von Spakovsky's perspective on the 2020 election (22:29) LinkedIn Ads -  Get a $100 LinkedIn ad credit at http://www.linkedin.com/thisweekinstartups (24:01) Election security and legal consequences of fraud (30:06) Closing remarks on election security (32:11) Reflecting on the election fraud discussion and transfer of power (31:00) (28:22) Kalshi - Visit https://www.kalshi.com/twist today to see live election odds, place a trade, and get $20 dollars when you deposit $100. (36:06) Introduction of Rafat Ali and discussion on Uber-Expedia rumors (42:16) Evaluating the potential Uber-Expedia acquisition (45:04) Challenges and consumer behavior in online travel industry (48:33) Future of loyalty programs and travel industry partnerships (52:17) Uber's strategic moves in the travel sector (57:00) AI advancements in travel and media (1:00:19) Media strategies and data monetization (1:05:21) Skift's business model, LinkedIn's role, and remote work strategies (1:11:24) Skift's growth and potential IPO discussion (1:13:18) Uber's expansion into the airline industry (1:15:41) Latest developments in AI with Anthropic's Claude 3.5 model (1:20:07) Announcement of Angel University workshop * Subscribe to the TWiST500 newsletter: https://ticker.thisweekinstartups.com Check out the TWIST500: https://www.twist500.com Subscribe to This Week in Startups on Apple: https://rb.gy/v19fcp * Mentioned on the show: Check out The Heritage Foundation: https://www.heritage.org/ Check out The Heritage Foundation's database: https://www.heritage.org/voterfraud Check out Skift: https://skift.com/ * Follow Hans: X: https://x.com/HvonSpakovsky LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hans-von-spakovsky-0a544913/ Follow Rafat: X: https://x.com/rafat LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rafatali/ * Follow Alex: X: https://x.com/alex LinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexwilhelm * Follow Jason: X: https://twitter.com/Jason LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis * Thank you to our partners: (11:18) Squarespace - Use offer code TWIST to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain at https://www.Squarespace.com/TWIST (22:29) LinkedIn Ads -  Get a $100 LinkedIn ad credit at http://www.linkedin.com/thisweekinstartups (31:00) (28:22) Kalshi - Visit https://www.kalshi.com/twist today to see live election odds, place a trade, and get $20 dollars when you deposit $100. * Great TWIST interviews: Will Guidara, Eoghan McCabe, Steve Huffman, Brian Chesky, Bob Moesta, Aaron Levie, Sophia Amoruso, Reid Hoffman, Frank Slootman, Billy McFarland * Check out Jason's suite of newsletters: https://substack.com/@calacanis * Follow TWiST: Twitter: https://twitter.com/TWiStartups YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/thisweekin Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thisweekinstartups TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thisweekinstartups Substack: https://twistartups.substack.com * Subscribe to the Founder University Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@founderuniversity1916

Episode Notes NYC Tourism + Conventions, the city's destination marketing organization, announced on Tuesday it named Julie Coker as its next president and CEO, writes Global Tourism Reporter Dawit Habtemariam.  Coker, who has held the same roles at the San Diego Tourism Authority since 2020, will assume her new position on December 9. She succeeds Fred Dixon, who served as NYC Tourism's CEO for close to a decade before stepping down earlier this year to lead Brand USA Coker will take the helm as New York City's tourism chief as the region prepares to welcome several major events, including the FIFA World Cup final in 2026.  Next, InterContinental Hotels Group had a strong third quarter in terms of hotel openings. But the company also saw a slowdown in revenue growth, reports Senior Hospitality Editor Sean O'Neill.  IHG added 17,500 rooms across 98 hotels, more than doubling its growth pace from the same period in 2023. O'Neill notes that a lot of that growth came from a deal with the German hotel group Novum Hospitality, which added roughly 6,000 rooms to IHG's portfolio. However, IHG only saw a 1.5% growth in revenue per available room worldwide during the third quarter. O'Neill notes a weak economy in China and turmoil in the Middle East contributed to the slowdown in revenue growth.  Finally, Cathay Pacific recently unveiled the Aria Suite, the carrier's new business class cabin. And the company has plans for a new first class cabin that its chairman called “mindblowing” in an exclusive interview with Airlines Editor Gordon Smith.  Cathay Chair Patrick Healy told Skift that having a world-class cabin is part of the carrier's aspirations to be one of the best premium airlines in the world. CEO Ronald Lam said Cathay plans to reveal the new cabin in 2025 or 2026, with Smith noting the carrier is awaiting Boeing's new 777X aircraft before launching a new first-class cabin. Connect with Skift LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/skift/ X: https://twitter.com/skift Facebook: https://facebook.com/skiftnews Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/skiftnews/ WhatsApp: https://whatsapp.com/channel/0029VaAL375LikgIXmNPYQ0L/ Subscribe to @SkiftNews and never miss an update from the travel industry.

Episode Notes The growth of U.S. vacation rental and short-term rental supply has been slowing down, a trend that will likely continue next year, reports Senior Hospitality Editor Sean O'Neill.  Vacation rental and short-term rental supply in the U.S. has grown 10% in 2024 from last year, according to analytics firm Key Data. However, that's down from 20% two years ago. Key Data said one factor for the supply deceleration is a shortage of housing.  Analysts at Truist Securities said that supply growth may continue to slow as some units become long-term rentals and migrant-focused corporate housing.  Next, Saudi Arabia is targeting Chinese travelers as part of its strategy to attract 150 million tourists by 2030, writes Editor-in-Chief Sarah Kopit. Tourism Minister Ahmed Al Khateeb said in an interview with Skift that the kingdom believes it can attract 20-25% of the Chinese tourists who take mid-to-long-haul flights, often to Europe and the Middle East. It's a “huge market,” he said, with an interest in traveling for culture and heritage. Al Khateeb added Saudi Arabia has been actively promoting itself in China, including organizing a Saudi Travel Festival in Beijing recently.  Finally, travelers are largely aware of the importance of sustainability. But there's a gap between awareness and action, according to a new survey, writes Asia Editor Peden Doma Bhutia.   Trip.com's Sustainable Travel Consumer Report found that 92% of travelers acknowledge the importance of sustainable travel. However, a little less than 57% of respondents said they practice sustainable travel. A major reason for the relative lack of action is general uncertainty about the concept, according to the survey. The divide is more apparent when it comes to paying extra for sustainable travel options, especially when it comes at a time of economic challenge and soaring living costs Connect with Skift LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/skift/ X: https://twitter.com/skift Facebook: https://facebook.com/skiftnews Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/skiftnews/ WhatsApp: https://whatsapp.com/channel/0029VaAL375LikgIXmNPYQ0L/ Subscribe to @SkiftNews and never miss an update from the travel industry.

Seth Borko, head of research at Skift, talks with Alan Fine of Insider Travel Report about key travel industry trends, including how domestic travel has surged post-pandemic but international travel is now surpassing it. Luxury and family travel continue to grow, with increasing demand for solo travel. Despite predictions of its decline, the travel advisor segment remains strong, particularly for complex and luxury trips. For more information, read Skift's "State of Travel" report at www.skift.com. All our Insider Travel Report video interviews are available on our Youtube channel, and as podcasts with the same title on Spotify, Pandora, Stitcher, PlayerFM, Listen Notes, Podchaser, TuneIn + Alexa, Podbean, iHeartRadio, Google,Amazon Music/Audible, Deezer, Podcast Addict, and iTunes Apple Podcasts, which supports Overcast, Pocket Cast, Castro and Castbox.  

Seth Borko, head of research at Skift, talks with Alan Fine of Insider Travel Report about key travel industry trends, including how domestic travel has surged post-pandemic but international travel is now surpassing it. Luxury and family travel continue to grow, with increasing demand for solo travel. Despite predictions of its decline, the travel advisor segment remains strong, particularly for complex and luxury trips. For more information, read Skift's "State of Travel" report at www.skift.com. All our Insider Travel Report video interviews are available on our Youtube channel, and as podcasts with the same title on Spotify, Pandora, Stitcher, PlayerFM, Listen Notes, Podchaser, TuneIn + Alexa, Podbean, iHeartRadio, Google,Amazon Music/Audible, Deezer, Podcast Addict, and iTunes Apple Podcasts, which supports Overcast, Pocket Cast, Castro and Castbox.  

In today's episode, we explore Skift's new Climate Hub in partnership with Intrepid Travel, focusing on sustainability in travel, and take a closer look at how the EU's Digital Markets Act is set to impact major platforms like Booking.com. Stay informed on the latest industry changes! Are you new and want to start your own hospitality business? Join our ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Facebook group⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Follow Boostly and join the discussion: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠YouTube⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠LinkedIn⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Facebook⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Want to know more about us? Visit our ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠website⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Stay informed and ahead of the curve with the latest insights and analysis.

Episode Notes Skift is taking another big step to shape the future of travel. We've launched Skift Elevate, an initiative that aims to empower underrepresented voices in the industry.  Skift President Carolyn Kremins calls Elevate a movement to drive meaningful, collective action across the travel industry. Its inaugural event took place at the recent Skift Global Forum, where several prominent women in travel addressed topics such as gender equity, leadership development and inclusive workplaces.  Skift's plans for Elevate include a series of additional events, content initiatives and industry partnerships.  Next, the Ray-Ban Meta AI-powered glasses will have a new feature that could help travelers overcome language barriers — live voice translation, writes Travel Technology Reporter Justin Dawes.  Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg demonstrated the new feature, among other updates, at the Meta Connect developer conference. Zuckerberg said a user wearing the glasses should be able to hear a real-time English translation of Spanish, French, or Italian through a speaker in the glasses. A translation from English to the other language comes through the app.    Meta didn't reveal when the update would come out but said it has plans to add more languages in the future.  Finally, Senior Hospitality Editor Sean O'Neill compares the state of hotel giants Choice and Wyndham following Choice's failed attempt to merge with Wyndham earlier this year.  O'Neill uses figures gathered by three research analysts to list Choice and Wyndham's strengths and weaknesses. Wyndham is taking advantage of the expected $1.5 trillion infrastructure investment in the U.S., which could increase demand for its three extended-stay brands. However, Wyndham has reset its full-year guidance lower, indicating some strain on its revenue per available room.  As for Choice, it's in a position to generate higher fees per room on average due to most of its rooms being in the midscale or upper midscale sector. But the company's revenue per room growth in the U.S. has been underwhelming.  Connect with Skift LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/skift/ X: https://twitter.com/skift Facebook: https://facebook.com/skiftnews Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/skiftnews/ WhatsApp: https://whatsapp.com/channel/0029VaAL375LikgIXmNPYQ0L/ Subscribe to @SkiftNews and never miss an update from the travel industry.

Episode Notes Residents of Juneau, Alaska, are set to vote next Tuesday on a measure that would ban large cruise ships from docking in the city on Saturdays and July 4, writes Global Tourism Reporter Dawit Habtemariam.  The ban would apply to any large cruise ship with more than 250 passengers. The measure requires a simple majority to pass. Karla Hart, who helped gather enough signatures to put the proposal on the ballot, said overtourism has pushed some fellow residents out of the city.  The initiative comes as Juneau's popularity as a cruise destination has surged. Habtemariam notes that on some days, 20,000 cruise passengers visit the city. Cruise visitors were responsible for $30 million in direct spending on Saturdays last year.   Next, Elliott Investment Management said on Tuesday it would call for a special meeting at Southwest Airlines as it continues to push for more changes at the carrier, writes Airlines Reporter Meghna Maharishi.  Elliott's push for a special meeting comes two days before Southwest's investor day, where Elliott is expected to reveal more changes to the airline's business model. The hedge fund could use the special meeting to elect new members to Southwest's board. Elliott has already proposed 10 possible candidates. Elliott, one of Southwest's largest investors, took a roughly $2 billion stake in the carrier this June. Finally, Etihad Airways has plans to launch around 10 new routes, reports Airlines Editor Gordon Smith. Chief Commercial Officer Arik De told Skift the new routes will be announced in late November. Regarding what locations they'll serve, De said nine routes would fly to brand new destinations for the airline. De also hinted that the 10 new routes are unlikely to be Etihad's last, adding the airline is currently accepting pitches from airports interested in joining the Etihad network. For more travel stories and deep dives into the latest trends, head to skift.com.  Connect with Skift LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/skift/ X: https://twitter.com/skift Facebook: https://facebook.com/skiftnews Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/skiftnews/ WhatsApp: https://whatsapp.com/channel/0029VaAL375LikgIXmNPYQ0L/ Subscribe to @SkiftNews and never miss an update from the travel industry.

This episode explores new developments in the hospitality industry, and today, we're welcoming Katie Cline as a special guest host while Sarah Dandashy travels all over Asia! Kicking off with an intriguing look at Tony Robbins' partners with SBE to launch a luxury hotel brand called "The Estate," as The New York Times reported. We then dive into Michelin's latest expansion, where they've extended their prestigious hotel ratings to include new luxury establishments in the U.S., Canada, and Mexico, as covered by Skift. Throughout the episode, we discuss the implications of these changes and how they're shaping the future of travel and luxury accommodations. — Good Morning Hospitality is part of the Hospitality.FM podcast network and a Hospitality.FM Original. If you like this podcast, then you'll also love Behind The Stays with Zach Busekrus, which comes out every Tuesday & Friday, wherever you get your podcasts! This show is structured to cover industry news in travel and hospitality and is recorded live every Monday morning at 7 a.m. PST/10 a.m. EST. So make sure you tune in during our live show on our social media channels or YouTube and join the conversation live! Thank you to all of the Hospitality.FM Partners that help make this show possible, and if you have any press you want covered during the show, fill out this form! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Episode Notes Skift Global Forum kicked off in New York City on Tuesday with big news in the U.S. travel industry. U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Richard Verma said U.S. travelers will have the option of renewing their passports online starting on Wednesday, writes Airlines Reporter Meghna Maharishi.  Verma told Skift CEO Rafat Ali that the State Department believes half of passport renewals will be done online in the near future. However, Verma acknowledged that the online option wouldn't necessarily be faster than the in-person process – but said that it would be a better customer experience. The State Department recently tested an online renewal process, which attracted 200,000 participants.  Next, Booking Holdings' short-term rental business is growing fast as it tries to compete with Airbnb, reports Travel Technology Reporter Justin Dawes. CEO Glenn Fogel told Executive Editor Dennis Schaal during Skift Global Forum that Booking Holdings is now selling two-thirds of the room nights for short-term rentals as Airbnb. Fogel added his company has grown its short-term rental business faster than Airbnb in 12 of the past 13 quarters. Booking Holdings has close to 8 million short-term rental listings worldwide, but only a small number of them are in the U.S. But Fogel said its lack of U.S. listings represent an opportunity for significant growth.  Finally, Tripadvisor has informed its vacation rental guests and hosts that it will discontinue direct bookings on its platform, writes Executive Editor Dennis Schaal.  Schaal reports that reservations with check-in dates on or after November 1 will be canceled, and guests will be entitled to a full refund. However, those cancellations don't represent the end of vacation rentals for Tripadvisor. A Tripadvisor spokesperson told Skift the company will turn to third-party providers to accept vacation rental bookings, like it does with hotels. Connect with Skift LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/skift/ X: https://twitter.com/skift Facebook: https://facebook.com/skiftnews Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/skiftnews/ WhatsApp: https://whatsapp.com/channel/0029VaAL375LikgIXmNPYQ0L/ Subscribe to @SkiftNews and never miss an update from the travel industry.

Discover how Gen Z and Millennials are shaking up the industry, how technology is reshaping the competitive landscape and why authenticity is crucial for travel brands. Seth unpacks these key findings from the Skift State of the Industry 2024 report. Seth Borko is Head of Research at Skift. Download your copy here: https://skift.com/insight/state-of-travel/

In today's episode of the STR Daily Podcast, we delve into the pressing questions facing the online travel industry ahead of the Skift Global Forum. Is the thrill of online travel fading amid fierce competition among giants like Airbnb, Booking Holdings, and Expedia Group? We discuss what's at stake and what industry leaders are saying. Plus, we explore the four-year partnership between Sabre and Google, focusing on their challenges and successes in implementing AI technology to revolutionize travel. From data management to ethical considerations, get insights into how AI is shaping the future of travel. Tune in to stay ahead in this ever-evolving industry! Are you new and want to start your own hospitality business? Join our ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Facebook group⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Follow Boostly and join the discussion: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠YouTube⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠LinkedIn⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Facebook⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Want to know more about us? Visit our ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠website⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Stay informed and ahead of the curve with the latest insights and analysis.

Episode Notes A growing number of women are making waves in leadership positions throughout the travel industry, and Skift is featuring 25 of them in our inaugural list, Generation Next: The Women Shaping Travel's Future. We're showcasing disruptors and innovators poised to take the industry to new places. We're highlighting executives such as Standard International CEO Amber Asher, who has helped take the brand global, and Amelia DuLuca, who is playing a leading role in Delta Air Lines' sustainability efforts. Our list includes leaders in all sectors of the travel industry around the world, such as Saudi Arabia's Vice Minister of Tourism Princess Haifa.  Next, Airbnb has relaunched the application process for experiences sign-ups after a roughly year-and-a half pause, writes Executive Editor Dennis Schaal.  Airbnb confirmed the relaunch after a LinkedIn user saw a prompt to host an experience. Schaal notes that experiences have been a passion project of CEO Brian Chesky for years. However, the company hasn't established a successful product yet.  The short-term rental giant halted experiences during the pandemic, restarted them later and then paused accepting new host applications for experiences around April 2023.  Finally, a recently published report reveals Saudis are exploring their own country in bigger numbers while foreign visitors are spending large amounts of money, writes Middle East Reporter Josh Corder. A report by the International Monetary Fund said Saudis were largely responsible for the surge in visitor numbers. Domestic tourists represented about 75% of visits in the kingdom last year. Although the Saudi government doesn't share how it defines a domestic tourist, the country's tourism authority told Skift it partly involves tracking mobile phone signals to see when people cross land borders.  Meanwhile, international travelers were the driving force behind the increase in tourism spending. Overseas visitors spent a little more than $37 billion last year — roughly $7 billion more than domestic travelers.  For more travel stories and deep dives into the latest trends, head to skift.com.  Connect with Skift LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/skift/ X: https://twitter.com/skift Facebook: https://facebook.com/skiftnews Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/skiftnews/ WhatsApp: https://whatsapp.com/channel/0029VaAL375LikgIXmNPYQ0L/ Subscribe to @SkiftNews and never miss an update from the travel industry.

This episode delves into the evolving landscape of short-term rentals and online travel services. We start by exploring how Airbnb guests are adjusting their expectations amid changing prices and experiences, analyzing a detailed report from The Wall Street Journal. Next, we discuss AirDNA's insights into New York City's intensified regulations on short-term rentals and its impact on the market. Finally, we turn to Skift's coverage of Expedia's CEO defending their B2B partnerships as essential components of their consumer business strategy, highlighting how these partnerships enhance overall service offerings without compromising consumer interests. List your properties with Homes & Villas by Marriott Bonvoy and reach over 200 million loyal travelers seeking premium vacation rentals. Elevate your business with the trusted backing of Marriott—visit homesandvillasbymarriott.com to learn more! Homes & Villas Episode Registration Link: https://streamyard.com/watch/guzDMvnf7jyC Article Links Mentioned in this Episode: Wall Street Journal: https://www.wsj.com/lifestyle/travel/airbnb-guest-prices-expectations-experiences-d249ff22 AirDNA: https://www.airdna.co/blog/nycs-short-term-rental-crackdown Skift: https://skift-com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/skift.com/2024/09/04/expedia-ceo-defends-b2b-partnerships-as-incremental-to-consumer-businesses/amp/ — Good Morning Hospitality is part of the Hospitality.FM podcast network and a Hospitality.FM Original. If you like this podcast, then you'll also love Behind The Stays with Zach Busekrus, which comes out every Tuesday & Friday, wherever you get your podcasts! This show is structured to cover industry news in travel and hospitality and is recorded live every Monday morning at 7 a.m. PST/10 a.m. EST. So make sure you tune in during our live show on our social media channels or YouTube and join the conversation live! Thank you to all of the Hospitality.FM Partners that help make this show possible, and if you have any press you want covered during the show, fill out this form! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Episode Notes Thousands of hotel workers went on strikeacross several large U.S. cities between Sunday and Tuesday. Senior Hospitality Editor Sean O'Neill examines why the strikes are taking place and what they mean for the hotel industry.  More than 9,000 workers at 21 hotels in 9 cities went on strike on Tuesday. O'Neill notes that hotels are struggling to balance maximizing profits with worker demands for better pay and improved working conditions. Gwen Mills, president of union Unite Here, told Skift in June that workers want increased wages as hotel revenue per room had gone up in recent months.  Roughly 40,000 hotel workers in 22 North American markets have union contracts that could expire in the next year. Unite Here has threatened to expand strikes to 65 hotels in up to a dozen cities if its demands aren't met. Next, investor Elliott Investment Management now owns 10% of Southwest Airlines' common stock shares. That enables Elliott to hold a special meeting during which it could vote to make big changes at the airline, writes Airlines Reporter Meghna Maharishi.  Regulatory filings posted on Tuesday revealed that Elliott managed to convert 10% of its economic stake in Southwest into common stock. Elliott could use a special meeting to force a vote on whether to oust Southwest CEO Bob Jordan and chair Gary Kelly. Special meetings are typically used to request shareholder votes on issues that can't wait until the next general meeting. Elliott said it wants a leadership change at Southwest in part because the carrier's stock has lost 50% of its market value in the last three years.   Finally, New Zealand has announced it will nearly triple entry fees for visitors, reports Associate Editor Rashaad Jorden.  Travelers to the country will pay roughly $62 U.S. starting on October 1, up from a little more than $21. The increased entry fee is intended to help cover the costs of environmental protection around the country. Tourism Minister Matt Doocey argued the increased entry fee wouldn't hurt travel since the new amount represents less than 3% of most visitors' spending.  However, some tourism executives believe the entry fee hike will make it more challenging for New Zealand to attract tourists.  Producer/Presenter: Jose Marmolejos Connect with Skift LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/skift/ X: https://twitter.com/skift Facebook: https://facebook.com/skiftnews Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/skiftnews/ WhatsApp: https://whatsapp.com/channel/0029VaAL375LikgIXmNPYQ0L/ Subscribe to @SkiftNews and never miss an update from the travel industry.

Brian Quinn, Skift's vice president of Editorial Events, shares his insights on how the Skift Global Forum brings together industry leaders for thought-provoking conversations, all within a carefully curated, single-stage experience designed to push the boundaries of travel and inspire the future. Connect with Skift Meetings LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/company/skift-meetings X: https://twitter.com/SkiftMeetings Facebook: https://facebook.com/skiftmeetings Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/skiftmeetings/ Subscribe to @Skift Meetings to discover the future of meetings.

Episode Notes The world's largest hotel groups have made huge strides in signing up guests for their loyalty programs in recent years. But which one has the largest loyalty program? Senior Hospitality Editor Sean O'Neill provides the answer.  Marriott has the largest loyalty program membership with more than 210 million members as of June 30. Hilton, IHG and Wyndham occupy the next three spots, with each of them recording more than 100 million members. Skift reported earlier this year that Hilton has grown its loyalty program faster than Marriott, which could result in Hilton overtaking Marriott's membership count next year.  Next, Expedia's short-term rental platform Vrbo is portraying itself as a stress-free alternative to rivals like Airbnb in its latest campaign, writes reporter James Farrell.   Vrbo's new campaign is centered around the slogan “Relax, you host on Vrbo.” While none of Vrbo's ads directly mention Airbnb, Farrell notes Vrbo is taking veiled shots at its biggest rival, explaining the big differences between the two platforms — like Vrbo's tendency to attract longer-term guests and its fledgling OneKey rewards program. Airbnb is considered an outlier in the hospitality industry due to its lack of a loyalty program.  One Vrbo ad featuring a man and a boy relaxing in a fishing boat invites hosts to “sit back and attract repeat guests” at their properties.  Finally, Visit Florida has removed an LGBTQ Travel page from its website. Global Tourism Reporter Dawit Habtemariam examines the impact of its move. The page provided information on LGBTQ-friendly beaches, destinations, businesses and museums. Habtemariam notes Visit Florida's decision could further damage relations with LGBTQ travelers, two years after Governor Ron DeSantis signed into law a bill dubbed “Don't Say Gay” by critics. .  Former Visit St. Pete-Clearwater CEO David Downing said the DMO used to have strong marketing efforts with the LGBTQ community. Other destination marketing organizations in Florida have kept similar pages geared toward LGBTQ travelers on their websites.  For more travel stories and deep dives into the latest trends, head to skift.com.  Connect with Skift LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/skift/ X: https://twitter.com/skift Facebook: https://facebook.com/skiftnews Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/skiftnews/ WhatsApp: https://whatsapp.com/channel/0029VaAL375LikgIXmNPYQ0L/ Subscribe to @SkiftNews and never miss an update from the travel industry.

Episode Notes Spirit Airlines had a rough second quarter, posting a significantly higher loss than last year. CEO Ted Christie is promising big changes to the company's operations, writes Airlines Editor Gordon Smith.   Spirit said it registered a roughly $193 million net loss during the second quarter — up from a $2.3 million loss last year. Airline Weekly Senior Analyst Jay Shabat said a surplus of domestic seats and an increase in operating costs have hurt Spirit's bottom line.  Spirit is making changes to hit its goal of $100 million in annual savings. The company has temporarily frozen pilot and flight attendant recruitment in addition to furloughing about 240 pilots. Spirit is also deferring all incoming orders with Airbus for deliveries that were due to arrive between the second quarter of 2025 and the end of 2026.  Next, the Biden administration is proposing a rule that would prohibit airlines from charging junk fees to seat families together on flights, writes Airlines Reporter Meghna Maharishi.  Airlines would be barred from charging fees to assign seats to children 13 years of age or younger next to their parents or accompanying adults. The Department of Transportation said the proposed rule could save a family of four as much as $200 if seat selection fees cost $25 each.  Airlines would also have to give families the option of a refund if adjacent seats aren't available at the time of booking.  Finally, Saudi Arabia has revealed its plans for hotels, stadiums and airports as part of its bid for the 2034 FIFA World Cup, writes Middle East Reporter Josh Corder.  The kingdom's 245-page bid book calls for ten of thousands of additional hotel rooms and 11 new stadiums, among other investments. Saudi officials said that all five proposed host cities will have modern airports connecting more than 250 international destinations. However, the bid book does not mention alcohol, which is prohibited in Saudi Arabia.  For more travel stories and deep dives into the latest trends, head to skift.com.  To find these stories and more insight into the business of travel, subscribe to the Skift daily newsletter at skift.com/daily. Connect with Skift LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/skift/ X: https://twitter.com/skift Facebook: https://facebook.com/skiftnews Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/skiftnews/ WhatsApp: https://whatsapp.com/channel/0029VaAL375LikgIXmNPYQ0L/ Subscribe to @SkiftNews and never miss an update from the travel industry.

Episode Notes Virgin Atlantic is pulling out of China after serving the country for 25 years. Virgin becomes the latest Western carrier to retreat from China, writes Airlines Editor Gordon Smith. Virgin Atlantic cited “significant challenges and complexities” as the reason for its decision. The carrier's final round-trip service to China will be London-Shanghai flights on October 25. Smith notes the closure of Russian airspace has made Virgin Atlantic's journeys even longer and helped increase the company's operating expenses.  Virgin Atlantic's decision comes weeks after Qantas said it was pulling out of mainland China later this month. Next, business travel spending by U.S. companies may finally top pre-Covid levels by the end of this year, writes Reporter Christiana Sciaudone. A newly released report by Deloitte found that U.S. companies' business travel spending is expected to grow between 8% and 12% this year. A Deloitte executive said that figure is projected to increase in 2025 as well due an increase in trips and higher airfares and hotel rates.  In addition, the Global Business Travel Association predicted earlier this year that most travel buyers expected their company's business travel spending and volume to increase this year compared to 2023.  Finally, Apollo Global Management's pending acquisition of The Travel Corporation could be a sign of more private equity deals to come in the tour operator and travel agency sectors, writes Executive Editor Dennis Schaal.  A source familiar with The Travel Corporation said multiple private equity firms had also expressed interest in the company. The source added that travel agencies geared toward luxury consumers are attractive targets coming out of the pandemic. The Travel Corporation is a family owned business and one factor driving the sale was that there was no heir apparent, the source said. For more travel stories and deep dives into the latest trends, head to skift.com.  To find these stories and more insight into the business of travel, subscribe to the Skift daily newsletter at skift.com/daily. Connect with Skift: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/skift/ X: https://twitter.com/skift Facebook: https://facebook.com/skiftnews Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/skiftnews/ WhatsApp: https://whatsapp.com/channel/0029VaAL375LikgIXmNPYQ0L/ Subscribe to @SkiftNews and never miss an update from the travel industry.

Send us a Text Message.Linking the Travel Industry is a business travel podcast where we review the top travel industry stories that are posted on LinkedIn by LinkedIn members.  We curate the top posts and discuss with them with travel industry veterans in a live session with audience members.  You can join the live recording session by visiting BusinessTravel360.comYour Hosts are Riaan van Schoor, Ann Cederhall and Aash Shravah.Stories covered on this session include -The latest Advito travel price index suggests that intercontinental airfares will decline and hotel rates will stabilize in the third quarter, while domestic and regional airfares in the U.S. and Europe are on the rise.Etihad Airways launches a chatbot to assist clients with ticket, visa and other information.Lufthansa Group's news about a new environmental surcharge caused a great deal of discussion and debate.VDR - The German Business Travel Association releases a study which says that German travel managers reported a "significant" cost increase in business travel spending.Whilst we're still waiting to hear about their next African investment, Qatar Airways revealed it's also hoping to invest in the Australian market by taking a proposed 20% stake in Virgin Australia.Duetto, a hotel revenue management solution, has been acquired by GrowthCurve Capital.KAYAK launches a travel product for SMEs, with a flat $20 per booking rate. Skift releases a "fact from fiction" travel industry carbon offset report. Extra StoriesYou can subscribe to this podcast by searching 'BusinessTravel360' on Google Podcast, Apple Podcast, iHeart, Pandora, Spotify, Alexa or your favorite podcast player.This podcast was created, edited and distributed by BusinessTravel360.  Be sure to sign up for regular updates at BusinessTravel360.com - Enjoy!Support the Show.

The use of artificial intelligence in the travel industry has grown significantly in recent years. However, the industry still has a lot of work to do to get the most out of AI. Vivek Bhogaraju, advisory partner of data and AI at Skift, provides travel companies with ideas on how to develop AI strategies. Bhogaraju writes that this is just the beginning of the AI era. He urges companies to be flexible when using the technology, noting that new regulations will eventually be introduced. Bhogaraju also emphasized the importance of hiring the right chief data officers, who he said need extensive technical knowledge and a background in the travel industry.  Although Bhogaraju writes that successful data and AI execution requires urgency and efficiency, he notes that projects that succeed take time and persistence.  Next, LVMH said on Thursday it reached a deal with Accor to speed up the revival of the hotel company's Orient Express brand, reports Senior Hospitality Editor Sean O'Neill.   LVMH said it would make an unspecified strategic investment in the Orient Express brand. O'Neill notes the joint venture will include ships in addition to trains and hotels. Meanwhile, LVMH downplayed rumors it would open a Louis Vuitton-branded hotel in Paris. Finally, Thailand has decided to scrap a proposed $8 fee on international tourists arriving by plane, writes Asia Editor Peden Doma Bhutia. Prime Minister Srettha Thavisin recently said his administration would abandon the previous government's plan, which was approved in February 2023. Thai officials intended to use the revenue from the tourism fee to fund the management of insurance for international visitors.  However, Bhutia notes the tourism fee faced significant opposition from private stakeholders. Plus, Thavisin said eliminating the tourist fee could produce greater economic benefits. 

Wil Slickers, Brandreth Canaley, and Michael Goldin are back after a very busy week(s) of travel (for Wil & Brandy at least

Welcome back to Good Morning Hospitality! In this episode, Michael Goldin, Brandreth Canaley, and Wil Slickers discuss the latest topics at recent and upcoming conferences, like the VRMA Executive Summit and Skift's STR Summit. They also talk about some numbers and data (provided by Jamie Lane) about Airbnb revenue from hosts and professional managers! This episode is brought to you by our friends at sojo! With guests becoming more savvy about the properties they book, the transparent pricing practices (or lack of), and many other topics discussed on this show, an empty pantry is another thing that catches guests off guard during their stay! Let sojo solve that problem for you and get the sojo pantry for your homes at getsojo.com/gmh — Good Morning Hospitality is part of the Hospitality.FM podcast network and a Hospitality.FM Original. If you like this podcast, then you'll also love Behind The Stays with Zach Busekrus, which comes out every Tuesday & Friday, wherever you get your podcasts! This show is structured to cover industry news in travel and hospitality and is recorded live every Monday morning at 7 a.m. PST/10 a.m. EST. So make sure you tune in during our live show on our social media channels or YouTube and join the conversation live! Thank you to all of the Hospitality.FM Partners that help make this show possible, and if you have any press you want covered during the show, fill out this form! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Send us a Text Message.Linking the Travel Industry is a business travel podcast where we review the top travel industry stories that are posted on LinkedIn by LinkedIn members.  We curate the top posts and discuss with them with travel industry veterans in a live session with audience members.  You can join the live recording session by visiting BusinessTravel360.comYour Hosts are Riaan van Schoor, Ann Cederhall and Aash Shravah.Stories covered on this session include -American Airlines had to address strong rumours about Vasu Raja, their CCO, and his future with the airline.A Singapore Airlines flight from London experienced abnormal and severe turbulence, resulting in the death of one passenger and multiple injuries. IndiGo (InterGlobe Aviation Ltd) hit the headlines with three stories:- One of their flights had to return to the stand after an "extra passenger" was spotted standing at the rear of the aircraft during taxi.- They posted profits of $1 billion for 2023/2024.- They are going to launch a business class offering.Airport lounges are big business for airlines, as is revealed in a CarTrawler study. SITA acquires passenger handling system Materna IPS GmbH. Several data protection groups file complaints against Ryanair for their online biometric verification methods. Sabre Corporation launches a new offer/order solution for airlines named SabreMosaic.Southwest Airlines fares appear on Google Flights, a significant move for multiple reasons as per the team at Skift.The Chinese aircraft manufacturer COMAC is offered the opportunity to have an assembly line in Saudi Arabia.You can subscribe to this podcast by searching 'BusinessTravel360' on Google Podcast, Apple Podcast, iHeart, Pandora, Spotify, Alexa or your favorite podcast player.This podcast was created, edited and distributed by BusinessTravel360.  Be sure to sign up for regular updates at BusinessTravel360.com - Enjoy!Support the Show.

IN THIS EPISODE...Business journalism is a cornerstone of our daily lives, shaping the companies we work for and the ones we choose to support as consumers. It serves as a vital mechanism for upholding corporate accountability, shedding light on areas where it may be lacking, and empowering individuals with the knowledge needed to make informed economic decisions.Today, we have the pleasure of introducing Jennifer Leigh Parker, an accomplished content strategist with an impressive track record. With extensive experience, Jennifer has held prominent roles such as editor-in-chief at Huge Moves in Brooklyn and Centre magazine at Surface Media in Manhattan. Her outstanding work has been featured in prestigious publications like Forbes, The Week, Bloomberg Pursuits, the Washington Post, Skift, Surface Magazine, Watch Journal, and Saveur Magazine, cementing her reputation as a distinguished voice in the industry.------------Full show notes, links to resources mentioned, and other compelling episodes can be found at http://LeadYourGamePodcast.com. (Click the magnifying icon at the top right and type “Jennifer”)Love the show? Subscribe, rate, review, and share! ------------JUST FOR YOU: Increase your leadership acumen by identifying your personal Leadership Trigger. Take my free my free quiz and instantly receive your 5-page report. Need to up-level your workforce or execute strategic People initiatives? https://shockinglydifferent.com/contact or tweet @KaranRhodes.-------------ABOUT JENNIFER LEIGH PARKER:Jennifer Leigh Parker, a distinguished figure in writing and journalism, is renowned for her insightful coverage of the travel business in Forbes. With over a decade of experience in media, Jennifer has garnered numerous accolades for her exceptional storytelling prowess. Her professional journey includes notable roles such as Editor-in-Chief of Huge Moves, where she explored the convergence of design and technology. Also, her bylines grace esteemed publications like Bloomberg, the Washington Post, Skift, Watch Journal, and Saveur Magazine, reflecting her versatility and breadth of expertise.Moreover, she achieved significant recognition with her debut feature-length screenplay, "The Money Channel," which reached the second round of the 2020 Austin Film Festival Script Competition. This accomplishment came amidst stiff competition, with over 13,175 entries.------------WHAT TO LISTEN FOR:1. What is business journalism about?2. What is unique about Business magazine's approach to storytelling?3. What does creative courage agility entail in journalism?4. How does AI impact media?5. How are business journalism and leadership connected?------------FEATURED TIMESTAMPS:[04:18] From Broadway Dreams to Business Journalism[20:34] Leading with Fearlessness: The Influential Figures of Kara Swisher and Stephanie Ruhle[24:46] Signature Segment: Jennifer's LATTOYG Tactics of Choice: Leading with Courageous Agility[28:48] AI in Media: Leveraging Technology to Elevate Human Storytelling[31:07] Signature Segment: Jennifer's entry into the LATTOYG Playbook: Staying True: Leading with Passion and Purpose in...

On this week's episode of AvTalk, Gabriel Leigh joins Ian in Stockholm to discuss his travels for the Flightradar24 YouTube channel, including a very exciting trip coming up in January. And we speak with Ned Russell, airlines editor at Skift about Alaska Airlines' proposed $1.9 billion acquisition of Hawaiian Airlines. We dig in to the […] The post AvTalk Episode 245: Alaska says Aloha appeared first on Flightradar24 Blog.