The Pulse #123: Big Tech using its distribution advantage to win in AI?
Big Tech companies seem to have learned the lesson on how they became dominant in the past. So most of them are giving away AI functionality for free – even if this could be at loss for them.
The Pulse is a series covering insights, patterns, and trends within Big Tech and startups. Notice an interesting event or trend? Send me a message.
Today, we cover:
Industry pulse. Where TikTok’s software engineers went, Apple Intelligence half-baked at launch, former FTC chair Lina Khan warns of reduced competition, OpenAI launches autonomous browser agent, Apple drops its AR glasses, with Meta also facing struggles – and more
Big Tech using distribution to win at AI? Meta, Microsoft, and Google are using their distribution power and financial muscle to give away AI features for free to users and customers. It’s a sensible way to avoid disruption, which makes it much harder for startups to compete
Before we start: thank you for all the thoughtful comments on last week’s issue about DeepSeek rocking the tech industry. I corrected a few details based on feedback – most notably how DeepSeek’s cost efficiency seems to be closer to 4-5x that of OpenAI, not 10-40x. See the updated issue here.
1. Industry Pulse
Where did TikTok’s software engineers go?
The past six months has been something of a Doomsday scenario-esque countdown for TikTok, as the start date of its ban in the US crept ever closer. In the event, TikTok did indeed go offline for a few hours on 19 January, before President Trump gave the social network a stay of execution lasting 75 days.
How has this uncertainty affected software engineers at the Chinese-owned social network? According to data shared exclusively with The Pragmatic Engineer by Live Data Technologies, which tracks real-time live job change data across more than 160M professionals, this is how:
There’s been an outflow of engineers to:
Big Tech: Meta, Google, Amazon (and AWS), Microsoft and Apple.
Publicly traded tech companies: Snap, Pinterest, Snowflake, DoorDash, NVIDIA, Coinbase, Coupang, Salesforce, Uber
Few private companies: X (formerly: Twitter) and OpenAI
It seems the uncertainty has motivated TikTok engineers to interview and quit when they get an offer. Still, I find it surprising that hardly any scaleups are popular destinations among TikTok leavers. To me, it indicates that people quit for better liquid total compensation packages; which may be why publicly traded companies are the most popular destination.