Former Yahoo CEO unveils new AI photo-sharing app

Meantime, a new AI powered app is on the market. That’s time for photo sharing. Sunshine, a new startup helmed by former Yahoo chief Marissa Meyer Adur De Bosa, joins us this morning. Today’s tech check with a very special guest. Hey, Dee. Hey. Good morning, Carl. That’s right. We have Marissa Mayer herself. Welcome to 1 Market. Thanks for being here. Thank you very much for having me. Congrats on the launch, which was earlier this week. I want to start with a very simple question. Why photo sharing? You said that it’s broken right now. How’s it broken? What are you trying to fix? I think photo sharing is broken because when you see someone take a photo, you might feel like, hey, I need to pull up my phone and take it to or remind them to give it to you. And The thing is, you’re there. It should be easy and fluid to be able to move photos around. And right now it’s just not if you think about the number of times that you’ve taken multiples of a shot or or or pulled your phone out. And So what we really wanted to do was take AI, apply it so you get good photo curation, get easy sharing. We have something in the app called Magic Mode where we decide which photos are share worthy and upload the ones that we think will be interesting to the group of people who were there. And we really base all of this around a time and a place. So if you’re in that time and a place, you’re part of that album, the photos get shared really seamlessly. You have an extensive history in AI and you studied it at Stanford and then you went on to Google and we’re focused on AI long before anyone was talking about it. This is a real moment, especially for generative AIA. Lot of the startups that we talked about on a daily basis, they’re trying to do very complex things like build the large language models or for example, build software on top of GPU. You’re using it for a lot more simple stuff. Photos is one. You’re also doing something with contacts and birthdays. What is the strategy? Why are you focusing on some of these more like mundane tasks using AI? Sure, Well we have all the respect in the world for those really cutting edge applications, but we think that AI is also at a moment where it can help in everyday tasks. And when you think about simple things at same time, finding someone’s contact, making it easier to share a photo or having that happen automatically picking the right photo, those are all things where yes, if we can do global facial recognition, we can figure out which photo is the has the best expression and eyes open really easily too. And so we want to take AI applied to those things. So it’s good at it. We also think that it really makes AI very relatable in that moment. It’s something that people can feel, they can understand how it helps them, and it demystifies AI a bit. Right? And a lot of the people I talk to here, they talk about this future vision, that generative AI. It started with ChatGPT and chat bots, but it’s going to be more than that. We’re still waiting for that moment, but the vision is like an AI assistant or an AI tutor for every child. When do we get there? And does Shine Sunshine sort of play into that idea? And how does that work? Is it going to be through our phone? Is it going to be through a different device? Sure. Well, I think there’s a few different things that are happening because one, there’s the generative AI piece, like how does the AI express itself, Speak on your behalf, act on your behalf, draw on your behalf. And there’s all the personal information. And I will say that’s where sunshine is really focused. We’re focused on how do we take the personal information, make sense of it, you know, pulling signatures and contacts out of your e-mail and making them useful to you, finding the great photo that you should have sent your friend and making sure that you do and giving you suggestions and reminders. And so I think in the future, what we’re going to see is those pieces that understand personal information really meet up with that expressiveness of being able to act or write or draw on your behalf. And that’s really when I think AI is going to become even more powerful than it already is, which is it’s already an impressive moment. But I think once we start to see, we’ll start to see the types of agents and assistants you’re talking about when we see those two pieces meet.