Mark Cuban on Media and AI

At CES there was a session in which Mark Cuban was interviewed. As he pointed out, he used to be most famous for being an entrepreneur, and then it was because he was the owner of the Mavericks basketball team, and now it is mostly his appearances on Shark Tank. In the interview, he was asked if he knew Shark Tank would be the big hit it has become:

No, I was invited to be a guest shark for three weeks. I figured this is a business show and has no chance, it will be gone, but I'll do my three shows. And here we are in season 11 and I’m sure it will be back for season 12.

The interview with Mark didn't take place at the convention center, but in the Aria hotel, where there was a whole program oriented around media and advertising. The first question was what was interesting at CES. Mark said that each year CES is either in an innovation phase, where new ideas surface, or in a copying phase, where the ideas of the previous few years are developed.

This year it is copying. Autonomous driving. 5G. AI...nobody even really knows what that is.

He was asked about TV.

TV is the best next alternative to boredom. Now there is lots of good stuff. I don't think we will subscribe to all these streaming services, just like we only watched a dozen of the 50-100 channels on traditional cable TV.

Mark pointed out one big question that we don't know the answer to is what the average age of the TV (as opposed to streaming) audience is... it just gets older and older. But we don't yet know if people "age in" to traditional TV or whether people who grow up on streaming like Netflix will continue to stream and ignore TV. Further, sports is becoming more important to traditional TV to keep it alive. "They need us more now than ever," he said, with his Mavericks owner's hat on. He predicts that streaming companies will get into traditional sports. "If there are lots of streaming services, then the big issue is churn, and sports can help reduce that."

Next, he turned his attention to movies.

People still want to get out of the house. But you won't go to the same number of films as in the past, so they are bigger events. I don't want my 16-year-old daughter to go  Netflix and chill, I'd rather she went to a movie theater...and sat under a spotlight!

He was asked about the companies that he invested in on Shark Tank.

20% just crushed it, 20% were just idiots, everyone else falls in the middle. The usual numbers. But outside Shark Tank, I'm investing in AI. Big companies like Google, Facebook, and Amazon can spend billions to learn what works, but AI is hard, and it is even harder for small companies. But today, if you don't know AI, you are like someone in 1999 not knoing about the internet. I'm taking Coursera courses and learning how to do neural networks in PyTorch and so on. You have to do your homework or you will be a dinosaur. There will be AI haves and have-nots, it will be really impactful.

Next up, social media:

Instagram was young and now is aging. Twitter is much older. TikTok is filling from underneath. My 13 and 16 year olds used to post everything on Instagram and now they don't. TikTok is more engaging. My 11 year old is lying that he is 13. I try not to say that is okay, but...whatever. You have to be there. Even Snapchat is aging and there are fewer stories than there used to be.

Mark was asked about the regulatory threat over the whole social media space.

The law of unintended consequences always catches up, so somebody is going to do something. I'm not a big fan but I think some sort of regulation is inevitable. In some ways it is unfair. If you put out a press release on PR Newswire then no matter what you put in the release, nobody blames PR Newswire. But Facebook and Twitter they do.

What about breaking them up?

That would be stupid. Look at AI. These big companies are doing the research that is keeping our country competitive. We have to be careful what we ask for since we don't have an AI policy as a nation, so if we break up these companies, we risk losing our best opportunity. So I'm not totally opposed to regulation but I am opposed to breaking them up.

AI is the new space mission and we really really really need to invest in it. Once you get batteries that can go for days, and processors that can do 100X what they can do now, we’re going to be talking about military weaponery driven by robotics and AI, so as a country we need to dominate that. Especially if our adversaries are trying to.

And on that note, the 30-minute session was over and it was time to get to the convention center at the other end of town.

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