SED News: Apple’s AI Problem, The Real Business Model of AI, and Token Cost Reckoning

Jun 9, 2026 by SED

SED News is a monthly podcast from Software Engineering Daily where hosts Gregor Vand and Sean Falconer unpack the biggest stories shaping software engineering, Silicon Valley, and the broader tech industry.

In this episode, they cover Apple‘s uncertain path beyond the iPhone. They also discuss Google‘s agentic pivot at Google I/O, a surge in DuckDuckGo traffic following Google’s default switch to AI mode, and payroll platform Remote surpassing 300 million in ARR with flat headcount.

Gregor and Sean also dig into why consumer subscriptions don’t seem to correspond to actual costs, how enterprise is quietly subsidizing the AI economy, why the true moat has shifted from model quality to context management and agentic harness, and what the coming wave of token cost optimization might look like as companies start scrutinizing their AI bills.

Finally, they highlight standout threads from Hacker News including Doom running on a travel router touchscreen, a viral post asking whether AI productivity gains should translate to a day off, YouTube‘s move to automatically label AI-generated content, and SimCity 3000 running in 4K.

Gregor Vand is a security-focused technologist, having previously been a CTO across cybersecurity, cyber insurance and general software engineering companies. He is based in Singapore and can be found via his profile at vand.hk or on LinkedIn.

Sean’s been an academic, startup founder, and Googler. He has published works covering a wide range of topics from AI to quantum computing. Currently, Sean is an AI Entrepreneur in Residence at Confluent where he works on AI strategy and thought leadership. You can connect with Sean on LinkedIn.

Please click here to see the transcript of this episode.

Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com

Thanks to our sponsors

This episode is brought to you by:

tigerdata.com
If you’re running Postgres in production, you’ve probably felt the moment analytical queries start fighting your transactional workload. Most teams end up adding a second database and all the pipeline complexity that comes with it.
Tiger Data, creators of TimescaleDB, takes a different approach. We extend Postgres with hybrid row and columnar storage so one table handles both writes and analytical scans. Native Compression cuts storage costs up to 95%. Continuous aggregates keep dashboards live without batch jobs. And it scales to petabytes without you re-architecting.
Companies like Cloudflare, Octave Energy, Schneider, Axpo, and Flowco run production workloads on Tiger Data today.
No stale data. No second system to operate. Just Postgres, managed for you, ready for the workload you’re building toward.Try it free at tigerdata.com
Tech.FidelityCareers.com.
You know Fidelity as a financial services leader. But did you know that inside Fidelity is a community of technologists working together to shape the future of finance and tech?
Fidelity is always investing in tomorrow: from emerging tech to cutting-edge tools that will transform what comes next. Their technologists are encouraged to keep learning so they can expand their skillsets, explore new ground, and stay ahead of this rapidly-evolving industry.
And right now Fidelity is hiring technologists to join their team.
Fidelity technologists get the best of both worlds: startup energy that’s grounded in the stability of a financial institution. That means support, resources, and amazing benefits.
Bring your skills to a culture where you’re empowered to dream big and build the tech that drives an organization and makes a real impact on people’s lives.
Find out more at Tech.FidelityCareers.com. That’s Tech.FidelityCareers.com.
Fidelity is an equal opportunity employer.
visionagents.ai.
Most AI frameworks started with voice and bolted on video as an afterthought. Vision Agents by Stream was built video-first from day one. It’s an open-source Python framework that lets you build real-time voice and video AI agents in minutes, not months. With 25+ integrations for models like OpenAI, Gemini, and Claude, sub-500ms latency on Stream’s global edge network, and support for YOLO, Roboflow, and custom CV models, you get a production-ready stack without the infrastructure headache. Whether you’re building coaching tools, multimodal assistants, or real-time security pipelines; Vision Agents handles the hard parts. Get started free at visionagents.ai.

tigerdata.com

Tech.FidelityCareers.com.

visionagents.ai.

Subscribe to the newsletter

Related episodes

Subscribe
to the newsletter