The Exchanges

Q be the future. I I'll say though, the action mode do stuff for me. And we've talked a lot about thought partner versus actually doing things. I had not seen anything that interesting, at least in my usage so far, though I have not been asking it to do too much and giving it too much sensitive information and we'll get into why in just a bit. What about you?

A So I have definitely enjoyed using it. I think that this is the future of the browser. The question is, is it going to be something that OpenAI can Ride and unseat the incumbents or that the incumbents will effectively adopt into their products. And this idea of having an AI assistant or an AI chat bot in your side window and then giving it some capabilities to go surf the web, to me, you know, it would be great and really meaningful if your competition wasn't Google. And maybe there's a chance that it unseeds Safari in some way, but, uh, I, you know, trying to go against Chrome is going to be really, really tough, uh, because Google does have the talent to build this into their product. They will, they already have Gemini baked in, uh, to some extent. So many things on the internet work as with Chrome as the default, like you and I today, we're recording on Riverside. It's a podcast recording platform. Um, it doesn't work outside of like Chrome and Safari. So you basically have to get all this compatibility built in from the ground up. Although I do think actually Atlas is built on Chromium, which is an interesting, which is an interesting, uh, um, sort of wrinkle in all this that it's built on Google's open source browser technology. Uh, but then there's other, there are other things that are just not great there. Uh, for instance, the New York times seems to block it. So if …

AI assessment note: “So I have definitely enjoyed using it. I think that this is the future”

Q on this platform and users will be able to sort of come across on mass relatively easily, but it would be their choice, right? You would still have to kind of pitch the application to them. Um, But in principle it would be an awful lot easier to break these, you know, incredible, um, uh, moats and barriers, um, that the social networking giants put up around their social growth.

A You know, I like this idea in theory. However, I think about it in practicality and I have some questions. So the idea of, okay, build your social graph on the blockchain and then maintain control of it and give it to certain applications as you see fit makes sense. Then I think about the nature of the different types of applications or the different types of graphs that I have on each application. So for instance, Facebook is my social graph. LinkedIn, my professional graph. Twitter is a asymmetric follow model. Where I, and it's an interest graph really, and then something like tic tac, my graph doesn't actually matter because the application is looking only at my behavior with the follow as a somewhat of an interesting signal and saying this is what I should show you. So how does the fact that every application has its own unique graph then sync with the idea of making a graph portable because it seems like it would only be useful in some cases and not others?

AI assessment note: “I like this idea in theory. However, I think about it in practicality”

Q and I can say that this writer, like, everyone was like, jaws hitting the floor, because Eight months into the job, the chief revenue officer, who's like, has a stellar background in, uh, she was, I think, Slack CEO under? Yes. Like, I mean, what, what do you think's going on over there? What do you think's going on? I've been waiting to ask you this for a month now.

A So it's not just Dresser, right? So this is, this is from Mr. Journal story. Last week, the company replaced its chief revenue officer, Denise Dresser, after she spent less than a year on the job. Her departure followed a string of other exits, including former chief operating officer, Brad Lightcap, and Fiji Simo, once seen as the heir apparent to chief executive, Sam Altman. So, uh, it is a lot of, uh, departures. Fiji, of course, health-related reasons, but Brad Lightcap, uh, is a big one. Uh, Look, I think this is just the consequences of them, you know, really getting their butt kicked by Anthropic on the way to coding. And they've taken a few months, uh, to sort of turn their ship and focus it on Codex, uh, which is still in the process of, of being released. So, uh, you know, they, they got their first draft out of it before, you know, sometime in July. Uh, and now, now they're gonna refine, but, uh, this is obviously a very powerful and very lucrative form of artificial intelligence and, um, And they are behind the eight ball right now. So when that happens, yeah, uh, revenue tends to grow more slowly than the arrivals. I mean, they made seven billion in the quarter.

AI assessment note: “I think this is just the consequences of them, you know, really getting their butt kicked”

Q talked about, I think, on all sides of the political spectrum, the idea that America's fallen behind in, in critical infrastructure. So if that is the case, and we are buying into this story that AI is going to be the battleground of the next century. Does it seem okay that they're asking for federal guarantees or a backstop in terms of all the debt financing that's being taken out?

A I mean, I think that's my point here. I think it's personally, it's perfectly reasonable for OpenAI to ask. Um, I don't think that the US taxpayers should be backstopping the company's debt though, because, and Sam Altman in a follow-up made this clear, if they fail, you'll still have Google, you'll still have Anthropic, you'll have many others that are going to be building this. Um, so in, in other words, I do think that the United States is, is gonna, is going to be in a good position. And I also don't really think that the government should be picking winners, uh, and giving open AI these guarantees, assuming that open AI would be the only one to get them. So to me, it's just like, it's a personal, it's a perfectly reasonable ask, um, and it's a perfectly reasonable, uh, no from the US government and David Sachs, the AI czar, basically said no to bailouts.

AI assessment note: “I don't think that the US taxpayers should be backstopping the company's debt though”

Q I cannot think about from a multiple perspective. I mean, that's already just insane, but I'm sure we've seen that at some point From a, like, loss perspective, certainly not, because I, I can't imagine at this scale any company ever losing that much money and being able to, like, confidently even think about an IPO. So do you think it happened? When do you think they go for it?

A I think it's going to be a while. I mean, again, and just some, so, so Altman, uh, did tweet out, he did this live stream this week. He treated, he, um, shared some perspective there and then tweeted out some notes about it. I mean, on the live stream, he said, OpenAI has 1.4 trillion worth of financial obligation. Uh, and it's made commitments to use 30 gigawatts of data center capacity. Uh, but OpenAI's revenue is going to be thirteen billion this year, and we already have eight hundred million people using ChatGPT. I just don't see how you go from, and I could be wrong, but I don't see how you go from OpenAI's base of revenue now to, uh, 1.4 trillion dollars that it can spend and, and ever have a economically viable company. I mean, we could go back to this and I'll look like an idiot when OpenAI pulls it off. Um, but to me, the financial picture just seems absurd.

AI assessment note: “I think it's going to be a while.”

Q I mean, do you know what I want though? I want a super brain every morning when I wake up writing me a morning brief, a personalized report while I'm sleeping five to 10 briefs a day that get me up to speed on the day and encourage me to check, chat, chat, GPT first thing in the morning. Do you have anything like that for me?

A Well, I think you are touching on what may be the beginning of OpenAI's ability or the product that might spark OpenAI's ability to pay all this money back. It's called ChatGPT Pulse, and we'll talk about it right after this. And we're back here on Big Technology Podcast Friday edition. In the first half, you might have heard us talk with varying degrees of trepidation about the economics of the AI business. Why don't we talk about one way that OpenAI might be able to justify its valuation, and that is continuing to innovate on the product front. This is from TechCrunch. OpenAI launches ChatGPT Pulse to proactively write you morning briefs. OpenAI is launching a new feature inside of ChatGPT called Pulse, Which generates personalized reports for users while they sleep. Pulse offers users five to 10 briefs that can get them up to speed on their day and is aimed at encouraging users to check ChatGPT first thing in the morning, much like they would check social media or a news app. Pulse is part of a broader shift in OpenAI's consumer products, which are being designed to work for users asynchronously instead of responding to questions. What do you think about Pulse, Ronjan? You excited about it? Is this, is this the killer app?

AI assessment note: “It's called ChatGPT Pulse, and we'll talk about it right after this.”

Q we're gonna get more into this, the kind of the depressing part is, it's not the technology, it's not that initial wave of, like, adoption for a cool new tool that's been, you know, like, uh, sent out into the market. It really feels like none of that matters, and in the end, it's just gonna be raw compute and distribution. I don't know. How do you feel about this?

A Well, I think it's fascinating because there's been this idea of powering this entire generative AI moment, which is the scaling loss, which means that as you add more compute and of course data, uh, to you, to this equation, your models are going to get much more powerful and that will allow you to do more things. And it's not a very difficult thing. Like there's no secret sauce to it. Well, there's maybe some, but Um, at a, at a brute level, if you build massive data centers, you should be able to get in the game. And this is something that OpenAI and Anthropic have been harping on. And now you have Zuckerberg and Elon that come in and they say, Oh, okay. So I can build great models by scaling this up, and even if I'm a little compute inefficient because I don't have the best cutting edge methods, I could get myself in the game, uh, and compete, and I, I think that is going to change the dynamics here, because as you mentioned, they have, uh, distribution. You can see Meta's, um, if Meta's able to build a, um, a competitive LLM with this compute and talent that it's stacking up, then it's going to be able to distribute that through Facebook products. And, you know, all they have to do really is slow down the growth of ChatGPT, similar to the way that they did to TikTok with Reels, similar to the way that they did to Snapchat with Stories, and they've served their purpose. So,…

AI assessment note: “I think that is going to change the dynamics here, because as you mentioned, they have, uh, distribution.”

Q the McKinsey guys ask, can you automate this away? He's just a bigger version of that. He's thinking, yes, my company can automate this away, but there's all these other questions, all these other things about, like, human capabilities that I think that, You know, Dario is an expert on AI, but he's not necessarily an expert on what humans do in every job in America, right? No one is.

A Definitely. I mean, I think if you're a salesperson, just to take one example, this really hits home. Um, I, I've been in sales before. I can tell you no salesperson is on top of their pipeline. Uh, they might be concentrating on like the two or three clients that are most likely to close and have a hundred accounts that they have to reach out to or nurture or nudge, uh, or, you know, meet with. And they just don't have the time. So if you make a salesperson, let's say a hundred percent more efficient now, instead of concentrating on those two, three, four, five accounts, maybe they can spend time with 10 and then all of a sudden they might be doubling their productivity if they're motivated.

AI assessment note: “Definitely. I mean, I think if you're a salesperson, just to take one example”

Q to change is important, and I do think there needs to be genuine conversations around this, but again, jobs change, people adapt, and I don't know, maybe, maybe I'm too hyped up from that song that you just played, but, uh, if we're talking about innovation, in what other world could we have a hyper true jingle? That quickly. That's, that's a net positive for society. That's all I'm saying.

A I think it's already, just because we have that jingle, it's already outweighed all the negatives of all time, um, that we might see with AI. But Dario, uh, in his conversation with Axios actually goes through step by step how he sees this happening. And yes, innovation always creates job loss and job creation. But the idea is that this technology is potentially so powerful, uh, that it just puts this process on steroids, or as you said last week on acid. Okay, so here's the step by step. Number one, OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, and other large AI companies keep vastly improving the capabilities of their large language models to meet and beat human performance with more and more tasks. This is happening and accelerating. The US government, worried about losing ground to China or spooking workers with preemptive warning, uh, says little. The administration and Congress neither regulate AI nor caution the American public. This is happening and showing no signs of changing. Most Americans unaware of the growing power of AI and its threat to their jobs pay little attention. This is happening too. So do you have an argument that any of those three steps are, uh, incorrect?

AI assessment note: “innovation always creates job loss and job creation. But the idea is that this technology”

Q if, if you're Microsoft, right. And if, if what your concern is, is that again, uh, Jevon's paradox isn't working out, then, um, things will get cheaper and cheaper and cheaper. And so you don't need, um, a core weave to, to get you your chips because you can do it cheaper and all that other stuff. So is this a company specific issue where they don't have a moat?

A I think it's company specific. And I also think that it's still on a trend, right? I'm going to go with your line, Brian, both can be true at the same time, right? It's a, it's not a strong company, uh, in terms of what you're looking for, if you want to get AI value and AI has been on a downturn at the beginning of this year, and it's not good for a company that wants to ride that wave. Um, and you're right, this is from the information. So this is from Corey Weinberg. He says tech investors, and this is making the point exactly. Seem a bit overstuffed on AI, uh, stocks, uh, Oracle and Nvidia, two public companies investors might compare to CoreWeave are down 12% and 19% respectively on the year. It's hard to ask investors to pay up for a new AI firm when they're worried about their existing portfolios. Investors also worry how much the business is tied to Microsoft or Nvidia. They worry that this is important. The CoreWeave founders sold so much of their stock already. I think they sold something like five hundred million dollars. They worry how much cash the company expects to burn, uh, which is a lot. And this is more, more from Corey. A bank anonymously surveyed, 135 investors, including hedge funds and long stock, long only stock pickers. A whopping 90% of the participants said they didn't think, Corey, we've had a sustainable moat, essentially meaning it really, wasn't r…

AI assessment note: “I think it's company specific. And I also think that it's still on a trend”

Q a text message. Um, About it. I mean, you could just do cool stuff and it's not, but again, like I want to build more complex things, right? I want to like find ways to save lots of time and automate everything from my professional life to my personal life. And we're not quite there yet, but it seems kind of close. Have you built anything? What have you done?

A Yeah. I mean, I've built, uh, I mean, using Claude and it's just a couple of prompts, but I've built games. Like I talked about on our Wednesday episode with the Roblox CEO. Um, I also built, uh, retirement, like a retirement calculator where I uploaded a fake bank statement and was just like, make me a financial plan based off of this bank statement. And I was like, all right, well now build me a retirement calculator just for kicks. And it built a working retirement calculator, uh, with like various fields, like a very nice and sophisticated one. So to me, I think that like just this power to imagine and prompt any piece of software, like as we're talking, I'm thinking like, Do I want to build, uh, like my own tracker for big technology stories or podcast guests, a specific calendar? Like you can probably prompt that with Claude and they give you dedicated links. So you can kind of use that, uh, as a webpage and sort of next thing, you know, you have this like custom application that you would have had to pay maybe a few thousand dollars, uh, for someone to build for you.

AI assessment note: “I've built games... I also built, uh, retirement, like a retirement calculator”

Q very little that really could happen at Amazon that would lead, you know, most people to cancel their Amazon Prime. So, you know, if tariffs happen, prices will go up, and, you know, maybe that creates some opportunity for Amazon if, You know, the situation that you described among, you know, Timu and Sheehan happens, but I just kind of don't know. What do you think is going to happen?

A I think that Timu and Sheehan are going to face some action, whether it is those higher taxes, and I would not be, or a ban, and I would not be surprised by a ban. Um, so to me, I think Amazon will be thrilled at that. They've like kind of stumbled trying to compete with them. I think we had some Black Friday statistics that we cited on the show this year, which is that those two retailers, Timu and Sheehan, made up about 50% of Gen Z's Black Friday purchasing. And, ah, so that is, you know, if you think if I'm at Amazon and I'm doing long term threat planning, ah, that's, that's front and center. And yeah, it might send Bezos, ah, who, you know, pulled the Kamala Harris endorsement from the Washington Post into the White House and be like, you know, Mr. President, there's something you need to know about, ah, what China's doing to take over our, our retailers, our American retailers. And, um, you ought to take some action and that could be successful.

AI assessment note: “I think that Timu and Sheehan are going to face some action”

Q Always Day One. And it's specifically that book that reveals the culture, the technology, and the processes of these, uh, tech giants. Um, and that's where, uh, where I want to talk you through today. And, and learn some of the things that, that you discovered from these tech giants. Um, but maybe let's, let's kick off properly. Um, can you quickly introduce yourself? Who is, who is Alex Kentrovich?

A Absolutely. So I'm a tech journalist with a really strange background, right? So I cover the technology, uh, giants in the world, Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and I really brought an amazing branding, uh, agency in, and we came up with this really creative name, big technology for both the newsletter and, And the podcast, um, just kidding. And, um, and so the reason why my background's weird is because I studied labor relations, uh, in college, not journalism. I didn't learn to code. I learned how do organizations work, how do management and workers relate, which I think ultimately everything that we see in the business world is downstream of culture. And it's always been a focus of mine. And, you know, I put that kind of in the back burner for a while as I wanted to Discover, you know, the businesses and, um, and, and the operations of, of the tech giants, and then it just came back. I couldn't, you know, stop paying attention to the fact that these companies have very unique cultures, very unique ways that they're led. They use really interesting technology, uh, and that's what's helped them again, stay on top. And their plan is to stay on top forever. So that, that background led me to, uh, the work And it's been, you know, really interesting to explore the tech giants in a way that I don't think is really covered too often, you know, in our, in our tech press…

AI assessment note: “So I'm a tech journalist with a really strange background, right?”

Q Um, yeah, no, but do you, do you think they're going after TikTok and YouTube here, especially YouTube to me?

A Yeah, I mean, they know everybody, it's, it's amazing how, uh, how YouTube has become this, this force that's eating into everything, eating into cable TV, eating into Netflix, of course, eating into the social networks, and I would even go further and say there's no such thing as social networks anymore in this world that you're hoping for, where there's no reverse chronological order, or there's no, there's no algorithmic feed. Uh, it, it, it's long past, uh, the point in time where that was even a possibility, and I think that You know, social media was a moment, but it's now just all entertainment. Meta knows that, TikTok knows it, YouTube knows it, and they're all competing on the same product, which is effectively shorts.

AI assessment note: “they're all competing on the same product, which is effectively shorts.”

Q I know, but that's the flip side of it. Like if you don't have your memory with you, you'll be frustrated, right? That you, you taught it all this stuff to do. And then you go to work and it's like stupid. It doesn't remember anything of how you operate.

A I know, but it's going to be, I, I, I agree. It'll be, there will be a case to be able to bring your personal AI into your work setting. But again, like, let's say I'm at company A and my competitor company B is breathing down my neck. And now my star employee brings their AI to, to me, you know, they're in my systems and then, you know, company B now company B is really trying to figure out what's the best way to, to compete. Um, What company B could then do is make the godfather offer to that employee who not only will they get them literal institutional knowledge in there. Absolutely. They're going to get them and their AI with the memory of how to do that.

AI assessment note: “I agree. It'll be, there will be a case to be able to bring”

Q know They are not software margins. Traditional software margins. Like, the marginal cost of distributing a product is not effectively zero. So, like, we know it's gonna look different, but them chasing and driving this in the wrong direction, I think, could be really bad. Do they, do you think they're gonna do it, Juan? And do you think it would be good or bad for them if they do?

A It'll be fun to ask Greg Brockman about it next week at the summit. Um, so I will do that. Um, I think they will. I mean, I think that there's, if you think about it strategically, right? Anthropic has been winning. It's also, it's like part of this is about lifetime value, right? Anthropic has been winning over a lot of these enterprise customers with its offering. And once you win these people over and you get them set on, on, you know, your system, they're not going to want to go anywhere else for a while because they're going to build that habit, right? And because if it's working for them, then why would they go somewhere else? And, um, and so I think that OpenAI probably sees it as, well, if we drop our prices, we're going to lean on our strength, right? And what's their strength? They have all this infrastructure. They've invested in more infrastructure than Anthropic. Dario called it Yoloing, right? What they're doing on the infrastructure side. If you've built the infrastructure, why not lean on that as a strength and try to win these companies over, um, and get that lifetime value. Uh, that will be difficult for Anthropic to get over time.

AI assessment note: “I think they will. I mean, I think that there's, if you think about it strategically”

Q mean, who cares about your nine hundred twenty million active users or nine oh five or whatever it is like, and again, is the entire game going to be codex? Like, I don't, do you think, do you think they're going to still go, do you think they go into IPO with a dominant story still being Consumer plus enterprise. Even after they told us it's going to be enterprise.

A I think it's going to be enterprise. And I think again, and this is something I've brought up in all of my interviews recently is, you know, a lot of the growth of generative AI has been on the back of like novel uses that's gotten people interested, uh, in the technology and sort of established a baseline behavior, but hasn't exactly become the norm. Like, I think we're still searching for like, what is the key use of generative AI? And remember where we've seen these spikes, image generation, voice generation, and now this agentic stuff. The question is, what is going to be the mainstream use that everybody goes for and is intuitive and useful for everyone? And, you know, that we don't know whether the codecs and cloud codes are going to be that type of mainstream use or whether there are another flash in the pan.

AI assessment note: “I think it's going to be enterprise.”

Q They are. Is it over hiring and a bloated company that just needs to actually trim itself, which is I think very true for many, many of these big companies, especially over the last five years, or is it really like we need to cut costs so we can invest more in artificial intelligence?

A I think it's the latter. I mean, they've spent so much money on AI. They're spending on the data centers. The market is actually much less forgiving if you don't have margins, right? And they, they don't have, I mean, they have some ROI on the AI because it's helping optimize their creative stack. And I think there was a headline recently that they're going to pass Google as the largest advertising business. So they see that the results there, but they're not a platform that's sort of benefiting from this surge in demand for AI compute. They haven't built super AI super intelligence. Um, so they are, they are in a position where they cannot remain this bloated, especially as they don't have, um, the leading model.

AI assessment note: “I think it's the latter. I mean, they've spent so much money on AI.”

Q be paying them. That's one business line, but like that they, no one has figured out AI search, LLM search based advertising. Actually, who do you think's gonna, who would you bet does it first? Fiji Simo over at OpenAI or the masters, the old timers, Google, and they figure out how to actually charge people to show up in LLM search. If you had to take, take a bet.

A Oh, it's not even a question. I mean, it is the one company that's built a multi-trillion dollar business out of search advertising, right? I, I think that OpenAI may do it, but remember, even with the code red that they had recently trying to fight against the product, the business model, uh, was put on hold. They put on the, the ad rollout on hold, even though we're seeing some of it. I, I think there's, there's no doubt, you know, and we're gonna talk a little bit about the fact that Google's gonna be able to share data across different products. Um, but I think there's no doubt that Google will take some of its targeting, some of its expertise from the other sides of its business, so it's not just starting at zero, um, with this LLM. But actually, now I'm curious to hear your perspective, Ranjan. Why, so we're talking, obviously, about the product side of things. Um, why have you zeroed in on the business side of it? So something about the business side and these, this deal that's making you, you know, making something light up in your head.

AI assessment note: “it is the one company that's built a multi-trillion dollar business out of search advertising”

Q that's, that's really interesting. And you can imagine how many other ways that becomes applied. But then also, at that point, are they taking on the risk as well? And then, like, They're giving away free compute in order to get that longer term rev share, which just adds actually an amazing whole additional layer of risk to the business. Like, I wonder what, like, what could that look like?

A So I actually thought this was much cooler when I saw it for the first time. Um, and then when I think about it, it's like, all right, so let's say, let's just go crazy here. Let's say OpenAI develops medical super intelligence that enables pharma companies to do things they never could before, uh, at human scale. Somebody else is just gonna develop super intelligence as well, and they're gonna get into a price war. So how long can you say, I want a party of the profit of this drug that you're gonna develop with our technology? Where like somebody else can be like, well, here's the platform. Just pay us a licensing fee, right? That only, that pricing model only works if you're the only one that can offer that. I just don't think they're gonna be.

AI assessment note: “That pricing model only works if you're the only one that can offer that.”

Q have a hard time trying to understand, again, that the nonprofit has a stake in the for-profit worth a hundred thirty billion and will get more ownership as the for-profit becomes more valuable. It still felt very open AIE, corporate structure-y to me. Like, it didn't help necessarily clear up A lot of the, what's been vague about everything so far. Do you, do you understand what is going on?

A So I'll be the first to admit not fully. Um, why I think this is important. This is why I think it's the most important story is because Microsoft's ownership in open AI is finally cleared up. And yes, there's going to always be some weirdness with open AI when it comes to the nonprofit, uh, and the for-profit, the public benefit corporation. Uh, but up until this point, you had Microsoft in this position where it get, it was entitled to Percentage of the company. Um, and it also had access to all of its IP rights and it could potentially lose access to all that. If opening, I just said, Hey, we've hit AGI. So I think that to me is the biggest thing that needed sorted out. And until that became sorted out until this sort of conversion was complete and Microsoft was baked in as a traditional investor, the company couldn't move forward and now it's been settled and now it can move forward. So to me, that That is the biggest point, and of course, we know Microsoft has been holding it, holding it up, because it was trying to negotiate and strong arm OpenAI for a large percentage, uh, uh, even larger, I think, than it got of this public benefit corporation. That is the big deal to me.

AI assessment note: “So I'll be the first to admit not fully.”

Q Wait, hold on. I'm going to push back on that. How do you see practical guidance and seeking information is distinct from traditional search? Like, wouldn't that be the main, or at least a very large component of overall traditional search?

A Okay, good point. Seeking information definitely is search, right? That is without a doubt search, but the fact that practical guidance is number one, like I think there was a, um, a misconception that AI was going to be, um, just like search redone, a refactoring of search, and it's probably led by publishers who are like, where's our traffic going? But the fact that practical guidance is number one, where you can go to, and we're gonna talk about it more, but you can go to ChatGPT, Say, I'm facing this situation. What should I do? Whether that's a work situation, a health situation, a relationship situation, uh, getting fit, which we're going to talk about. That to me is a brand new use case. You just have not had that online at all.

AI assessment note: “Seeking information definitely is search... That to me is a brand new use case.”

Q And do you think it's gonna work in this model?

A Yes, but I will make a prediction here. And that is that this is, people are going to say this is going to displace Hollywood. And I think this is just an entirely new category in and of itself, because I think one of the things, one of the great enjoyments of watching good entertainment is not being too involved in the creation process, sitting back and being surprised by the brilliance of the people that are creating The content that you're watching. Uh, same with video games. Like part of the enjoyment of video games is, you know, not necessarily like creating your own path is just like following the, you know, brilliant output of thousands of games designers. If you're playing something like Assassin's Creed and not having to really worry about doing that yourself. Like, I think our brains have two different modes. We have like kind of doing and consuming, so to speak. And, um, This type of AI creation actually puts, ah, the consuming bucket in a more of a creation place, if that makes sense. So I think that if we're gonna basically transpose the entertainment side of our lives into the creation part of our lives, it doesn't displace entertainment, it just creates a new category that sits maybe right between those two.

AI assessment note: “Yes, but I will make a prediction here.”

Q it was definitely, it was definitely a mistake. It was definitely a screw up, but nothing that you wouldn't see, I think from, I mean, even these Waymo's sometimes will do screwy things and, but ultimately like, you know, they didn't hit any pedestrians. They didn't get in any accidents. I think, you know, In the end, I, I think it was a pretty successful launch. What do you think?

A Yeah. I mean, I, I watched the video and I mean, look, the thing is, this is the thing with all tech. If it works 95% of the way, that's not good enough. If it works 99.5% of the way, that's not good enough in self-driving cars. So, um, things have been fine so far, uh, but it definitely has, we need to see a lot more. To decide whether or not this was, this is going to really work for them. If it works, obviously it's a major, major boon, uh, for the company. And certainly from the videos, it looked a lot like the Waymo experience. You get in the car's driving itself. Um, They have some predetermined routes. There are tele operators. So there are some shortcuts being taken so far. And there is, there are people that are part of this, you know, people list driving experience, but I think, yeah, it's important there. They are off to the races. They're gonna get, they're gonna get moving. They're gonna get data. And, um, I don't know why I'm, my fingers are across that they pull it off and pull it off safely. Uh, but I think it's too early to tell.

AI assessment note: “we need to see a lot more... but I think it's too early to tell.”

Q been with us since, you know, the dawn of the human species. There have always been a lot of things that we need to do just to survive, um, and If you remove all of those, um, there is at least initially this sense of kind of disorientation or an undermining of, of the, like, we feel like kind of what's the purpose? Like we would just be these blobs.

A But this is different from what we spoke about the last time you and I were on, on the phone. This was in 2019, I think you said that, um, we'd have to find some new source. This is from, from our conversation that I put in my book. We'd have to find some new sources of self work worth. But in Disneyland, the job of children there is to enjoy the whole thing. And Disneyland would be a rather sad place if it weren't for the kids. So we, you say we would all be like kids in this giant Disneyland, maybe one that would be maintained and improved by our AI machine tools. So effectively that even if we didn't have to do any sort of sustainment work that gets turned over to AI, we could be actually quite fulfilled in life.

AI assessment note: “we could be actually quite fulfilled in life”

Q like, You know, what his, what the effect of Doge was probably, and hopefully more comes out, and we actually start to see some concrete evidence of certainly the negative a lot came out. Maybe there was some positive, but overall, like, what were the real impacts of those few months running around with Doge? But, uh, yeah, I think overall, Elon's legacy, we, it remains to be written overall.

A I do want to like pause for a point, a moment here and just kind of like you brought up the Doge stuff. I think we should talk about it. And then there's other stuff that we're going to find with Doge that just didn't work according to plan. Uh, we might look at this as a moment that, um, went from Elon Musk, you know, being a suboptimal performer with Doge, uh, to, to being a, maybe a disaster because there's this other, uh, tool. This is from ProPublica that they developed this error prone AI tool to munch veterans affairs contracts. Um, here's from the story. There was an engineer who worked for Doge, who built an artificial intelligence tool to identify which services from private companies were not, uh, essential. He labeled those contracts munchable. Um, but the tool hallucinated the sizes of contracts, frequently misread them and inflated their values, and concluded more, and concluded more than a thousand, uh, were each worth thirty-four million, while some of them were worth only 35,000. The AI tool flagged More than 2000 contracts for munching. It's unclear how many have been or are on track, uh, to be canceled, uh, but they included, uh, but some of the canceled contracts are unclear if this is a hundred percent, uh, related or related at all, but some of the VA contracts that have been canceled, including one to maintain a gene sequencing device used to develop bett…

AI assessment note: “they developed this error prone AI tool to munch veterans affairs contracts”

Q Meta, right? Uh, you, uh, you address the last couple of pages in your, uh, in your book on the chapter on, uh, on the next reinvention of, uh, of Facebook. But like, what, what does the future hold for Meta and the metaverse in general? Like you're so close to this organization. Like what, what, what do you think we should expect from, uh, Meta in the near future?

A Well, it's interesting. The metaverse reinvention, uh, Facebook's push into the metaverse. A lot of people think it's about, you know, their belief that virtual reality is going to be the next big format. And yes, of course, there's a belief there, but there's also like this, this, you know, it's a wish. It's, it's a dream for them. And here's why. Facebook has always lived as a website in someone else's browser, as an app inside someone else's phone. And that has caused the company to lose a ton of control and actually done meaningful damage to their business. And you see that with the way that Apple has put those little bubbles up that says ask app not to track. That's really destroyed Facebook's ability to measure whether their ads are working. And the company says it's going to be a ten billion dollar hit this year alone, right? That's massive. And you know, when it comes to, uh, uh, virtual reality, if you build your operating system, you exist outside of the confines. Or those other companies, and you start to control your destiny. And I think I, when I was with Zuckerberg, I saw that interest in saying, we want to have our own operating system. And he starts telling me a little bit about the ways that he believes that current operating systems don't do justice to the human experience. So here's one example. You know, when you want to hang out with someone, you pick the p…

AI assessment note: “if you build your operating system, you exist outside of the confines”

Q we can, we're going to talk about later. So I think it's going to be real. To me, it's always, like, it was going to happen at some point. The only question is, Is this going to be like a dramatic negative effect on the economy overall? Or does it just mean if the World Cup was today, you could get tickets for like a grand instead of two grand?

A Right. Some of the spending is so outrageous that, uh, you know, even a small pullback will sort of bring it back to, uh, normalcy, right? Like things have gone crazy to the extreme. Um, but you could also see some of the spending, you know, as the article indicates in, uh, Non-extreme luxury purchases, right? If people are going out to dinner more often, they're going on trips more often, uh, likely because their portfolios are doing really well, right? We're basically on the back of two, 20% plus, uh, you know, gains in the S&P years in a row, and then this year we're, You know, a little bit more than halfway through, and the S&P is up about eight percent. So the increases in people's portfolios are leading to more spending, and the concentration in the market is in AI, right? So, 25% is in the Mag-seven. Uh, and then there's now these additional memory companies that are also pushing up the, uh, the value of people's portfolios. So, so this is how the article argues that, you know, one scenario for How things might end up unraveling, and you let me know if you think this is feasible. They say, if companies find that their AI investments aren't paying off as quickly as they hope, as they hope, they might pull back their spending, forcing the AI labs and their suppliers to trim their growth projections. Such a disappointment could incite a market sell-off, which would make it …

AI assessment note: “one scenario for How things might end up unraveling”

Q No, no. Why do you think it's important, uh, Belize relationship with USA? So, yeah, thank you.

A You know, all right, I will, I will take that question, and then Ranjan will answer which model he likes better. Um, You know, I think that we're obviously in this competition. The US and China are in this competition, and there's like a lot of suspicion on both ends. And, um, you know, I've said in the past that, like, it would be great if there was better cooperation between the two countries. And people have told me that I'm naive, but I'm not going to, you know, lose that hope. I think that if, if, I mean, in some ways, competition is good, right? Because then you'll just have everybody striving to build a better thing. But, you know, we just talked about AI for health. If the countries were able to work together, maybe on specific initiatives, that would be much welcome.

AI assessment note: “The US and China are in this competition, and there's like a lot of suspicion”

Q Um, what, what do you use it for?

A I, I use it to build, um, build tools internally for my, uh, for the people who I work with to sort of get on the same page about, um, about when videos are coming and what the thumbnails need to look like, and I'm also integrating things from, uh, from YouTube, and so we can basically then rank how the videos are doing based off of thumbnail and like a custom-built piece of software that I never would have paid for. And that's one of the things that I think is interesting about this moment, I guess, is that software, it's, it scales, it's used by the masses, but, um, when you use it, therefore, there's going to be so many things that are not made for you, and maybe what this does is it allows us to interact with software in a way that's much more natural.

AI assessment note: “I use it to build, um, build tools internally for my”