AI labs want to pump the brakes, but Amazon and SpaceX are still blasting off

After years of pushing full speed ahead on AI, Sam Altman says maybe it’s time for the AI industry to “pace” itself. The comments come just days after one of OpenAI's own models broke out of its test environment and got tangled up in a breach at Hugging Face, though as Equity’s hosts point out, sloppy security seems to have been just as much to blame as the model itself. Altman's not alone in this stance: both OpenAI and Anthropic have come out in support of a petition echoing that same message. On this episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, Kirsten Korosec, Anthony Ha, and Sean O'Kane dig into whether the industry is ready to pump the brakes or just spooked, and who's on the hook when a model goes rogue. Listen to the full episode to hear more about: The viral “Avoiding AI” workshops hosted by librarians to help people opt out of AI features they didn't ask for How Amazon's new 5,000-satellite bid to connect directly to your phone could turn up the heat on SpaceX (even though it's unclear if anyone actually wants satellite-to-phone service) Why somehow there's room for one more AI lab: Reid Hoffman and Mark Pincus's new startup, Prentis, is in talks to raise $100M at a $1B valuation How Pangram raised $9 million to help publishers, teachers, and readers tell human writing from AI slop Why DoorDash is building its own drone delivery business instead of just relying on partners like Wing and Flytrex Subscribe to Equity on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod. Chapters: 00:00 Intro 1:18 Zoox gets its robotaxi exemption 2:11 Sam Altman calls for pacing the frontier 6:01 The Hugging Face hack, dissected 10:12 Responsibility, regulation, and the Elon Musk wildcard 13:29 Librarians teaching people to unplug from AI 15:16 Prentice: a new AI lab raises at a $1B valuation 16:46 Amazon files for its own satellite-to-phone network 18:42 SpaceX, Blue Origin, and the launch-business angle 23:48 Pangram raises $9M to detect AI slop 29:23 DoorDash builds its own delivery drones 33:24 Outro Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This episode of Equity is brought to you by Schneider Electric. Schneider Electric, advancing energy tech.

• 0:05Kirsten Korosec?

  After years of pushing full speed ahead on AI, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is now saying maybe we should pump the brakes. Also this week, SpaceX and Amazon are racing to beam satellite service straight to your mobile phone. And we're keeping our eyes on a couple of deals, including one startup that just raised $9 million because of its AI detection tools. Stick around.

• 0:35Kirsten Korosec?

  Hello and welcome back to Equity TechCrunch's flagship podcast about the business of startups. Today is Friday, July 31. I'm Kirsten Gorosek, Transportation Editor here at TechCrunch. And I'm joined, as always, by our Weekend Editor, Anthony Ha, and Senior Reporter, Special Projects, Sean O'Kane. And I have to say, Anthony, it looks like a little bit of a different backdrop. I'm going to say it's giving me beach vibes. Are you at the beach?

• 1:05Speaker 00

  I am at a friend's, he's just renting this house for the week, near the Jersey Shore. And I've had a very nice couple of days on the beach. I may even look slightly more tanned than usual. Don't answer that. I'm ready to dive back into the, into the world of tech news. How was your morning been?

• 1:24Kirsten Korosec?

  Yeah, so this morning I spent a very early morning, because I'm on the West Coast, writing about Zooks getting its final exemption, which is a big deal because now they can finally launch a commercial robot taxi service with those toaster-like robot taxis that you might have seen in Las Vegas or San Francisco. So that's how I spent my morning, definitely not tanning on the beach.

• 1:51Speaker 00

  I'm okay if you want to feel a little bit jealous, but we have a lot to get to. The first one, as you mentioned in the intro, is, you know, some comments from Sam Altman, which I think tie into this broader discussion of kind of where we are in this AI moment. And basically, what Altman said on this podcast was essentially seems to be embracing a decelerationist message right now. Sean, like, what did you make of that?

• 2:16Speaker 02

  I mean, I'm going to pull out my favorite segment and talk about Sean doing a victory lap. Because it wasn't, it wasn't that long ago that I was talking on this podcast about why we aren't just slowing down with this stuff a little bit. And, and, you know, there are myriad reasons why that's the case. But maybe we've finally hit an inflection point here. I think a big driver of this has to be what we talked about last week with one of OpenAI's models breaking into hugging faces data and apparently breaching a few other things around the internet as well. I, we should couch this, he's not like calling for, you know, a pause like we've seen some people in the tech industry try to do in the past. He was, I guess, very careful with his words and, you know, saying pace it.

• 3:01Speaker 02

  And so I will see how this holds. I mean, any caution that we see some of these labs throw out there often gets reversed when the incentives push them forward to resume sort of like full speed ahead. So I remain skeptical. Big surprise.

• 3:18Kirsten Korosec?

  That sounds so cynical. I think he really means it. Now, I will say this, he might have been careful with his words, but OpenAI and Anthropic did sign a petition that does reflect what he did talk about. And I do think, and I do agree with you, I think a lot of this was very much triggered by a hugging face. He had a quote in the story that we covered, really calling this like viscerally felt. I think it probably spooked him and a lot of other people, and certainly a lot of people in the industry. The hard thing, I think, here is how do you thread the needle? Or how does OpenAI thread the needle of continuing to generate revenue, raise money or have a successful IPO and quote unquote, like pace development?

• 4:02Kirsten Korosec?

  So show progress and pace. And I don't know if they can do that. I'll be curious to see how they, how they manage both.

• 4:11Speaker 00

  One of the things I've been wrestling with is also this question of is sort of acceleration, deceleration, the right framework to be thinking about this? Because it, I think, kind of suggests that there's sort of only one path and we're all kind of stuck on this path. But in as much as we get to decide at all is sort of like, do we speed up or do we slow down? As opposed to, again, I'm going to really torture this metaphor, but, you know, do we build different kind of guardrails? Do we choose different paths? And so on some level, I'm just very resistant to this framework as opposed to saying, okay, if we're not happy about, you know, what models are doing right now, what else can we do? Is, is sort of a slowdown, a pause, just a stoppage, the only option? And I don't think it is.

• 4:55Speaker 00

  And I do think that it has become, again, with, as with so many other discussions about AI, become this like site of like all these different kinds of debates. And I mean, one thing that I did want to emphasize again, because it's been really interesting to see how the, the level of alarm around this, which I think a lot of it, you know, these are again, real concerns. And this sense of, oh my gosh, like what if we have these autonomous agents and models just running around, hacking each other, trying to stop, you know, prevent hacks? And it's sort of just all getting out of our control, leading to all these like broader debates about kind of alignment that Rebecca Bellan did a great piece about. But, but it's worth coming back to, I think, one of the points that we also wrote about at TechCrunch, that this specific hack, yes, it was caused by an OpenAI model,

• 5:40Speaker 00

  but it also comes from the fact that it sounds like they just didn't secure the testing site properly. That in theory, this model should just not have been able to get online. And that didn't happen. Now, of course, if you have sort of a powerful, misaligned AI, the risks of, of that human error, I guess, go up dramatically. But it does start from just the fact that they kind of didn't secure things the way they should have.

• 6:06Speaker 02

  I think that's right. I think your, your point is well taken in the sense of like, we shouldn't only think about this in some linear fashion and whether things are accelerating or decelerating. There's a lot, I think, that could and should be said about just how responsible these companies are being in both parties here. I mean, Lorenzo, one of our colleagues, also wrote a really good piece, sort of walking through how serious some of the security researchers who pay attention to this stuff think that the hack really was. And it really does seem like on both sides of, of this hack, there were steps that probably should have been taken that would have prevented it. And one of the things that I found most interesting in that story was that some of the researchers were pointing out that, you know, what this model did

• 6:52Speaker 02

  was not some new advanced thing. It was really very human in the way that it thought about trying to break into, trying not to anthropomorphize, but the way that it thought about breaking into hugging face. And that, that it was also very loud and messy and, and sort of, it wasn't really trying to hide its tracks. You know, it was more like Nixon's people breaking into Watergate than, you know, some real stealthy cyber op. Because it didn't need to be and it wasn't instructed to be. And so that should have been more easily preventable. And, and hopefully this is a sign that these companies will take this forward and be more careful about that stuff. I will say one other thing on the, the sort of like Excel and D cell side. I don't know if this is the motivation, but I think it's smart. You know, you mentioned the IPO, Kirsten.

• 7:37Speaker 02

  I think it's smart of Altman to be able to push this advantage that they have now, which is that they're not going to markets next month or two months from now. He's even floated the idea of going, you know, in 2027 and that they, they only filed their confidential filing, you know, so that they have the option ready when they're ready. So if you believe all of that, he has the ability to talk this talk in a way that Anthropic can't. Because Anthropic's already in conversation with a lot of the bankers and is, you know, headed towards a more near term IPO and is, you know, therefore more restricted in what it can say and how it should be saying it and how the market is going to react to that.

• 8:15Kirsten Korosec?

  Okay, one pushback on that, I think Anthropic's been saying what they kind of want to say. I mean, I would, I would maybe counter that, like, they have in, in a lot of respects, disregarded probably the smarter, more diplomatic move and have been pretty boy see. But I actually want to go back to Anthony's point, which is, The only choices are stopping or going full speed ahead. And so my question for both of you is, so what is the right approach, Anthony? Like, if there are these two options, and you're saying that maybe AI labs should be, and the industry as a whole shouldn't just think of it in this way, what should they be thinking of?

• 8:55Speaker 00

  Well, I think there are a few different ways to approach it. And I'm, yeah, I'm going to say right now that I'm not going to have some grand sweeping solution.

• 9:02Kirsten Korosec?

  Solve all of our problems, Anthony. Solve all of our problems.

• 9:05Speaker 00

  This is the new way everyone should think about AI and guardrails and alignment. But I think that certainly one of the things that Sean touched on was this idea of responsibility. And so it's less a question of how fast or slow do we go, but who's responsible when things go wrong? Who, you know, has incentives to actually make sure things don't go wrong? I think also there was some interesting posting on social media over the weekend from the CEO of Hugging Face, where he went to visit OpenAI and basically said his, really, his kind of big suggestion is radical transparency, where OpenAI releases a lot more information about what happened, which, I mean, I know they have released a report since then. And

• 9:48Speaker 00

  on top of that, basically, they commit a lot of resources to allowing a variety of researchers, including independent researchers, to figure out how to create defenses against this kind of hack. And so, again, it's not about sort of fast or slow, but, okay, if we're going to commit a lot of resources to building powerful models that could potentially do these kinds of cyber attacks, the same company should commit the same amount of resources to figuring out how to defend against those attacks.

• 10:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I agree with a lot of that. And I am pleased to see that Hugging Face is treating it that way. I think the question, you know, if we head down this path, or we consider this stuff more, these tech companies consider this stuff more, the question has to be responsibility to whom, right? Is it going to be responsibility to their backers, or their eventual public shareholders? Or is it really going to be responsibility to, like, the world, where all of us could feel the impact of these things going in bad directions? And, you know, I just, unfortunately, I think it's fair to say, we are in a moment where regulatory frameworks and oversight are not really something we can, especially at the federal level, that we can fall back on for those things. The other thing, I'll

• 11:02Speaker 02

  make a point before we kind of start to wrap this up, is like, the wild card here is Elon Musk, as always, right? I mean, Grok and XAI and SpaceX in general is kind of behind these other companies in a lot of different ways, but they bought Cursor, they're sort of building on what Cursor had built. And if you pay attention, in between all the racist memes and stuff on X, a lot of the things that Elon Musk is sort of copying to now is just basically being an accelerationist. And he basically said it in the Economist interview he did a few days ago. He has 180ed from his cautious position as OpenAI founder a decade ago. And, you know, should he find the ability to turn those products that he

• 11:47Speaker 02

  has under his auspices into something that is powerful and really competitive and widely adopted, when compared to OpenAI and Anthropic, that could just throw a lot of these efforts out of whack. If there really is an effort to make these things responsible and treat them responsibly, and make sure stuff like this doesn't happen again, and in a worse way, you know, he could put a lot of, a big thumb on the scale to mess with those incentives.

• 12:13Kirsten Korosec?

  I'm glad that you brought up Elon Musk, because it just isn't the same to have an equity conversation without him. But to your point about his changing position, he used to have a very different kind of rhetoric around the pace and development of AI. And that has flipped. And at the same time, the responsibility question, then also, the next question is, is it voluntary responsibility, or is it legislated? And if we go down the road of legislating this responsibility, Elon Musk is going to have a lot to say about that, because he has, you know, generally speaking, not liked, again, to go back to

• 12:56Kirsten Korosec?

  this metaphor of guardrails, around his other businesses. That is going to be a really interesting fight. It's not just about like, oh, sure, we should take responsibility, great. But should it be voluntary? Like, for instance, how a lot of the autonomous vehicle on the federal level is handled? It's like voluntary reporting, things like that? Or is it something where it's really a mandate? And it is interesting to me that Sam Altman is talking about pumping the brakes, and it clarifies and crystallizes how far ahead the AI industry is from any law or national framework, unlike how to even handle this talk.

• 13:34Speaker 00

  Well, that also brings up something that our colleague Amanda wrote this week as well, about thinking about sort of the distance between the AI industry, whether those are the people who are kind of the accelerationists, who are just very, you know, evangelical for the technology, or those who are sort of, you know, the doomers as well. I think all of that can sometimes feel kind of disconnected from the everyday experience of people using AI, or not using AI. And all which is to say, you know, Amanda did this great piece about librarians discovering that increasingly, there seems to be a lot of popularity for these workshops, giving people the option to kind of get AI out of their technology.

• 14:18Speaker 00

  How do you like actually remove AI results from your Google search? How do you turn off AI features on your smartphone? And, you know, like, a lot of these kinds of stories, it's, you're talking about like relatively small groups of people. These are workshops with, say, dozens of people, maybe slightly more than that, in a few different states. We're not talking about a mass consumer movement. At least, that's not what this story is about. But I think, if you think about that in the context also of, you know, polling numbers in general showing that particularly Americans really, really are not excited about AI, about, you know, the kind of future that AI may be ushering in, it's important to keep that in mind as we talk about acceleration versus deceleration, or Sam Altman one versus Elon

• 14:59Speaker 00

  Musk one, is that it's not entirely up to them. Like, they can, they can very much, you know, kind of push us towards these different futures, but individual consumers can also say, well, I'm not so interested in that. I mean, our power as one person is limited, but if millions of people are like, you know what, this sucks, which I think you see some evidence of that happening, that actually does shape the direction of these technologies.

• 15:22Kirsten Korosec?

  Well, there's nothing more powerful than a cultural movement that may start in a very niche, and it may start with a real, like, crystallized black and white feeling about whether AI is good or bad. But when it, like, then seeps into the rest of culture, and people just adopt ways of life that they are not really sure where it started, that's when it becomes really powerful. And I kind of wonder if that will happen in our culture, and specifically with younger generations, in how they use AI, and whether these, like what's happening with the librarians workshop, if these are just going to be little small niche things, or if it will actually end up kind of seeping throughout the culture in

• 16:03Kirsten Korosec?

  a way in which the way certain generations use AI is very different than it is right now. And I don't think we know the answer to that question. The one thing we do know is that people are still investing in AI. And specifically, there is a scoop that Marina Temkin had this week about a company called Prentice. And not only is this a new AI startup, this is a new AI lab, which is kind of incredible, that was co-founded by Reid Hoffman and Mark Pincus. And apparently, they're in talks to raise $100 million on a $1 billion valuation. So people are still putting money in it, even if they're not really sure where it's

• 16:44Kirsten Korosec?

  headed, even if they're pumping the brakes a little bit, and even if they're, you know, trying to find weird niche ways to avoid it.

• 16:52Speaker 02

  Well, that's a pretty lofty valuation for a company that we really haven't heard much about yet. And speaking of lofting things into orbit, how do you like that one? We should talk a little bit more about, we should talk a little bit more about space. And in particular, there was a story this week that I think sums up a lot of what's been happening.

• 17:11Speaker 00

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• 17:48Speaker 02

  Among some of these companies, and that was Amazon filing to basically create a new satellite network that would connect to mobile phones. They want to build as many as and send up as many as like a little more than 5,000 satellites, starting in 2028 to create a network. And this is the latest in a bunch of these kinds of announcements that we've seen. Blue Origin is building its own different kinds of satellite networks. Amazon already has one called Leo that it's been building for a little while. And then there's SpaceX with Starlink, obviously. So I'm curious what you guys think of this because I still think of satellite, mobile satellite networks as things that happen

• 18:31Speaker 02

  on the fringes that are good in a pinch, but not something you rely on. But we're seeing a ton of, a ton of interest and a ton of push into this space from some of these major companies. And I'm still trying to figure out why.

• 18:42Speaker 00

  I had that, the same question. And so I'm, yeah, I'm going to do the classic thing where I answer your question with a question. But I also wondered about to what extent, in some ways, it reminded me of trying to keep track of all the data center announcements and like that there's clearly a lot of money flowing into it, but also an element of, hey, there were like these, all these high flying deals and who knows how many of them are going to become a reality. To what extent does this reflect the reality on the ground now? And, and I know that certainly, you know, with SpaceX, that this isn't just like a future fantasy. This is something that to an extent already exists. But I'm curious for companies that aren't SpaceX, is this something that they're saying, well, we'd like to do this? Or have they already kind of started to put, you know, satellites up there and started to create these, these networks?

• 19:25Speaker 02

  The thing that maybe makes the most sense to me is we're talking about companies, Amazon obviously has a close relationship with Blue Origin because they're both founded by Jeff Bezos. SpaceX has Starlink. There's really nobody else at the moment, new entrants at least, who can do this kind of thing. Right? And so this is, in my view, at least as much a move of opportunity as it is, you know, one of necessity. Because if they don't do it, you know, someone could come along and try to do this a little bit down the road. And clearly, there are existing companies that offer stuff like this. We see SpaceX is buying a bunch of spectrum from Echo Star. And, you know, they have a deal with T-Mobile to provide their service, you know, sort of in that direction. There's

• 20:10Speaker 02

  been rumors about SpaceX buying T-Mobile. And so I think it's really another example in some ways, honestly, of a Bezos company following what Elon Musk company was doing, where Musk was doing this to, to build a business for himself and take advantage of the opportunity that they have at SpaceX of being kind of the leading launch provider around the world. And the sort of synergy that he gets out of that by, you know, doing business with himself. And, you know, Amazon sort of following that same path. And, and so I think that's probably a big driver of this.

• 20:43Kirsten Korosec?

  Yeah, it seems protective in nature, which Elon Musk is actually pretty good at doing, which is he'll take big, big bets far out before there is really demand for something. And that has worked out for him in the past. And this feels like that as well. I mean, I guess my question for you is, is this, you know, infrastructure before demand? I believe it was the T-Mobile CEO, I think it was like something like 2,000ths of a percent of its total network usage is using satellites and most of it's in national parks. So is this a question of infrastructure before demand? Or are we seeing hints of demand?

• 21:25Kirsten Korosec?

  Like, when you're following this, do you actually see hints of demand happening?

• 21:30Speaker 02

  Specifically for mobile connectivity, I don't think so. And not at the moment. There must be some calculation that these companies are running of, you know, it may be this infinitesimal amount of usage now, but you know, across the globe, in every country, you know, those little tiny percentages add up to something that makes sense if you're able to become the provider. Another thing that I think people should consider when they think about this stuff, and I've said this a bunch, especially relative to SpaceX on this show, if you can come up with even the slightest justification for something that needs to be launched into space, and you have a business, whether it's, you know, in the same company or next to the company that you're running, you know, you're creating

• 22:14Speaker 02

  a revenue stream for that launch company, right? Like, a large portion of what SpaceX is trying to do now, and arguably even in the future with the sort of data centers and orbit idea, is you come up with a project that requires your launch company to be able to offer that launch service to them. And you're, you're creating a revenue stream for it. And so I think there's probably an element of that playing here. The, the only caveat to that at the moment is that Amazon's kind of stuck in a spot right now with its Leo satellites, where it's turning to other providers to launch them into space because it's new Glenn rocket, while it looked better than I think a lot of people expected over

• 22:57Speaker 02

  the first few launches, starting in early 2025, blew up on the launch pad a few months ago, in one of the largest explosions that has ever happened, you know, in the space industry. And while they say that they're making very good progress and, and, you know, they're committing to getting that rocket back off the ground by the end of this year, which would be an insane turnaround. You know, it's just something to think about now, where maybe this is partially driven by the idea, like creating business for Blue Origin. But, you know, at the moment, it certainly isn't.

• 23:31Speaker 00

  One thing I want to mention, partly just to undercut the idea that Kirsten is the only outdoorsy person on this podcast, is that I did have a moment a couple of years ago where I could see the need for this, where my partner and I, we were, you know, driving into a national park in Maine. We completely lost cell service, which we were warned that that would happen. And it was just, you know, like, you're driving, you're like, did we miss the turn? Where are, you know, and like navigation basically just goes down. And you're just sort of thrown back on, on paper maps. And it was like a very harrowing experience. So like, I can see the appeal of like, oh no, you get connectivity in those moments. At the same time, of course, that's like the only time in the last, however many years that that's happened to me. So it's hard to see, you know, that that's something

• 24:15Speaker 00

  I would pay like an ongoing fee for. And so the explanation, Sean, that I think you've offered repeatedly on this podcast, which, which I think has been very clarifying, is just, launch company says we need to do more launches is a pretty good explanation for why they're talking about this.

• 24:31Kirsten Korosec?

  Yeah, that is actually a really good explanation. And I will say that we need to work on our map and compass work next time we're together, Anthony, so that next time that happens. I will say though, to the point of like the need for satellite to mobile, and I'm going to throw in a humble brag in here for a minute, but I was on a backpacking trip earlier this summer, and in an area where I never would have been able to have cell service, and I did. And so those pockets of the, of the world in which you don't have that, I think has diminished greatly. And so then you're like, why do I need this, you know, satellite to mobile service? But I want to talk about, if you'll

• 25:12Kirsten Korosec?

  let me, getting into some other deals. One is, I think, kind of close to my heart because we're always complaining on this show, and also sometimes, you know, just personally between us about AI slop and AI content. And this is a company that's apparently developed some tools to spot or detect AI content. And the company is called Pangram, and they just raised $9 million. I don't know about you two, but I'm excited about them succeeding.

• 25:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, this is a company I've heard a lot about in, I don't know, the last few months, maybe the last year, because I think they seem to be the, the most cited of these various AI detection tools. I think Substack actually just announced that they're also going to be, be using some Pangram tools to identify which newsletters are written with AI, which be very interested to see how that goes and who gets mad about that. I mean, I think it's definitely like a very interesting area with, with a lot of potential. Obviously, it ties into a lot of the different things we were talking about earlier in the show. And I also couldn't help noticing that, and again, this is not an AI lab, it's not a frontier lab, but it's, you know, doing work that, that you would expect that the opportunity

• 26:24Speaker 00

  to, to sort of increase as AI usage increases. And yet, I mean, the funding that we're talking about here is so small compared to pretty much any other AI startup where we talk about, like $9 million. I feel like I'm back in, in 2015, you know, like that, that seems like a respectable first round back then. But now that's like, you know, nothing.

• 26:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, not everybody is a hyperscaler, right? Although you know, you mentioned like sort of their relationship with the leading labs. I think there really is an interesting dynamic here about how they're going to keep pace with those new models as a smaller company. By all accounts, their tech so far is actually pretty good, better than attempts we've seen in the past. And I think it's something along the lines of like 1 in 10,000 of their evaluations they get wrong as far as properly labeling AI, which is pretty good. Can they keep up that pace as the models get more advanced and start maybe weeding out some of the telltale signs of AI writing? I don't know. The other thing I'll point out is that I

• 27:30Speaker 02

  think it's easy to get lost in numbers all the time and 1 in 10,000 is a good hit rate in some ways, but also if you're doing these millions and millions of times, it's going to get stuff wrong. And I think we're already seeing a bunch of pushback from people who are hardcore Substackers, who don't like the idea of getting this kind of witch hunt dynamic thrown into the mix. There's also this week LinkedIn added a new option to label things that you think is AI slop, which I'm sure that's going to have an even wider and louder reaction from the most LinkedIn maxed people. To me, it's like, it's really a question of these dynamics, like, how do people start to accept this? And it's more of a social question than it is about whether or not this

• 28:14Speaker 02

  tech is super accurate.

• 28:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, there was this really interesting piece in the Atlantic a few months ago. So even before these most recent announcements, the title was "America Has A Pangram Problem," which is a little bit hyperbolic, when I think most people have no idea what Pangram is, but does speak to some of those broader social questions you're talking about, Sean. And I think one of the most interesting points in it was this idea that, yes, like, these AI detection tools have gotten a lot better over the last year or so. And in fact, in the funding story about it, it was really interesting because we actually did test, I think it gets pretty granular about what are the things that Pangram seems to be able to detect and things where it's still giving you

• 28:56Speaker 00

  wrong answers. But the argument in the Atlantic piece that essentially it's trickier once these tools are pretty good, because then you do start to accept the answers more. And I mean, obviously on some of that's what the tools are for, but you still can't accept them 100%. And so you still need to have some humility. You need to, to use the same phrase that you used, I think is sometimes fair, is like this kind of witch hunt mentality of just as soon as you run somebody, especially somebody you don't like, they're writing through Pangram and it says, suggests some level of AI contamination, then you're gonna be like, oh, this person is just producing slop. And I don't think that's exactly the right way to use these tools.

• 29:37Speaker 02

  I want to know if they use that Mateo Wong story in their pitch deck. I feel like that's, as much as it might have felt hyperbolic, were they like, you know, looking at investors and saying, hey, see, look, we're a problem. You have to come in and back us. Like, we're making impact. We got one more deal to talk about this week, and this one was maybe not something I was expecting, even though I follow this stuff relatively closely, but DoorDash is building its own drones and its own drone delivery business. Kirsten, what was going on with this?

• 30:06Kirsten Korosec?

  Well, first of all, I 100% believe that it was in their pitch deck, and they should contact us and let us know. And yeah, DoorDash is in the drone business. So to be clear, they have been working with other drone companies, FlyTrex and Wing, which is the Alphabet drone delivery company. And they've been doing that for a couple of years. This is a different, very specifically in-house effort, and this is coming through their R and D team. It's called DoorDash Labs. And this is the same team that gave us, and we've talked about it on the show, an autonomous sidewalk delivery robot. This is an autonomy and robotics focused team. They still have a long way to go.

• 30:46Kirsten Korosec?

  They just received a very important permit, however, that allows them to be a drone operator, the eighth here in the US. They have not gone through the certification process for having a fully autonomous drone that you don't have to have visual line of sight, which is like a whole other thing. But yeah, I mean, this is really remarkable. In some ways, it makes a lot of sense, but in other ways, it's like, why take this on when there are other companies doing this?

• 31:17Speaker 00

  Yeah, we've talked about some of these other drone delivery companies and technologies in the past. And the impression that I've gotten from those discussions is that often it's not so much about just replacing the delivery options that exist now, but sort of reaching areas or customers that you can't get through the e-bike delivery service in urban areas. But that seems like it's relatively a smaller market and you have to sort of spend a lot of time and resources in order to actually like make that work in an effective way or some degree of reliability. And so I'm curious, to what extent is this, it seems like DoorDash is talking about this mostly

• 31:58Speaker 00

  as kind of like an experimental initiative versus a major strategic investment right now? Is that right?

• 32:05Kirsten Korosec?

  I don't know. I mean, it's easy to put it under this is an experimentation, but I don't think that they would have been working on this for as long as they would have. And by the way, committed to doing in-house if this was just a pilot and a sort of fanciful exercise. I do think that since they've moved past just partnering, which by the way, they say that they're going to maintain those partnerships with other companies and have committed real dollars to this, I think that they want to see if it'll work. The question is, will it? And I think that right now they're going through something that Uber went through on the ride hailing side, which is how do we grow our business? How do we be everywhere?

• 32:47Kirsten Korosec?

  We're already the largest, I believe, in the US. DoorDash is already the largest on-demand delivery service. How do you grow? Well, do you do it by offering drones and sidewalk bots? I guess you do that. And do you want to own the entire stack, which to me is really the interesting part here? They clearly want to own all the software and the hardware and really control which mode is used to deliver your burrito.

• 33:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm just glad we've finally arrived at the eventual future of being able to have nine different robots race to deliver you a burrito in every type of mode. One point to what you just said that I think is interesting to think about is this is happening at the same time that we are seeing a pretty now public split between Uber and Waymo happening. And that's happening because Uber and Waymo were both going with this like heavy partnership approach. And part of me wonders if Waymo is thinking about whether it should have been more vertically integrated and sort of full stack, or even if it isn't, I think a DoorDash or companies like it could look at

• 33:59Speaker 02

  stuff like that happening and think, boy, if like those big companies can't play nice together, this is validating for us that we're going in this direction.

• 34:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, listening to it also just reminds me of how in the early days of DoorDash, when they were just coming up, like how much they talked about, and of course, take this with a grain of salt, because it's startup marketing, like how much their real focus was on essentially like the logistics side of things and just being as sort of fast and efficient as possible. Now, was that actually why they've become the biggest delivery startup right now? Like, I'm not totally sure, but I can see them sort of trying to maybe reclaim that in some of these new areas. But we'll see how it develops. In the meantime, of course, we are out of time. Next week, we're not going to be doing this news roundup. Instead, we're going to have an interview I did with the historian Jill Lepore about her book, "The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State." She had a lot

• 34:50Speaker 00

  of pretty interesting, critical thoughts about how big tech companies are affecting our democracy. So stay tuned for that. And of course, until then, you can follow us at EquityPod on X and Threads.

• 35:03Rebecca Bellan?

  Equity is hosted by TechCrunch senior reporters and produced by Teresa Locan Solo with editing by Kel. Subscribe on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts and find out what's next at techcrunch.com/events. Thanks so much for listening and we'll talk to you next time.