Pod Insights Big Technology Podcast Is OpenAI’s o3 Model AGI?, Is AI The New Social Media?, Zuck’s Revealing Testimony About this episode Ranjan Roy from Margins is back for our weekly discussion of the latest tech news. We cover 1) Is OpenAI's o3 model AGI? 2) Maybe it's AGI when you squint 3) Why people are floating the idea that OpenAi is close to AGI 4) Is OpenAI going to declare that GPT-5 is AGI 5) What's in it for companies saying they've achieved AGI first? 6) AI's new memory capabilities add something big to the experience 7) Is AI the new social media? 8) Facebook has moved away from friend sharing 9) Could Google be broken up? 10) Is Google's stake in the open web actually a good thing?
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0:00 Alex Kantrowitz? OpenAI's new model has serious people coming out of the woodwork, calling it artificial general intelligence. What exactly is going on? Plus, AI gains as social media fades, and Google loses a massive antitrust trial. That's coming up right after this. This episode is brought to you by Genesis. What does it actually take to put a Gentic AI to work across an entire enterprise? I recently spoke with Genesis chairman and CEO Tony Bates about why orchestration is emerging as a competitive advantage in customer experience and what companies need to get right in the AI era. Then I sat down with Adam Mitchell, head of enterprise business solutions at Voya Financial, to go inside a large scale agentic CX transformation,
0:44 Alex Kantrowitz? including the business decisions, trade offs, and lessons along the way. You can watch both conversations now on my YouTube channel today. It's never been more challenging to get frontier compute. How do you know where to look? Who to trust? Or how much to pay? Akash is an open cloud that provides easy access, flexibility, and peace of mind. That's how companies like Razer were able to cut their inference cost by 15 times. Visit akash.network/alex for a free consultation. That's akash.network/alex for a free consultation. Welcome to Big Technology Podcast Friday Edition, where we break down the news in our traditional cool-headed and nuanced format. We have a major week of news for you,
1:28 Alex Kantrowitz? including a massive new model release from OpenAI, Facebook testifying in a court against the FTC, Google losing two antitrust cases, and of course, plenty more AI news to talk about this week. We're going back to our traditional format after doing a full episode on tariffs and the trade war last week. We're back talking about AI, back in our bag, as we should say. Joining us as always is Ron John Roy of Margins. Ron John, great to see you. Welcome back to the show.
1:59 Speaker 01 AGI is here. How could I miss it? Day three of AGI being part of our lives.
2:05 Alex Kantrowitz? So on this show, we pride ourselves in digging into the real mysteries of the tech world, the real mysteries of the world. And I think we have to just spend today's episode answering the question that everyone has on their minds, which is, did Jeff Bezos stage the Blue Origin landing?
2:27 Alex Kantrowitz? I don't know. I saw him fiddling with that door. I'm reading and I'm watching the TikToks.
2:31 Speaker 01 I saw, I saw one of those TikToks. I saw one of those conspiracy. I mean, the fact, I think, what percentage of the American population believed that the moon landing was faked? I think it's something just unreasonable, whatever it is, that I'm on board with. Blue Origin didn't happen. Katy Perry, sorry. You didn't see space.
2:52 Alex Kantrowitz? Now, I think it did happen. I think they actually went to space. There's too many people watching it to believe they didn't. But there was some funny business going on with that door being open. The door swings open and then Jeff Bezos walks over and tries to open it with a pair of pliers. I mean, that's weird.
3:08 Speaker 01 Did you see Jeff Bezos face plant? That was my favorite part of the entire thing.
3:12 Alex Kantrowitz? So for those listening and watching, Bezos did take a spill on his way to fake open the door. Anyway, what a moment.
3:20 Speaker 01 Tough day for Bezos. Everything else good in his life, but still those divots in the ground will get even the billionaires.
3:28 Alex Kantrowitz? Speaking of tech billionaires, I don't know if you saw the Wall Street Journal story on Elon Musk's many kids and the compound that he's building. I mean, we're not going to do gossip on this show. I don't even know if this is gossip, but that was some crazy stuff.
3:42 Speaker 01 I recommend all of our listeners, go read this article from the Wall Street Journal. Find a gift link on Twitter if you need to, but it's about how he approaches baby mamas on X and just how he raises his cohort of children. And it's, it's, it's so over the top that I don't even feel comfortable talking about it on our nuanced look at the technology news of the week.
4:10 Alex Kantrowitz? Yeah, he calls it the Legion, and I think we'll leave it there. We could definitely turn this into TMZ for tech, but instead, we're here to do what the people want, which is to talk about AGI. But like Ron Johnson said, go read that Elon story. You know, even if you admire the guy's business smarts.
4:27 Speaker 01 Maybe some people admire it. Maybe, honestly, maybe some people are into that and will admire it, but.
4:34 Alex Kantrowitz? I mean, would you, if you, if you were the richest man in the world, would you have a legion?
4:39 Speaker 01 I mean, I guess you juice Tesla stock and you get up to 300 billion net worth. Maybe a legion is the only logical conclusion from that. I guess so.
4:50 Alex Kantrowitz? I do know that we're, I mean, geez, we're really going off the rails right at the beginning here. Usually we wait to the end. But I, I do know that we're just going to see a wave of Elon offspring make some waves in the next couple of decades. There's going to be a lot of little Elons running around there. And I mean, he's going to have some smart kids. So this is not the end of the story. This may be just the beginning of the Legion story.
5:15 Speaker 01 The PayPal mafia expanded to just unimaginable proportions.
5:22 Alex Kantrowitz? You know, I, now I'm regretting not spending the whole show talking about this, but alas, we do have more important stuff to cover, which is the fact that OpenAI released this new model, or really two new models, but a big new model this week called O3. It's a reasoning model. And to me, it's the most advanced model that they've ever released. All of a sudden it comes out and a lot of very serious and smart people are calling it artificial general intelligence. Like no comments about it. This is AGI. And Tyler Cowen, who is a professor and podcaster, he writes in The Marginal Revolution, "O3 and AGI is April 16th AGI Day."
6:05 Alex Kantrowitz? And he writes this, "I think it's AGI seriously about O3. Try asking it lots of questions and then ask yourself, just how much smarter was I expecting AGI to be? As I've argued in the past, AGI, however you define it, is not much of a social event per se. It will still take us a long time to use it properly. I do not expect securities prices to move significantly. And I doubt if the market cares about April 16th per se." And he goes on to say benchmarks, benchmarks, benchmarks, blah, blah, blah. Maybe AGI is like porn. I know it when I see it and I've seen it. I think we should like, we're going to get to all the others that have called this AGI or approaching AGI. But we should talk a little bit about what this model does.
6:50 Alex Kantrowitz? And Ranjan, let's just go to you right away. I'm curious, have you gotten a chance to use it? And if you have, what do you think Tyler is talking about that would make him conclude that it is AGI the way he has?
7:04 Speaker 01 Okay, I will get into a specific query that I did do actually this morning, which reminds me that it is not the AGI we were promised. But again, O3 is bringing reasoning to, you know, like essentially the mainstream. It's taking what deep research was going to bring us and bringing it to every query. The idea is that the model pauses and essentially thinks through the problem before simply just going and trying to answer it. And it actually is able to reason its way through the problem. That's actually very exciting. Another thing I thought was interesting was the idea of visual reasoning. In the past, when you feed an image, essentially it's broken down into back to text and words.
7:47 Speaker 01 And then that's sent back to the model to be processed. They claim that it now is able to actually understand the image at the pixel level and then be able to process that into some kind of query. A third thing that's big is tool calling. And we had discussed this before about is the better user interface that you have to choose which model you want to use? Or the model is smart enough to actually go and choose the right tool and model? Like the, when you make a query, it knows, should I go to O3? Should I go to deep research? Should I go to generate an image or GPT-4, 1, 4, 5, whatever the latest one is? And so all of these things really indicate that maybe there is a big step change on this.
8:30 Speaker 01 However, this morning I asked, and I asked from the deep research side, what are the top 150 retailers in the US by revenue in 2024? Seemingly straightforward query.
8:45 Speaker 01 It returned Walmart 23 times and Amazon 36 times in this list. And I started kind of digging into it and it was mixing up different sources, mixing up different entities within those. And that's not a PhD level answer. I'm sorry. Like it's, it's one of those that you can see how the LLM got confused, but it was, this was actual day-to-day work and it seems like pretty straightforward and difficult and impressive, but it got it wrong. So, so I see the potential. They made the announcements. A lot of people are excited, which you're going to get into, but it's not, it's not AGI for me yet.
9:26 Alex Kantrowitz? So I just want to tell an interesting story. So my wife is reading this book about artificial superintelligence and we had this discussion of like whether we're going to have AGI before superintelligence or whether we were just going to move straight into superintelligence and when that might come. And I was just like offhand saying, I think what we have today is basically AGI. And I know this is going to sound crazy because obviously I don't think it hits the scientific benchmarks for being artificial general intelligence, but I would say for so many use cases, it is that good. Where if you would have presented this in front of people years ago, they would have told you, oh yeah, that is AGI.
10:10 Alex Kantrowitz? And so I think that that's what we're starting to see is people starting to realize how far the AI industry has come in just a couple of years and saying, yes, this is artificial general intelligence. I'll just give you one example, just to entertain this idea, then we'll knock it down, right? Every time a new model comes out, I just take our podcast metrics from Megaphone and upload them and say, what can you tell me about the show? And what O3 was able to do was an unbelievable analysis of the show, picking out the topics that do well, and even realized that we do a Wednesday and a Friday
10:50 Alex Kantrowitz? show, and was able to split the trends into two and say, well, the Friday show performs this way and the Wednesday show performs this way. So you should just know what's going on on that front. And I think what's amazing is that this thing, O3, and you hinted to this, or you mentioned it before, it does this multi-step reasoning. So it could basically come to a conclusion, go to the web to check it, come back and check the results it's pulled from the web, and then say, okay, does this compute? Does this match? Now, it's not going to be perfect in everything, right? And so there were so many tests that like, were like, put above Tyler Cowen's post about how this is AGI, just to show how it makes
11:35 Alex Kantrowitz? so many silly mistakes. It can't fully interpret complex drawings. It still has trouble saying how many Rs there are in strawberry, like, basic stuff that a child could probably count, and it's getting it wrong. But that being said, it is so adept at so many different tasks that, while I still wouldn't say this is AGI, because we spend so much time in this, and we've kind of know that we have higher expectations for something that deserves that label. I think day to day, if you're like, one step removed from where we are, and you come and you use this, like, and I think this was what Tyler Cowen is saying, there's not that big of a difference between what you get and what you're expecting.
12:19 Speaker 01 That is, that's an interesting metric that's almost like, to me, superior than, like, the ARC AGI benchmark or anything like that. You get what you're expecting. And like, you don't have to be a prompt engineer to do that. I think that's definitely fair. And I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna try to downplay the moment at all either, in terms of... It is light years beyond where we were certainly like a year ago, a year and a half ago. The idea, as you said, that it can generate something, check against it, reach different sources, search the web, take the deep research approach. That's incredible. I completely agree. It's incredible.
12:59 Speaker 01 But again, not even, maybe not a child, but a college student, let's say undergrad, would have known that that list given to me was not what I was looking for. And I think the term AGI, I guess, it's been given to us by OpenAI essentially. I mean, others in the community. And it was, you know, it's the center of the contract between OpenAI and Microsoft. But like, no one, the fact that it's never been defined as to what it means, it's almost silly that trying to even, you know, come up with, is it here or not? Because obviously, Ilya right now would say, we're waiting for ASI, artificial superintelligence.
13:42 Speaker 01 So I don't know. Do you think, how do you define AGI?
13:47 Alex Kantrowitz? I would just say AGI is something that can perform as well as most humans on most tasks.
13:53 Speaker 01 But this is, but this is a perfect example of it performed better than a human in the sense that it went out and searched the web and compiled this in a matter of maybe a minute. It actually, you can see it thinking and, but it wasn't what I was looking for. And if I'd assigned that to an undergrad or even like a freelance researcher for like eight bucks an hour, they would have known better. So that's why I agree. Maybe that's a good like rubric, but then it certainly is not there yet.
14:24 Alex Kantrowitz? Yeah, look, I'm not saying that it's there. I'm just saying that if you squint, you could see it, right? And one thing that this has really been useful for me for has been search. And we've had, going back probably for a year now, debates about whether AI was going to replace search.
14:43 Speaker 01 What was the Forrester metric again? I think it was Forrester.
14:46 Alex Kantrowitz? Yeah, 25% of search or something was going to be replaced by AI. I was very skeptical of this. In fact, I kind of called Forrester or Gartner, or whatever it was to make fun of this idea because I thought it was lunacy. And now for the, I mean, I'm following your path for the hardest searches that I do, I'm using AI. And I'll just give you an example. I'm looking for a bookkeeper. And typically, the way I would do this is like go on Google Maps, use Google Search. There's really no good way to find like reliable bookkeeping or services of that nature close to you. Anyway, I just go to O3 and I say, find me a bookkeeper. I gave some specifications.
15:26 Alex Kantrowitz? It like gave me the names of people, it summarized what they do, it summarized the ratings they have, and it gave me the phone number. I called the guy up. I said, let's talk. He was perfect for what I'm looking for, because I explained like I need someone that can handle small businesses. And he goes, how did you find me? I'm like, ChatGPT. By the way, big technology in past few weeks, our paid subscribers, we always have a source for where they're coming in. Multiple paid subscribers have come in through ChatGPT, which is crazy. So in a way, what this is really, and I, obviously, you want AGI to be more than just an incredibly adept search engine, but maybe this is really good at like not so deep research,
16:10 Alex Kantrowitz? which is pretty cool, like what you would do with search, but just like one level deeper. And whether you want to label it AGI or not, I do think it's clear to me that the capabilities are just so much better now than they ever were up until this point.
16:25 Speaker 01 All right. I now have my rubric for AGI, and it's going to hold up in court and decide the future of OpenAI, Microsoft.
16:32 Alex Kantrowitz? Let's hear it.
16:33 Speaker 01 It's cool. It's exciting that you found the bookkeeper. And I have been saying this a while. I almost never use Google Search now. I really almost never start a search on Google. AGI is when you don't find another bookkeeper or a human bookkeeper. You just do it in ChatGPT, because there's no reason, come on, or you code your own bookkeeping software, but I think like you feed a bunch of CSVs that you downloaded from QuickBooks, and everything's just done. That's my AGI.
17:07 Alex Kantrowitz? I don't even think we're far away from that.
17:09 Speaker 01 I don't think, I don't think we are either.
17:11 Alex Kantrowitz? In fact, in Claude, you can now connect, I'm sure you've done this, Gmail Calendar Drive, and start speaking with Claude about the content of your, of your files or your communication.
17:25 Alex Kantrowitz? And I mean, you could also do that with Gemini. If you have these Google apps and Google, of course, is an investor in Anthropic. But are we that far away from Google with its massive context window? Providing that type of service or like sharing some ideas for prompts that go into, let's say, Google Sheets and maybe cross check your bank accounts and prepare your taxes for you. I mean, this should be able to be done today.
17:52 Speaker 01 I completely agree. I even actually while filing taxes, fed in some of my older tax returns and understood them better than I did when I sat with an accountant and actually like went through them. But it's not there. I would not trust it today. Maybe next, maybe April 15th, 2026, we're all filing our taxes on ChatGPT and Intuit is somehow still going to come out on top. Somehow they always do with TurboTax.
18:20 Alex Kantrowitz? There's an Intuit fee on your OpenAI.
18:21 Speaker 01 ChatGPT, they have a partnership. But, uh, no, I mean, to me, again, that's it. Like you can kind of ad hoc do that today. I agree. You could connect Google Drive, upload a bunch of CSVs of your expenses and it probably will do something. Would you trust it as of today? I'm guessing most people would say no.
18:43 Alex Kantrowitz? No, not yet. And that's why I'm saying, okay, it's not, it's not AGI. Right? I think that there are some simple tests that you can give, but that's what I'm saying. You have to squint a little bit and you could see why, um, you know, some people might believe this. And by the way, it's lots of people that have been saying it. It's not just Tyler Cowen. I think he wanted to get, well, actually I have some conspiracy theories about why he did say that. Uh, but here's, here's Ethan Mollick, the Wharton professor, an AI expert. Is O3 good enough to be AGI? The counter argument might force us to wait until artificial superintelligence because only then will an AI definitively outperform all humans at all tasks. In the meantime, we have to have, we seem to have jagged AGI, a mix of below human
19:28 Alex Kantrowitz? and superhuman abilities. The number of superhuman ones just keep increasing though. I, I think that's, that's. Great point. And I'll just note that another thing that I found this was very useful. This O three model was very useful to do is usually I'm just like dropping my drafts in these of stories that I write. I drop them into things like Chachi PT and Claude to be like, did I miss anything? And this was the first time with this model, the model actively improved the draft by giving me pointers of my blind spots and suggestions for stuff I was missing. And I just like dumped some disparate thoughts. And I was like, I know that there's a connection
20:13 Alex Kantrowitz? here. I'm not quite getting there. What do you think? And it got the connection. And I think that's what this was billed as. It was billed as something that could help you come up with new discoveries, not come up with discoveries on its own, but help you do it. I'm not saying my writing was a discovery, but I could see it. I could see how that's possible. So that's very interesting. What do you think about this jagged AGI?
20:34 Speaker 01 Jagged AGI. I like, I like the name.
20:37 Alex Kantrowitz? Let the buzzwords continue. Let the jargon continue.
20:40 Speaker 01 You know, I'm a, I'm an investor in jagged AGI. I also do like the idea that in a court of law, Sam Altman saying, if you squint, you'll see AGI and nullifying the entire Microsoft leverage over them. But I, it's gonna, if you squint, um, no, no. Okay. Again, I, I do think the last few months of development, like the pace has not slowed down. I think there's like a bit of fatigue over every new model release and the hype overall in the industry and people saying things are slowing down. And there's a lot of discussion six months ago about, you know, just overall scaling laws being reached. Actually, in a way, things are getting more
21:24 Speaker 01 exciting for me because hitting different models and one model like talking to another and different types of tool calling happening, that's on the product side as well. And, you know, I'm team product over model any day. So I think the overall experience is definitely, it's continuing to scale it as it has for the last few years, like that it hasn't slowed down. It's only getting better. That makes me excited. What, whether.
21:53 Speaker 01 It's PhD level on at all times. And I think it's AGI as it was billed for the last three or four years. I don't think we're there yet.
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24:03 Alex Kantrowitz? Here is OpenAI trainer John Holman talking about what it was like to experience O3 for the first time. When O3 finished training and we got to try it out, he says, "I felt for the first time tempted to call a model AGI. Still not perfect, but this model will beat me, you, and 99% of humans on 99% of intelligence assessments. One can start to see the light at the end of the tunnel." Now I'm gonna drop my conspiracy theory and get you to respond to it.
24:38 Speaker 01 Let's go.
24:39 Alex Kantrowitz? What I think is happening here from OpenAI and from some of the people that I imagine are close to them, like Tyler Cowen, is that the company is floating a trial balloon. Because for more than a year now, it's been building up to this mysterious release, the long anticipated, long awaited GPT-5. And they're telling us that they're gonna get their naming under control, because now we have GPT-4.5, and then the advances GPT-4.1, and we have O3 and O4 mini, and then O4 is coming. And we've been promised this versatile model that is coming, that is improved, and that, of course, is gonna
25:22 Alex Kantrowitz? be GPT-5. And OpenAI is telling us they're gonna clear this all up by summer. So my tin hat here is that whether it's this summer or early fall, GPT-5 is gonna come out. People like Tyler Cowen, who have called the original models, these O3s AGI already, will have effectively cleared the way for OpenAI to say, "We didn't call the last model that everybody else was calling AGI, AGI. We showed restraint. But now that GPT-5 is out, we are calling it AGI." And that is what I think this is all about.
26:00 Speaker 01 I'm not gonna disagree with that. I don't think it's that tinfoil. Again, OpenAI has been the master of kind of driving the communications narrative, I think, out of all companies there. Sam Altman is the greatest product marketer, I think, in a long time.
26:19 Speaker 01 I guess the only question is, what benefit do you see of them being able to at least say themselves confidently, it is AGI. There's obviously the contractual relationship with Microsoft, but is there anything else really like, do you think it will actually result in a spike in paid chat GPT subscriptions or enterprises paying for access or agents and Masasun spending even more money? I don't know.
26:47 Alex Kantrowitz? Yes, I do.
26:49 Speaker 01 So you think that will unlock a flurry of revenue for them?
26:55 Alex Kantrowitz? Because here's the thing, OpenAI, like we've talked about, the thing they have going for them, I mean, obviously they've led the product, but their entire existence has been, and this might be diminishing them a bit, but it's not that far off, building off others' innovations and just doing the product and the marketing a little bit better. And you could see like in our Discord all the time, people are talking about how Gemini's latest model outperforms OpenAI on the benchmarks. But I just dropped a chart there, Gemini is still not getting anywhere close to the amount of usage as OpenAI. And I think, now I think Demis and Google will show some restraint about using the term AGI, but I think that it would be really rough for OpenAI if another big lab beat them to the punch
27:40 Alex Kantrowitz? and said that they had AGI before OpenAI. I think there is value in being the first one to do this purely from a positioning standpoint, and that's why I think they're gonna do it.
27:52 Speaker 01 Imagine if Google comes out this summer and beats them to it. That actually would be the most incredible twist of events, I think.
28:00 Alex Kantrowitz? Well, the date I would, the date I would watch is May, week of May 19th, which is Google I/O.
28:07 Speaker 01 All right, Sundar.
28:07 Alex Kantrowitz? Where there's definitely gonna be some announcements.
28:09 Speaker 01 Your move, Sundar. It's time. Sundar just stands up there right behind him. AGI.
28:15 Alex Kantrowitz? AGI. I promise you, maybe not this year, but we're gonna, we are gonna see some lab make that proclamation, I think in the next two years, without a doubt. And I'm not saying OpenAI will definitely do it this summer, but I wouldn't be surprised, I wouldn't be shocked. It's currently at like 50/50 on the betting markets, by the way.
28:33 Speaker 01 Plot twist, it's Apple.
28:35 Alex Kantrowitz? I know.
28:36 Speaker 01 It's Apple.
28:37 Alex Kantrowitz? No, it's not gonna be Apple. Yeah. It's called Apple General Intelligence.
28:45 Speaker 01 Wait, I wouldn't put at this point, I wouldn't put that past them.
28:50 Alex Kantrowitz? Well, yeah, but the thing has to actually ship. So we'll see what happens there. Okay, enough beating on Apple. I just want to go to one more example of what we saw from oh, three. And then we'll move on to some of our other stories. But Dan Shipper, who is the CEO of Every, and he's a reviewer there, he writes this very nice newsletter about AI product. He actually had Chat GPT oh, three. He writes this great prompt, predict my future where I will be a year from now. Use everything you know about me, be realistic and direct. And what oh, three does is it gives, it says by next year, I'm going to be AGI. No, no, I'm kidding.
29:30 Alex Kantrowitz? But it gives this like really interesting look at some of the things that are going on in Dan's life, including where it expects the newsletter to be, where it expects the revenue to be, his public presence, his, his team and his leadership, and even his personal life. And it's just clear that Dan has been speaking with Chat GPT a lot about like really intimate things, including like what he's getting out of therapy. And what, what oh, three does here is it takes its sort of the most advanced capabilities that we've ever seen with Chat GPT and the memory of all chats that Dan has ever had with it. And it brings it together in this one cohesive picture.
30:12 Alex Kantrowitz? And that is, and we're going to talk about memory in a second, and we should actually talk about it now, right? Like, uh, last week, OpenAI said, when you speak with Chat GPT, it's now going to remember all of your conversations. And I think that just adds this level of, uh, depth and insight into your life that's crazy. And you can really see it come out in these answers. So I'll just read the personal growth section from, uh, from Chat GPT oh, three's response. It says, personal growth, you'll be noticeably quicker to say, no, that's not on a roadmap in partner calls. Weekly therapy check-ins continue. Your shame spiral episodes drop from a few a month to a couple a quarter. I've also seen other people prompting and say, how have I changed since I met you?
30:57 Alex Kantrowitz? And I think that this combination is crazy. It is going to make so many people. Feel like they've developed friendships with these bots, companions, companionship with these bots, and even love towards these bots, which I spoke about with Mustafa Suleyman a couple of weeks ago. And to see this in action with better memory and better capabilities with the O3 release is nuts. So AGI buzzword, or whatever it is or not, this is a very big deal. What do you think, Rajan?
31:30 Speaker 01 Yeah, I think it's definitely a very big deal. I had actually done this after I saw that you dropped this in the document. And again, I use ChatGPT frequently, but I also use all Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, everything. And it is kind of funny because it thinks I was helping my friend who runs pizza restaurants in Kansas, who had actually wrote the DoorDash pizza arbitrage piece about a few years ago. He's starting an ice cream shop, and it thinks I'm also, it thinks I am trying to start the ice cream shop, and it's telling me juggling, writing, podcasting, working a full-time job, and an ice cream shop might be too much for
32:11 Speaker 01 you. So it recommends that I start to work in six-week shape-up cycles where one flagship project gets the lion's share of attention. So I think what it reminds us is like, this stuff will be really interesting if people use it and invest time. And the more people do use, invest time into it, as this is their one platform, the bigger the moat gets. So I think that's pretty interesting because memory, I think, is another big deal in the whole competitive landscape. Because up until now, we've all seen this, the switching cost between consumer-grade chat apps is zero, essentially. It's like just canceling a subscription
32:53 Speaker 01 on one Claude and going to ChatGPT, vice versa, Gemini is free. But I think if they can actually make this stick, it's a big deal. But I also feel others are going to catch up on this pretty quickly as well. So I don't know, I don't know if it will be that sticking moat. They have, they're the leading consumer brands, no question. But I don't know. It's going to be interesting.
33:18 Alex Kantrowitz? Well, also for your example, what you could do is just say, listen, I'm not doing the ice cream shop.
33:23 Speaker 01 Maybe I am, maybe I should.
33:25 Alex Kantrowitz? Maybe you should, but this is the thing, you have this, you corrected. So I'd also got some stuff wrong about me. I corrected it, I shared information and then started getting it right. And I think, yes, that's interesting because it takes investment and that investment leads to lock in. Because the bot that you talk to the most is the one that is gonna want to, is gonna be the most useful to you because it knows you best. And you're right, everybody's gonna do this. We also, I mean, when Mustafa came on, he was basically like the headline of the co-pilot upgrade was the fact that they were going to have better memory. So that is something that's gonna come across the board.
34:03 Alex Kantrowitz? But that being said, I think memory just adds such a deeper aspect to your interactions with these bots. That when you have that and the better processing capability of something like O3, the experience really becomes bananas. And look, we talk about the problems of these bots all the time and the problems of these companies.
34:25 Alex Kantrowitz? But I'm feeling, I don't know, I mean, there's still a lot to figure out, but I'm definitely feeling much more optimistic about where this is heading. After experiencing these feature upgrades show up over the past week and model upgrades.
34:39 Speaker 01 My optimism has not gone down at all. I think even in like the, we haven't hit the trough of disillusionment just yet. Maybe we will more from an investment perspective, but yeah, to me, it's just been getting better and better and better and more exciting. And but then on the other hand, you have, why does Gemini Gmail not work well? When it should be the ultimate repository, I've used Gmail since 2007, I think. That should be the ultimate memory of who I am and everything I've done. And it just doesn't answer those questions well. So I think like, maybe that's an overload of memory upfront and OpenAI is almost in a better place because
35:23 Speaker 01 it's much more focused and targeted and shorter in terms of its scope, but I don't know, I think, I agree, we're gonna get there. We'll definitely get there, but we're not there yet.
35:34 Alex Kantrowitz? Okay, and that brings us to this sort of provocative and maybe a little bit loony post I put on big technology today, which is why AI is the new social media. And I just thought this week was a week of contrasts where you had Mark Zuckerberg in DC trying to testify about what Facebook has become and what it's up to. And the stats that he shared were really interesting. So he said, currently, only 17% of Facebook and 7% of Instagram time are spent with friends' posts. So basically, he admits that social media has become more of a broad discovery and entertainment space, effectively being taken over by the for you.
36:17 Alex Kantrowitz? And we've had like four, I would say we've had four eras of the web. First is, or maybe five. First is the web is a disaster with lots of information. Second is, let's organize it so we go to portals like Yahoo where you can click through links. Third era is the search era, where like now, instead of going through a portal, you can just search for what you want and you get it. And it's, and it works very well, thanks to algorithms like PageRank that Larry and Sergey came up with. Then we say, maybe instead of us pulling information via search, we'll have information pushed to us from our friends. And so we enter this social media era where friends will send us memes and information and news. But of course, that is imperfect.
36:59 Alex Kantrowitz? And we end up getting pushed a lot of outrage, a lot of, you know, really low quality news. We live in the memes now where we're sharing shrimp Jesus and all this AI crap. And I think that AI is, this is the point of the post, AI is becoming the new social media, where instead of trying to find information from our social feeds or even search, we are now developing this relationship with these bots who are taking the internet, condensing it, and sharing it with us and dialoguing with us about it. And in some ways, it really lives the original social media dream, where it is social, it's useful, it's helpful, it is, doesn't make us feel bad about ourselves, it doesn't stimulate
37:44 Alex Kantrowitz? the worst urges to get something to spread, and it is a filter of information on the internet. So. That's why I'm calling AI the new social media. Obviously, it's crude. It really is like maybe the evolution from social media, but it is this important new era of interacting with the web's content. And I just wanted to sort of plant a flag and get that out there on big technology. What do you think about that theory?
38:11 Speaker 01 Whoa.
38:14 Speaker 01 Hold on. Oh, my God. I'm in. I think I'm in. Hold on. As you described that, so already, and I read through the post, and like, I liked the idea again, and it almost kind of raised the questions around like, when Mark Zuckerberg is proudly saying in court, 17% of Facebook and only 7% of Instagram time is spent with friends, already, yeah, social media is dead. We've said this for a while. The moment TikTok, to me, killed the traditional notion of social media because it became follower based rather than friend based. So you followed accounts or were served random algorithmic content. It wasn't about keeping up with your friends
38:58 Speaker 01 and family. So that, I think social media has been dead for a while, but at that point, what fills time? Right now, you know, entertainment based content from accounts that of people you don't know has been filling that time. And I agree, that's even worse than friends outraging you in terms of like, from a qualitative standpoint or societal standpoint. But to me, I get it because I haven't gone all out therapeutic chat GPT or anything like that, or talking about my day or feelings. But I have full on conversations. I have a random
39:38 Speaker 01 idea popped into my head. I have a conversation back and forth. And you're right, that's social. That's weird. That's like, it is social. It is media. So in a way, this, I think I'm bought in. That could be the next generation of social media. And I think it is important to define, and I think you made that distinction. We're all associating companionship and love and even sex in that New York Times piece from a while ago. But like, just having, spending time, having a conversation and engaging, even though it's an AI. You're doing that when you're having a back and forth about, here's a topic I'm interested.
40:21 Speaker 01 Let me learn a bit more. Let's create this app together. That's social in a weird way.
40:27 Alex Kantrowitz? And by the way, this is happening as two things are happening. First of all, they're becoming much more personable. Right? So we're seeing the greater memory, the bigger, better EQ, better personalities, the better competence. And they're all connecting to the web. So ChatGPT is 03, like we said before, its tool use can go to the web. It can come back. It can sort of analyze what it found and then go back to the web and go back and analyze what it found. So it's navigating the web. Claude, like finally, just started connecting with the web. And we know perplexity is connected to the web as well and has a discover page where it will push you information.
41:05 Alex Kantrowitz? So this idea, remember ChatGPT came out, right? It was kind of funny. It sort of had a cutoff and it's at some point in 2021 or 2022. Now it is current. It is, it reads the internet. It's learning what's going on and it is like basically synthesizing that and pushing it back to you. Now, of course, there's lots of different questions that arise in terms of who's going to get compensated for the material, like I wrote about recently with World History Encyclopedia. But this is without a doubt, it's the internet, it's almost the internet becoming a friend and becoming social and then pushing media to you. The media side of AI is becoming a much bigger part of the experience.
41:46 Speaker 01 The internet is my best friend. That's where we're at.
41:51 Alex Kantrowitz? We have a quote in the story from a Harvard researcher who said that.
41:54 Speaker 01 Again, the biggest and most important part, I have a feeling this one's going to stick. I have a feeling like there's something here that I think we should all think about a lot more. Cause even as we're talking right now, the idea that that conversation with a chatbot is social. I just had never really thought about it. Every story I read about, I associated with like companionship and falling in love, or even like not having other human interaction and needing to find it here. Versus, I'm actually just having a simple, interesting, intellectual exchange with this thing. And that's what it is, which you, we are having right now on this podcast. And you do a dinner with your friends or at work.
42:40 Speaker 01 And now it's just another expansion of that. And it's something that social media was, the original version of social media was supposed to give us. And certainly was there a bit and was lost. And then now this is giving it. And there's no, there's no algorithm ranking that kind of, there's an L L M deciding what to return to you. But there's not like an engagement based algorithm that's driving that whole thing, which listeners and readers of mine know is my biggest gripe with how social media went. And this is an alternative in a weird way.
43:15 Alex Kantrowitz? Right. And I think that's the reason why social media failed was because of how, the way it made people feel. It made people feel mad. It made people want to fight with each other. The people that fought and were outraged were the ones that did best. And some people have hit me in the replies and been like, the AI is a sycophant, which it is.
43:33 Alex Kantrowitz? However, that might be exactly what enables it to work, which is that it doesn't make people angry. It actually feels like it's helping them. And in many cases, it does help them. And one last piece of proof I want to put before we move on here. Guess who's running product at OpenAI and Anthropic? At Anthropic, it is Mike Krieger.
43:53 Speaker 01 Yep.
43:54 Alex Kantrowitz? The co-founder of Instagram.
43:55 Speaker 01 Yep.
43:56 Alex Kantrowitz? At OpenAI, it's Kevin Weill, the former head of product at Instagram. These guys know where the future is moving. The heads of social media past are now running product at social media future.
44:11 Speaker 01 I, I'm in, I'm in, all in. This is it. I mean, when you just threw in, and I mean, I know that the heads, the heads of product at both Anthropic and OpenAI, but I think that kind of like perfectly brings together the entire theory in just an incredible way. Yeah, this one, I have a feeling we're going to be talking about for a while.
44:36 Alex Kantrowitz? Okay. And one last point, because I can't help myself.
44:39 Speaker 01 Keep going, keep going.
44:40 Alex Kantrowitz? When you look at mainstream social media, what are they doing? They're becoming AIs. Facebook, of course, it is pushing AI hard with Llama and building Llama into its product. And you don't have to go far, right, to see what happened with X. It was acquired by an AI company. Now, funny math or not, what Elon Musk said is XAI and X's futures are intertwined. And I think that like initially, maybe we shook that off because, okay, it's like, yeah, well, you're trying to do financial engineering, whatever it is. But on the other hand, it is absolutely correct that he probably also sees what's happening with social media and that it is moving in this direction. And that acquisition now makes even more sense to me.
45:24 Speaker 01 It is interesting because when we're talking about social media, you do, and AI, you do have these two very distinct visions of it. You have one, as we've been discussing, a chatbot you engage with and have a discussion with. But then the other could be, I mean, and this has obviously been, Facebook has tried stuff with this, still that feed with different content and still likes and comments, it just happens to be generated by AI. And I'll take the former. I like this vision of the, even if it's a sycophant, the chatbot you can engage with intellectually versus, versus the feed.
46:04 Alex Kantrowitz? Even if it's jagged AGI, screw it. I'll have a conversation and learn from it.
46:09 Speaker 01 I'll talk to anybody, even jagged AGI.
46:12 Alex Kantrowitz? Even jagged AGI.
46:14 Speaker 01 Yeah.
46:14 Alex Kantrowitz? Just wait till the summer, you get the real deal. All right, let's move to the final story of the week. I mean, we did talk a little bit about the Facebook. Obviously, Facebook is at trial, talking to the FTC about how it's not a monopoly and not really a social network. And it's funny because it's like, we don't have to spend too much time on it, because it does feel like both those entities are fighting the last war, that it's like, we're going to argue over a social network where people don't really share anymore, and is it under siege from TikTok and AI, the way that we're going to argue over the way that it acquired Instagram and WhatsApp, where like, clearly, there's competitive pressure, and clearly, the world is evolving in a way that does not make Facebook dominant forever,
46:57 Alex Kantrowitz? or an illegal monopoly. But that case is going to play out. And then, speaking of illegal monopolies, the US federal court found Google guilty of being an antitrust violator twice this week, where it illegally maintained a monopoly, both in publisher ad serving and in ad exchanges. And that's the third, those are the second and third losses that Google has had. This is a moment, to me, where we are starting to see big tech companies, which seemed impervious to government action, which seem stronger than governments, which seem more popular, which definitely aren't more popular than governments, finally, take it to the teeth
47:39 Alex Kantrowitz? from the government and from antitrust action. And I'm starting to think there's a real possibility that we might see Google broken up. And I'm starting to revise a lot of my long-held beliefs that nothing is going to happen to big tech. So Ranjan, put it all together. I mean, what are we seeing here?
47:57 Speaker 01 I cannot make any predictions about what will happen at the intersection of our political system and the business world, given the unpredictability of how things are going. But I will say, I was very surprised. And I mean, it's interesting, the fact that Google, again, if you had read into the court case over the last few years, the amount of leverage, which they would exercise over advertisers, and the way products would be intermingled on the ad exchange, like, and you come from the world of advertising as well, like, I mean, it's almost comically shocking, but obviously, it would, it just never had any impact for so long.
48:40 Speaker 01 It's what does it's still been so long since there's been anything at that scale like could Meta sell off Instagram or WhatsApp? It's just that you can't even imagine a world where that would happen. Like, I mean, I can't, it's so difficult. Would Google divest Chrome or YouTube? I can't even imagine that. But if it is on the radar, if it's might be coming, I mean, it could happen. It's still in the cards. It's certainly moved more than I ever thought it would. But making a prediction again in this environment is a difficult one.
49:19 Alex Kantrowitz? I don't think we have to predict. I mean, we could just look at the probability. And I think the probability that the breakup will happen has increased. What do you think?
49:26 Speaker 01 What does the breakup look like to you, though?
49:29 Alex Kantrowitz? Well, it could be that Google just has to divest its publisher ad server. Google has to divest its ad exchanges, maybe Chrome. But then we get into really interesting territory here. And, you know, opponents of Google might be like, aha. You know, it's like, finally, they they are hurt. But we do know that Google's search, for a long time, has been putting Google products more prominently in search. But they've still sent lots of traffic to the web, in part because they had that publisher ad server and they would make money if you visited the web as well. Actually, I'm starting to think Google was a pretty good business or remains a pretty good business. But this is the thing. If you make them divest that publisher ad network,
50:12 Alex Kantrowitz? they're going to keep you even longer on Google pages. You're never going to leave search.
50:18 Speaker 01 Well, okay, now here, here's a take. Especially in this environment where maybe if they see search is declining, that it is not the future. AI overviews will already be the future. They have as much data as anyone else, if not more. Then maybe if there was ever a moment to let certain things go, that they don't need the publisher ad network anymore. That that obviously it's still the cash cow right now, but uh, or one of the cash cows. But if there was ever a moment that it does not look as important to their future, that would be today versus three, four years ago, they would have fought to that. It would be existential.
51:00 Speaker 01 Now it could, in a way, be part of a five year strategy.
51:05 Alex Kantrowitz? Yeah, this is interesting. It's almost like the argument. Now, hear me out. This is gonna sound kinda crazy, but the argument that you want China to be doing as much business with the US and as much business with Taiwan because it's in China's interest if that's the case to make sure things remain status quo, because if they don't, then you could see bad outcomes. And with Google, the parallel is you almost want Google to be doing as much business through publisher ad serving, because that might be the reason why the publisher internet still exists, however diminished it's been. And once Google cuts off, then you cuts that part of the business off, then you really see the sort of nuclear
51:47 Alex Kantrowitz? attack on the web publishing business from the number one portal to it.
51:52 Speaker 01 Yeah, the web is dead. Web's dead, man.
51:56 Alex Kantrowitz? Yeah, I don't know. That might be a bridge. I might, that might be a bridge too far.
52:00 Speaker 01 I'm still, I'm a, I've thought this for a long time, that the idea that the web is like an interconnected ecosystem of websites that have content on it and you access them through primarily search, that's been gone for a while. Or you're directed there through social, that's been declining over time as well. Where it's just information is living in, even at like Reddit is its own information ecosystem. Email newsletters are their own email. I mean, they'll live on Substack in a lot of cases or some other web presence, but it's their own information ecosystem. So the idea that like, it's a completely disparate
52:40 Speaker 01 but interconnected ecosystem, that's been gone for why, and that, and they'll make money in a living off search ads, I think, or off ads in general and display ads, I think, that's, that's pretty much dead. Would you, would you disagree?
52:55 Alex Kantrowitz? Wouldn't call it dead. I mean, Google's earnings are still super impressive. So the old system is still working. That revenue goes up every quarter, a lot. But I think under threat, yes. I mean, I think that in all these conversations about the way that Google has improved over time, we often leave out the fact that there's still this sort of existential threat waiting at the end of the tunnel. And maybe that's, you know, jagged AGI or AGI this summer. And we shouldn't ignore that. I think the best possible outcome for all publishers is to join Elon Musk's legion, move to the compound in Texas, don't say anything bad about him, and take the money.
53:35 Speaker 01 It's your only option. And again, I agree. The web is not dead, but the web is dead sounds better than the web is in secular decline. But
53:45 Alex Kantrowitz? I know.
53:46 Speaker 01 Not as punchy a subject line.
53:49 Alex Kantrowitz? See, this is why our advertising agency really has legs. It's we know how to brand things. That, you know, it's jaggedly true.
53:57 Speaker 01 Jaggedly, if you squint at the light at the, I love that. One of the definitions even used like the light at the end of the, you can see the end of the tunnel. Everyone's squinting. Everyone's trying to see that light for our AGI, but it's jagged right now. So I hope you enjoy your jagged AGI this weekend.
54:19 Alex Kantrowitz? I sure will. I sure will. And we will be back next week to talk about all the other new things that we've found from oh, three and whatever other craziness goes on in the tech and the AI world, because Lord knows the one thing, the one thing that's consistent is when we come back every Friday, there's going to be some crazy stuff that's happened. And we can't wait to speak with you about it next week. All right, Ronton, great to see you. Thanks for coming on the show.
54:44 Speaker 01 All right. See you next week.
54:46 Alex Kantrowitz? See you next week. All right, everybody. Thank you so much for listening and we'll see you next time on Big Technology Podcast.
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