Too Many AI Companies, Amazon's Alexa Upgrade Awaits, RIP Humane Pin

Ranjan Roy from Margins is back for our weekly discussion of the latest tech news. We cover 1) Satya Nadella's criticism of AI benchmark hacking 2) Ex-OpenAI CTO Mira Murati's new Thinking Machines Lab startup 3) There are too many AI startups 4) Why foundation models have commoditized 5) Did Google 'DeepSeek' itself? 6) Grok3 arrives 7) How do you evaluate whether models are good? 8) Grok3 at the top of Chatbot arena 9) Benedict Evans on Deep Research 10) Does using AI tools make our brains atrophy? 11) Amazon's incoming Alexa upgrade 12) Actually, voice AI helps during marital disputes 13) RIP Humane Pin Join the Big Technology Discord here: https://www.bigtechnology.com/p/lets-talk-deepseek-ai-etc-on-big 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.

• 0:00Alex Kantrowitz?

  There are probably way too many AI companies, but why not? Let's add another. Humans criticize OpenAI's deep research. Amazon has an Alexa upgrade on the way. And the Humane pit is dead. Off to HP to check your toner. 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

• 0:41Alex Kantrowitz?

  to go inside a large scale agentic CX transformation, 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 Razor 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.

• 1:26Alex Kantrowitz?

  We have a wild show for you today because there's a whole lot of news in the world of artificial intelligence and the tech world in general. We got a new AI company. It is from the ex-OpenAI CTO Muramirati. We also have new models from Grok. We have big news from Microsoft, which we're going to touch at right at the top. And we'll look at the death of the Humane pit. Oh, by the way, there's also an Amazon Alexa upgrade coming. Joining us as always to talk about it on Fridays is Ron John Roy of Margins. Ron John, great to see you. Welcome to the show.

• 1:55Speaker 01

  R.I.P. Humane pit. What could have been.

• 1:59Alex Kantrowitz?

  I know we're both feeling a state of loss. We're both feeling a state of hurt and harm. We're going to try to do today's show.

• 2:08Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 2:08Alex Kantrowitz?

  With respect, but also holding back some of those feelings till the very end. So we can analyze what's happening. With the appropriate nuance, the appropriate tone.

• 2:21Speaker 01

  We'll analyze and we'll emote at the end for the humane pen.

• 2:25Alex Kantrowitz?

  I want to start this week with a quote from Satya Nadella, who's been obviously listening to this show because he's channeling Rajan in a recent interview with Dwarkesh Patel. He's on the Dwarkesh podcast talking about Microsoft's new announcements of one in quantum, another world model. And he says this, "Us self claiming some AGI milestone, that's just nonsensical benchmark hacking to me. The real benchmark is the world growing at 10%." Very interesting statement for him to make, quite provocative, especially because we keep hearing from the company that Microsoft has funded, OpenAI, that they keep getting

• 3:05Alex Kantrowitz?

  closer and closer to these AGI benchmarks. Yet Satya is coming out there and I think rightly saying, hey, listen, it's not about getting those benchmarks. It's about can you actually have practical impact on the world. Just one statement in a long podcast that I think is worth listening to, but pretty revealing in terms of where Microsoft stands today, where the discussion is going today, and also maybe how Satya feels about OpenAI. Am I reading too much into it, Rajan?

• 3:32Speaker 01

  I don't think you're reading too much into it. I think we could break this down. There's two main levels. You can look at this. One is actually the legal and contractual side because remember, Microsoft and OpenAI's entire deal actually hinges on when AGI is achieved. And that's a key part of it. And we've been joking for, for weeks or even months now that all Sam has to do is say, AGI, and we're there. So I think him recognizing this and openly kind of calling out this self claiming of AGI milestones is ridiculous is important in whatever is going to happen in the future of OpenAI and Microsoft's relationship.

• 4:11Speaker 01

  But the other is nonsensical benchmark hacking is my favorite line. I feel like, I mean, I want to put that on my own LinkedIn right now because Satya is just after his, we're good for the $80 billion and now him coming up with phrases like this. This guy, he's got some, he's got some words. He's got some lines that I would not have expected from him.

• 4:35Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yes, I as a low key baller, I mean, he has some sharp elbows.

• 4:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think put him in the cage match. Put Elon never challenged him, but I think Satya actually is currently now my favorite in the in the octagon that never happened.

• 4:50Alex Kantrowitz?

  And it's also just so interesting to me that he's talking about it, the nonsensical benchmark hacking in the context of OpenAI, which is very proudly proclaiming how they're doing against the benchmarks. All right, so speaking of OpenAI, they have lost a lot of people recently, shall we say? 2024 was a year of exodus for them. Where are these people gone? Well, we know Ilya Sutskever is doing super safe, super intelligence or safe super intelligence. Like, I keep forgetting exactly what it's called, but they're raising billions and billions of dollars without building anything yet. And now we see the emergence of another former OpenAI executive, former OpenAI CTO Mira Maradi. She was the CEO for the weekend that Sam Altman was fired.

• 5:32Alex Kantrowitz?

  She is out with a new company called Thinking Machines Labs. But it really is true that we have so many companies that are working on, I think, the same thing. And you get into the point where you're like, what are we all doing here? So let me just read from TechCrunch. It's called Thinking Machines Lab. The startup intends to build tooling to make AI work for people's unique needs and goals, and to create AI systems that are more widely understood, customizable, and generally capable than those currently available. Maradi is heading the lab as the CEO. She's also brought over cast of characters from her former company. The co-founder of OpenAI, John Schulman, is the chief scientist at this new company,

• 6:13Alex Kantrowitz?

  and Barrett Zoff, the former OpenAI chief research officer, is the CTO. So they've got they've got the former royalty from OpenAI over there, outside of Ilya, who's doing his own thing. Let me just read you one more bit from the from the TechCrunch story, because I do think I got to the point this week where I was reading words and I was just like, what does this all mean? Thinking Machines Lab plans to focus on building multimodal systems that work with people collaboratively, that can adapt to the full spectrum of the of human expertise and enable a broader spectrum of applications.

• 6:50Alex Kantrowitz?

  You know, we talk a lot about PR on this show and about marketing and positioning because we do think that oftentimes that does reveal the inner soul of a company, or at least the inner direction of a company. And I can't for the life of me figure out what this word salad means, Ron, John. And maybe you have some clarification here because I'm scratching my head.

• 7:09Speaker 01

  What was, what's funny is I was just about to ask you, as you were reading it, what does that actually mean? What does Thinking Machines Lab do? So I'm a little disappointed that you already preempted me by acknowledging it's a word salad. Because I think you also had left out this part from their blog post. The scientific community's understanding of frontier AI systems lags behind rapidly advancing capabilities. Knowledge of how these systems are trained is concentrated within the top research labs, limiting both the public discourse on AI and people's abilities to use AI effectively. Again, more word salad. I don't want to say an AI wrote this, but it certainly seems like there's no really

• 7:53Speaker 01

  concrete tangible thing that this company will do. It's a tough one because you have a lot of very smart people. We have very regularly said OpenAI is effectively a research house that had a business that kind of accidentally walked into a business. Sam Altman himself has declared or described his company as this kind of institution. So to me, it's almost odd that you look at how Ilias Itzkever and Safe Superintelligence, which again has raised or is raising some ungodly amount of money to achieve some nebulous goal where they're essentially saying, I think they said that they're not even planning on having

• 8:35Speaker 01

  a product anytime soon. Here you're having Mira Murati, who I'm sure is going to be able to raise a bunch of money, launching a company with a name that's kind of hard to say, like Thinking Machines Lab. I feel it should be Labs.

• 8:49Alex Kantrowitz?

  I've lost it pretty good right at the beginning. By the way, it's also a copy of a name of another company that was established back in the day.

• 8:56Speaker 01

  Oh, really?

• 8:58Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah.

• 8:58Speaker 01

  It's a good, I mean, yeah, Thinking Machines is a good one. Call it Labs, though, Mira, please. But, but overall, I, the, the whole alumni ecosystem from OpenAI.

• 9:10Speaker 01

  You can tell it's a problem because they can raise money so easily without any planned product or anything simply on promise that I think the this whole, you know, like the PayPal mafia ecosystem of companies did quite well. I don't think the OpenAI alumni ecosystem is gonna do as well. Maybe they're gonna produce some of the greatest research out there, but I don't think they're gonna build the actual businesses of tomorrow.

• 9:41Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, look, I think we're gonna also have to talk about how there are so many AI companies and what are they gonna actually offer that's differentiated? Like, do we need another one working on? It seems like it's gonna work on foundational models. I don't know. We still don't really know. By the way, I've invited Mira Murati on the show. I think I got her email, right? I tried about like 17,000 different permutations until I figured it out. So, Mira, if you're listening, or if Mira's representation is listening, please come on. But before we go on to the fact that there are so many of these of these companies and what's, how's this gonna shake out? I just want to ask one simple question, because you did mention Ilya Sutskever. He's raising this money. He has this safe superintelligence lab. It's not going to release a product. I

• 10:24Alex Kantrowitz?

  mean, Ranjan, to me, I just want, I'm just wondering, how are you gonna have safe superintelligence if you have to build a product that delivers returns that VCs anticipate? Like, you have, taking that VC money, the contract is growth. And if you're gonna actually do the job, you're gonna have to grow the way that they expected, they expect. And I tried to put this to Reid Hoffman when he was here, and he seemed to brush it off. But it just doesn't seem to me like this is compatible. And it's sort of been baked into the entire AI mythology. We need more money, so therefore we grow big, but also we're concerned about the impact of this technology. But then again, like, you're raising unprecedented rounds? How is that possibly compatible with

• 11:09Alex Kantrowitz?

  safety and slow-rolling things if you're actually afraid of them?

• 11:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, the, just confirming here, the safe superintelligence reporting was they're looking to raise over $1 billion in capital at a valuation of $30 billion. Now,

• 11:26Speaker 01

  How you even come up with some kind of math to get to evaluation on something where they're not even announcing or even pitching a product, I don't understand. But I think if I'm to try to see the other side of this, let's look at OpenAI is generating revenue. They're losing a lot of money, but they're still, they're growing quite fast. Claude came out of this model. Anthropic, I mean Anthropic has been playing this same game. Mistral, I don't know how they're doing in terms of revenue, but they clearly played the same game. Like, so I guess if we take Anthropic and OpenAI, the game presented this really specific

• 12:08Speaker 01

  way of working has had some reasonable success stories. I hesitate calling them success stories because they haven't proven themselves as actual sustainable businesses, but they're generating revenue pretty quickly in terms of like VC growth expectations. So maybe the assumption here is we're just going to get more of that exact pathway that these two companies got, or three, or the early entrance to this.

• 12:34Alex Kantrowitz?

  Just kind of, basically, it's clear in my mind, like, there is no safe path to developing this. I don't know, I'm just kind of...

• 12:42Speaker 01

  Oh, the safety, I think, is a whole different conversation.

• 12:45Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, it's just like, I don't know, I don't, I don't see, I don't see how it's feasible, and I understand there's like the promise, but I don't know, if you're taking a billion dollars of venture capital and you're telling me that like, you're, I'm sure you're in the, in the meeting with the VC, talking to them about how you're going to deliver the returns, you're not really working for society, you're working, you're working to deliver that money back.

• 13:07Speaker 01

  I would love to have seen that pitch from Ilya and Save Superintelligence. Like, it almost feels like an episode of HBO's Silicon Valley, where you can imagine him sitting across the table, there's some VCs on the other side, and him looking them in the eye and saying, "We are not going to build a product." We are not, and them be like, oh, good.

• 13:29Alex Kantrowitz?

  Oh, my God, this guy, this guy knows something.

• 13:33Speaker 01

  What do you need? What do you need?

• 13:35Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, it's totally, it's totally bizarre. So there's, so I think this sort of brings us home to this piece that Casey Newton wrote. There are probably too many AI companies now. It's a great piece and there's a really hilarious subhead. Everyone has a model, almost no one has a business. I'm just going to read a little bit from it. He says, I've been talking with tech executives about the likelihood of a bubble in artificial intelligence. Everyone I've spoken to described the experience of seeing another AI company come along with a slightly better or cheaper model than they've been using, and quickly swapping it in to replace the previous one. There's a reason foundation models have become so commoditized. Most of the original research was published openly for anyone to make free use of. Catching up to the state of the art is just, is often just a matter of acquiring the necessary hardware and a smattering of talent.

• 14:20Alex Kantrowitz?

  All the big AI labs are losing money. As models improve and prices fall, it seems increasingly certain that a wave of consolidation and even outright failures will follow. And that is kind of, you know, when I, when I think about what Ilya is doing, when I think about what Mira is doing, when I think about what, even the fact that we have all these established ones, the Open AIs, the Anthropics and Grok now and DeepSeek. I think Casey has a point.

• 14:46Speaker 01

  Well, I, I think he's missing one big part of this. We currently you kind of have two categories. You have the model builders and then you have the model users, the productized side. I don't know what we want to call it, but like on the more product oriented side, there's still endless products coming out like granola AI. Have you been using it for a note taking in meetings? It's really good.

• 15:11Alex Kantrowitz?

  Tell me about it, yeah.

• 15:12Speaker 01

  It's Otter and others, it's like, you know, are all competing in this space, but it basically both transcribes your meeting. It does it without, I don't know if anyone's ever used Otter, but there's this like kind of really creepy. The Otter assistant joins the meeting and shows up on Zoom or Google Meet as like a separate guest and everyone gets freaked out and is a versus granola uses your local sound on your computer, takes notes, however, they've trained the model to actually summarize the notes and give you action items is good. So here's a product that is probably worth paying like 10 bucks a month or whatever their pricing is, and it could work. Maybe it'll be a sustainable business, or maybe OpenAI will somehow or any other large player

• 15:57Speaker 01

  will be able to kind of just abstract away that specific service and kill their business. But there's that side of it. Then on the actual foundation model side, as you said, we have the OpenAI's and the Anthropics and the Mistral's and now Grok from XAI. All of these, their products all look kind of similar. There's a chat interface. Obviously, OpenAI's operator was a completely new interface and new looking thing. Gemini and OpenAI all have good voice modes. You know, it still all looks the same. So that's the side where

• 16:36Speaker 01

  I do believe Casey's right, that that part of the entire stack will get completely commoditized. And the idea that they're the ones continuing to raise the most money and have the richest valuations does not make sense to me.

• 16:51Alex Kantrowitz?

  Let's go to Benedict Evans. He's talking about this commoditization issue issue that Casey pointed out. OpenAI and all other foundation model labs have no moat or defensibility except access to capital. They don't have product market fit outside of coding and marketing, and they don't really have products either, just text boxes and APIs for other people to build products. Deep research, which we talked about last week, is one attempt amongst many, both to create a product with some stickiness and to instantiate a use case. But on one hand, perplexity claims to launch the same thing a few days earlier. And on the other, the best way to manage airwaves today seems to be abstract the LM away as an API call inside software that can manage it, which of course makes the

• 17:36Alex Kantrowitz?

  foundation models themselves even more of a commodity. I think this is such a good point from Benedict Evans, basically saying like, what is defensible if the best way to use these things is to sort of? Implement them in your software and put the proper controls in so that you cannot, so you don't have the same errors that they do out, you know, off the shelf. And I think he makes this other good point, which is that, and it's also something that Casey pointed to. Look how many deep researches we have at this point. I mean, there's four of them. There's four deep researches. OpenAI has one. Google has one. Google was first. Grok has one and now perplexity has one.

• 18:18Alex Kantrowitz?

  And so if you ask me like, what are the modes for these companies? And where are these, you know, trillion dollar valuations coming from? I don't know. I think some of these skeptics have a point.

• 18:29Speaker 01

  No, I welcome Benedict to team. It's the product, not the model. We still haven't gotten our T-shirts made, but if and when we do, I'll make sure to send you one. Because yeah, he laid it out perfectly that the, and having built on this stuff, it's so easy often to just switch whatever model you're looking at. Like you build something and then you just change an API call and that's it. And as you said, deep research, what's, what's almost terrifying and amusing is when I read the words, deep research in this quote, I actually didn't know what he was talking about. Cause I, I've actually started using perplexity's deep research this week, which they launched off of deep sea car one within days.

• 19:14Speaker 01

  So yeah, I think it's very clear that those kind of interfaces, those kind of use cases are going to be completely commoditized. I still give Google an advantage here because like the distribution side of it is going to become even more important. Gemini is still getting there in terms of the integration and Gmail and other areas. It's still not great, but like, I think. The as those get commoditized, the distribution becomes even more important because if you can inject these type of features into places people already are, it becomes a lot more useful than having to

• 19:57Speaker 01

  get more people to to your platform, though ChatGPT actually just came out today and said now they have 400 million.

• 20:04Alex Kantrowitz?

  So, speaking again of this commoditization of everything, and has DeepSeek been commoditized at this point? So this is actually coming from the Big Technology Discord. And, look, folks, I'm not gonna, I won't spend too much time hitting you all over the head with the Discord pitch, but it has been pretty fun in there. We have 54 people in there, and it's for Big Technology paid subscribers. And if you want to join, you can just go to bigtechnology.com, find the story that says, "Let's talk DeepSeek AI, etc. on Big Technology's new Discord server", sign up for the paid tier, and then join us. I think it's been awesome, Rajan. The signal to noise has been insane, like it is the, some of the highest value conversations I'm having on AI already.

• 20:48Speaker 01

  Oh, no, I completely agree. Signal to noise ratio, I think, is how, my other chats certainly do not equal the same quality in signal to noise, but yeah, and I've been, I've been learning a good deal.

• 21:00Alex Kantrowitz?

  It's been cool. So we got, we have some real builders in there, and I just started a memes channel, so. I apologize for what I'm gonna put in there, but it's gonna be fun.

• 21:09Speaker 01

  As all chats go.

• 21:10Alex Kantrowitz?

  So yeah, sign up for the Big Technology Premier, the premium subscription, it's just $8 a month or $80 a year, and you can join us in the Discord. And if not, no worries, we'll just talk with you on the podcast here. So, this is from the Discord, though. Someone wrote, "It looks like Google just DeepSeeked itself." DeepSeek, of course, dropped the price of a lot of stuff, and here we go. This is Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking, an input token is 7.5 cents per million on Flash Thinking, and it's 55 cents for DeepSeek R1. Output token, 30 cents per million, and DeepSeek R1, $2.19. It is, I mean, I, you know,

• 21:55Alex Kantrowitz?

  whether the quality is the same or not, it is just amazing to me that like, talk, what happens when it's a commodity, right? The margin compresses. I gave a talk about this at Web Summit two years ago. The margin will compress when everything is a commodity. Margins are flying out of the game right now for these foundational model companies.

• 22:13Speaker 01

  Well, you wanted Jevon's paradox, everybody. You're getting it. Because if, when we're all two weeks or three weeks ago now, talking about Jevon's paradox and the idea that when things are commoditized, they will be used more. And that's the like, really, I don't want to say desperate, but it's the, the argument that, okay, if this goes down from what used to be like three or four bucks down to seven cents, but we're going to now distribute this at a much larger scale because people are going to build a lot more with it. So we'll make more money. Uh, I don't know. I don't know. I think it's the product, not the model, is just getting even more real for this. And Gemini 2.0 flash thinking, not the greatest

• 22:56Speaker 01

  name, which we've discussed many times.

• 22:59Alex Kantrowitz?

  They get worse. It's amazing.

• 23:00Speaker 01

  They get worse, but you know what? The models are getting better. I've started using Gemini a lot more. Gemini voice is really, really good. The latency on it, the voices they use on it, the conversational ability of it. So I think that, again, this going back from a cost standpoint, and also remember, everyone who is already sitting in Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure, if these models and the actual building capabilities within those get really good, they're always going to beat an OpenAI. Like, if you already have a contract and an entire customer success team with Google, why would you then waste your time with OpenAI if it's more expensive and not as good?

• 23:46Alex Kantrowitz?

  I mean, you wouldn't. So this is, yeah, it's an argument for Google and an argument for, for Microsoft also. And there was this hilarious moment in the Dwarke interview with Satya, where he goes to Satya, he says, all right, you tweeted about Jevon's paradox after DeepSeek. What is so expensive about artificial intelligence today that I would use more of it if it was cheaper? Because for my vantage point, it's already pretty cheap. It was a great question. Well, of course, you and I just paid 200 bucks for unlimited ChatGPT. So this is like a stupid thing for me to be saying in that context. But I think the big problem is, again, like, what are people going to do with it? Not they want to use it so much that it has to be cheaper for them to use it. Now, maybe on the enterprise

• 24:30Alex Kantrowitz?

  side, it makes sense to, you know, this Jevon's paradox thing makes sense, especially in the eyes of Satya Nadella, who's selling to enterprises and selling that compute. But it was a really good question. And Satya was basically like, listen, he's like, the price needs to come down and the model needs to be better also.

• 24:46Speaker 01

  Well, no, but I would disagree on that because it's still such, even when OpenAI, let's say it's not 400 million, but I think whatever the other numbers, 200, 300 million of users of ChatGPT, it's still tiny relative to the overall population. And the number of use cases and for the average person are still tiny. So I do think that most people, the idea of spending 30 bucks a month on ChatGPT Pro or 20 bucks or whatever it is, like, they're not ready to do that. And also knowing that most of these companies are losing gobs of money. So they're essentially subsidizing our, meaning you and me, our

• 25:26Speaker 01

  use. So I do think that there is a world that the more use cases that like the average people, a person adopts, it'll, it'll be important, the actual cost to the individual.

• 25:39Alex Kantrowitz?

  I accept that. Ranjan for Microsoft CEO. That was even a better answer than Satya gave.

• 25:45Speaker 01

  I don't know. After his nonsensical, what was it?

• 25:49Alex Kantrowitz?

  Benchmark hacking.

• 25:49Speaker 01

  Nonsensical benchmark hacking, Satya gets to stay.

• 25:53Alex Kantrowitz?

  He'll, he'll stay. He'll be the king. There's another, Lord almighty, another AI model to talk about this week. We'll go quick through this. Elon Musk's XAI has released its latest flagship model, Grok 3. This is according to TechCrunch. Grok is XAI's answer to models like OpenAI's GPT-4O and Google's Gemini. It can analyze images and respond to questions and powers a number of features on X. XAI has used an enormous data center in Memphis, which we've talked about here on the show, containing around 200,000 GPUs to train Grok 3. XAI claims Grok 3 beats GPT-4O on some benchmarks. An early version of Grok 3 also scored competitively in Chatbot Arena. I used it. It has, it spells out its chain of thought in some really interesting ways.

• 26:38Alex Kantrowitz?

  It is supposed to be kind of edgy and real, but I always like find it to be, I want it to be good, but I find it to be cringe and I just feel like it's like the Steve Buscemi thing, like how do you do fellow kids when it, when it responds to me. But I'll just say this about, about Grok. I want to know how well this performs. I think that Elon is such a polarizing figure that the people that like Elon say it's the, you know, the next generation of model and better than everything else. And the people that hate Elon say that it, the, it's filled with nonsensical benchmark hacking. I mean, it's really, really tough to get a solid read on how it's performing, you know, maybe outside of Chatbot Arena. What do you think about this, Ron John?

• 27:19Speaker 01

  Well, I think the overall space of benchmarking, for me personally, I don't want to call it nonsensical, and Satya is using his words, but like, to me, the way, like, the benchmarking is always done at such a theoretical level, using whatever test has been developed or using, and we saw this with like, what was it, 4O was 90% or 80% of the way to AGI based on a test that was defined in 2021. I think, to me, like, you see this stuff and you feel it when you're actually using these products. And it's so hard, and I don't know, like, I feel there needs to just be like a normie benchmarking

• 28:04Speaker 01

  where you just ask, you don't try to like fool it with a math problem, or you don't try to like have it create some like PhD level thing, but you just ask it some like pretty straightforward questions and see if it gets it wrong or right. I mean, I've even done that where if you're trying to test some type of rag tool, like a retrieval augmented generation. Put in a bunch of documents and ask it like five questions that you already know the answer to, see if it gets it right or not. And a lot of the times, like OpenAI connecting to Google ChatGPT, connecting to Google Drive, even with Claude, you ask questions and it just doesn't get stuff right. So like numbers, really specific facts, I don't know what benchmark would actually show that, but.

• 28:47Alex Kantrowitz?

  I think it exists, though. I mean, that's, isn't that Chatbot Arena where basically they put two outputs of Chatbot side by side and you let, they let you vote on what the better one is?

• 28:56Speaker 01

  That's the closest we have. That's, I agree, that's the closest. But who is using Chatbot Arena? Come on, like.

• 29:01Alex Kantrowitz?

  People who care about this stuff.

• 29:03Speaker 01

  Exactly. But the real, the value is going to be accrued to people who don't currently care and who just want to use it and not spend their time in Chatbot Arena.

• 29:13Alex Kantrowitz?

  No, I'm not saying Chatbot Arena is a valuable program in and of itself, but I think we can rely on it as a pretty good evaluation. And, you know, I, as we're talking, I'm taking a look at Chatbot Arena. And guess what's number one on Chatbot Arena? It is Grok 3. So there's an answer.

• 29:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, but you don't think that can get gamed pretty well by?

• 29:33Alex Kantrowitz?

  I guess it could. I guess.

• 29:34Speaker 01

  I mean, come on.

• 29:35Alex Kantrowitz?

  Elon's fans go into Chatbot Arena and they say, let's find the edgiest, realist answers and vote them up.

• 29:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, ask some questions where you want something slightly more not politically correct. And then you'll guess pretty easily which one is Grok 3. And again, if they're the type of user that would spend time on Chatbot Arena, I think in terms of persona would be an Elon fan. So I think like, this stuff can get gamed, basically. I want to know when my mom is using ChatGPT versus Claude or whatever it is and whatever questions she wants to ask, who's going to give the best answer?

• 30:16Alex Kantrowitz?

  Let's go back to Casey Newton. He says, "If you accept that Grok is a state-of-the-art model, not a single person working in AI believes it will stay there for long." Leading AI labs push out new models every few days, and any innovations are almost all quickly copied and absorbed by their rivals. Speaking to people who work inside these labs, you get the sense that none of that really matters. To the true believers, AI is the final technology, the one that will invent all the others, and almost all the rewards lay simply in getting there first. They seem not to be building traditional moats for their businesses out of a sense that they don't really need them, that once

• 30:57Alex Kantrowitz?

  superintelligence arrives, the world will shift from scarcity to abundance, and the need for money will disappear. For now, that vision remains strictly in the realm of science fiction, but a lot of bills are going to come due between now and then." I think that is a really great analysis, and really ties together a lot of what we've been talking about. Where's the ROI on the Ilya thing? Can Mira Murati's company exist? Where is all the products coming from these labs? I think Casey puts it really well and really succinctly. The people that believe in this, and I've heard this before, either believe it goes to infinity or zero, and so therefore they're investing it, and therefore

• 31:40Alex Kantrowitz?

  they're betting on it. And basically, as long as it survives long enough, to the point where it gets to be good enough that it can invent other things, then they're good. But this is, and again, I was speaking about this with Reid Hoffman a couple of weeks ago, that's a big bet. That is a very big and dangerous bet to make.

• 32:00Speaker 01

  It's a big and dangerous bet. I'm guessing a lot of the investment community either made, I mean, made paper returns on OpenAI already, or has FOMO for not being in the early rounds of OpenAI. So I think, yeah, this feeling or thesis, and me sitting here in New York, I don't come across that many people. I feel like if you're... In Silicon Valley, maybe you'll hear this more, but I think Casey put it really well. There is this almost religious belief that the, the game here is to just build this either AGI or superintelligence or whatever you want to call it. And that will magically solve all the business challenges. Everyone will pay you for the product.

• 32:43Speaker 01

  Everyone will pay you untold amounts of money for the product. And I guess I don't look at it like that, so.

• 32:51Alex Kantrowitz?

  It's kind of like a science fiction investment thesis. I mean, I guess you have to be believing in science fiction in some sense. You're investing in technology, but this is, it's pretty bold.

• 33:00Speaker 01

  Let's go back to that, that pitch scenario of Ilya and the VCs. Cause I wish Silicon Valley on HBO was still around, cause right now.

• 33:09Alex Kantrowitz?

  I could never watch that show. It's way too close to home for me. Just couldn't.

• 33:13Speaker 01

  I loved it.

• 33:14Alex Kantrowitz?

  I lived it when I was living in the Bay area. So I was good.

• 33:17Speaker 01

  That's true.

• 33:18Alex Kantrowitz?

  I saw some crazy stuff. I was, uh, there's a scene in Kevin Roos's book about, uh, some young kid telling him that he's building an automation company and calling it a boomer remover. And yes, and I was there when he told, he was telling both of us this. I'm good with Silicon.

• 33:37Speaker 01

  Boomer remover.

• 33:38Alex Kantrowitz?

  I'm good with Silicon Valley, man. I mean, I, I'm happy I spent time there. I'll probably live there again at some point, uh, but I don't need to watch that show.

• 33:46Speaker 01

  All right, that's fair.

• 33:47Alex Kantrowitz?

  It's too much. And, and what about, um, research removers? So, you know, let's go back to Benedict Evans just for a minute. So we've wrapped our too many AI companies, uh, segment, probably too many, but if they're right about this science fiction vision, then joke's on us. Uh, but as, as I was reading through, I actually went to, um, I read through the full Benedict Evans post, and it was actually quite interesting because Benedict Evans is a researcher, an analyst, uh, and he put deep research through the motions, basically trying to see if it was capable. And what he found was, was quite interesting. He found that basically it does decent research, but it's often quoting from surface level sources,

• 34:31Alex Kantrowitz?

  uh, often misses obvious sources that are more definitive and it's just incomplete. Let me read from him. Uh, are you telling me that today's model gets, uh, this table, one, one that he had to produce 85% right? And the next version will get it 85.5 or 91% correct? That doesn't help me. If there are mistakes in the table, it doesn't matter how many there are, I can't trust it. If on the other hand, you think that these models will go to being 100% right, that would change everything, but that would also be a binary change in the nature of these systems, not a percentage change, and we don't know if that's even possible. We don't know if the error rate will go away, and so we don't know whether we should be building products that presume the model will sometimes be wrong,

• 35:15Alex Kantrowitz?

  or whether in a year or two, we will be building products that presume we can rely on the model by itself. That's quite different to the limitations of other important technologies, from PCs to the web to smartphones, where we knew in principle what could change and what couldn't. Excellent analysis here. Basically, he's saying like, these models keep improving, so they get like 85% right, 90% right, 95. He's like, why am I going to use a research report, a research tool, that I know may never get to 100% right? And if it does get to 100% right, then it's a totally different tech. What do you think about this?

• 35:50Speaker 01

  I like this. I think this is a really smart take on it, especially the part around, like, should we be building products with the assumption that this is 85% right, or 91% right, or whatever it is? Should we be educating people today on how to use a research product that is, call it 85% right? There's tremendous value in that. I do believe, I've been using it more and more myself, and again, I'm not going to pay ChatGPT or OpenAI 200 bucks now, because perplexities is pretty good. It's good enough that I'm okay not spending 200 bucks. Is it a starting point? Is it, is that 85% good?

• 36:34Speaker 01

  How should I look at the data being presented? How should I look at the sources? Like, me spending time on how to use it at this error rate is actually valuable for me, and then it makes me a better user of it. But these companies are not going to stand, like, do that, though. They're not going to build a product for an 85% because they have to promise that it's going to get to 100%. So now they're going to keep pushing, they're not going to improve the product, and now, this is what I worry about, and I've been saying AI has a brand problem over and over again, because they're going to keep building for that 100% accuracy. Maybe they get there in six months, a year, two years. But in the meantime, more and more people are going to be like, oh, well, this is useless

• 37:18Speaker 01

  because they're going to see wrong things rather than just even it's like if you use Google search or Wikipedia, you learned to use it. You learn that if I use Google search, the best result, if I click the first one, might not be the best one. That's okay. I'm going to work my way through the list. This is a process. So I think this is the smartest point on this is that companies like the way we actually release these products into the wild, there's a big disconnect here right now.

• 37:48Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yep, definitely. And speaking of AI's branding problem, you got to think about humane, but we'll talk about that in this, well, it's not the second half because we're in the second half already, but after the break. But before we get to the break, I want to talk about one more piece of the consequences of deep research, which I, I think the handing tasks off to AI already, there's already some early research that it's atrophying people's brains. Uh, and this is from four or four media. It's about a Microsoft study. Microsoft study finds AI makes human cognition atrophied and unprepared. A new paper from researchers at Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon University finds that as humans increasingly rely on generative AI in their work, they use less critical

• 38:31Alex Kantrowitz?

  thinking, which can result in the deterioration of cognitive faculties that ought to be preserved. So it's a key irony of automation that by mechanizing routine tasks and leaving exception handling to the human user, you deprive the user of the routine opportunities to practice their judgment and strengthen their cognitive musculature, leave them atrophied and unprepared when the expectations do arid us. Interesting that it's coming out of Microsoft research, uh, but this makes sense to me, right? Like people say that when you use GPS as opposed to a map, that part of your brain kind of goes away. Lord help me, I couldn't get around with a map today. And so maybe we're going to experience the same thing on a wider scale when it comes to these products like deep research or even just the chat GPTs.

• 39:15Alex Kantrowitz?

  What do you think about this, Ron John?

• 39:17Speaker 01

  I think it's both correct, but not worrying. I think, as you said, GPS, I mean, I honestly have outsourced a part of my brain where I remember where I keep things with air tags. And now literally before I would look around for my phone or AirPods or keys, and now I go straight to my phone and find the item and beep it. Like I've completely outsourced that part of my brain. So I think. There's always good and bad in these kind of things, but I do think, and you have a Paul Graham piece a bit later, I think the pro- and it's going back to what I was saying a second ago, the process of researching in itself is valuable. Understanding how to look through what you're presented, if it's 85% right, is valuable.

• 40:02Speaker 01

  So I do think that certain parts, but the actual act of having 20 tabs open and having to click on and copy paste into a document, that skill will probably go away. Maybe that's not the worst thing in the world. So I think, I think this one's okay.

• 40:20Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay, let's hear from Paul Graham, uh, being quoted in The Economist, which uses the most economist word ever to start this paragraph, and that is ineluctably? Ineluctably?

• 40:34Speaker 01

  Ineluctably.

• 40:36Alex Kantrowitz?

  Why do people write like this? No one speaks like this. If you speak like this-

• 40:39Speaker 01

  Because you're the economist, editors, they speak like that. They do. I worked at the Financial Times. I can guarantee the economist editors speak like that.

• 40:49Alex Kantrowitz?

  Well, I'm gonna just skip this word. Paul Graham, a Silicon Valley investor, has noted that AI models, by offering to do people's writing for them, risk making them stupid. Writing is thinking, he has said. In fact, there's kind of think, there's kind of a thinking that can only be done by writing. The same is true for research. For many jobs, researching is thinking. Noticing contradictions and gaps is in the conventional wisdom. The risk of outsourcing all your research to a super genius assistant is that you reduce the number of opportunities to have your best ideas. I completely agree with the, about, with this, uh, about writing in particular. I kinda see your yes and no perspective, but I'm also kind of like, probably a bit more concerned than you are because this stuff all seems pretty real to me.

• 41:32Speaker 01

  I'm not denying that I have zero concern on this, but again, I think that over time, people will figure out how to use it. There's gonna be some large number, or some number of people that do use this in a lazy way and do lose the ability to think through writing. But I think overall, I actually had the most random deep research, also related to last week, we were talking about model picking, and, uh, do you, do you know what the opposite of a cake donut is? There's two main kinds of donuts.

• 42:06Alex Kantrowitz?

  A, is it a potato donut?

• 42:09Speaker 01

  No, no, no. No, but.

• 42:11Alex Kantrowitz?

  Is it? Is cake donut? It is.

• 42:13Speaker 01

  There's cake and you know, like the kind of fluffier ones that are, uh.

• 42:18Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay.

• 42:18Speaker 01

  Anyway, this came up.

• 42:20Alex Kantrowitz?

  A bread donut.

• 42:21Speaker 01

  The answer, I'm not a huge donut guy, but this just came up.

• 42:24Alex Kantrowitz?

  So I'm a little ashamed of myself now, but sorry. Yeah, let's hear it.

• 42:27Speaker 01

  You can become an expert thanks to deep research. So I, I was asking, and because I use not Google for most of my searches nowadays. I asked, you know, what is the other type of donut other than a cake donut? I asked perplexity. I accidentally had deep research still clicked and rather than giving me a simple answer. I received an entire term paper, essentially a PhD paper. The opposite of cake donuts, a comprehensive exploration of yeast raised donuts and their contrasting characteristics. And it goes on and it provides like 6,000 words. It's a yeast donut around this. And this was where I was also like, how much random stuff is going to get generated by either people

• 43:12Speaker 01

  asking dumb questions, asking simple questions and picking the wrong model. But these research tools are, uh, they're quite something.

• 43:20Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay. I'm, I changed my mind. I'm into this. This will expand the human capacity for cognition.

• 43:25Speaker 01

  I mean, I might, I'm, you might become a donut expert now. I'm, I've learned more about the, uh, the opposite defined by contrasting leavening methods, textures, preparation techniques and color app, culinary applications is unequivocally the yeast raised donut.

• 43:44Alex Kantrowitz?

  That's pretty good. I think that these deep research tools are going to be a godsend to stoners everywhere. Who instead of browsing Wikipedia will start to read long, half true, uh, research, deep research entries about lots of weird stuff. All right. Well, maybe deep research will give stoners something else to do outside of talking with their Amazon echoes all day long about the meaning of life. And, uh, I think they're going to have some competition because the Echo and Alexa are about to get better. We'll talk about that right after the break. This episode is brought to you by Avpoint. Everyone's racing to roll out AI right now. Co-pilots, chatbots, agents doing real work. But here's the part nobody loves talking about.

• 44:27Alex Kantrowitz?

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• 45:11Alex Kantrowitz?

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• 45:56Alex Kantrowitz?

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• 46:17Alex Kantrowitz?

  And we're back here on Big Technology Podcast Friday Edition. Couple of news items to hit before we get out of here for the weekend. Next week, Amazon is going to have a big revamp of Alexa that it will be announcing on Wednesday. This is from Reuters. The AI service will be able to respond to multiple prompts in a sequence and as company and company executives have said, even act as an agent on behalf of users by taking actions for them without their direct involvement. This contrasts with the current iteration, which generally handles only a single request at a time. So it looks like at long last, we're going to see an Alexa update.

• 46:58Alex Kantrowitz?

  I am planning to be in attendance and I'm hoping that we'll be podcasting in or around the event, so stay tuned for that. But I'm personally looking forward to this. I have three Echoes in my apartment here in New York and I really want them to work well, to work at all, to even just play some music when I ask them to do it, where sometimes they do and sometimes they don't. Am I getting over my skis being excited about the Amazon Alexa overhaul? Ranjan, and what are you looking out for here?

• 47:29Speaker 01

  Well, I don't want to rain on your parade as a Apple Home user with multiple HomePods everywhere who just gets more and more disappointed by Siri in every new release. But I do, I want to root for you. I want to believe that Amazon is going to figure out. I do think, and I'm, I'm almost confused how good voice has become Gemini on the Gemini app, ChatGPT advanced voice mode. They're so good that there's no reason these voice assistants should not be good. I don't understand, like I, I'm genuinely baffled why even the latency with Gemini

• 48:13Speaker 01

  and stuff like that, like it's really good. So I've been very confused as to what the holdup with all these companies are. And honestly, Amazon brought us voice assistants. Alexa was one of the most revolutionary devices, I think, of the 2010s. So I think if anyone can do it, I think they have a shot.

• 48:34Alex Kantrowitz?

  Well, it's coming and it looks like it's going to potentially be a subscription product. This is all speculation, but the post says, Amazon previously planned to launch the improved Alexa. With the free trial period, after which customers would have to pay a subscription fee. It is going to be delayed, the post says, so they're going to announce it on the 26th, but we might not see it until the end of March. And the opportunity is massive for Amazon here. Also from the post, Alexa is free on the more than 500 million Echo devices or Alexa-enabled devices around the world that can play music, dim lights, and read the headlines. So if they get this right, massive opportunity. But if they don't, it'll just be more disappointment.

• 49:19Alex Kantrowitz?

  But the cool thing about having a piece of hardware that is software-enabled is you can update it at any time and take something that's mildly disappointing and make it shockingly beautiful and wonderful. And so maybe that is what Amazon will do.

• 49:32Speaker 01

  The thing that would worry me here is, and I'm curious if you have use cases beyond, I don't know if you have it turn off and on lights, but ask the weather, ask sports scores, maybe ask some like recipe information, like do you have any more advanced use cases currently?

• 49:52Alex Kantrowitz?

  I used to do lights. I don't do lights anymore. I think it stopped working as well as I wanted it to and sort of gave up on the whole smart home concept. I do music a lot. I do timers. But every now and again, when my wife and I have an argument about something, I will summon Alexa and say, what's the answer here? And it does get it right every now and again. And I just think that that is going to be like one of the cool use cases. If you have it, you know, be somewhat conversational, start conversations, facilitate things, and be able to answer accurately and sort of actually get the context of your question when you ask something.

• 50:31Speaker 01

  Do you know what I will never do? Do you know what I will never do? While in an argument with my wife, turn to my smart, my voice assistant and ask who is right? Because does that, does that really go well?

• 50:45Alex Kantrowitz?

  Huge miss. It's a huge miss. Honestly, honestly, it really does diffuse some of the tension because you're just like, well, at least we're not as dumb as this Echo here. And then, you know.

• 50:55Speaker 01

  All right. All right. But if it gets smart, what if it gets smart and starts, Alex, you're wrong. You're wrong. You're like. Is that okay?

• 51:05Alex Kantrowitz?

  Look, then I'm owned. I have to admit it, right?

• 51:07Speaker 01

  That's true. Two against one.

• 51:09Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. I just think to, I mean, this is not marriage advice or relationship advice, but

• 51:16Speaker 01

  I sincerely not marital advice.

• 51:19Alex Kantrowitz?

  If you're trying to find ways to bring common ground with those that you love, I think that you might want to just try bringing a voice AI into the conversation and seeing what happens. Maybe it will be great. Maybe it will be terrible, but at least you tried and that's what matters.

• 51:40Speaker 01

  If any listeners do go down this path, write in and let us know how it went.

• 51:46Alex Kantrowitz?

  You can find us at [email protected]. I don't even know if that's your email address, but, but yeah, please don't, please don't do this in any high stakes moment.

• 51:57Speaker 01

  No, no.

• 51:59Alex Kantrowitz?

  So that will not be our fault.

• 52:01Speaker 01

  Speaking of high stakes.

• 52:03Alex Kantrowitz?

  Just keep it in the low stakes argument. You know, what's the capital of Greece? When you say Athens, she says Sparta. And then you call in your voice assistant to tell you the capital of Macedonia. It's just how it goes.

• 52:16Speaker 01

  Okay, that is fair. I'll give you, if it's purely information or factual, maybe, but if it's like.

• 52:23Alex Kantrowitz?

  Can you believe that? Full blown. You never pick up the kids. We're always at your parents. Alexa, who's right?

• 52:28Speaker 01

  Who's right?

• 52:29Alex Kantrowitz?

  I think that.

• 52:30Speaker 01

  Well, I've been tracking your, both of your movement regularly for the last two years, and I can tell you exactly who's right.

• 52:38Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. Honestly, it's true innovation that we need. It's going to herald the new American century and once again, take the AI discussion away from model and towards product. See, just trying to help here, Ron John.

• 52:50Speaker 01

  It's the product.

• 52:51Alex Kantrowitz?

  All right. A few minutes on the humane pin before we leave. The humane pin is dead. If you all remember, it was this pin that you would wear. On your shirt, basically, and you could touch it and could give you AI stuff and it would project stuff on your hand when you needed some information. HP will acquire the assets from Humane, the maker of the wearable AI pin introduced in late 2023 for 116 million. The deal will include the majority of Humane's employees in addition to its software platform and intellectual property. However, it will not include Humane's AI pin, which will be wound down. I saw a great meme about this. I should drop it in the Discord meme section

• 53:33Alex Kantrowitz?

  about someone hitting the Humane pin and it projecting on their hand that their printer is low on toner. But it is really a, by the way, they raised 230 million dollars. So it really is a ignominious end. Is that the right way to pronounce it? For one of the AI era's worst conceived and worst marketed products. Rest in peace, Humane pin. We will not miss you. We will remember you with the likes of Quibi and Quickster and other terrible failures that began with Q. But you began with an H. Humane pin. HP, HP now stands for Humane pin. That's the rules. I don't make them up.

• 54:14Speaker 01

  That's the rules. I think it's not the worst outcome. Again, as MG Siegler put out, they're selling for 116 million. So for something that feels like this just dramatic a failure, they somehow got something out of it, at least initial investors. But I was thinking about, remember, we came up with the concept of pin casts instead of podcasts specific to the pin? That's what I'm a little disappointed that where you're like, it's some kind of interactive podcast that you're listening to and it's, you're talking to your pin and it's projecting some information. I'm a little disappointed. I did not bet at all on making pin casts.

• 54:55Alex Kantrowitz?

  That's right. That should have been, we should have done that. But we didn't. And we could have really, I think, saved Humane with either pin casts or just imagine you're, you're in a dispute with a loved one.

• 55:12Speaker 01

  It all comes back to solving arguments.

• 55:14Alex Kantrowitz?

  Things are going rough, like real rough. And you're like, sorry, honey. Let's, let's bring in our pin.

• 55:19Speaker 01

  Let's bring in the pin.

• 55:20Alex Kantrowitz?

  You tap your pin twice and then it settles the matter for you.

• 55:25Speaker 01

  And it's right above my heart as well.

• 55:27Alex Kantrowitz?

  You ask who is right and it projects the answer on your hand in green. Let's read MG Seigler just before we go. He goes, a regular person might read that headline that the, um, sorry, that the company sold for 130 million and think, wow, a startup sold for nine figures. Impressive. Of course, it's not impressive in this case. It's a fire sale for a company that has been under duress for months after their product, the AI pin, failed to catch fire in the market. Actually, that's not technically true. There was a little risk, there was a literal risk of fire when charging the device, which led to a recall. I completely forgot the humane pin lights on fire side of this, uh, of this recall.

• 56:05Speaker 01

  Never good.

• 56:05Alex Kantrowitz?

  Of this story, but apparently that's what happened.

• 56:09Speaker 01

  I do think, I do wonder these kinds of things. If they weren't, if those launch videos weren't so bad, did it stand a chance? Like sometimes you wonder like the, was it really the technology? Also, it was released at a point where voice interaction with generative AI was, it was again, it was only two years ago, a year and a half ago. The voice mode and voice interaction have like exponentially jumped in quality. So it's a timing issue of one, but the marketing in those launch videos will live in history as some of the worst I've ever seen. And did, could this have stood a chance if their launch videos were just memed into oblivion?

• 56:55Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, that's, that's what MG Seigler is basically saying here. He says, the PR strategy was obviously a disaster from the get go. This is easy to say in hindsight, but many people were saying it in real time from their grandiose but nebulous introduction video to their first product tease on stage at TED. It was seemingly less of a stround, uh, less of a sound strategy than a vignette of cliches. And by God, we've heard a lot of vignettes of cliches lately. This is me, not MG, but, uh, he says it also includes a 699 price point. That was obviously never going to work for this product. And on top of that, a monthly subscription fee, like cool. Everyone was like, oh, that might be cool. Maybe we weren't, but just like the dynamics of this business, uh, were never going to work. And that kind of leaves me to our final question of the week, which is.

• 57:40Alex Kantrowitz?

  There is something to be said of like, you kind of got to hand it to these people for actually going ahead and building. But the other side of that is like, I don't know, do you have to applaud everybody that tries? Or can you just say, that sucked, and I'm disappointed that happened? And I'm kind of in the second category on this one.

• 57:58Speaker 01

  Well, I think I have a lot more sympathy or empathy for people who weren't able to raise $240 million before even launching the product. And then the production value and just knowing how expensive those launch videos must have been to make and how much they must have spent on the agencies. So no, I don't have sympathy for them. I think like, you could just, come on, you can make a good engaging video pretty easily nowadays. You should have made one. And maybe we would all be wearing our pins as we argue with loved ones and listen to our pin casts and, and the world would actually be okay right now. Everything would have been okay.

• 58:41Alex Kantrowitz?

  They should have called in.

• 58:42Speaker 01

  If Humane didn't screw it up.

• 58:44Alex Kantrowitz?

  They should have called in Cantor, Rosenroy. We would have told them, got to show the use case, got to show the product, and got to show the humanity of your pin. And instead, they burned through $240 million.

• 58:56Speaker 01

  Could have saved democracy.

• 58:58Alex Kantrowitz?

  Could have saved it all.

• 58:58Speaker 01

  Democracy, yeah.

• 58:59Alex Kantrowitz?

  Instead, there's no more pin. It's now, it's now with the printers.

• 59:03Speaker 01

  That is the, the ultimate graveyard of innovation, I think, that we've ever, you can, one can ever imagine Hewlett Packers printers division.

• 59:13Alex Kantrowitz?

  There goes any chance that HP will ever sponsor this podcast, but it was worth it. So, thank you. Thank you for that, Ron John. But if you're listening out there, HP, good luck with Humane. Maybe you'll do something cool. And we're waiting for it.

• 59:26Speaker 01

  Bring back the pin.

• 59:28Alex Kantrowitz?

  Bring back the pin. In the meantime, we're wishing you all love and success and happiness and tranquility at home. And, and remember, if anything goes wrong, just, just ask Alexa.

• 59:39Alex Kantrowitz?

  Ron John, great to see you as always. Thanks for coming on the show.

• 59:41Speaker 01

  All right. Hopefully my marriage survives the weekend and I don't ask Alexa to resolve anything.

• 59:47Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay, everybody. Thank you for listening. Chris Hayes is coming on next week. We actually have a very lively and fun conversation about how social media and publishing differs and all this other stuff that he's been talking about on his tour about The Sirens College is his number one bestselling book. So I hope you stay tuned for that. Thank you for listening. Thank you to Ron John and we'll see you next time on Big Dick Technology Podcast.

• 1:00:09Speaker 02

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