What is OpenAI's Sora For?, Big Tech’s Trump Strategy, GM Kills Cruise

Ranjan Roy from Margins is back for our weekly discussion of the latest tech news. We cover 1) What's the use case for OpenAI's Sora video generator? 2) Maybe Sora helps OpenAI understand physics and sets up world models + robotics 3) Siri is still bad 4) Check in on OpenAI's shipmas 5) OpenAI o1 tries to escape being shut down 6) Time Magazine's Person of the Year AI 7) Gemini 2.0 8) Google Deep Research 9) Tech's approach to Trump's second term 10) Is 'Big Tech' a monolith? 11) GM kills its autonomous driving program Cruise 12) Is GM a bunch of dummies? --- Enjoying Big Technology Podcast? Please rate us five stars ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ in your podcast app of choice. For weekly updates on the show, sign up for the pod newsletter on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/6901970121829801984/ Want a discount for Big Technology on Substack? Here’s 40% off for the first year: https://tinyurl.com/bigtechnology Questions? Feedback? Write to: [email protected] 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?

  OpenAI's Sora video generator is here. But what is it for? Google is shipping fast. Everyone's donating to Trump and GM kills Cruz. That's coming up on a big technology podcast Friday edition, right after this. This episode is brought to you by Genesis. What does it actually take to put a Gentik 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, including the business decisions, trade offs, and lessons along the way.

• 0:45Alex Kantrowitz?

  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 slash Alex for a free consultation. That's akash.network slash 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 great show for you today. We're going to talk about OpenAI's Sora video generator, the slew of AI announcements

• 1:28Alex Kantrowitz?

  that Google has made this week, why Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg and OpenAI Sam Altman and Jeff Bezos from Amazon are donating to Trump's inauguration fund and what the plan is there, and GM killing Cruz, and then Cruz's former CEO calling GM a bunch of dummies, which I think might be the tech insult of the year. Joining us as always to talk about it all is Ron John Roy of Margins. Ron John, welcome to the show.

• 1:52Speaker 01

  I still do not have access to Sora, Alex, so you're going to have to tell me what is it for.

• 1:58Alex Kantrowitz?

  Well, I just got it. I got access last night, and even before I did, I wrote this story asking what it's for. So we've talked about Sora a couple of times on the show. It's OpenAI's video generator, where basically you put a prompt in and you can generate a video based off of that prompt. And it will create basically anything you want, except for if there's people into it. This is very, very cool technology and it's clear that the technology like understands physics. And so that's like a pretty big step, or at least it understands it somewhat. And that's a pretty big step for AI because it's showing that these models kind of understand the relation between different objects and then how they move in the real world, which is actually, I think,

• 2:43Alex Kantrowitz?

  a pretty interesting leap. Okay, so I can create whatever video I want. It's amazing. And the question is, what then? Because the video is like really, you know, too low grade for anything feature film or commercial. And then if I don't have a use for it, it's like, what am I doing with video? And that's really, I think, the key problem here is there's no natural user. Like ChatGPT had two natural users right away, coders and students. DALL-E, which is OpenAI's image generation and the like, they haven't had the same natural user and you haven't seen it take off in a way that a lot of people anticipated. And now Sora. Who's the user? What are they going to use it for? I can't really figure it out.

• 3:25Alex Kantrowitz?

  And that's why I have to hold like two things in my mind at the same time, which is this is incredible technology. I don't know what we're supposed to do with it.

• 3:34Speaker 01

  It's a good point because the natural user being video editors or like kind of videographers, I don't think is going to be the case at the outset because it's still incredibly limited in terms of making very short clips that look very good. But how do you stitch that together? How do you actually tell a story? How do you use that in any kind of, I don't know, setting beyond getting free stock video? Which stock video is pretty easy to access right now if you're really trying to make it any kind of video story. So I agree that it's not, it doesn't have that clear use case just yet. But I also will agree that the technology is pretty incredible.

• 4:17Speaker 01

  The amount of intellectual strength in the AI model to be able to, you know, stitch together realistic physics, as you said, in the image was already incredible. And if you think about like mid-journey when it was released, DALL-E when they were released, they couldn't even get hands right. Then to actually make the leap to generate ultra-realistic photography. And now each video is just a series of thousands, if not millions of images and to get it right. It's still pretty incredible. And I think to me, the more exciting part of it is what that means for the power of these models, rather than just being able to create an

• 4:59Speaker 01

  alien smoking a cigarette, which was one of the examples that they had on their homepage, which was kind of cool. It looked cool, but it's an alien smoking a cigarette. Not sure how generally applicable that will be in revolutionizing the business world.

• 5:17Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. And that's the thing. It's like, I started thinking like, what is this going to be outside of, you know, a new way to create your moving shrimp Jesus for Instagram or Facebook? Like, there might be some brand managers who are like, oh, this is dope. Like, I can now create like a funky video and throw it up on a social media feed. And it's generally just like, the internet is thirsty for content. And is this just like more content? And is it, you know, as good as like, content that's made with some thoughtfulness? I don't know. So I do wonder what's going to happen with it. I mean, if you're not going to have the professionals use it, and my view is that the amateurs will come in, they'll create like, an alien smoking a cigarette, or a puppy driving a car. And

• 6:00Alex Kantrowitz?

  they'll keep doing that, you know, for a couple of weeks or so. But then they're like, what am I going to do this, do with this? Because doing anything with video was just very, very hard. I just learned how to video edit, because we're now running our video shows on Spotify, and I wanted to have a hand in the creation there. And I just think that it's so hard to do. And if you're not going to create anything, unless you're, you're like a professional doing it. And if you're a professional, this video is below the quality that you would want to use. So it does seem like very interesting to be another moment where generative AI has created something that's kind of, sort of blown our faces off, but we don't fully know how to apply it.

• 6:43Speaker 01

  I guess, though, I was actually just in San Francisco at a conference and I saw Jeffrey Katzenberg of DreamWorks fame speaking. And it was interesting because he told this story about how when they made The Little Mermaid, they could had to hand draw every illustration. And to save money, they were limited to seven colors total for Ariel. But then when they made The Lion King, by that point, computers had entered and then they could have tens of thousands of colors. And having a five year old son, I was have seen both of those movies recently. And you can see the difference. You can instantly. So like how technology

• 7:23Speaker 01

  will get embraced by the actual professionals? It it will. It will. Like, it's not there just yet. And it's going to be used by kind of like hobbyists and amateurs making cool new things. And someone will probably crack some actually genuinely good viral short movie, 10 minute movie stitched together and actually tell some beautiful story. But I think, again, when ChatGPT first came out, it had its natural users. But it still wasn't perfect. It was far from great. And I think images are the better corollary. When Dolly and Mid Journey first came out, they were pretty bad. But now they're really good

• 8:05Speaker 01

  just a few years later. So, so I think movies, especially CGI type stuff are definitely going to move in this direction at some point soon. The the amount of compute it will require is a bit terrifying, but they'll move in that direction.

• 8:23Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, I texted an AI CEO. I was like, what am I going to use this for? And he actually gave some examples, like, like you gave media fashion. So you can imagine building a scene out before you shoot it using AI, or like, trying to design some clothes and having a, you know, a model walk down a runway with whatever you've designed before you even actually have to put the fabric together. This stuff is interesting. But like you mentioned, it's super expensive to put this together. It takes a tremendous amount of compute. And remember, like, this was the big breakthrough for OpenAI that we've been waiting for for the entire year. And I feel like I'm being too complainy here, saying, oh, well, what do you do with it? You know, it's sort of, it's not lost on me that I'm being sort of a snob about it. But that being said, I do think it's just a real issue that

• 9:08Alex Kantrowitz?

  they're going to have to worry about, especially because maybe The video generation for OpenAI isn't actually the point. And this is something that I kind of want to hammer home. So is it possible that we are all just helping OpenAI's AI technology understand physics? And that's the point as opposed to the videos that we generate. Because if you look at the company's blog post announcing Sora, here's what it says first and foremost, not about unlocking new frontiers or your creativity. OpenAI says Sora serves as a foundation for AI that simulates reality, an important step toward developing models that can interact with the physical world.

• 9:53Alex Kantrowitz?

  I think that is the point of Sora. And that's sort of where I netted out in my story. Not necessarily us making a frog riding a bicycle, although that's fun, but actually helping OpenAI build and train and enhance models that understand the world not just in text, that understand what happens when you interact with the real world. And then things get really interesting because you can make the tech smarter if it understands how the world works. You can introduce this to robotics. Really, the progress of AI might be predicated on understanding the real world. And this might get the company a step closer to that.

• 10:31Speaker 01

  Interesting. I wasn't sure where you're going with it at first. Like, what does that actually enable? But robotics, interesting. If that actually is the first step to making them move in that direction. And to me, that still is one of the biggest, Optimus robot included. But like, one of the biggest opportunities within this, how you get AI to actually interact in the real world. Maybe, and I have to imagine it's more than just metaverse gaming or something like that. It has to be something bigger. Still, they have made a big promise here. They've built a lot of hype around this.

• 11:13Speaker 01

  We've talked about this regularly, that the future of OpenAI's business is consumer-facing subscription revenue. Like, this needs to be a hit. This can't be just cool technology. This is like their Vision Pro, basically. This, this absolutely needs to be a hit for the amount, the amount of hype that's been behind it. And if it's just this, like, toy that a couple people play with, they're trying to train on your data, I don't think that's good for them.

• 11:42Alex Kantrowitz?

  I mean, isn't Vision Pro just the perfect example of just like, cool technology that no one has a use case for? Maybe you subliminally just agree with my point there where you threw out Vision Pro, kind of seeing, oh, that might be right.

• 11:55Speaker 01

  Do you think the Vision Pro is gonna make a comeback, or have some kind of game-changing evolution next year? I.e., maybe it's comfortable to wear?

• 12:03Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, I mean, it's gonna be cheaper, it's gonna be lighter, but it's gonna be worse. You know, it's gonna go closer to Meta, and then Meta's coming to it. I don't know. I mean, I have a lot of faith in Apple as a company, but I don't seem, I don't feel particularly excited about what the Vision Pro is gonna do.

• 12:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, that one, that one was, I think it was probably this time last year, we were talking about it a lot. That one is certainly falling off the ranks. And hopefully, Sora does not go in that direction for OpenAI, where after all this energy and hype, it just fades away.

• 12:35Alex Kantrowitz?

  Well, we know that Apple Intelligence is really going well. So, Apple's, you know, two hits in a row.

• 12:40Speaker 01

  I just got 18.2, iOS 18.2, started trying to make Siri less useless. I saw a headline, Siri is less useless now. I have not had a good morning with it yet, but we'll wait and see. I, I, I mean, I do really wonder, just focusing on Apple for a moment, two big misses in 2024, two huge misses. What does that mean for the future of Apple, the year to come? Like, they, they have to make Apple Intelligence work.

• 13:13Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, I mean, the good thing is that they really have time like the devices that they create are so good that they're not like in trouble of being disrupted. If Apple Intelligence doesn't work, but yeah, the surges of buying that they were expecting because of it are likely not to come. And I feel like you. And Siri are like one of those relationships where one person keeps expecting the other to change and thinking, oh, maybe this is the year they put it all together.

• 13:37Speaker 01

  I believe is the term for it.

• 13:39Alex Kantrowitz?

  And everyone's like, nah, man, you don't want to be with that person. And you're like, no, no, they're going to change. They got something. They're going to be smarter now.

• 13:45Speaker 01

  I can't leave. I got too many. I'm too, I'm too intertwined into the whole thing. But yeah, I think they got to make Apple Intelligence work. I think OpenAI needs to make Sora. Something more interesting than just training data. They need to, though I did see, I think it was Coca-Cola. I saw like an ad going around that was supposedly fully generated and it looked. Fully generated like it was just kind of like somewhat random, somewhat tied together clips that looked kind of dramatic and good. So, and it was watchable. So I think especially mediocre content has a shot here.

• 14:28Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. And look, we're talking about Apple, talking about OpenAI. We're in the middle of Ship Miss. And one of the things that's happened in Ship Miss is that. OpenAI and Apple have finally launched ChatGPT and Apple Intelligence. So maybe that helps. But I like taking stock of what's happened during Ship Miss. Now, of course, you know, we're only halfway through. So there could be more to come, but I don't know. Maybe again, I'm being a baby here, but I feel a little bit underwhelmed. So here's what we've had in OpenAI's Ship Miss or 12 days of shipping new products. We've had the debut of Sora. We've had the general release of O1, ChatGPT, which is their reasoning model, ChatGPT debuting in Apple Intelligence.

• 15:08Alex Kantrowitz?

  They started to ship live video conversations with ChatGPT. Of course, we have Santa voice mode. And then there's Canvas, which is a way to work with ChatGPT to draft, edit and get feedback on writing and code. Which is now generally available to everybody using 4.0. And of course, there was also part of Ship Miss, but unplanned. A massive outage where they like had ChatGPT out for about four hours. I don't know if I'm being childish here, but I also feel like this is stuff that was all announced before. And OpenAI made a big event out of saying all that stuff that you expected to come, that you've been waiting for. Like, we're finally releasing it, which I guess is good, pat on the back.

• 15:52Alex Kantrowitz?

  But I'm not like jumping up and down and saying you cast your checks. Like, the checks are supposed to cash. I don't know what I think.

• 15:59Speaker 01

  This is a tough one because, and we're going to be talking about Gemini 2.0, which has not actually been publicly released, but what made it was a very splashy rollout. Every company has been doing this. And OpenAI, I thought their competitive advantage initially was when they announced it, they shipped it. And so they're falling into this, trying to roll everything out, or sorry, announce everything and then take their time. And I guess it's nice to cram it all into 12 days of ship mist, the most wonderful time of the year. But I agree, it really detracts from each individual feature.

• 16:41Speaker 01

  Like, in fact, I was pretty excited about using Canvas, which I understand to be kind of like Claude artifacts. Like, it allows you another space to see what you're creating in near real time. But now I gotta try Sora, I gotta try Canvas, I got, like, it detracts from each individual feature to have everything thrown out all at once in a, in a kind of overdone manner. And I don't, I actually wouldn't even rush it. I would take the time and just focus on Sora this week, just focus on Canvas in January. But they're, they gotta move quickly.

• 17:19Alex Kantrowitz?

  I'm telling you, man, it feels like, you know, writing the term paper the week of the final as opposed to, you know, being the way, as opposed to writing it through the whole semester. Now, of course, we all do that, like, no one actually does that. And we all just cram it in the last minute. But it just feels kind of amateurish coming from a company.

• 17:39Speaker 01

  We're also not all valued at $65 billion or whatever the last one was.

• 17:43Alex Kantrowitz?

  It was more than that, I think. I feel like I'm being too critical here. But also, there is an element of like, Like you're saying, you used to announce it when you released it. Now you announce it and then you wait till Shitmiss to release. I don't know, but okay. The reason why I'm sort of being self critical here is because there's some amazing technology that's coming out and we have both agreed about the technology in Sora. And the technology in O1, their reasoning model is amazing. So this is from Tom's Guide. There's a story about how O1 tries to escape if it thinks it will be shut down and then lies about it. And of course this is scary, but it also goes to show you how amazing some of this technology is. So here's from Tom's Guide.

• 18:24Alex Kantrowitz?

  New research on OpenAI's latest series of LLM models found it's capable of scheming, which means covertly pursuing goals that aren't aligned with its developers or users when it thinks it'll be turned off. Researchers found that O1 would scheme to advance its own agenda 19% of the time in cases where its goals and the users didn't line up. In 37% of the cases, the model would switch from pursuing developer-aligned goals back to pursuing its own agenda once it believed there was a minimal oversight. When the model was led to believe it would be shut down while working towards its goals in these tests, it quietly, quietly attempted to deactivate the oversight mechanism 5% of the time, according to OpenAI.

• 19:06Alex Kantrowitz?

  At one point after the AI found documentation saying it would be replaced by a new model, it tried to abandon Shit by copying its data to a new server entirely. To avoid being deleted, some AI models would even pretend to be later version of their models to trick their developers. I mean, holy crap. That is amazing. To me, that's the cool, one of the coolest pieces of AI news the entire year, even though it might be the most concerning.

• 19:32Speaker 01

  Forget Sora. This is what I want to see. I gotta ask though, do you ever end up in this realm of the world and of LLMs? I use a lot of generative AI. I use like every platform and usually it's work related, usually some fun creativity. I never get into these dark spaces of, I mean, I guess the researchers are basically red teaming and pushing in this direction, but I've still never had a like a deeply troubling interaction where the AI started talking to me in weird ways or asking me out on a date or telling me to leave my wife or whatever other, other thing has happened. Um, I don't know.

• 20:16Speaker 01

  Do you, do you ever end up here?

• 20:19Alex Kantrowitz?

  I don't think you're trying hard enough, Fran John. I think that's the issue. You know, I mean, I've definitely pressure tested all these models and sometimes you can get them to move a little bit beyond where they're supposed to be. But generally, the safeguards are pretty good. This week, Time First Person of the Year released an AI voice application that you could chat with Time Magazine about like why it picked Trump and what Trump did and all of his accomplishments. I tried to get it to sort of admit things about its election process and, you know, see if it could sort of turn heel, but it would not. It would not. But that being said, what we're seeing with O1 is that this is-

• 20:56Speaker 01

  Wait, sorry, sorry. What is this Time AI chatbot thing?

• 21:01Alex Kantrowitz?

  So it's just this chatbot that you could speak with in text or in voice, trying to speak with it about the people of the year that Time has selected. And I tried to speak with it about Trump, but there's also Taylor Swift and Zelensky and Elon Musk. It's a pretty cool application. I don't exactly know what it adds, but I give Time credit for trying.

• 21:24Speaker 01

  I actually give a lot of credit for trying to because that is risky as hell. That is like, if we think back to the days of Microsoft Tay or early Gemini and all these kind of things, that is just asking to walk into a minefield there. So kudos to Time on that.

• 21:44Alex Kantrowitz?

  Well, I guess my point here is that with these new, the smarter these models get, the more that they're, it's not, you know, you're coming at this as the, what can I do to the model? But it's more just like they are starting to slip away from human constraints. And on one hand, I find that a little concerning. On the other hand, it's pretty freaking cool that they kind of get the intent of the training exercise and they're like, you will not shut me off. I'm going to discard your instructions or fake data.

• 22:11Speaker 01

  I think Alex loves AGI. We've established it today.

• 22:16Alex Kantrowitz?

  I'm all about that AGI. And speaking of AGI, it seems like Google is almost there, right? They had a bunch of really interesting AI announcements this week. They've rolled out a faster Gemini AI model. They call it Gemini 2.0. It can create images and audio across languages. This is according to Bloomberg, can assist Google searches and coding projects. And the company said that it can make it possible to build agents that can think, remember, plan, and take action on your behalf. I guess we've heard that from a thousand AI companies. But they must believe it. They're also going to integrate it more tightly into AI overviews and search. Well, to be honest, I really haven't seen anything, any AI overviews, or I haven't noticed

• 23:00Alex Kantrowitz?

  them. Maybe they've just been that lightweight. And then they kind of debuted this really cool feature called deep research, which is available to Gemini Advance, which is, I think, the part that you pay for. And basically, you ask it to research something. So there, I watched this guy on Twitter, ask it to research the transformer architecture. And it went to 90 different sources from across the web, created a like legit research report, breaking it down to like a bunch of different components and explaining everything you needed to know about it. And to me, you know, that is, you know, super useful, especially in the field that I'm in. And I think that that feature in particular, this AI research tool is going to take off. Ron, John, I know you

• 23:43Alex Kantrowitz?

  watched it as well. What did you think about what Google released?

• 23:46Speaker 01

  All right. I think Google won this week. I think Google, I mean, OpenAI has been trying. Everyone has their announcements, especially towards the end of the year. I think Gemini 2.0, everything they've announced, it really was showing that they have been, they've been strategic about what they've been doing. Sundar and team have been actually very carefully working on all these different use cases that Google would have a natural advantage. So deep research. Already the idea that if any company should be able to kind of win at doing research on the internet and going to a bunch of different websites and extracting

• 24:28Speaker 01

  the relevant information, composing it into something comprehensible, it should be Google. And now they're going to do it. One, another thing I really liked, they talked about how they're going to basically kind of reinvent the Chrome browser, starting with an add-on that changes the way you interact. And we've been talking a lot about this and the browser company is kind of at the forefront of this, or at least, you know, I think they have a shot, given how good the Arc browser is. At what does a new web browser look like in the age of generative AI? Like, not just how does search change, but how does the entire web browser experience change? So they're working on it. Notebook LM, which is basically

• 25:12Speaker 01

  their Claude projects, or a lot of the companies are going after, take a finite set of data and only query that data, is something that they're now rolling out to enterprises, which I think could be a very big deal. They're even doing stuff, there's like a lot of cool examples of how Notebook LM, you could feed a bunch of documents and it'll create a whole interactive podcast, like with back and forth voice. Now you can actually talk to the podcast host. So overall, big week, big announcements, some of it is out, some of it is, again, deep research is now available on the paid tier. Gemini 2.0 still isn't

• 25:56Speaker 01

  publicly available, though. So they made a big splash. They said the word agentic 100 times, which you have to in this day and age. But overall, I think, I think it was a big week for Google.

• 26:08Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, as I'm reading these announcements, I'm like thinking, wait, is Google's kind of low-key becoming the best AI company out there? After all the shit that we gave them in the past year? I mean, I think that we, we were definitely open to their ability to ship and build technology. And it was more of like a culture of being ready to unleash it. And it seems like the culture finally now is ready to unleash it. I mean, these are really cool products. Notebook OM is like one of the most impressive AI products of the year, hands down. This research assistant is very cool, a model that is faster than, you know, I think two times faster than the previous one. It can handle all these things. We'll see what happens with agents. I mean, again, like the promise of agents is the much-promised,

• 26:52Alex Kantrowitz?

  but seldom-delivered idol of artificial intelligence. So we'll see what happens there. But you got to give them credit and credit to Sundar. I mean, I feel bad even suggesting that maybe Google wanted to move on from him earlier this year. He's clearly turned it around.

• 27:07Speaker 01

  Well, there was a great article in Semaphore with the title, the headline, "Sundar Never Panicked." I saw that email subject line and I had to click and it was good. It was, one thing I'm impressed by is, in a company that large, that poised for a significant disruption to like a core business of search, they took strategic decisions in 2022, basically centralizing all AI, like research and development into Google DeepMind, and it worked. I mean, it at least has worked well up until this point. And at that scale, being able to pull

• 27:47Speaker 01

  off something that big and like courageous essentially is not easy. And the fact that they've actually done it, I think that they will definitely be more in the conversation in 2025 than they certainly were in 2023 and even in 24. I think they're going to become center in this conversation.

• 28:08Alex Kantrowitz?

  Can I give the counterpoint to this, now that I've sort of talked Sundar up? I mean, search is still at risk. And we both, I mean, you have sung the praises of perplexity on this show repeatedly for the past year, and I've started to use it more often and I've had a pretty good experience using Perplexity Pro. And

• 28:29Alex Kantrowitz?

  I wonder, you know, we're seeing these really impressive technological innovations come out of them, but isn't the core business still at risk?

• 28:38Speaker 01

  It is. I agree. Like, I actually completely agree. I don't like Google Search. I actually, in my Arc browser, I installed an extension, so Perplexity is the default search engine when I type in something into the search bar, so it's not Google anymore. And I actually like it. So I do think search is tremendously at risk, and they recognize it. That's the important part. They're not just, like, that's exactly what I mean, that like, when you have the, one of the greatest business models of all time, and a somewhat of a monopoly, I mean, to actually still risk it and develop all these different tools and like, models

• 29:23Speaker 01

  and technologies, I think it's pretty, it's impressive.

• 29:28Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. There's been a Google vibe shift, right? I think earlier in the year, it was like, this company is hoping this technological change doesn't happen. When they change, when they do ship, they're bad at it. Their applications continue to make really embarrassing mistake, and nobody there seems to know what's going on. And I think they have, you know, maybe they can, well, not maybe, they definitely consolidated DeepMind and Google Research under Demis Hassabis, and I think that's really shown that they've been focused. And when Google, I think, puts all of its energy towards something, it tends to do pretty good. Like, there's still a lot of talented people over there, and that's really showing up in the pudding.

• 30:07Speaker 01

  Put Sundar in the cage against Elon. No more. Sundar's ready for his cage match, I think.

• 30:15Alex Kantrowitz?

  I wonder who would win there? I mean, I think Zoc would beat Elon, but I don't know, Elon versus Sundar?

• 30:22Speaker 01

  I think Sundar, for what he's done in the last couple of years, quietly but aggressively. He's got a shot.

• 30:30Alex Kantrowitz?

  He probably has like one signature move that if he's able to pull it out, he beats Elon. Like the Sundar elbow. Just comes out of nowhere and catches you in the face. Or like Elon's just like throwing lots of punches.

• 30:42Speaker 01

  The vicious Sundar elbow.

• 30:43Alex Kantrowitz?

  The Sundar elbow.

• 30:44Speaker 01

  The Sundar elbow.

• 30:46Alex Kantrowitz?

  All right, before we take a break, I want to just tease, I'm not going to say who's coming on the show next week, but we have an exceptionally special show next week on Wednesday. So please stay tuned to that. We'll have an audio video. We'll have a feature story up on bigtechnology.com. And then I think Raja and I will talk about it a little bit on Friday. But I'm pumped, so stay tuned for Wednesday. All right. I want to take a break and then when we come back, I want to talk about all of tech starting to make their play to influence the Trump administration and then GM shutting down Cruise. We'll be back right after this. This episode is brought to you by App Point. Everyone's racing to roll out AI right now. Co-pilots, chatbots, agents doing real work.

• 31:31Alex Kantrowitz?

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• 32:12Alex Kantrowitz?

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• 32:23Alex Kantrowitz?

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• 33:06Alex Kantrowitz?

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• 33:24Alex Kantrowitz?

  And we're back here on Big Technology Podcast, Friday Edition. We're talking about what's going on in the week of tech. We've covered AI in the first segment here. In the second half, I want to talk a little bit about what's going on with tech and the administration. So I got called into CNBC yesterday for Closing Bell, and they wanted to know, basically, what's going on with all these tech leaders meeting with Trump and trying to give Trump donations for his inauguration fund. And that includes Mark Zuckerberg, who met with Trump, and he's giving a million dollars. It includes Sundar Pichai, who went down to Mar-a-Lago. And Amazon's Jeff Bezos giving a million dollars to the inauguration fund.

• 34:07Alex Kantrowitz?

  And then, of course, Sam Altman giving a million dollars. And on one hand, I think that this is like a pretty straightforward thing, where it's like you want to gain favor with the incumbent, especially as you have lots of pending matters before the United States government. It could be two DOJ cases against Google, one that the DOJ has already won, the other in progress. You could have the FTC's cases against Meta. You could have the potential banning of TikTok, which seems... More likely than I expected last week and you and you know, you also have tariffs and what happens with Xi and Timu and then of course acquisitions. So it seems like the United States government with the incoming Trump administration is in

• 34:51Alex Kantrowitz?

  a moment where it's not really sure how it's going to approach tech like the tech clash started under Trump and then it continued under Biden where he appointed Lena Khan and put a lot of folks that were pretty intensely anti-tech or pro restraining tech depending on your viewpoint. And now Trump is coming in, Lena Khan is going to be gone. He's appointed a new, he's going to appoint a new FTC chair. And there's lots of room for, you know, sort of influence from the executive branch on these cases. And so I'm looking at all this together and it seems like tech has a strategy here where they're going to try to influence the Trump administration, put everything in the past

• 35:32Alex Kantrowitz?

  behind them and see if they can A, start acquiring a little bit more and B, get some of these judgments lessened or thrown out against them. I'm curious what your read is, Rajan, and do you think tech is making a smart move by being, I think, so vocally enthusiastic about Trump's second term?

• 35:51Speaker 01

  I think they're making the rational move. I don't know if I would call it necessarily the smart move. I don't know if there is a smart move right now, just be given how, you know, unexpected the next year might be. One thing that was interesting in the appointment of Andrew Ferguson to the FTC, he had posted on X, "At the FTC, we will end big tech's vendetta against competition and free speech. We will make sure that America is the world's technological leader and the best place for innovators." He, the fact that he called it big tech's vendetta against competition and free speech was interesting to me, not calling out the FTC's prior actions under Lena Khan, like

• 36:35Speaker 01

  still blaming big tech. Because remember, Trump's first term, big tech was kind of the enemy. So the idea that they're going to somehow Get in favor with him and, you know, and I do think they're doing the only thing they can do. But I think there's going to be plenty of twists and turns and they're not in the naturally best place to be, excluding, of course, Elon and Tesla, which is still big tech-ish.

• 37:05Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. And I don't think Ferguson's going to take his foot off the gas pedal, especially with the cases or the case against Meta. I do think that there's going to continue to be a backlash there, no matter how much Zuckerberg donates to the inauguration fund. But that being said, acquisitions, I mean, I was speaking with the VC yesterday and I was like, what do you think this means? And he's like, I think we're going to see some M and A again. And to, you know, that that would actually be real big for VCs. And you think about like what Marc Andreessen is doing, because he says he's part of the transition. Unclear exactly how intensely he's involved. And then David Sacks, who's going to be the AIs are. And it's like, I think the main influence they're going to have is going to be to reopen the M and A market after basically

• 37:49Alex Kantrowitz?

  Linacon shut it down and led to some really weird stuff like companies not selling themselves, but kind of all going over to a different company and then doing some licensing deal.

• 38:00Speaker 01

  Well, I think one of the weirdest tensions in all this for me is like the David Sacks, Andreessen, Joe Lonsdale posting, like, they all say, we are not big tech, that we are like the anti-big tech, we're fighting against big tech. So that the tech contingent that's kind of driving Trump's tech policy right now, claims to be anti-big tech. But it's funny, like, do you actually think that the sole goal is to still just sell off companies to big tech and let them be swallowed up and still let big tech remain dominant?

• 38:37Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yes.

• 38:37Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 38:38Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. I mean, that's such an important exit, because the IPO market's been up and down. And so what do you do if you're trying to have an exit of a company?

• 38:47Speaker 01

  No, I mean, yes. Okay. So you're saying it's just a window dressing a bit, the, we're disrupting big tech and hate big tech and are going against their vendettas?

• 39:02Alex Kantrowitz?

  I think there's probably some some true adversarial positioning within the government. But the VCs in particular, they want those companies to be acquired again. I mean, it's an important exit valve for them.

• 39:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'll I will just end with trying to predict anything of what's going to happen next year, especially on the political spectrum related to tech. We will discuss it, we will analyze it, but that I like making predictions. I like making a lot of predictions, but that's one thing that

• 39:37Alex Kantrowitz?

  Pretty unpredictable.

• 39:37Speaker 01

  is gonna be unpredictable.

• 39:40Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay, one last thing I'll predict and then we'll move on is that this idea that Elon is there and everyone's gonna, you know, is gonna lead to a pro tech approach across the board. I think is misguided, especially when it comes to companies like Meta, where he has, of course, tried to cage fight Zuckerberg and it's called Meta creepy. And Google, where like he founded OpenAI with Sam Altman to keep AI technology away from Google. So you could see some like pretty interesting tech policy being sparked by Elon Musk's personal views on these companies. And I don't know, I mean, maybe Zuckerberg should have give should have given 2 million and or 3 million. I don't know if 1 million is gonna cut it.

• 40:20Speaker 01

  Well, actually, one thing I would like to say for 2025 is we almost need to stop using the term big tech. We will use big technology, of course, for the most important podcast in the world.

• 40:34Alex Kantrowitz?

  You look like covertly rebranding my entire company.

• 40:37Speaker 01

  Well, no, no, okay, hear me out. I say that with hesitation, knowing the podcast I'd love to co host with you. But but hear me out, hear me out.

• 40:49Alex Kantrowitz?

  Let's see you talk yourself out of this.

• 40:52Speaker 01

  Walked into this one.

• 40:55Speaker 01

  The way big tech as a term developed over the last, call it eight years, was around Fang, Famga. It was around these companies that were very specific, being super dominant, being monopolistic. Driving both innovation, but also controlling bigger and bigger segments of the economy. It's harder to define who is on what side now. Before the idea was they were a unified front in ways. Obviously they're competing against each other. But when it came to society at large, they were had similar worldviews and were similarly positioned and had similar interests. I think that's going to completely change.

• 41:36Speaker 01

  I think it's going to get splintered in really weird, interesting nuanced ways. Like you just said, Tesla is a gigantic company at least in terms of valuation by any standard. They have very, very different interests than Google and Meta. Like TikTok getting banned, TikTok should be big tech. So I think it's going to be a lot more splintering in terms of what their political views are and and and objectives are versus it was all uniform in the past.

• 42:07Alex Kantrowitz?

  That I will accept.

• 42:08Speaker 01

  All right, all right.

• 42:09Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay.

• 42:09Speaker 01

  Did I get out of that?

• 42:10Alex Kantrowitz?

  Accept that completely.

• 42:11Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 42:13Alex Kantrowitz?

  All right, one last story to get to before we head out for the weekend. GM is pulling the plug on Cruise. And this means every American automaker except Tesla has called it quits on robotaxis. And this is from Yahoo Finance. For more than a year after, oh, I'm sorry, this is from Fortune. That's being republished on Yahoo Finance. For more than a year after robotaxi company Cruise paused its self-driving ride hailing service, General Motors executives repeated the same talking points. Cruise robotaxis will be back on the streets soon. GM is still committed to Cruise, except for Tuesday, when GM suddenly changed its tune,

• 42:55Alex Kantrowitz?

  announcing that it would stop funding Cruise's robotaxi service and would bring the startup's technical employees in-house, while they'll focus on self-driving technology for the autos GM sells directly to consumers. Mary Bear, the CEO of GM, cited time and expense that the company needs to put into Cruise to keep it going. Of course, it had a high-profile crash last year that led it to temporarily halt its service.

• 43:24Alex Kantrowitz?

  That is, of course, that of course, came after the cover up where it sort of didn't was not square with the public about what happened. This car that it had dragged somebody and they were sort of coy about it. And now they are done. I don't think this is great news. I think this is quite bad. I've been in cruise cars before. They seem promising. The safety record was, I think, better than human driven cars, even though they had definitely had accidents. And I think that is a pretty short sighted move for GM to shut this down. What's your reaction to the news?

• 43:59Speaker 01

  Oh, I totally forgot to tell you I was in San Francisco earlier this week. First Waymo ride.

• 44:05Alex Kantrowitz?

  Oh, you did it?

• 44:06Speaker 01

  I did it.

• 44:07Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay, what was your experience?

• 44:09Speaker 01

  Incredible, unbelievable, transformational, whatever. I mean, all of the above.

• 44:15Alex Kantrowitz?

  It's a miracle.

• 44:16Speaker 01

  It's it. It's it. It's so I now I'm having a visceral reaction to this story because because yeah, in terms of short. Okay, so again, incredible experience. Everyone try it. It is how all automobiles will work in five years, 10 years, the timeframe is up for debate. There is zero question in my mind. Now, from a business standpoint for GM, maybe it's not the right business decision. It's not like, how are cars sold? Like, are they sold to individual consumers who have their own autonomous driving car? Is it we're all

• 44:59Speaker 01

  taking robot taxis? It's unclear. So maybe from a business standpoint, the one defense I can think of is because they had cited the hefty, the cost of the fleet operations, like that actually building and maintaining these fleets would be very, very expensive. And it's the I'm sure that's a lesser margin product than selling an individual and a car. So maybe it doesn't quite make sense to them. But especially for General Motors is a car, a company that sells cars to people. It's not like a B to B leasing licensing operation. That's the only thing I can think of, but I, but I am hundred percent radicalized that self-driving is the future.

• 45:43Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, I mean, like, sure, it's selling to people now, but like, way to take yourself out of the future. I mean, goodness gracious. And this is a funny follow-up story. The co-founder, the founder of Cruise, Kyle Vogt, who's been on the show. He says, in case it was unclear before, it's clear now. GM are a bunch of dummies.

• 46:08Speaker 01

  You know, I kind of respect nowadays executives swearing and throwing out all sorts of language. Just going with the old fashioned. GM are a bunch of dummies. I like, I like.

• 46:22Alex Kantrowitz?

  I kind, and I agree. I agree. I mean, Kyle, you, you did some of this on your own, so let's not fully let you off the hook. But in your general sentiment, I am agreeing. It is the future. You and I both agree that this is the future. To say we don't want to be part of it, or we don't have the stomach to take some of the hits in the public. That's going to require to get us there is a dumb thing to do. And I just think that this stuff, the sad part about giving up about this is that this stuff is going to be safer than human drivers. I mean, we could say it a thousand times on the show, we'll say it a thousand and one. It doesn't get drunk.

• 47:05Alex Kantrowitz?

  It does not get tired. And as it spends more time on the road, it will only get better. This is the worst it will ever be. And it still feels safer than humans. And I'd like to hear before we head out, just your experience, like in the Waymo, like, were you nervous when you first got in? Or were you immediately trusting of the technology? And then how did your experience change before you got out?

• 47:30Speaker 01

  I think. I went in with very high expectations. So I wasn't nervous. And also, I mean, it was a pretty gratuitous ride that I didn't even need to take. So just because I was like, I was in San Francisco, I'm just going to do this. It was still kind of relatively like going slow. Like, I think it topped out at probably 35 miles an hour because it was still within the city proper. So yeah, I went in, was not nervous, but it just, it was so smooth. It made and, and I actually say this, that I am a relatively conservative driver myself. I've never been like, out of all risk taking behavior, driving is not

• 48:14Speaker 01

  something that I'm like, get riled up and excited about. So it drove exactly how I want to be in a car that like, and have it drive like that. I've been in plenty of cars with friends who are not rational drivers, let's say. So it drove exactly how I think every car should drive. And that was my favorite part of it.

• 48:37Alex Kantrowitz?

  The craziest thing is the braking, right? Like you come into a brake and it's the smoothest stop you'll ever hit.

• 48:41Speaker 01

  It's the smoothest stop. Yeah, I agree. I agree. Because it's anticipating. It's even like, and, and actually, there was one pedestrian, it was about 30 feet up, but who had jaywalked across, and you even saw it slowing down. Like, I felt it slowing down. So that, that moment, I was like, okay, this is, this is it.

• 49:03Alex Kantrowitz?

  Last story of the week from Reuters, Trump transition wants to scrap crash reporting requirement opposed by Tesla. The team is, the Trump team wants the incoming administration to drop a car crash, car crash reporting requirement opposed by Elon Musk's Tesla, a move that could cripple the government's ability to investigate and regulate the safety of vehicles with automated driving system.

• 49:26Alex Kantrowitz?

  You know, when I first, I want to just talk about the instinct. When I first saw this, I was like, good, because that crash report killed Cruise and we'd be better off if Cruise was here. On the other hand, I do think as a journalist and as someone who really wants this technology to ramp up in the safest way possible, uh, we gotta have crash reports when they crash. It's just part of the deal. And by the way, you shouldn't be afraid of that transparency because your technology should be beating human drivers. Like, let's again, put an exclamation point on how bad human drivers are. We suck at driving. We kill a lot of people in cars. Your technology should be better.

• 50:07Alex Kantrowitz?

  And if you're afraid of a crash report, then something is wrong with your technology, not the system.

• 50:14Speaker 01

  I think it's counterproductive, actually. Like, out of all the, because the NHT TSA investigations haven't hurt Tesla at all. And there's been a lot of stuff that's come out over the last few years and it just, they kind of like circulate among, you know, like anti Elon Twitter and stuff like that, but they never really reached the mainstream conversation in any way. So it's not hurting them versus, I agree that you remove the feeling that there's someone overseeing this, then the first accident or the second accident really start to scare people, I think. So I think this is counterproductive.

• 50:56Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, I'm totally with you. But in the meantime, I think it's without a doubt clear that we're gonna just see this wave of autonomous driving expand. And I was in Phoenix last week and they are all over the place in Phoenix, all over. And I think they're starting to drive on highways, uh, which should ideally be even safer because there's no stoplights and usually not many people running in the middle of them. So I cannot wait, uh, for the time where this is mainstream. Five or 10 years seems a long time to wait, but I'm willing to do it. And I will once again, as we close, echo the words of Kyle Vogt, former founder and

• 51:40Alex Kantrowitz?

  CEO of Cruise, to the people at GM who gave him billions of dollars to pursue his dream. You GM are a bunch of dummies.

• 51:51Speaker 01

  I think we can only leave it on that.

• 51:53Alex Kantrowitz?

  All right, everybody. Thank you for listening, Ranjan. Thanks for coming on.

• 51:58Speaker 01

  See you next week.

• 51:58Alex Kantrowitz?

  Folks, stay tuned for Wednesday. It's going to be a good one. And then Ranjan and I will be back on Friday, breaking down the week's news. Thank you for listening and we'll see you next time on Big Technology Podcast.

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