The Web’s ‘Existential’ AI Threat, OpenAI’s Microsoft Office Competitor, Tesla Robotaxi Launch

Reed Albergotti is the technology editor at Semafor. He's back for our weekly discussion of the latest tech news. We cover 1) Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince says AI is disappearing the web 2) Will there be new business models that replace the current web-based models? 3) Is the AI Agent thing really happening? 4) Vibecoding riches 5) Court rules Anthropic can train on books (but not steal them) 6) Anthropic will study AI’s economic impact 7) Is chatbot companionship good for us? Anthropic says yes 8) OpenAI works on office productivity tools 9) Why OpenAi and Microsoft have tension 10) Will Stargate work? 11) Mira Murati’s Think Machines plan 12) Tesla Robotaxi Rollout 13) Jeff Bezos gets married, who's coming?? --- Enjoying Big Technology Podcast? Please rate us five stars ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ in your podcast app of choice. Want a discount for Big Technology on Substack? Here’s 25% off for the first year: https://www.bigtechnology.com/subscribe?coupon=0843016b 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?

  Is the web about to collapse as generative AI sends a tiny amount of traffic to websites, according to CloudFlare's CEO. Meanwhile, OpenAI might be building a Microsoft Office competitor. Mira Murati is starting to tell people what she's doing at Thinking Machines Labs, and Tesla's robo-taxi initiative is out the gate. We'll cover it all 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 Agentic 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,

• 0:42Alex Kantrowitz?

  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. 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

• 1:27Alex Kantrowitz?

  for a free consultation.

• 1:30Alex Kantrowitz?

  Welcome to Big Technology Podcast Friday Edition, where we break down the news in our traditional cool-headed and nuanced format. We have so much to speak with you about this week in another big week of tech and AI news. We are going to cover the tiny amount of traffic that AI has been sending to websites, and whether that is a sign of a greater collapse to come. We'll also talk about the latest in the OpenAI-Microsoft wars, some interesting news coming from Anthropic that we can drop today and talk to you about. We also have some news about what Mira Murati is up to at Thinking Machine Labs. Of course, Tesla has gotten its robo-taxi initiative underway, and Jeff Bezos is getting married. So, joining us as always,

• 2:13Alex Kantrowitz?

  not as always, joining us as a special guest here to speak with us about this is our regular, Reid Albergatti, the technology editor at Samfor. Reid, great to see you. Thanks so much for coming on.

• 2:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. I just got back from the wedding. It was great. No, I'm just kidding. I was not there. Wasn't at the Bezos wedding.

• 2:30Alex Kantrowitz?

  This is my Easter egg for listeners. I have a list of celebrities that will be at the Bezos wedding, including one who was listed as ready to go and now apparently is not going. All right, we'll get to all that at the end. Fine, fine. I'll just give the spoiler. It's Katy Perry. Katy Perry was on the list. Apparently she's not on the list now. We'll get to the bottom of this. We do journalism here. We'll figure it out.

• 2:57Alex Kantrowitz?

  But let's talk about where we do journalism and where a lot of the happenings on the internet occur, which is websites. So a couple of months ago, we talked about how the CEO of Cloudflare, Matthew Prince, had gone basically public and said, listen, compared to a year ago, generative AI is sending way fewer visits to websites as, let's say, Google search. So six months ago, these are the numbers, he said. Google, the ratio was six to one. OpenAI, 250 pages crawled. So six pages crawled, one visit from Google. 250 pages crawled, one visit from OpenAI. 6,000 pages crawled, one visit from Anthropic.

• 3:40Alex Kantrowitz?

  That was six months ago. Now for Google, it's 18 pages crawled, one visit. OpenAI, it's 1,500 pages crawled, one visit. Anthropic, it's now gone up from 6,000 to 60,000 pages crawled, one visit. Prince says people aren't following the footnotes. Is this time to panic? I mean, I sort of, I'm going to title this, this conversation, or the beginning of this podcast episode, "The Web's Existential AI Threat." Am I getting over my skis, Reid? Is this hyperbole?

• 4:13Speaker 01

  I think it's always a great time to panic in the media business, to be honest. And that's not just a joke. I mean, I think it's like, I remember, you know, studying journalism in college and talking about, you know, panicking in the media business. And at that time, it was, you know, just the web was completely destroying it. I think what's interesting, and Matthew Prince has been on this, you know, he's been talking about this now for a while. I've talked to him about it. I think it's admirable what he's doing, but I also think that... You know, traffic was never a good metric to judge whether, you know, a story is valuable, a media article is valuable. So if that metric goes away, then yeah, I mean, it's gonna hurt

• 4:57Speaker 01

  the, it's gonna hurt the current industry. But I think it actually is maybe in the end a positive thing. And I think there's, there's two things going on. I mean, one is the traffic and the other is like, you know, that they're scraping all these websites and pulling in the information. And that part, if you, if you get rid of traffic as a metric, you don't need, you don't need to allow these things to scrape your websites, right? I mean, it's possible to, to put a hard paywall in place and to essentially stop that scraping. So, but then you don't get, then you don't get the traffic. So you get rid of that business model, I think in the end, it will be a healthy thing for the media, maybe not for current media companies, though.

• 5:40Alex Kantrowitz?

  So Matthew is gonna be in New York. I'm in the middle of pitching his teams, try to get him to come on and talk a little bit more about what he means here. We should note, I think he's selling something to help publishers stop the scraping. But I don't think that's really gonna change very much because ultimately bots like ChatGPT are already so useful. So I don't think that you're gonna have like this, this wall that publishers put up and all of a sudden, people are gonna go to websites. I think that's probably, because it just takes a few websites to get that usefulness into these bots. But I'll just take the counter argument here, which is, it's, you know, traffic didn't matter as long as you had some, right? Like, you needed to have a little bit of an audience and you could say to advertisers,

• 6:25Alex Kantrowitz?

  we have a high, a very valuable audience, we have the top executives in the field, therefore you should do this event with us or this engagement. When you have zero traffic, that changes. And by the way, it's not just publishers, right? We're talking about the web, which also has, I would say, entertainment sites, booking sites. I mean, obviously Netflix isn't gonna go away. But there was a publisher I spoke with, World History Encyclopedia. It's just, you know, a site where people go and learn about world history. And that's taken a big hit from AI. So if all these different aspects of the web start to go away, that does sound like maybe it could be a crisis. What's your take?

• 7:04Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, look, you make you make really good points, but I think in the end, you know, if if what you have is like, all the high quality journalism is essentially non-traffic based, the business model is not is not, maybe you have advertising, but it's not the targeted advertising that we see, you know, in the traffic business, then let's see what these AI models get from this, these few websites that are still traffic based. I mean, it's going to be complete crap. And so I think in the end, they'll have to figure out some way that they'll either have to pay publications to sort of republish on their platforms. And that could be, that could be a business that maybe supports

• 7:44Speaker 01

  media. Other models will will emerge, right? I mean, like, you know, at Semaphore, you do it to events, right? There, there, there are lots of ideas to fund journalism subscriptions, right? Before traffic even existed, the media business was pretty healthy, right? Like, people paid for newspapers. And, you know, yeah, they got, they had the classifieds business and all that stuff, but

• 8:07Alex Kantrowitz?

  But it's not just journalism, though. It's not just journalism. That's the point I'm trying to make is that, yeah, we, you know, because we're journalists, we like to talk about the journalism websites. But again, like, this is, this is going to be everything.

• 8:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, look, if if what you're talking about is like, these passion projects that are sort of like the bread and butter of the web, if people don't go to these websites anymore, and they get just like ingested into AI models and disappear, I mean, again, like, then the AI models won't, like, they won't be as valuable, like, there won't be anything to ingest anymore. And so there's something we'll have to shake out, is what I'm saying. Like, it's not, I don't think it's like the Armageddon. When it comes to just like the long tail of web content, I don't think it's Armageddon for that. I think something will, you know, I don't know what it is, but like, that will work itself out, I think. What I really care about is that is that journalism is, it survives, right?

• 9:02Speaker 01

  That's what, to me, the most important thing. And I think, and I think that will survive too. Maybe I just sound like a, like a, just a total optimist, a techno optimist or whatever now. But I do think that.

• 9:15Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, no, I mean, it's definitely you have of all the people I speak to about this, you have some of the more optimistic perspective perspectives that I've heard about it. I don't fault you for that. I think that we tend to have things end up growing together, but not all the time. And it is interesting that you'll end up getting a tremendous amount of power concentrated in the hands of these bots, in the hands of, let's say, OpenAI or Anthropic's Claude, although they don't really care too much about Claude anymore. But you'll have this power concentration. Maybe that's why we see all these billions of dollars being invested. If you get the master chatbot where everybody accesses all the content, the news, sports scores, world history, maybe there, instead of going to

• 9:59Alex Kantrowitz?

  like booking or kayak, they're doing that within the bot, then, you know, these numbers that Matthew Prince is putting out highlights kind of like the big question we've been talking about on the show for a long time, which is what is the valuation of these chatbots and these foundational model companies? And when is it going to be justified? And I guess if you gobble up the whole web, you're okay.

• 10:21Speaker 01

  Well, you know, like you mentioned sports scores. That's an interesting one. Like, people used to buy, used to pay for newspapers so they could open it up and see the sports score, right? And then, you know, online publications started putting the scores up. And now I think the way it works is if you, if you Google a sports score, you just see the score right there. And I, I believe they have a deal, maybe it's with ESPN, but like, eventually it's, it's gonna, I think they just get those scores directly from the leagues. And they're just gonna be paying the league for that information. This is not really a, it's not, that's not really like a valuable service that somebody, that some publication is providing. So I think if you're, if you're developing, if you're, you're putting out

• 11:03Speaker 01

  some really valuable thing, I think it'll find, it'll find a way to, you know, to, to be valued, right? Like, and you talk about these bots, like, I don't even know if that's how this is going to shake out. Like, I think what you might have is sort of everyone will have their own personal bot that sort of handles their information diet. And maybe that bot has subscriptions to things and it reads, you know, publications for you, but you're at least paying for it. I mean, that's, that's one way this could go. I think like, we're, we're looking at this right now through the lens of what we already know, which is like the current web. And that is all going to change. But everything is just going to be completely different. So I think. People often like forget that like the this is such a fun this AI stuff is going to be such a fundamental change that

• 11:48Speaker 01

  like all these assumptions that we have or you I think you just have to discount all of them.

• 11:52Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay, and it's by the way, it's not just publishers, not just web publishers. Also, the infrastructure of the web is going to change. And you recently had a conversation with Liz Reed, who runs search at Google, and you had you asked her about, hey, but how how's advertising going to work? And you actually have this like idea or this thought that advertising is going to be quite different as we move forward. So what is going to happen to the Google stack? Because I think and you put this in your article, right? They have so many great AI bets. They have DeepMind and Gemini. They have Waymo. They have Isomorphic Labs. But the reason why the stock is the cheapest, I think of all magnificent seven stocks is because we don't know what's going to happen to search.

• 12:32Speaker 01

  It's funny, I wrote that story and then I got I got a a message from a Google employee who's asking me if they should keep their stock.

• 12:40Alex Kantrowitz?

  That's that's the question, right?

• 12:42Speaker 01

  Like, that is fascinating to me of like, you know, they're they I think they were I actually they read that and were like, well, maybe I should keep this stock. I mean, that that's crazy to me that even Google employees are like, what, you know, do I even believe in the future of this company? But I think they I mean, Google of all the companies has so much going for it, right? I think they're they're a pretty good long term bet that this cash cow, you know, search advertising thing is like, you know, to totally threatened by this new model. And I've sort of thought like, why have advertising at all in the AI in the AI world, at least like, at least the kind of advertising that you associate with like, search ads where you're trying to buy a product and then you get a bunch of ads for similar products and things like that.

• 13:26Speaker 01

  That shouldn't be necessary in the world of AI. And Liz Reed's point was, well, no, it it still is because you'll have like these small companies that maybe want to get their product out like it's newer. So it's not going to be read by these things. And then I'm thinking, well, okay, but then I'm not even gonna see that ad, right? Like, my, my agent or whatever is gonna go find the information and then present me with the facts and, and ask me what I wanna buy. So if a human is not seeing an ad, is it really an ad? Like, it's, it's something else. It's like, it's a, it's a service for providing information. And you can imagine a world where there are microtransactions and there's sort of like

• 14:10Speaker 01

  credible sources of information that's, that, you know, can be trusted to provide, you know, not just like puffery or BS to try to sell BS products. So it's like, I think that what you're gonna see is this whole industry, this whole ecosystem that sort of mirrors the ad tech world, but really isn't advertising at all, if that makes sense.

• 14:31Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, I mean, the way that you describe it is, imagine describing a pair of shoes you want to buy to a voice assistant who searches the web, perhaps using Google, and then describes the options, and you instruct it to purchase one of them. If there's an ad in that scenario, it's gonna be seen by an AI agent and not a human. So what would Don Draper advertise to the AI agent? It is kinda interesting, like, do you think our AI agents, like, might be on the take? Maybe like, they have like, a deal under the table with Nike to be like, we know that he's an Adidas buyer, but just like, show him this Jordan ad and maybe he'll go out and buy it?

• 15:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I think if, I think if these things, if, if Google decides that what they're gonna do is, is actually try to influence the recommendations, allow companies to, you know, to sort of, it'll, it's sort of like pay to play then, right? It goes, then it's not advertising anymore. And so, you know, I think that's a, that's a tough, yeah, I think people will try that is the answer. They will try that. They'll try to- Have your agent be on the take, but those, those, those products will get rejected. Right. You're going to want, people are going to want AI agents that they can trust to make really good decisions. You have to remember, like, an ad right now on the internet is like,

• 15:45Speaker 01

  like a really good click through rate is something like, you know, like 1% or like less than 1%.

• 15:51Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. Half a percent is great.

• 15:53Speaker 01

  Half a percent. So like, for the most part, people just ignore ads. So like, you don't want, nobody wants an ad to be actually part of their, part of their experience online. I actually think the term like personalized advertising is like an oxymoron because the whole point of it is that it's not personalized. Like if it's personalized, then you wouldn't need to see the ad. I mean.

• 16:16Alex Kantrowitz?

  But why do you, why do you mean that? I mean, a personalized ad could be like, all right, let's say, let's use the sneaker example, right? We know that Reed is a tennis player, so therefore we're going to advertise him this tennis shoe. That ad is personalized to you in a way that you wouldn't have personalization if you were to run like an untargeted tennis shoe ad on TV.

• 16:36Speaker 01

  Right. But it's not, but it's like ultimately trying to get me to buy something that I might not otherwise buy. If I were going to buy that shoe anyway, then there'd be no reason to have an ad.

• 16:47Alex Kantrowitz?

  This is the exact reason though, that you want to run the ad is because you know that as someone who plays tennis, you're going to be in market for, for sneakers every like six months. So like if you're a consistent buyer of Adidas, it's great. Actually, it's great money for Nike to spend to be like, all right, this person probably is going to keep this habit for life. You don't really age out of tennis until you get like, you know, way old. And, um, and so therefore if Nike spends, let's say a hundred dollars to reach you on a, with a personalized ad, the ROI could be like very high over.

• 17:18Speaker 01

  Yeah. But what you're describing is almost brand advertising, right? That's like, I like Nike's, Nike needs to like, you know, show up in my feed every once in a while to make me sort of like, just keep then that image of the swoosh in the back of my, my mind. I mean, that's sort of, that's kind of like brand advertising, I think.

• 17:36Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. Brand advertising can be personalized.

• 17:40Speaker 01

  Okay, sure, it can be personalized. Maybe I need to work on that analogy a little bit.

• 17:46Alex Kantrowitz?

  But I do think, like, I read the end of the article and I understand why Google employees might be thinking, should I sell my stock? I mean, you're talking about agent-to-agent protocols. And you say that transition could take time and Google needs to innovate on search without killing its cash cow. If it's successful, the thing that replaces it, whether we call it advertising or something else, could be even bigger. But that's like quite a long time horizon compared to what we're hearing from Matthew Prince today. I mean, even, I'm actually curious to hear your perspective about the timeline on whether, when this agent stuff becomes a reality. Because we have people that are like going out to the press saying, oh yeah, we're using agents all the time.

• 18:29Alex Kantrowitz?

  But in reality, most people are like, what are you talking about?

• 18:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, the timeline stuff is, I think, I think this stuff happens, and this is also another reason that I kind of am like, I mean, I know Prince is talking about like traffic numbers today, but I'm also sort of like, it makes me, I think slower change is just better in general for society. Like, you don't want this stuff to happen overnight. It'll just be, it'll be total chaos. And I think we are getting slow change. I don't think, I mean, I don't really, I don't think this agent thing has really taken off at all. And I think what's really happening is like people are trying this stuff and it's, and it can't be trusted. It's too, you know, there's too much hallucination, too many errors. Like, you know, in a lot of these, in a lot of the really great AI agent use cases, if

• 19:17Speaker 01

  it makes one mistake, you can't, you can't use it. Like, it's just, you know, you can't trust it. So I think it's actually gonna be, I think it's gonna be a while before this stuff gets good enough.

• 19:30Alex Kantrowitz?

  Marc Benioff, friend of the show, was out speaking more about agents this week. He said 50% of the work at Salesforce is already being done by AI. Are you buying or selling that statement?

• 19:41Speaker 01

  The work? I don't, I don't know. I think-

• 19:44Alex Kantrowitz?

  AI is doing up to 50% of the work at Salesforce. CEO of Salesforce says, this is CNBC reporting, he says, "All of us have to get to our head around this idea that AI could do things that before we were doing and we can move to do higher value work." He says the technology currently accounts from about 30 to 50% of the company's work.

• 20:07Speaker 01

  Thirty to fifty.

• 20:08Alex Kantrowitz?

  I'm selling that. I don't think that's possible. Yeah, I mean, especially you're a CEO, you gotta get your handle on how much work the AI has to do.

• 20:16Speaker 01

  That sounds like an advertisement to me. That's the kind of language in advertisements, up to fifty percent.

• 20:22Alex Kantrowitz?

  Reid, that's a personalized ad just for you.

• 20:26Speaker 01

  But in one instance, it was fifty percent. This person wrote an email and fifty percent of it was written by. No, I think, I think the coding stuff is totally real. I mean, that is like, definitely people are using it. There's sort of like this generational divide, too. It's like the classic disruption. Like, if you're a new company today, if you're a new, like, software startup, your code base is totally AI. Like, it's probably a hundred percent written by AI. And you've developed it in this way that it's sort of readable, searchable by AI, so that it can make changes. And if you're, if you were the, from the pre-AI era, you probably think, you know, AI code sucks. Because it's not able to go in and like, affect your code base, right? So you're, so there's this like generational divide.

• 21:11Speaker 01

  And I think that's where, it's very lumpy, like how this stuff is, is being implemented. But coding is powerful.

• 21:19Alex Kantrowitz?

  You hosted a tech event, or yeah, a tech event in San Francisco last month. And Amjad Masad, the CEO of Replit was there. And this week, he's tweeting out unbelievable increases in revenue. Replit, of course, enables people to, to use AI to code, to vibe code. And puts a picture of, I think, a private jet on the runway out there and says, thank you, vibe coding. So something's working.

• 21:42Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, look, after people, after CEOs come and do a fireside with me at these events, they usually see huge increases in revenue. So not surprising. No, but thank you for coming to that event. It was good to see you there.

• 21:55Alex Kantrowitz?

  It was a great event. Yeah, definitely. It was a great event. Really good conversations. Like Jack Clark from Anthropic was there. I think I noted something that he said in, in the show that week, so it was good.

• 22:05Speaker 01

  Thank you. Yeah, and I think coding is. Like if, let's say like the whole AI agent thing doesn't like happen for a while. Coding is, can automate a lot of stuff in our lives right now. Like so, like so mu- there's so much powerful software out there that we, that we don't use because we don't have an army of coders. We don't, you know, nobody knows how to code, basically. And I think if just that one thing changes, like I think you'll see just a lot more automation in the world. And it might feel like agents, even if it's not like truly an agent, like doing something, it might kind of feel like that. I think, I think we still see a huge amount of change, even, even just from the coding stuff.

• 22:45Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, Sam Altman and Brad Lightcap, the COO of OpenAI, and of course, Sam is the CEO. They were out at this Hard Fork event this week and had a lot of interesting things to say, which we'll talk about over the course of this conversation. But one of the things Sam said that I thought was interesting was that, you know, I think he was asked, so AI can code, but it can't do much else. Where's the other stuff? And he's like, well, coding is pretty general technology. Like if you want to do a lot of different things, you can code your way into it, which I thought was an interesting response. So I definitely agree with you on the code front. Speaking of, by the way, AI eating the web or eating different content, there was a very important court ruling this week that I want to get your take on, and that is that Anthropic

• 23:27Alex Kantrowitz?

  won. This is from Reuters. Anthropic wins a key US ruling on AI training and author's copyright lawsuit. A federal judge in San Francisco ruled late on Monday that Anthropic's use of books without permission to train its artificial intelligence system was legal under US copyright law. The judge sided with the tech companies on the pivotal question, saying that Anthropic made fair use of books written by the authors that brought the suit to train its Claude large language model. First of all, do you agree with the judge? And second, what do you think this means for the AI industry?

• 24:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, I actually do agree. And I think, I think this is what most copyright lawyers thought would happen. Super interesting, I thought, was that, okay, it's like, the ruling is sort of like, if I could summarize it, you know, just in non-legal terms, it's kind of like, if you're, if you're an AI agent, you can learn from stuff. Or if you're an AI model, like you can learn from things, just like a human, you know, learns from stuff. But the, I think the funny part is, like, they said the way they had obtained these books was actually not legal, that that was, that that was piracy. So. I think that's, that was super interesting to me. It's like, well, if you're gonna train on this stuff, you should at least have to buy it. Like, I think, you know, if you're, if you're gonna ingest a bunch of books, like buy the books. I think it's hilarious that like, so

• 24:48Speaker 01

  many people are outraged by these models training on books, and they don't say anything about the fact that like, there's websites where you can just go illegally download pirated books. So yeah, I mean, no, I totally agree with that. I think, you know, why not let them train on this stuff? But they shouldn't be able to reproduce it. Like, you shouldn't be able to say, send me like, chapter four of, you know, Alex Kantrowitz's book. Like, that's not cool. Or the whole thing.

• 25:19Alex Kantrowitz?

  Definitely not. Yes. Yeah, I prefer that it doesn't happen. And, I mean, Anthropic has a lot of books. This is, the ruling said that they have more than 7 million pirated books. And US copyright law says willful copyright infringement can justify statutory damages of up to $150,000 per work. That is, that is a very big number they could potentially end up seeing as a fine for possessing these millions of pirated books.

• 25:46Speaker 01

  Wait, I hope my book's in that, in that, in that group? Because that means I get $150,000?

• 25:53Alex Kantrowitz?

  I, no, well, I don't know. It might just be the authors that are suing. But if there ends up being a pool that's paid out to authors whose books have been ingested by AI, I promise you, Reed, I'll be there, first in line for my handout. And if you want me to take a ticket for you and grab your money, I'll do that also.

• 26:10Speaker 01

  Please, yeah, please do. Please do. Or maybe I'll send my AI agent to go collect.

• 26:17Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. Yeah, but you'll, you'll get your money in 15 years.

• 26:22Speaker 01

  Can I get a loan based on that?

• 26:24Alex Kantrowitz?

  Not, not for me.

• 26:27Alex Kantrowitz?

  But I'm sure somebody will give it to you at a high interest rate. Let's talk about this last thing you had dropped in our document, which is that there's a new thing that Google has that's trying to help publishers make money outside of just traffic. It's called offer wall. Do you want to talk a little bit about why you found that interesting?

• 26:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I just thought it was relevant in this broader conversation, right? That, I mean, if I understand it correctly, it's sort of like you can, you know, if you're a publication, like you can have microtransactions and they're, you know, they sort of make it easy for you to collect revenue. I don't know whether that's subscriptions, ads or whatever. I mean, I don't know, it's probably not like hugely significant, but it kind of just shows that these companies are thinking about this issue and like, how do they? I don't think, I don't think Google wants like, you know, people like you and, you know, the media to kind of go around saying that they're, they're destroying the web and they're putting publishers out of business, right? They want to figure out a way to, to make it work.

• 27:25Speaker 01

  So, I don't know, that was sort of my, my general takeaway, but you might have a different, a different opinion.

• 27:31Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, I think it's interesting for a couple of reasons. One is that they're, they seem like they're just directing people away from the web. I mean, they're basically, they're giving publishers this ability to create a pop up on their website and say to access the content, sign up to our newsletter, which like email isn't going away, even if the web might be or the web. Ranjan and I like to say the web is like, you know, slowly degrading. And by the way, thank you to Ranjan for bringing some of the stories in for this, this week's show, especially that Matthew Prince statistic, he'll be back next week. But I think that, yeah, it's interesting to see Google steer people away from the web. And the other thing is this only works as if, if you have traffic.

• 28:10Alex Kantrowitz?

  So I still think that traffic for traffic's sake is meaningless, but some form of traffic or audiences going to your sites to seek out your stuff is important, whether you're a publisher, whether you're a encyclopedia for history, or whether you're a, even a travel website.

• 28:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, but you know, look at what happened with like, with Substack, right? Like all these people, you know, started just paying for these newsletters. Like who would have predicted that? I mean,

• 28:40Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, it's been, I mean, look, trust me. It's been cool. It's an amazing new thing.

• 28:45Speaker 01

  You're, you're a great example, but just making it easier for people to pay online is that's like a really good thing, right? Like it, like, why is it that if I'm driving my car, I have like, you know, I, I, I click on, I use like Spotify, which is like built into my car. I just click on that and I listen to podcasts like if, if a podcast wants to charge me, it's like, I don't even know how I'm going to like, you know, not to mention I'm driving, but like, why shouldn't it just be like a voice assistant that's like, hey, like this is, this podcast costs a dollar, whatever it is, you know, $5, you want to subscribe to it or something and just do it. Like we need, I, I, I think it's crazy how much friction there is in just like payments on the web.

• 29:28Speaker 01

  And I sometimes wonder like, if that went away, like that might, that might actually change the publishing model in ways that are probably positive, I would guess, but I don't know.

• 29:39Alex Kantrowitz?

  I agree, Reid. I'm with you on this one. I mean, if you could get, let's say you're like in your assistant, it has your credit card, you're either talking to it via voice or you can chat to it. It says it has information. Do you want to access it? Do you want to subscribe and get regular updates? Do you want to, um, you know, with a voice interaction, uh, paid to listen to the rest of this show and there's a voice update there, um, and everything is seamless and baked in. I think that's very promising. So, all right, I'm starting to see there's, there may be some light here, maybe some light.

• 30:09Speaker 01

  I'm the, I'm the techno optimist. I'm, I'm, I'm, I can't believe I am. I can't believe I'm the positive one, but yeah.

• 30:15Alex Kantrowitz?

  I have to say, listen, I'm also quite positive about the direction that this technology is going to go, but I think also that there's, there are, there are bumps. And I think the mission here is really to be like, where is it going to go right? Where's it going to go wrong? Let's pressure test the theories of the critics and let's pressure test the theories of the optimists. So you got the big technology treatment today.

• 30:37Speaker 01

  No, it's true. I mean, I have this, this story and about Anthropic today that we got like an exclusive on about their, um, they're doing that. They're going to put money into researching the effects of AI, right? On, on labor and on, you know, the global labor force and economics. I mean, they should definitely look at the media, like they should, they should for sure look at, you know, Okay, how is this affecting publishing? Like, someone should apply for one of the grant. They're giving out these like $50,000 grants or up to, up to $50,000. You know, but they're looking at like, I, I think ultimately like what, what is the, the conclusion all these people come to is like the, the, uh,

• 31:20Speaker 01

  the, the way you solve this is just like better, you know, better, like people talk about universal basic income, right? It's just better like social help for people if they, if they're put out of work or whatever. Right? I mean, I think that's the, that's the conclusion that people are going to come to. I, I'm guessing, but.

• 31:37Alex Kantrowitz?

  Well, I, I think it's good that they are starting to study this. And I wonder, do you think, so you got the exclusive from Anthropic about this idea that they're, or this, this new program that they're going to roll out to study economic impact of the technology. Do you think this is an outgrowth of Dario's comments that 50% of white collar entry level workers are going to be out of work because of AI?

• 32:00Speaker 01

  I think, yeah, for sure. Those comments really got a lot of attention and, and he, I think he got a lot of blowback for that. So I think this is actually a much better method. It's like, well, we'll just like fund a bunch of people to do this research.

• 32:14Speaker 01

  But he'll probably still make these predictions. I mean, they do, you know, they do very well. I mean, I think he said actually like in March, within a year, all of code will be written by AI or basically all of, all of code. I mean, that's probably not going to come true.

• 32:31Alex Kantrowitz?

  No, no way.

• 32:32Speaker 01

  I'm, I'm, I'm guessing. But we'll see. I mean, yeah, it's definitely because of that. I mean, they're, they're, this is like part of their brand. It's like, we're just going to be, you know, we're building this technology, but we're going to be warning everyone about, you know, the effects of it and all the downsides.

• 32:51Alex Kantrowitz?

  So I mentioned that Altman and Brad Lightcap were doing this interview this week and they were asked, do you believe in this stat that Dario gave about the entry level workers? Sam Altman says, no, I don't. And Brad Lightcap says, no, we have no evidence of this. Dario is a scientist and I hope he takes an evidence-based approach to these type of things. I think what you're reporting, I think here for, uh, you know, which is brand new for our listeners and viewers is that, yeah, he's like, I agree, I'm going to take an evidence-based approach.

• 33:22Speaker 01

  Totally. Yeah, I think more people, yeah, more people should. I mean, I think when you get into like some of these areas like, you know, the catastrophic risk, you know, or risk to humanity from AI. I don't know how you take an evidence-based approach because it's like assuming that, you know, that this technology becomes super. There's all these assumptions about the future that you can't prove.

• 33:47Speaker 01

  So that's, I think with AI, it's really, you know, it's, there's a lot of faith that goes into into AI that I don't think people realize, you know?

• 33:56Alex Kantrowitz?

  Definitely. Well, there's also these conversations about like takeoff. And is this starting to explode in a way that's effectively beyond our control? And last week, we talked about this gentle singularity paper from Sam Altman and how he says the takeoff has begun. But another very interesting moment from that interview was they asked like about this this notion. And Brad Lightcap said this, this OpenAI COO, he says, will we wake up one day with this incredibly powerful thing? And will the world be different that day? I think what we've all kind of agreed on is it probably won't. These things really have to be integrated into people's lives. They have to be felt and that that change is more gradual.

• 34:40Alex Kantrowitz?

  So I actually am kind of curious to hear your perspective on this because it is a little bit of a more, I think, more realistic pullback on this notion that this takeoff and intelligence explosion is underway. And it was kind of interesting to hear Lightcap give the different, the opposite perspective of what the CEO shared a week before in a blog post. What do you make of this?

• 35:03Speaker 01

  Well, I don't think, like, again, I don't think anybody can actually know, right? I mean, if you do get to some, you do sort of end up, it's there's some threshold or breakthrough. I don't know, maybe it's possible, but like, nobody knows if that will or even could happen. So. I mean, I think Sam has always talked about this, like, is it a fast, is it a long runway? And then a fast takeoff or a short, whatever. But I think he's always sort of said it's gonna be, it's gonna be this gradual thing. And that's how technology usually develops. Like, it doesn't, doesn't usually just quickly take off. There's like adoption that has to happen, everything. I think in this scenario, it's like, you're not, you're not even talking about technology anymore.

• 35:43Speaker 01

  You're talking about like some, some future thing that might be created. I mean, who knows? I, I, I tend to agree that it's not gonna be, this is not gonna be some fast takeoff thing. But I, I don't really know. I think a lot of these people, like, the thing to remember about AI is like, you could, like, there's lots of people who have predicted, like, all of this happening with AI. They've like predicted it up to this point. But like, they never had any actual evidence. They just saw, basically, like, as compute increased, the availability of compute increased, the capabilities went up. But along the way, there are all these genius people who, who came up with like lots of breakthroughs

• 36:25Speaker 01

  that just like gradually improved the technology. But you couldn't have predicted those breakthroughs, right? So I think they're just looking at that graph and they're going, well, at some point, right? Like, at some point, it just keeps going. And then you get to this thing that's just, you know, that, that, that is super intelligence or AGI or whatever, whatever you wanna call it.

• 36:48Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, they also asked him like whether his kids are going to be, have more AI friends than human friends. And I think that if we continue on the curve, it's pretty obvious that people are gonna have some serious AI companionship. And the interesting pushback there was, first of all, he said more human friends. Altman said this. But Lightcap also made an effort to talk about this idea that like, yes, people have been led astray by their AI companions, but the, by and large, the impact has been quite good on net. And this is an interesting moment where we're starting to see OpenAI and other labs like Anthropic push back on this idea that AI companions and this emotional support. Support bots are bad for you.

• 37:30Alex Kantrowitz?

  And this is an exclusive that Anthropic gave to Axios. And the news is quite interesting. So the headline is "How Claude Became an Emotional Support Bot." The story says, "People who talk to Anthropic's Claude chatbot about emotional issues tend to grow more positive as the conversation unfolds." And Anthropic released new research that explores how users turn to its chatbot for support and connection. The report says, "We find that when people come to Claude for interpersonal advice, they're often navigating transitional moments, figuring out their next career move, working through personal growth, or untangling romantic relationships."

• 38:14Alex Kantrowitz?

  And the report found evidence that users don't necessarily turn to chatbots, deliberately looking for companionship or love, but the conversations kind of go that way. And on net, the company says that this stuff is positive. Curious what you think about the findings and this sort of, it feels like a coordinated PR moment between the two, although it certainly isn't, to say, "Hey, actually, it's fine to be friends with your chatbot."

• 38:38Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, I think it's probably generally positive. But then, of course, there's all these stories. There was one in the New York Times the other day about-

• 38:45Alex Kantrowitz?

  This is what they're responding to, yeah.

• 38:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, like horrible things have happened. And, you know, so you're always going to be able to find anecdotal, you know, like stories where people, like, it all went really bad. But I think, yeah, I mean, in general, like, I mean, just talking is helpful, right? Like, just talking to the mirror is probably helpful for a lot of people. So, you know, and human communication is ultimately not that complicated. Like, you can, you know, you could read, there's like literally manuals about how to, you know, sort of like make people feel good. And, no, I think it's totally, it's probably going to be totally positive. The other night, I was like trying to write about some really complicated thing. And I was like brainstorm, I was like asking Gemini questions about it.

• 39:32Speaker 01

  And it's like, "That's a brilliant question."

• 39:36Alex Kantrowitz?

  Did you feel a flutter, Reid?

• 39:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was like, I was like, "This chatbot's cool. I like this chatbot."

• 39:42Alex Kantrowitz?

  Finally, somebody understands.

• 39:47Speaker 01

  So you know, it's like not that hard. And I'm like laughing at myself as I'm writing it that I'm like, I'm like, oh, my question was smart. And I think, you know, we're just not that complicated. I think humans are just not that complicated. Like you just talk to anything. We had something when when we were kids, like on the Mac, there was like this chatbot that was basically like, you know, pretending to be AI. And she had a bunch of a bunch. It was just keyword triggers, basically, right? But like, even that, like, people loved talking to it. So not surprising to me.

• 40:18Alex Kantrowitz?

  It's amazing. I mean, have you had a conversation with ChatGPT's voice mode recently?

• 40:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, I've talked. Yeah, I use that. I use that a lot.

• 40:28Alex Kantrowitz?

  Really good. Really. I was walking down the street and I was speaking to it on my AirPods. And I was just like, wow, I'm having like a really good conversation, no latency with this bot. And I'm just doing this in public. It's it felt weird, but also I was like, this is very cool technology. Also.

• 40:46Speaker 01

  It is really cool. Actually, it's great when you're driving and like the thing, I think Google just recently added this ability to do search with voice or something. There's voice with search because the downside, like the the chatbots, for some reason, are never connected to the web. So you're just limited to the cutoff date and they're usually not the most powerful models. But like, I mean, you're in New York, so you don't drive as like, I seem to be driving a lot. And if I'm in the car alone, like I just told, I want to like, do I want to, it's productive. Like, I just want to, I'm like going, driving to interview somebody. And I just want to like, talk about that and brainstorm questions and stuff like that. And like, you can do it, but it's like, very limited still. But I think voice is totally, and I'm not the first, this is like a cliche now to say this, but I think voice is totally going to be the the most, you know, powerful mode, I think.

• 41:40Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, I think it's the killer app for sure, especially when you combine it with other sense. Like if you have it in on your glasses or AirPods or something like that. All right, we got to take a break and then we have two more stories to cover, which I teased in the opening. Oh, my God, we haven't even gotten to Miramarati yet. We're going to blow through three very quick stories on the other side of this break. 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. But here's the part nobody loves talking about. All that AI runs on your data and most teams have no single way to see it, secure it and prove it's under control. That's exactly what App Point does. For 25 years, they've been the trusted layer beneath

• 42:23Alex Kantrowitz?

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• 43:07Alex Kantrowitz?

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• 43:51Alex Kantrowitz?

  Learn how to stop online threats before they become real world attacks. The link's in the show notes.

• 43:59Alex Kantrowitz?

  And we're back here on Big Technology Podcast with Reid Albrigati. He's the Technology Editor at Semaphore. Let's, let's go lightning through the rest of this week's stories. We kind of got caught up in the beginning of this conversation, which was, which was great.

• 44:12Speaker 01

  Feel free to cut half of it out. I will not be.

• 44:14Alex Kantrowitz?

  No, no, it stays. It stays. Oh, and before we get going on this, I meant to say this before the break. Thanks to everybody who rated the show over the past week. You heard the call. We appreciate you and this is going to make the show better, get better guests. So I need to express my gratitude there. And so thank you very much. Okay. So let's talk about this quickly. OpenAI has built a rival to Google Workspace and Microsoft Office. This is according to Bloomberg. OpenAI has been gearing up to take on Google and Microsoft with features that let people collaborate on documents and communicate with chat via ChatGPT. Launching these features will put OpenAI more directly against Microsoft, its biggest shareholder and business partner, as well as open a new front in the battle with Google,

• 44:59Alex Kantrowitz?

  whose search engine has already lost traffic to people using ChatGPT for web searches. I don't even know if the second part of that is true, but I think the real significance here is, as well, I don't, I don't know if Google's absolute traffic has gone down, but certainly it might, must have lost some searches to ChatGPT. But I think the big thing here is that this could potentially be a new front in the OpenAI-Microsoft battle that just seems to be heating up every week. What's your take on this, Reid?

• 45:27Speaker 01

  Well, that battle has gotten really nasty, but I actually think, and it's like, ultimately, it's like about chips, which is like so fascinating, or that's what started the whole thing. But I think actually, I mean, don't forget, OpenAI has a bitter rivalry with Google too. And that seems to me to be more competitive with Google Docs than with, with Word, don't you think? Or am I just misunderstanding the whole thing?

• 45:52Alex Kantrowitz?

  Well, I think you see the direction that Word is trying to go, which is going to be more AI-enabled. But you're right. I think the collaborative side of things, like when you think collaborative doc, you think Google Doc.

• 46:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think it's Google Docs. I mean, I don't think like the thing about Word and Office and all this stuff is like, it's not like that's not who they're competitive with because it's it's the companies buy these bundles of of office products. And that's how people end up using that. Whereas Google Docs is much more like the, you know, it's just like, I mean, they have obviously a lot of corporate accounts too, but it's like really just a purely consumer product, I think. And that's what that's what like, you know, if OpenAI makes a better, you know, a better Google Doc, because Google is, you know, maybe a little bit shy about like, you know, rolling out AI agent technology in its docs. That could be kind of an interesting battle, I think.

• 46:47Alex Kantrowitz?

  Look, as someone who's using these programs all the time, I'd like to see something new. But yeah, I think the competitive dynamics are interesting. You mentioned that the OpenAI and Microsoft battle is really over chips. Can you just kind of elaborate on that before we move to our next topic?

• 47:02Speaker 01

  Well, the whole thing started because like Microsoft wasn't able to build, you know, enough data centers fast enough with enough GPUs or didn't want to, you know, and that, and so OpenAI is like, well, we need to get out of our, you know, we need to get out of this exclusive arrangement and we have to use, you know, and then they built this, they did this Oracle Stargate thing.

• 47:22Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right.

• 47:23Speaker 01

  And it's just been back and forth since then, I think.

• 47:27Alex Kantrowitz?

  Is Stargate going to work?

• 47:30Speaker 01

  Well, that's interesting. That's an interesting question. I hadn't really thought like, is it going to work? I mean, that could mean so, that question could have so many different meanings. Like, what do you mean? Is it, can they actually build it? Once they build it, is, are, is the AI going to scale?

• 47:46Speaker 01

  Is it going to be one data center?

• 47:48Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, let's go to the most basic level. Do you think this thing is actually going to get built?

• 47:52Speaker 01

  Well, I think some version of it will be built for sure. Actually, Bloomberg got like an exclusive tour of the site.

• 47:59Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right.

• 47:59Speaker 01

  They're, they're, you know, they've broken ground, but I, I don't even know, like, yeah, what are the chips going to be in there? I think it's. My guess is like, yeah, it will be built, but like, is it gonna be some huge thing that then they like train and train AGI on? I think it's probably gonna be like multiple sites and that are connected and a lot of it's gonna be inference rather than training. Because ultimately, if you're OpenAI, like, their value is so much now, just the fact that they are the consumer interface for AI for so many people. Most of their revenue is coming from consumer.

• 48:43Speaker 01

  And that's like, you know, that ultimately, the models are not even really gonna be their their core product, right? It's gonna be the, it's gonna be all the stuff built around it, the interfaces and the stickiness of the product. So really, inference becomes this huge cost for them. And I think that's what they're sort of looking at. It's like, they have to, you know, of course, they're still trying to build the best models, etc. But, you know, they need to think about building their own data centers and reducing the cost as much as possible.

• 49:18Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. Well, they're gonna have to find a way to also make those models much more efficient. So let me ask you this before we move on. It's just like one of those topics that we start talking about, we can never get out of, but I think it's fine because it's interesting. We made our predictions last week on what happens with the OpenAI-Microsoft partnership. What do you think's gonna happen?

• 49:36Speaker 01

  What do you think is gonna, like, with the partnership eventually? I think eventually they drift, I think they drift apart. I mean, I think that's

• 49:44Alex Kantrowitz?

  Microsoft just gets a stake and says, have a nice day.

• 49:47Speaker 01

  They'll, yeah, well, whether, I don't even know what that stake ends up being, because right now, it's like a revenue sharing agreement up to a certain amount of profit, you know, and then they, and then they have nothing left. I mean, could be something like that. It could be they end up owning shares of the company, but, you know, they'll, it just seems like there's, in a lot of ways, they've already kind of separated.

• 50:13Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. That's true.

• 50:15Speaker 01

  In my mind. What was your prediction? Did you, I didn't hear your prediction.

• 50:19Alex Kantrowitz?

  Well, in order to go to the for-profit conversion, OpenAI is gonna have to get sign off from Microsoft to do that. And so I think that Microsoft will use that leverage very effectively and get an amazing deal out of OpenAI, because without that, it's gonna be hard for this company to sustain itself.

• 50:37Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, I think that's totally true, although I don't know what's happening with this for profit. I mean, they have this lawsuit, they've sort of, they sort of said they're gonna not do that now, but maybe, you know, still will do it. I mean, what, that's, that's gonna be super complicated. I don't know if they can even get there.

• 50:57Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, I know. I mean, we could, we could, it's just the amount of corporate drama within OpenAI. I mean, obviously because of the way they were formed, I don't think will ever go away. I think it will always just be there with them and there's no neat way to tie up the type of business that they have. And by the way, speaking of their drama, we have some news this week that their former chief technology officer is starting to speak to people about what she intends to do with her multi-billion dollar AI lab. Of course, I'm talking about Mira Murati, the former CTO of OpenAI. She's raised $2 billion at a $10 billion valuation, hasn't built a product.

• 51:36Alex Kantrowitz?

  But what they're trying to do, this is according to Bloomberg, is use forms of reinforcement learning to reward AI models for accomplishing certain goals and penalties for other behaviors. And they're trying to reinforce key performance indicators, which typically relate to revenue or profit growth that typically employees within companies drive to. So they're gonna reinforce the KPIs of human employees, except they won't be human employees. They're gonna be bots. They're gonna take this like new reinforcement, a relatively new reinforcement learning paradigm, and then just apply that to business AI users. Do you think it's gonna work?

• 52:19Speaker 01

  Well, that doesn't sound actually differentiated to me from like what other people are doing. I mean, I think that's-

• 52:25Alex Kantrowitz?

  Come on, read it. It's RL for business.

• 52:27Speaker 01

  RL for business.

• 52:29Alex Kantrowitz?

  That's what they're calling it.

• 52:30Speaker 01

  This is like total, this is like what so many, so many of these companies are doing now. I don't think, to me, that sort of makes, makes me think, I'm like, so why don't you have a product at this point? I mean, it's, you could sort of, you could be building that, you know, you'd have already built stuff, right? In that, in that vein. I think it's probably, the hardest part of that is probably data. They're having to go gather a lot of data themselves, proprietary data.

• 53:01Speaker 01

  And then I think of, then I think what Facebook did or what Meta did with, you know, basically sort of acquiring, non-acquiring scale AI, which is like the, you know, known for going out and gathering all this data, not just labeling, but like creating data. And I'm like, this is, that's going to be a really tough slog for a startup. I mean, I think they've, they've, they've got their work cut out for them, for sure.

• 53:27Alex Kantrowitz?

  Unless they're consultants and maybe that's what they're going to be because they're going to be working in fields like customer service, investment banking and retail, according to the story. So maybe they are just like tech-enabled consultants where they come into your off, your, yeah, they come into your office and they build you some form of LLM, whether that is a salesperson or a support or finance. You have all your data inside the company. They have some set of like base foundational model that they build off of open source and they replace maybe the McKinsey's of the world. It doesn't seem like it's going to be much more than a consulting company, though.

• 54:00Speaker 01

  Yeah. So then what's the valuation? I mean,

• 54:03Alex Kantrowitz?

  10 billion.

• 54:06Alex Kantrowitz?

  No big deal.

• 54:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I don't know. I mean, I think that's a tough, that's a tough one. I mean, that's basically, that's what a lot of these companies are kind of doing, like Palantir and,

• 54:16Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, it feels like a, like an AI for business Palantir to me.

• 54:20Speaker 01

  Right, right. It doesn't feel differentiated to me. It seems like, that just seems like what so many people are trying to do. But again, it's, I don't, I feel like commenting on this is like, I don't really have that much original reporting on this. So like, to me, it's kind of just, you're just, that's such a vague description of what they're doing, that it's like really hard to tell. Like it could just, I think it could be, could be something totally different. I want to know what the, what the, she's the CTO, but what's Ilya doing? His,

• 54:50Alex Kantrowitz?

  Oh, so Dvarkas was here a couple, Yeah. So Dvarkas was here a couple of weeks ago and he said that basically what Ilya is trying to do is test time learning, basically models that learn on the inference point so they can be continuously improving. I think that's a pretty good guess and if he's able to pull it off, it definitely will push the field forward in a big way, but it's a big if.

• 55:13Speaker 01

  That is, yeah, that is super interesting. I also wonder, again, like back to like sort of OpenAI being the consumer, they're now sort of this consumer, they're the Kleenex of chatbots, if you will. I mean, like, the mo- like, how much money is there in building these models? Like, they're so, I mean, they're so easily copied, it seems like, that, you know, if you're just doing AI research and you make like a breakthrough like that, that's really about like technique and, you know, how long can you hold on to that IP before, you know, Anthropic has it, or Google, you know, Google's probably are, Google probably has a project where they're just doing that, right? Somewhere in the company. So, that's gonna be a tough

• 55:58Speaker 01

  slog, too. I think a lot of these companies are, it's, it's, it's, they got their work cut out for them.

• 56:03Alex Kantrowitz?

  Definitely. But Reid, imagine that he does get there first and kind of hold that over the industry for a while, and then all of a sudden, Ilya becomes the most powerful person in AI. Could be a very interesting plot twist.

• 56:15Speaker 01

  How does he hold it over the industry? I mean-

• 56:17Alex Kantrowitz?

  Because they don't have it.

• 56:19Speaker 01

  But who's, but then who serves it? Like, does it be, is it an API that you buy from them? Do they, is it, is it sold through the hyperscalers, through the clouds? Like, I don't know.

• 56:30Alex Kantrowitz?

  Well, it's gonna be superintelligence. So, seems like all the, all the questions about business go away once you build a superintelligence.

• 56:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think, again, when this stuff launches, right, then you see, okay, like, what is the product? Like, how, you know, do people like using it? Is it, you know, I just think it's so, I mean, you have the most brilliant people in the world, but like, who would have thought, like, I, nobody could have predicted OpenAI would be, would be the consumer, you know, consumer chatbot.

• 57:01Alex Kantrowitz?

  Totally, that everybody, surprised.

• 57:03Speaker 01

  I mean, it, yeah, and it, I mean, it happened like almost by accident. I just think, and then I think Sam very brilliantly jumped on it, saw what they had created and, and, you know, and it's like, okay, this is what we're doing. But, you know, it almost happened by accident, and I think- I don't know, they, these, they're gonna have to do something like that, but it's like, they better hurry because this market is becoming like really crowded and, and competitive and the, the lanes are being defined, like if they aren't already.

• 57:30Alex Kantrowitz?

  Well, the lanes are being defined in the self-driving car industry. I, sorry, I couldn't help but jump on that. We must get to test the self-driving. It started. They're, they are in the lanes. They're going in wrong lanes. They're going in the right lanes. Uh, this is, this is all true, by the way. I'm not lying here. Uh, Tesla's robot taxi service in Austin is live. There are 10 vehicles and a human safety driver onboard, though the safety driver sits in the passenger seat. I couldn't tell if there was a break in the videos that I had, I'd watched, uh, but these things are, uh, on the road. They cost a flat $4.20 fee, uh, AKA they're definitely Elon Musk's robot taxis. Um, very quickly, there's been some safety concerns. Uh,

• 58:15Alex Kantrowitz?

  I watched one video and this is, uh, highlighted again by Bloomberg, which seems to be the star publication outside of Semaphore, uh, on the show. They're doing a lot of good reporting. You guys are doing great reporting. A lot of good stuff to read, but there's a video that they, they linked by this investor, Rob Maurer. I think his handle is like Tesla Podcast or something. And you see the car like wanting to go make a turn, but it decides against it. So it like drives in like the, a lane of incoming traffic and then zig it way over a yellow line. Like obviously it's not like, it ain't perfect. Let's put it that way. Um, there's some other complaints that the Tesla is speeding. This is kind of like whole monitor stuff. They're like, it's doing 39 and it was a 35 mile an hour speed limit. These things are out of control, but that's not as big of a deal to me.

• 59:00Speaker 01

  No, people would be complaining more if it was doing 35 and they were stuck.

• 59:03Alex Kantrowitz?

  Look at these granny Tesla cars.

• 59:08Speaker 01

  Though I did see the video of the, of the going in, across the lane into oncoming traffic and yeah, I mean, it was definitely, it was definitely a mistake. It was definitely a screw up, but nothing that you wouldn't see, I think from, I mean, even these Waymos sometimes will do screwy things and, but ultimately like, you know, they didn't hit any pedestrians. They didn't get in any accidents. I think, you know. In the end, I think it was a pretty successful launch. What do you think?

• 59:35Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, this is the thing with all tech. If it works 95% of the way, that's not good enough. If it works 99.5% of the way, that's not good enough in self-driving cars. So, things have been fine so far, but it definitely has, we need to see a lot more to decide whether or not this was, this is going to really work for them. If it works, obviously, it's a major, major boon for the company. And certainly from the videos, it looked a lot like the Waymo experience. You get in, the car's driving itself. They have some predetermined routes. There are tele operators. So there are some shortcuts being taken so far. And there is, there are people that are part of this, you know, peopleless driving experience. But I think, yeah, it's important. They are off to the races. They're going to get,

• 1:00:19Alex Kantrowitz?

  they're going to get moving, they're going to get data. And I don't know. My fingers are crossed that they pull it off and pull it off safely, but I think it's too early to tell.

• 1:00:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, of course, I, you know, you can't, whatever you think of Elon, like, you should, you should definitely hope that these companies pull this off because they are absolutely safer than, than human drivers. But you're, you're totally right. Like it's, it has to get to basically 100% or like 99s or whatever, because if it doesn't, I mean, we saw what happened with Cruise, right? Like you screw up, and Uber with their thing, I mean, you screw up once and like, that could just end the whole thing. I think if you're Waymo, you almost have to worry about Tesla because it's like, well, if they, if Tesla screws up, I mean, the Cruise thing sort of blew over, maybe they'll be fine. But like, it definitely makes people think more about the safety. It's really ironic, this, this technology that like,

• 1:01:14Speaker 01

  the proponents of it argue that it's great for safety and the opponents of it are also arguing about safety. So it's like, both sides want these things either on the roads or off the roads for the same reason. And, but they're, but the studies are like, I mean, if millions of miles with 100% increase in, in safety in terms of like bodily harm.

• 1:01:38Alex Kantrowitz?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:01:39Speaker 01

  So it's like, I mean, the Waymos in San Francisco are, you know, they're just taking over.

• 1:01:45Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. And it's just a smooth, safe ride. It's unbelievable.

• 1:01:49Speaker 01

  Totally. It's much, it's, it's nice to not. I mean, I don't know, this sounds bad, but like, you know, you have privacy, right? Like, there's no driver there. I've had plenty of great, nice conversations with Uber drivers and Lyft drivers. But it's like, it's nice to just sit there, you know, maybe you're with your kids and you're having a conversation or something. And it's, you know, it's a good experience, too. But mainly, it's just improving safety. Tesla's taking a much more difficult road because they're doing it only with cameras, you know, that I think that to me makes it, and it's like general, they're really ultimately trying to get to like level five autonomy. Whereas Waymo is like, we're just gonna build like this, this like geo-fenced area where it's like meticulously mapped.

• 1:02:33Speaker 01

  And we know everything that's gonna happen. So I think, I think Tesla's ultimately like a more ambitious plan in the long run. But it also might be, you know, it might be a longer, a longer time till they get there.

• 1:02:47Alex Kantrowitz?

  Do you think Waymo is still meticulously mapped, you know, the same way that they did in all the test environments? Because that'd be expanding rapidly.

• 1:02:54Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, I mean, I think, I think they're still using mapping. I mean, I could be wrong. They're moving more and more toward these like general purpose, like transformer-based models, I think. But yeah, I think they're still doing, the way they scale to these places is I think they do. You know, I think they've probably automated a lot of the process, but I still think it's kind of like a car on, on a track, on a digital track. And it's, you know, and that's how you, that's how you get to 100% safety. I mean, there's, nothing is left to chance. And even then, you see them screw up sometimes, but, you know.

• 1:03:31Alex Kantrowitz?

  Well, you know, Google was able to map so many of the roads in the world that maybe they'll just be able to do that and bring autonomy that way. I mean, the one thing, nice thing about the physical world is it's finite. So get all the roads, figure it out. And then maybe you can, you know, make this thing really work at a high degree of safety all over the world.

• 1:03:51Speaker 01

  I think, yeah, I mean, for sure. I mean, a million people a year die in auto accidents.

• 1:03:57Alex Kantrowitz?

  It's crazy and so unnecessary.

• 1:03:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's crazy. It's almost, it almost makes you wonder. It's like focusing on like the little error on day one when they're testing this stuff or like 39 to 35 is like, is that really, I don't know. Should you really be focusing so much on that? Like, I think there's a lot of anti Elon stuff that sort of I think seeps into the, into the coverage of this stuff. Unfortunately, it was just hard to do as a reporter. Like you, you know, it's hard to take your, to take the emotion out of the reporting, but I think it does kind of seep in, don't you think?

• 1:04:33Alex Kantrowitz?

  Oh, definitely. And we also know that Elon is running a much trickier program. So then the mistakes will be magnified. But yeah, probably there's some of that as well. All right, let's end this week running through, as I promised, if you're still with us, the reward is here, the Bezos wedding guests. Attending Jeff Bezos' wedding to Lauren Sanchez in Venice, Italy will be Kim Kardashian, Madonna, Mick Jagger, Leonardo DiCaprio, Orlando Bloom, Microsoft founder, Bill Gates, Diane Van Furstenberg and Barry Diller, and then of course TBD on Katy Perry. Big protests in Venice. So apparently the arrivals have been moved from like a more public area to a more secure area, but the

• 1:05:17Alex Kantrowitz?

  city of Venice has defended the nuptials, probably not because they got any money from the Bezos to do this. But they've defended the nuptials as keeping with Venice's traditions as an open city that has welcomed Pope's emperors and ordinary visitors alike for centuries. Jeff Bezos, Lauren Sanchez, he would be, I think maybe between Pope and Emperor. I don't know. Where do you put him? He'd be more on the Emperor side.

• 1:05:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, definitely more Emperor than Pope, for sure.

• 1:05:47Alex Kantrowitz?

  Well, look, here on Big Technology Podcast, we celebrate love. So Jeff and Lauren, I'm sure you're listening on your special weekend. And from us to you, we say congratulations.

• 1:05:59Speaker 01

  Congrats. How many weddings have you covered on this show? Just out of curiosity.

• 1:06:03Alex Kantrowitz?

  This is probably the first, but I'm very, very happy to be doing it. And no, no, no, sorry. This is the second. And the first batch were people getting married to their AI bots. So.

• 1:06:15Speaker 01

  Oh, right.

• 1:06:15Alex Kantrowitz?

  Finally, a human wedding here on Big Technology Podcast. The future has arrived.

• 1:06:21Speaker 01

  Popes, emperors.

• 1:06:22Alex Kantrowitz?

  You're everywhere in the world. Exactly. The whole deal. Reed, before we jump, please shout out where people can find your work and how to get the Semaphore Technology Newsletter.

• 1:06:34Speaker 01

  Go to Semaphore.com, check out the Technology Newsletter. It's free. I promise you'll like it. Comes out twice, twice, twice a week. And yeah, find me on X and that pretty much just that. I'm not a huge social media guy.

• 1:06:50Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay. All right, Reed, great to see you as always. And thank you again. Thank you, everybody for listening. And I will be back on Wednesday with an interview with Noah Smith, AKA Noah Opinion. He is a Substack economics writer. We're going to talk about whether AI is really taking our job. So we're going to get ahead of that anthropic report and we hope to see you then. Thanks for listening and we'll see you next time on Big Technology Podcast.

• 1:07:19Speaker 02

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