Pulitzer-Winning Journalist: This is Why Big Tech is Betting $300 Billion on AI

What role should government, regulation, and society play in the next chapter of Big Tech and AI. Today on Digital Disruption, we’re joined by Pulitzer Prize–winning investigative reporter, Gary Rivlin. Gary has been writing about technology since the mid-1990s and the rise of the internet. He is the author of AI Valley and 9 previous books, including Saving Main Street and Katrina: After the Flood. His work has appeared in the New York Times, Newsweek, Fortune, GQ, and Wired, among other publications. He is a two-time Gerald Loeb Award winner and former reporter for the New York Times. He lives in New York with his wife, theater director Daisy Walker, and two sons. Gary sits down with Geoff to discuss the unchecked power of Big Tech and the evolving role of AI as a political force. From the myth of the benevolent tech founder to the real-world implications of surveillance, misinformation, and election interference, he discusses the dangers of unregulated tech influence on policy and the urgent need for greater transparency, ethical responsibility, and accountability in emerging technologies. This conversation highlights the role of venture capital in fueling today’s tech giants, what history tells us about the future of digital disruption, and whether regulation can truly govern AI and platform power. In this episode: 00:00 Intro 02:45 The early promise of Silicon Valley 06:30 What changed in tech: From innovation to power 10:55 The role of venture capital in shaping Big Tech 15:40 Tech disruption vs. systemic control 20:15 The shift from public good to private gain 24:50 How Big Tech wields power over democracy 29:30 Can AI be regulated in time? 33:45 Lessons from tech history 38:20 Government’s role in tech oversight 43:05 Gary’s thoughts on tech accountability 47:30 Future risks of an unchecked tech industry 51:10 Hope for the next generation of innovators 55:00 Tech is at the center of politics 58:00 What should change? 1:09:00 Journalists using AI are more powerful Connect with Gary: Website: https://garyrivlin.com/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gary-rivlin/ Visit our website: https://www.infotech.com/ Follow us on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@InfoTechRG

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

• 0:01Geoff Nielson?

  Hey, everyone. I'm super excited to be sitting down with Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Gary Rivlin. He's been reporting on the personalities and power structures behind Silicon Valley for nearly 30 years. What's cool about Gary is he has the inside scoop on the who and what of the AI boom. I want to ask him about the technology risks and promises he sees on the horizon, as well as the players driving it, and if we can trust them. Let's find out.

• 0:29Geoff Nielson?

  The first thing I wanted to ask, I realize is like a very loaded question for a technology podcast, but maybe I'll ask it anyway and see where it goes. Gary, I read that you have or used to have basically a plaque on your desk that your North Star is to state complex social issues in human terms, impossible to ignore, which I love, by the way. But I wanted to ask you, as you kind of look from your vantage point in 2025, what are the complex issues of the day? Or the things that you think are worth crafting these narratives around that you want to be a part of, or at least want somebody telling stories of?

• 1:10Speaker 01

  And by the way, it's still right there above my desk, a little bit faded. I should probably redo it. But so my whole approach is to tell stories through the people. We're talking about AI, like, is it a good thing? Is it a bad thing? Why did it arrive when it did? That set of questions, what's it going to mean? The impact on society, jobs, et cetera. Rather than writing a book exploring each one of those issues, chapter by chapter, I really kind of try to stay true to that motto. And just like, I think it would be dull for people, but if I can kind of introduce you to a set of characters who are almost emblematic, right?

• 1:55Speaker 01

  I mean, here's someone trying to cash in on AI. Here's somebody who had the opposite view. By telling their stories, I think people could understand these complex social issues in a very relatable, human way.

• 2:11Geoff Nielson?

  Right. So let's, let's talk about that a little bit. And you've been, you know, the, the questions of AI and the story of AI, obviously, is kind of intrinsically linked to Silicon Valley today. And you've been following the Silicon Valley beat, if I can call it that, for, you know, quite a long time. As you went back there and looked at some of these characters, you know, what's, what's changed in the past 20 some odd years there? And, you know, what's fundamentally the same?

• 2:38Speaker 01

  Right. So, you know, I, I started writing about tech in the mid 1990s. In fact, I'd moved from writing about politics to tech. I have an engineering background. I had programmed earlier in my life and just boom, the dot com, the internet was with us. And so, you know, some things don't change, right? You know, just like when Netscape went public, the internet was starting to spread. You know, you saw a lot of excitement, a lot of over enthusiasm, enthusiasm, you know? And so, you know, kind of the, the hype, the overhype, the promise, the over promises, you know? The internet was going to bring about world peace, you know, essentially.

• 3:18Speaker 01

  You know, now AI is going to equalize between the developing world and the developed world is going to cure cancer. You know, since there's, I, I think AI is an incredible technology. Obviously, the internet, you know, has changed society in profound ways. But, you know, some of the over promise almost feeds the other side's skepticism. And like, AI is not going to, it might help some scientists help cure cancer. But, you know, AI is not in quotes, going to cure cancer, at least anytime, anytime soon. You know, one big difference is the money. So when I first started writing about tech, I was always interested in the venture capitalists and the startups and that whole ecosystem.

• 4:01Speaker 01

  Like this idea, like, you know, our idea for a company is either going to work, be worth. Back then, tens of millions, hundreds of millions, now billions, if not trillions, or it's gonna be worth nothing. And the venture capitalists who are staking, you know, back then millions, now tens of millions, hundreds of millions, billions. But, you know, in nineteen ninety five, venture capital was under ten billion dollars a year. By twenty twenty one, it was over three hundred billion a year. You know, roughly one hundred and thirty, one hundred and fifty billion went into AI startups last year. I mean, a lot of it went into a few, you know, like Anthropic, OpenAI, XAI, that's Elon Musk. You know, they raised collectively tens of billions of dollars, you know, almost a

• 4:44Speaker 01

  hundred billion dollars just between those three. But there's still a lot more money going to AI startups. So the money has really changed. I guess the final difference is, you know, when the internet came out, like, maybe the biggest criticism was around the attention span. You know, oh, there's, if you're always online, you know, this instant gratification, what was it gonna do for consumerism in our, in our society? With AI, there was much more of a worry, much more of a backlash. People didn't, you know, greet OpenAI with, excuse me, AI with open arms the way they did. The internet, people are fearful of it, you know, we could talk about that, I, you know,

• 5:28Speaker 01

  I think it's kind of Hollywood-induced fear. I don't think the media has done such a great job with AI. So, you know, AI kind of has a double battle, like, there's the usual battle of creating a startup and trying to cash in, but, you know, the second battle of trying to convince people that this is a good thing and the laser-eyed robots aren't gonna feed us into submission.

• 5:52Geoff Nielson?

  So, so let's talk about those laser-eyed robots for a minute. I'm, I'm curious, Gary, because you, you've painted, I, I think, pretty accurately the picture of how people talk about AI, everything from, you know, this, you know, utopia of abundance, which, by the way, I get people, you know, who I talk to, I'd, I'd say routinely, who use words like that to describe where AI is gonna take us, you know, curing cancer, you know, and, and, you know, laser robots who are gonna destroy the world in, you know, the blink of an eye, you know? From your vantage point, like, how transformational is this? Like, what's your outlook for what this technology can and cannot do in the next few years?

• 6:30Speaker 01

  Right, so Reid Hoffman, who's the main character in my book, he has a set of terms. There's the doomers, the laser eye robots, we're fearful of this thing. Let's bomb the data centers before they take over, to give the extreme of that.

• 6:44Speaker 01

  The zoomers, who say nothing, there should be no speed bumps, no regulation. The only role of government is to speed this thing up. In part because we're in a race with China, in part because tech is what's kept the US economy going and strong, and, you know, it's one of our competitive advantages as a country. I'm more of what Reid Hoffman calls a bloomer. You know, I definitely am an optimist. I think AI is going to do extraordinary things around science, medicine, education, a whole wide range of things. But I do think we have to be deliberate about it, in part because AI is way ahead of the public.

• 7:26Speaker 01

  You know, Pew did a study last year, a poll last year, and the majority of Americans are fearful of AI. Less than a third are optimistic or excited about AI being here. And, you know, AI didn't have the best timing. I mean, you know, innovation happens when innovation happens. But, you know, kind of hitting at the end of 2022, the distrust for big tech, the distrust for tech generally is pretty much at an all time high. And, you know, of course, AI, like, you know, ultimately, humans will lose their apex status as the, you know, the smartest entity on Earth. But, you know, we're asking for a lot of trust. Like, if, you know, the big thing this year, of course, I'm sure you've been talking about this, is personal agents.

• 8:10Speaker 01

  Well, a personal agent, they really have to get to know me. They have to know my private details. They're going to have a lot of agency in my life. And if these companies get ahead, either the Googles and Microsofts of the world, or the startups that hope people are using their agents, they get too far ahead of people. I'm not sure people are going to trust these things. And, you know, one last point on that is, there is going to be something bad that happens because of AI. Just to make one up, like, you know, a trillion dollars is siphoned off from the global economic system before a human could. Even notice it. And you know, at that point, of course, we all know the way these things play

• 8:50Speaker 01

  out, you know, people are going to be fearful. And so I, I, I'm a bloomer who thinks there should be some regulation, but I also think that AI is going to be central to our lives within a decade, maybe 15 years. It has vast potential.

• 9:10Geoff Nielson?

  Right. So, so with that in mind, and thinking about the, you know, the trust part,

• 9:16Geoff Nielson?

  we're, we're in a space now where, well, let me ask it as a question. There's in, in your book, and I'm sure a little bit beyond your book, there's a handful of top dogs, I'll call them, who it seems like have a really outsized influence over this technology, how it's developed, how it's played out, how it collects data, what it does. Is that fair? Or is there really kind of a, you know, a small cabal that has, you know, an oversized amount of control? And, you know, do, do we trust them? And should we trust them?

• 9:48Speaker 01

  Right. So, so you're getting at one of my fears around AI. It's nothing to do with laser eyed robots or anything like that. It's the consolidation in the hands of the same few tech companies that have been dominant for the last decade or two. You know, it's funny. So I started this book right at the end of 2022, started 2023, and I went in search of the next Google, the next Meta. And, you know, I ended up concluding like, I fear that the next Google is Google and AI and the next Meta is Meta. You know, that big, this stuff is really expensive. When I first started, you know, people were talking about, you know, millions, tens of

• 10:27Speaker 01

  millions to train, fine tune and operate these chatbots, large language models, whatever you want to call them. And the same with text to video, audio to, um, text to audio. By the time I was done reporting at the end of 2024, mid 2024, it was hundreds of millions, if not billions. And Dario Moda for, from Anthropic, they do Claude, the chatbot Claude, you know, he's estimating that they're going to need a hundred billion dollars by 2027 to train these things. And so who has that kind of money? You know, Google, Microsoft, they have a hundred billion or so laying around in cash. But if you have to raise

• 11:10Speaker 01

  A hundred billion dollars, or even if it's only, you know, three, five, 10 billion dollars. Well, a large venture capital outfit in Silicon Valley has a billion dollars alt hold in a fund. And so we're talking about billions. And so that's one way this is weighted to big tech. And the other is data, right? This is really central to the remedies, the government is now talking to remedies for the Google antitrust trial. You know, a court, a federal judge found that, you know, Google is a monopolist that abused its power. So now what should we do? And a lot of the discussion, I think rightfully, is around the data.

• 11:49Speaker 01

  You know, OpenAI approached Google and said, hey, can we lease, can we kind of buy access to your data? And they said, no. And that's a huge advantage. In fact, anyone reads the book, every time Google steps on stage in 2023, 2024, they fall flat on their face. Google was so far ahead of every other big tech company around machine learning. You know, give them credit, they were using it in the 2000s and they went on a hiring binge, binge, you know, in the early 2010s, long before anyone else. You know, they came up with the transformer paper in 2017, that T and GPT. And so it's, you know, foundational research. And yet, you know, it's a big company that was scared.

• 12:32Speaker 01

  So OpenAI puts out ChatGPT, they try to catch up to a race they were already winning, but they were scared, so they weren't winning it. And they kept on falling in their face. Despite that, Gemini, their chatbot is one of the two or three most popular chatbots on the planet because they're Google. You know, we have, many of us, Google's the front door to the internet. They have all this data and they can, you know, train better and cheaper than others, so.

• 13:00Geoff Nielson?

  Yeah, it's, it's interesting and, and you know, your position is, is very similar to mine, I think, which is,

• 13:08Geoff Nielson?

  it really feels like there's, I don't know if I want to call it an arms race or a space race, but there, there, there's this race of some kind between the, these, you know, tech giants to try and just. Own the platform of the future, you know, own the data, use it as a way to continue to monetize, you know, the, the, the public here, I guess. So, you know, with, with that in mind, who, who are going to be the winners and the losers of, you know, this, this shift to AI? And is it necessar- you know, when, when you look out over it, do you really see it's winner take all with one or a few, you know, technology giants that probably are the Open AIs, the Googles, the Microsofts, the Anthropics?

• 13:51Geoff Nielson?

  Or is it going to be more democratic than that?

• 13:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, I, I mean, we're talking about predicting the future. So, you know, take anything coming out of my mouth right now with a, a grain of salt. You know, I, I would kind of distinguish between OpenAI and Anthropic. They're, you know, relatively new startups. They have a lot of cash. They've raised billions, tens of billions of dollars in the case of OpenAI versus a Google, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, and Apple are, they're, they're, they're not quite doing it yet, but they're, they're in the race. To, you know, I, I, I want to be optimist. I, I guess I'm built, I, I root for startups. You know, I root for the underdog. You know, to me, but one thing that was exciting about AI

• 14:40Speaker 01

  is the possibility that there would be kind of a new set of major, major, major players. But I, I even wonder if an OpenAI, despite all its successes, right? It just raised $40 billion earlier this year. That's the largest raise in the history of venture. Capital is worth, you know, it's, it's got a paper worth of $300 billion right now, which if you put in the Fortune 500, would make it top 50. I think it's top 50 for the globe. And so, you know, it's, it's a, it's a, you know, it's 10 years old, but it's, it's seems on paper, just kind of a, a global giant has been there around forever. But I'm still not sure they can make it because they-

• 15:22Speaker 01

  They're bringing in revenue, but they're still losing a ton of money. I mean, give them credit. They're making virtually nothing in 2022 and 2024. They brought in almost $4 billion. They'll have a much bigger number than that than that this year, you know, 10 billion or more. But they're still losing money because this stuff is so expensive to operate. You can use ChatGPT or their other products for free. You could pay a premium, but you get a very good service for free. And so, you know, it's like kind of that consumer thing and you could just go to, you know, Claude or u.com or Gemini or X A, uh, uh, what it was, uh,

• 16:03Speaker 01

  Grok, you could use, you know, that's, that's, that's muss. And so, though that one costs, um, and so I, I, I do fear that what's going to happen is it's inevitable that one of the giants on Microsoft or Google are going to buy an Anthropic or an OpenAI. You know, right now, Microsoft's put around 15 billion or so into OpenAI, you know, Anthropic, their two biggest funders are Amazon and Google. And so let's take Dario Amode at, at his word. In two years, where's he getting that $100 billion? I mean, I, I suppose he could raise that money, but I'm not even sure they're profitable

• 16:49Speaker 01

  at that point. So I do wonder if it's inevitable that these popular chatbots get bought by one of the tech giants.

• 16:57Geoff Nielson?

  Well, and I have to imagine the tech giants are chomping at the bit at the opportunity to buy, you know, an OpenAI or an Anthropic too, and add them to their, you know, to their stack.

• 17:05Speaker 01

  Well, and they have been doing that, you know, kind of this idea of an aqua hire or inflection was having to be the company at the center of my book. It was started by Reid Hoffman, this guy Mustafa Suleyman, you know, kind of a co-founder of DeepMind, which, you know, is kind of the first great machine learning startup. It started in 2010 in London and Google bought it for $650 million. You know, they had everything going for them, you know, it's like Reid Hoffman, best connected guy arguably in Silicon Valley, you know, kind of the, the pedigree of a Mustafa Suleyman, a great CEO. Bill Gates funded it, Will.i.am, you know, kind of had that, you know, kind of. Hollywood thing, Ashton Kutcher was was a investor.

• 17:50Speaker 01

  They hoarded all this talent. They some of the top researchers in the world raised a billion and a half dollars in like 15 months, but it wasn't enough. And so basically, everyone at the company jumped to Microsoft. Microsoft paid the investors $650 million to make everyone happy. And, you know, essentially this company inflection, really cutting edge chatbot. What I loved about it is it's created EQ, emotional intelligence, not just IQ. But now the talent, virtually the whole company is inside Microsoft. Google did the same thing with Character AI, spent billions of dollars essentially to hire

• 18:32Speaker 01

  the two creators of of Character AI, really popular, another popular chatbot. These two founders who are ex-Googleites got frustrated at Google because they couldn't do what they wanted to do, went and did it in a startup, and then Google had to pay billions of dollars just to bring them back.

• 18:51Geoff Nielson?

  Yeah. So, you know, when I think about AI and the impact it's going to have, there's clearly this kind of, I don't know if I'm supposed to call it this, but I'll call it a boys' club of like the the big, you know, incumbent or emerging organizations and the tens of billions of dollars and the kind of, you know, political infighting you see there. And it's, you know, it's funny, Gary, and I don't know if this is a result of your background or just kind of a parallel I picked up on, but I can, I can certainly see through lines to what's going on here to what you probably saw, you know, covering City Hall and those kind of political beats all those years ago where it's jockeying for for power and influence. Is that, I mean, is that fair? Is are there, is that just coming through?

• 19:35Geoff Nielson?

  Do you think, sorry, is there merit to that?

• 19:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, there is. Like, you know, in in a political sense, we call backroom deals kind of going on, you know, that politics is happening in front of us, but the real deals are being cut behind closed doors. It is true of Silicon Valley. It is true of tech. Like, it's one of my big, you know, criticisms. But let's just get five smart guys, and they are invariably guys, in a room and we'll figure it out. And, you know, I mean, that works for your app. That has worked very well for tech. But I think AI is different. You know, AI requires a much broader group of people. I mean,

• 20:21Speaker 01

  some of it is what discipline are you from? Like, it's not just computer scientists. It's not just, you know, tech folks. You know, AI, I mean, first off, it's linguists. You know, you need linguists. It's math. It's math. But I really want a much broader group, given the power and potential of AI. What AI is, I want a broader group in terms of discipline. I want a broader group in terms of who we're talking about. I mean, tech is heavily skewed male, of course. And these days, it's very white and Asian. Our world is much broader than that. It's a global thing. And so, bringing in people from different backgrounds from,

• 21:02Speaker 01

  you know, around the globe, you know, to figure this out. Again, coming back to a point I made before about the strategy, I think it's going to be very dangerous for tech if this is the same old, same old, where it's, you know, Sam Altman negotiating with Sachin Adella at Microsoft with a few other people in the room. I really think for kind of trust and safety reasons, there needs to be a much broader group than the same old, same old that Silicon Valley does.

• 21:34Geoff Nielson?

  It makes sense. And as I think about, like, what that impact could be and what this technology could do, I mean, we talked about why, you know, the hype is kind of, you know, inflated potentially on both sides. What impact do you see this having, I guess, across the population? And is this a leap board in some ways for, you know, the poor or the traditionally marginalized or underserved? Or is it, do you foresee it just going to end up being like a rich get richer platform?

• 22:07Speaker 01

  Yeah. So again, I'm about to predict the future. So take anything I say with

• 22:11Geoff Nielson?

  That's what we do here, Gary.

• 22:14Speaker 01

  With a grain of salt. But, you know, I

• 22:20Speaker 01

  So I do think AI can be a great equalizer. You know, kind of just I give a couple of examples. So in the sense of making art, you know, if you want to make it, you are you're a movie maker. You want to make a movie, you need a lot of money to do that. You have to hire people and stuff, but with AI you can make a movie. You know, it's it's kind of the great equalizer in in terms of the art. It gives you these superpowers to do things. We could talk about the ramifications that, you know, all those actors and production people, et cetera, who aren't getting a job and, you know, to add a caveat, it's not just like make me a Martin Scorsese movie.

• 23:03Speaker 01

  You know, the human is still the driver. The human has to bring the the storylines and the plots and the, you know, plot twists and all that. And, you know, another example is, again, it could be an equalizer that

• 23:21Speaker 01

  anyone can code, right? I mean, I don't think we're quite at that point yet, but we're not that far away for a point where you don't have to have a computer science degree. You don't have to have much experience of all, if if any at all, and you could code. And that that that will really help. So someone in a developing world could see a problem that's not a first world problem, but a problem in their world and do code, you know, and and and have this magic power of coding to come up with a solution tailored to their world. You know, just to use the example of education, I I think AI has amazing potential for for education.

• 24:01Speaker 01

  They did a study in Nigeria where they had teachers use AI tutors. And of course, an AI tutor could figure out exactly what a student doesn't understand and then feed them examples of information that helps them learn that aspect and stuff. And what they found is just in a six week period, they had like two years of advancement in the students they worked with. And I really do think, you know, this this idea that, you know, a tutor, you know, hundred dollars an hour, two hundred dollars an hour, I don't know what a tutor costs, but it's a lot of money. It's beyond the means for, you know, mo- mo- most people on the planet. But what if this tutor was in your pocket?

• 24:44Speaker 01

  And it was, if not free, virtually free or healthcare. There's a great stat that basically a billion or so people have access to ready healthcare. But there's five billion or so who have a smartphone. And should you go to a doctor, is a doctor better or a nurse practitioner, whatever, a healthcare professional better than a phone? Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. But what about all those people who have zero access? And you know, you could take a picture, my child has this rash. You know, should I be worried and move heaven and earth to get to a hospital? Or is it nothing? And so that could be a life and death thing.

• 25:25Speaker 01

  So, you know, I, I, I do think, you know, kind of this idea of a AI doctor in your pocket. You know, it's certainly better than not having any access to healthcare. So that's another way I, I, I, I see, you know, education, medicine, that AI could be an equalizer. But the flip of that is that, you know, winner takes all, if not winner takes most. And, you know, I, I am nervous that, well, as we've been talking, power over AI in the hands of just a few people will mean that that small group in Silicon Valley or technology generally is going to grow super wealthy. And only a little bit will spill over to, to the rest of us.

• 26:10Geoff Nielson?

  Yeah, it's, yeah, prediction there is, is a tough game and it's, there's like so many moving pieces to this. And I don't know if this is something you heard about or you're concerned about as well. But when I think about that, you know, that AI doctor, which, you know, whether, whether we choose to acknowledge it or not, I feel like that's already starting to happen. Right? People are talking to chat GPT about their symptoms. And, and frankly, I think for the most part, that's probably a good thing, but. What I don't know if is happening right now, but I have to imagine we're on the cusp of is ChatGPT or whatever, generative AI saying, oh, and you should take an Advil for your symptoms. And there's quietly, you know, money changing hands between, you know, the tech giant and Advil

• 26:55Geoff Nielson?

  so that you take an Advil and not a Tylenol. And suddenly, you know, the difference to me between the web and some of these generative AI things is just, and even even Google frankly, is it, it gives you an answer that it acts like is definitive, right?

• 27:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:12Geoff Nielson?

  And what kind of influence does that have over people? Is that something that came up at all or something that you have a perspective on?

• 27:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, these, these chatbots speak with an authority. I joke, well, they were, they were trained on a disproportionately male dataset. And so they're know it all. So in fact, they've had to be teach to say like, it's okay to say, I don't know if you don't know, but what you're getting at is one of the things. Again, before we were talking about like what the fear out there is with laser eyed robots. There are very real fears that are, that we could see right now. And one of them is the power of AI to manipulate or the power of AI to make suggestions that you think, well, this is just based on its knowledge, reading, you know, what it's been trained on.

• 28:00Speaker 01

  And you don't know like, oh no, the maker of Advil has paid for this. By the way, right now, I don't think there's any chatbots that are giving recommendations. You, you know, I, I think people are using and probably sometimes abusing as if like, people who do have access to medicine, like, oh, I, I, I'm going to learn about this here. And like, you know, sometimes that works, sometimes it doesn't, you know, there's, there's stories where, you know, someone has struggled for months, years to figure out what's wrong with them. They Give it their symptoms to chat G P T or whatever and they figure out the solution. I mean, you know, A I can be incredible.

• 28:44Speaker 01

  There's a study where they are training a chatbot to have early detection of diabetes, type two, type two diabetes, just by hearing your voice. And so, you know, that's the positive where there's amazing things that can happen. You know, they're really accurate at reading mammograms and, you know, X rays and all that, far more accurate than human doctors. Me, I want doctors to use A I as a backup, as a check. I don't want A I reading my, you know, I, I, I, I. Another thing that worries me is autonomous A I.

• 29:25Speaker 01

  You know, for the foreseeable future, if not forever, we need humans in the loop. These things, they know a lot about everything, but they don't understand a thing. They have no common sense. They have no, uh, uh, you know, it's, it's a parrot. It's repeating words, but it doesn't really understand. You know, there's an expression I learned doing the research here that it tends to know everything. These chatbots, these large language models tend to know everything that humans over twenty years old know, but they don't know a lot that a kid under five year old, five years old would, would, would know. You know, just kind of just the common sense stuff, like just stupid stuff like you chew

• 30:08Speaker 01

  this, but you don't chew this, you swallow, you know, that kind of like, they have to be taught everything. And so, you know, it's, I, I do fear that we're going to invest too much power prematurely in these things. I really don't want autonomous A I anytime soon.

• 30:26Geoff Nielson?

  That's, that, that, that's fair. What, what? When you look at what we have or where we're going with AI, is there anything that came across to you as being underreported right now, either in capabilities or in risks that you think we need to have a little bit more of a light on?

• 30:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I mean broadly speaking, I don't think the media, I mean, I used to work for the New York Times, so I am big media, I guess you can say, at least in my past. But you know, the New York Times, Washington Post of the world, I don't think they've done a great job covering AI, generative AI in particular, since the release of ChatGPT, that was November of 2022. You know, there was a little bit about, you know, its potential, but right away, it was, it's all the negatives. It's going to destroy education, you know, that it's going to write essays for kids and, you know, kids are going to use it for cheating. And you know, that's a problem, but you know, what about,

• 31:26Speaker 01

  in fact, I have an eighth grader and, you know, he writes a composition and he gives it to ChatGPT and it gives him feedback. You know, the teacher's busy, but like, you know, how can I improve this? Well, you could make a better topic sentence and it's just repetitive kind of thing. And, you know, gets good feedback. And so it's an amazing tool for a teacher. You could devise lesson plans, you can, you know, use it to help with grading and, and all. And, you know, I think that, I think that has been largely missing from the coverage. Occasionally you see an article about, oh, it could do this around healthcare and all.

• 32:05Speaker 01

  So I really don't think the broader public has a sense of what the true promise of this is. And the flip side of that is I think people, in part because of the media coverage, are scared of the wrong things. I mentioned AI, autonomous AI, but AI, the use of AI in warfare, the use of AI for surveillance, you know, a AI that can come up with a

• 32:38Speaker 01

  A new vaccine or a new treatment or tailored treatments for this specific cancer or whatever someone is suffering through can also create a deadly pathogen that could kill a lot of people, you know, kind of the potential for AI to write your wedding toast or for your friend's 50th birthday, you know, is a powerful tool in the hands of scammers. And so I wish that's where the coverage was, you know, around here are the potential pitfalls. And this is the stuff we need to navigate. I mean, every technology ever is both pro and con because both ways, you know, the cars extraordinary

• 33:23Speaker 01

  changed our society. But, you know, a global warming 35,000, 40,000 people in the US die in car accidents. Yes, every technology cuts both ways and the same will be true with AI. And I think I wish we were being smarter, more deliberate about making sure AI was a net positive rather than a net negative. Right now, I don't know. Like, I'll give you an example of regulation. So the Biden administration imposed, I thought, light regulation, like, okay, if you're working on one of these powerful models, before you release it, we're going to require you to red team it to hire an outside group to, you know, test with vulnerabilities and then share the results with the US government.

• 34:03Speaker 01

  Didn't seem a very heavy lift, but as soon as Trump took over, he counteracted that executive order and JD Vance in January, I mean, February was in Paris for the third of these worldwide AI summits. The first two were totally focused on trust and safety. This one was not. And there was JD Vance who stood up there and said, stop with the hand wringing. We need to win this right, this race because of China, China, China thing. And, you know, that worries me. Government does have a role. Again, I don't want them micromanaging this. That's not the way we have great innovation. But I do think they

• 34:44Speaker 01

  need, I do think we need guardrails. And I do think we need kind of this mindset. So we're really looking at the stuff around the corner that's negative and the stuff around the corner that's positive. So we can, you know, work it out. So it's more positive than negative.

• 35:01Geoff Nielson?

  Right, so I'm thinking about that kind of doomer versus zoomer mentality and it feels like, you know, as we look at the regulatory bodies broadly, we've gone from doomer to zoomer and just started like ripping off, you know, red tape if you can call it that, but it sounds like your perspective, Gary, is we do need, the focus on some sort of responsible AI guardrails are important and that now is the right time to get some of that right. Is that fair?

• 35:32Speaker 01

  Right, so you know, it's funny, I was so, if you, if we had spoken in 2023, I would have been really optimistic about this, right? I think most of us can agree that the government blew it as far as social media, right? It was just like, it took 20 years before their first hearing about social media and by that time, social media had, you know, caused the problems it caused. But AI, like, you know, remember Sam Altman in the spring of 2023, you know, stood before the Senate and said, I have fears around this too, we need to be regulated. He was talking about a AI body, like, you know, a nuclear regulatory agency-like thing for AI, people have talked about a global version of that.

• 36:16Speaker 01

  And, you know, the senators were talking about it. You know, Chuck Schumer, then the Majority Leader, he had a series of talks in 2023 where they had leaders in AI come in and talk to the senators about, here's the way it works, here's our fears, here's where we think the potential is. But then, you know, two things, one, the tech companies themselves, because of the arms race, as you called it before, they really dropped the trust and safety aspect, or at least that took a backseat to winning this race and, you know, kind of our model will outdo your model. And, you know, the other thing, just kind of the wider politics meant there really

• 36:59Speaker 01

  hasn't been much room lately for kind of debates about AI when we're talking about a whole different set of issues in politics. So, you know, now I am worried, you know, where I was at the school that I thought it was a good thing that OpenAI put out ChatGPT when they did, it wasn't that powerful yet, it really couldn't do much harm at that point, but.

• 37:26Speaker 01

  It sparked a discussion, you know, long before this thing was super powerful, you know, to you, you know, instead of we figured out how to make jet engines, jet airplanes safe or relatively safe, there's very few accidents, because, you know, it started off with prop planes and we came up with rules and then they got better and stronger, you know, cars, we, you know, cars, we've anti-lock brakes and, you know, kind of all those kind of, all those airbags, all those kind of safety things, you know, it's, it's good that we're kind of struggling with the technology before it's super powerful. But I think in 2023, we were really jumping on that opportunity. But now it just, I don't hear it at all. It doesn't seem an issue.

• 38:12Geoff Nielson?

  Yeah, no, it's fair. It feels like it has been like, like, almost like a pendulum swing in, in the complete opposite direction.

• 38:20Speaker 01

  And of course pendulums never swing to the middle where they should, you know, more or less should be, they swing to the other side. Yeah.

• 38:26Geoff Nielson?

  Yeah, yeah. No, that's, that's well, well said. Moving away from, from, you know, the government and the regulators here, if we think about the role that, that organizations play and, and, you know, call it, call it companies here, what, what would be your best advice for, you know, if you were brought into a boardroom of, you know, a non, you know, a non, you know, whatever you want to call them, magnificent seven tech company, but just, you know, a company that sits in the middle of the economy, is looking at AI, is looking at kind of future tech, wants to know if it can help them or hurt them, what they need to know. What, what's kind of your best advice for what they should be thinking about?

• 39:05Speaker 01

  Yeah. So it's funny, my, my second interview ever as a tech reporter in mid 1990s with this guy, Paul Sappho, he's a prognosticator, a futurist is kind of the more, more common word for it. And he said, It wasn't his idea, but he's the one who shared it with me. We tend to overestimate the short term impact of a new technology and underestimate the long term aspect. And you know, the internet was a perfect example of that. Like, all these startups thought we're gonna get rich overnight. And, you know, every company had to embrace the internet or they were gonna die. Well, you know, most of those companies that thought they were gonna get rich overnight went out of business.

• 39:47Speaker 01

  But slowly but surely, the internet seeped into more or less everything. And so, you know, it probably took, I'm gonna say 15 years before it was central to everything. And I think the same thing is gonna happen with AI. So, back to the boardroom, you know, I'd be saying, this stuff is real, it's coming. Obviously, there are tools that individual employees can use, large language models, you know, a marketing team, you know, kind of its graphics ability and all. And you should be using that. In fact, I would encourage everyone in an organization to use it because our construct is a little bit, has been a little bit wrong. It's in the short and medium term, it's not gonna be AI who replaces humans.

• 40:32Speaker 01

  There'll be some exceptions to that, but it's gonna be humans who use AI who get a best, humans who don't. This is a powerful tool. I use it as an editor, I use it as a research assistant. I'm faster, I think I'm better because of it. So I'd be encouraging their individual employees. But as far as the organization changing its processes and stuff, I would encourage them to experiment, to be thinking about it, to maybe put a pilot project here. But it's not there yet. I mean, this 2025 is supposed to be the year of the agents. And just like, well, first off, they don't have much of a memory. So if it's a personal agent that's gonna be as if we're all wealthy people with a personal assistant that knows all our preferences and stuff, like, it's having a hard time remembering

• 41:16Speaker 01

  us from session to session. So they're not a good personal assistant in that sense. And, you know, there's interesting things I see companies doing with these AI agents, but it's a work in progress. They're not quite there yet. So, you know, bottom line, like, Anticipate it, play with it, figure out how it might help. But you know, right now, like there's also the exponential factor. Like, these things have been getting like 10 times better, more or less every year and stuff. So what we have today, we could presume that what we have in 10 years will be more powerful, different and stuff.

• 41:59Speaker 01

  And at the same time, there's this whole thrust ever since Deep Think, like, wait, maybe we're gonna have smaller models and stuff. So, you know, this stuff is moving so fast and there's still like big changes and all. I think a corporation's job, a business leader, or for that matter, an educator, anyone running a big organization, is to be paying attention to stuff, find ways you can use it to help individual employees. But I'm not sure I would turn the company upside down yet.

• 42:28Geoff Nielson?

  And I like, I like that and it's, you know, it's clear advice. And if I can, like, if I can hone in on a part of it, going back to what you said about the startups and, you know, kind of the, you know, the web, the web bubble that we had, you know, 25 years ago. It sounds like you've got a, you know, kind of a healthy skepticism of like,

• 42:52Geoff Nielson?

  companies that are thinking, oh, well, I'm just gonna uproot everything I'm doing and we're an AI company now. That's not, that's not the advice you're giving.

• 43:00Speaker 01

  Right, so, you know, I'm gonna contradict myself, but then I'm gonna defend it. I think AI is underhyped and overhyped. And I think it's overhyped because these startups have taken hundreds of millions, billions of dollars and they have to overhype it. They have to tell you that artificial general intelligence is just around the corner to justify the huge amount of money they have. Microsoft, Google, you know, Amazon, et cetera, they're putting Facebook meta, you know, they're putting, you know, tens of millions, tens of billions of dollars, you know, into AI. So of course. They want to see a, they want to recoup their investment.

• 43:44Speaker 01

  So they're overhyping this like, hey, you know, use Copilot is going to change your life tomorrow. You know, kind of thing. And so I think the individual companies, startups and big tech alike, the venture capitals who funded them, they're overhyping it. But I do think it's underhyped in that sense I said before that we tend to underestimate the long-term impact. You know, I, I, I think everything, business, education, healthcare, consumers and their personal relationships. I think everything is going to be profoundly impacted by AI. And again, I don't know if that's five years from now, 10 years from now, 15 years from now.

• 44:29Speaker 01

  But at some point in the next decade or so, you know, the world will look very different. The same way the world looked different after the internet. The same way the world looked different after mobile. You know, I think we're going to see the same impact, if not a greater impact. I mean, there's this sense that, you know, kind of the semiconductor plus personal computer, plus the internet, plus the cloud, plus the phone, you know, all of that is undergirding, all of that is going to be used in AI. And so it's almost the culmination of, you know, kind of the computer revolution, or whatever you want to call it. Since, you know, over the last 57 years, AI is the culmination.

• 45:14Speaker 01

  In fact, you know, AI had been, and Bill Gates has a fun quote about this. That's been the holy grail for him since he first touched a computer, right? Like, again, the power of Hollywood, that power of science fiction and media. This idea that, you know, like Star Trek, we could talk to the computer. For me, it was like, what was it called, Lost in Space? That we'd all have a robot helper who had all the information in the world. It was super powerful and could protect us. And I, I, I do think that's been the dream. And I do think like, we're getting pretty close to that dream.

• 45:50Geoff Nielson?

  Yeah, well, and I, I think that's well said and it is. You know, it makes me reflect on the fact that this is a, this is the continuation or the extension of a thread that's been running for a long time, right? People say AI and sometimes, sometimes we talk about AI abstractly in a way where it's like, okay, what are you actually talking about when you say AI? Because, you know, beyond like the narrow scope of gen AI and maybe even with it, you know, AI, it's, it's an algorithm, right? Like it's just, it's taking input, transforming it into outputs and in some way, you know, creating something new or doing something new. And it's like, well, that's, that's what we've been doing all along, right? Like, that's what computers were meant to do. We've just gotten to a point at it now where like something has tipped over and what it's

• 46:35Geoff Nielson?

  capable of doing and whether it's agentic or whether it's generative, you know, but, but it's still the same, the same thread.

• 46:42Speaker 01

  You asked me for surprises. Another surprise is AI has been with us for a long, long, long time. And the term artificial intelligence was first coined in the 1950s. And, you know, there, there have been people who thought like, you know, useful AI is just around the corner. It's, you know, it's, it's been a decade, decade away for like 70 years and we're finally around that corner. We're now finally where, you know, people can use it. But the truth is, Google's been using AI in search, you know, to, to help translate a garbled search, you know, spelling mistakes and such.

• 47:24Speaker 01

  They've been using AI since the 2000s to more efficiently deliver up ads. You know, in the 2010s, I'll stick with Google, Google Translate. That's AI. And, you know, that's, I think 2015 is when Google Translate came out. So, you know, billions of people have been using AI without knowing they're using AI, you know, suggestion engines. You go to Netflix, you, you know, you, you, you get a recommendation of movies you might like, you know, that's AI. So we've been using AI for a long time. I think the difference with generative AI, the difference with chat GPT is we could talk to it. It wasn't this thing behind the scenes that you had to kind of know how it works to know that was artificial intelligence.

• 48:07Speaker 01

  Now you could speak with it and, you know, it's funny, I, I kind of was a skeptic in the second half of the 90s where, okay, this stuff is really interesting. I was, you know, I used email. I love, you know, browsing things on the internet. You know, these dot coms seem kind of preposterous to me and some of the claims that are being made. So, you know, the end of 2022, I started using ChatGPT. I'm a, I'm a journalist. I was, you know, a reporter who covered this stuff. I'm used to tech companies overstating the potential of something. But first off, OpenAI, there was no press release, there was no press event. We just released this thing in, on November 30th, 2022 with a research report.

• 48:51Speaker 01

  And, you know, kind of word spread, you know, rather quickly and stuff. But, you know, the first time I used this, like, I was ready to be unimpressed. And, you know, it was magical. It was cool. It was fun. It was like extraordinary. Like, first thing I did, like, write me a 5,000-word book proposal justifying a book about AI. This is the end of 2022 and stuff. And, you know, two things, it's far better read than I am, has a far better memory that I do. But the other thing, it's, it was flat. I mean, I couldn't like hit, you know, print and turn it in, you know, kind of thing. But it was like, it took like, what would, what ended up taking me a week? You know, it produced a serviceable proposal within a minute.

• 49:35Speaker 01

  And, you know, it's just like, it's, it's ability to write poems. One of my favorite early uses was, and this kind of underscores that it's original, it's generative AI. It's creating something original. Explain Marxist, Marxist economic theory in the form of a Taylor Swift song. And it was really good. It was really clever at doing it. Obviously, that was original. I, I don't think they went out and found that somebody had done this before and produced it. So, you know, I, I, I kind of did start with the, this stuff being magical. You know, I could be talking to you right now. I don't understand Italian.

• 50:15Speaker 01

  But we could translate my words with my voice and I could do this interview in Italian or Chinese or, you know, just, just, you know. Any of a dozen, two dozen languages, probably by this point, a hundred plus languages. And so, you know, I do think it's an extraordinary technology. That was kind of fun for me because again, you know, as a journalist, you kind of have ideas in your head. I think as a good journalist, you should be willing to say, oh, what I had in my head was wrong. And not just like pursue examples that show like, oh, this thing is, you know, lousy. So it was fun for me to like, kind of have my world turned upside down from the start as I was going out and introducing myself to founders, venture capitalists, you know, those trying to cash in on this AI moment.

• 50:59Geoff Nielson?

  Yeah, no, it's, it's, it's super, super neat. And yeah, it's fair. I think it's, it became a surprise to all of us. I do, Gary, want to slightly switch gears and talk about, back to the human in the loop and, and, you know, 2025. And maybe we can talk about AI or maybe not. But what I, what I wanted to ask you about is, I think about six years ago, you wrote a book series called Masters of Work.

• 51:26Speaker 01

  Right.

• 51:26Geoff Nielson?

  On a few different, you know, what you considered really interesting, important roles at the time. You did venture capitalists, you did cybersecurity, you did sports agent.

• 51:35Speaker 01

  Right.

• 51:36Geoff Nielson?

  If, if you were to do that again in 2025 or, you know, 2026, has that changed for you? Are there, are there new roles that you've found in kind of your research and what you've been pressing up against that you think are going to be really, really interesting in the next few years?

• 51:49Speaker 01

  So that was part of a bigger series and those are the three, actually. They were like 20 or so professions. You know, I, I'll answer it differently. Like, I, I think something that's so interesting is, you know, what's going to be the impact of AI on jobs? Already we're seeing AI being very productive in customer service centers. You know, this idea that, you know, the AI could do a perfectly good job of answering basic questions. I need to reset my password kind of. Uh, thing. So, you know, a lot, there's millions of people who work in customer service. It's gonna take a big chunk, chunk out of that.

• 52:32Speaker 01

  One of the more, uh, there's eight to 10 million people, uh, who make a living in this country, uh, as drivers, long haul drivers, Uber drivers, taxi drivers, local delivery. You know, how far away is autonomous vehicles? I mean, I was just out in San Francisco and, you know, there's, you know, robo taxis everywhere and it's, you know, it's working there in a few different cities. So I, I can't predict if we're two, five, 10 years out, but at some point in the foreseeable future, you know, all those jobs, uh, as drivers or most of those jobs, you still need delivery people that carry it. Unless we have a robot in the car, you know, bringing in the, the stuff they're delivering. And so, you know, there'd be job categories that are decimated, uh, by, by AI.

• 53:17Speaker 01

  But there'll be these new categories that we can't understand. And one of the obvious ones right, right now is prompt engineer. You know, it's, it's, it's not as, you have to, something I think people don't use AI don't understand is that you're still the creative, you're still the one who's needs to find the use in this thing. You know, you just can't like tell me something interesting, you know, you, you know, I, I, I, when I use it, I use my knowledge and, you know, I've done a little bit of research and I can guide it and stuff. And so prompt engineer is gonna be, or is, um, a job. But there's all these job categories that we can't imagine.

• 53:58Speaker 01

  My, my, the example I use, it's, you know, Gutenberg comes up with the printing press. And, you know, we could worry about like, oh, what, what are all these monks gonna do? How are they gonna earn a living kind of thing? It, it gave rise to the publishing industry. It gave rise to newspapers and magazines. Like there's millions of people, you know, who have jobs based on essentially this technology, the printing press. And so I, I, I can't help but think that AI is gonna create job categories that our brains can't quite understand, because we need to see how it plays out. I, I do fear that AI is gonna be, um, is, is gonna lead to. The destruction of more jobs than the creation of new jobs. But I could be wrong.

• 54:43Speaker 01

  I think I said the same thing in the mid 1990s and the internet, right? I mean, you need less people at the Amazon bookstore than you would at the local bookstore. So in my head, like, oh, my goodness, the internet is going to destroy all these jobs. But, you know, we have 4% unemployment right now. So somehow we've we figured that out. But, you know, I I am scared of that. It actually happens to be something I'm writing about and researching now because I I don't know the answer in my head. Again, I fear it's going to be largely a a big net negative. But I've had that fear before and have been wrong.

• 55:22Geoff Nielson?

  Well, so can you tell me a little bit more about that? What your your next project and what you're looking into?

• 55:28Speaker 01

  I I mean, this is just an, this is just an article I'm I'm working on for the New York Times. But, you know, you know, if you look at my career, I've written about tech or I've written about politics, urban issues. And of course, what's been happening the last year or so is, you know, tech has eaten politics. Tech is at the center of politics. I would argue that tech is the largest special interest, corporate interest, whatever you want to call it, like in the history of politics, like in the old days, you know, uh, the rich moguls would write big checks.

• 56:09Speaker 01

  And, you know, kind of have their politicians, they treat it as puppets. But this is different. And first off, you know, look at Elon Musk, 250 million or so. Crypto put like $200 million into the 2024 election. They're writing much, much, much, much, much bigger checks. And so somehow I wonder if there's a a a book, a book there, The Billionaire Boys Club.

• 56:35Geoff Nielson?

  I did, Gary, want to talk to you about something else outside of tech and politics that you you kind of touched on earlier, both in your career and with like the the Gutenberg Press example, which is journalism and how journalism fits into all this and what AI means for journalism.

• 56:53Geoff Nielson?

  Journalism, I mean, I don't think I'm being controversial by saying it's in a pretty precarious place right now and has seen, in my eyes, like a rapid and depressing, you know, decline in the past decade or more. What does all of this mean for journalism? And if you had, like, well, let me maybe just leave it there.

• 57:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, so this has been going on long before AI grew front and center. In fact, you can make the argument that it was the internet. You know, the internet, Craigslist wiped away classified advertising. That was a big piece of, of the revenue for any newspaper, you know, a whole set of things. You know, AI, I fear, accelerates that. I mean, again, I think AI could be a, a good tool for journalists to help him or her do her jo- uh, job. But, you know, I, I, I do fear, in fact, we're already seeing it, that AI is good enough right now

• 58:00Speaker 01

  where it could write a basic news story. You know, kind of the, one of the coins of the realm these days is like the hot take. Well, AI could just digest what's being said about, you know, this, this event or that. And you train it, it could come up with a hot take much faster and many, many, many, many more than any human. Um, Sports Illustrated, they got in trouble for it, but they created these bots, even gave them names and backstories, um, as if they were real humans, they were deceptive, uh, about it. But they're using them to write stories, uh, CNN, the same thing, they, they did it, but they,

• 58:39Speaker 01

  they stopped because they found that there, you know, half the stories and more, uh, had errors, some of them serious errors. So again, I come back to this idea like, okay, we could use AI bots, I think it's dangerous, to create a rough draft of a story, but there has to be humans in the loop who are skeptical, who are like, wait, what's the source for this? When I use, you know, a chatbot to do research, you know, I use one of them like perplexity as an example, that footnotes, because I, you know, I'm not going to trust anything it says. Hey, most of what it says is right, but most of what it says is right is not good enough.

• 59:18Speaker 01

  And so I always want to go, oh, okay, that quote, here's a CNBC article that had that quote in it. And so, you know, it can be a tool, but you know, I'm scared that, you know, with all the pressure on

• 59:34Speaker 01

  news outlets to cut costs because we're getting, you know, they're getting less revenue from subscriptions, less revenue from classified ads, less revenue for advertising, that their solution is going to be, you know, kind of reporter bots and all. But, you know, who's going to go to the meeting, the city council meeting and get the quotes? I mean, I still have to think there needs to be journalists out there doing this shoe leather reporting and all. But, you know, big companies are always looking for ways to save money. You know, maybe we'll have reporters, but the editors and copy editors, they'll be bots. So I think there'll be a profound

• 1:00:17Speaker 01

  impact of AI. In fact, one more data point, and again, this isn't AI, this is before AI. You know, newspapers and magazines in the US brought in like $50 billion in advertising collectively in 2000. But Google and Facebook, now Meta, you know, they have eaten huge portions of that to the point where it's now closer to 10 billion rather than 50 billion. That's a lot of money that they're no longer getting. And so how do you make it work? How do you, as a newspaper, magazine, a publication, make it work? You know, AI is a way you can save money.

• 1:00:52Geoff Nielson?

  Right. And it makes sense. And I really like, you know, your take on it and what you covered. There's one like specific piece that I want to dig in a little bit deeper, which is specifically investigative journalism, which is something that you've focused on in your career. And to me is, I don't know, maybe the piece that's least replicable by AI, either because they can't do it, or because, you know, the news outlets of the future don't necessarily want them to do it. Is that like, what is the future of investigative journalism? And is it in trouble in your eyes?

• 1:01:27Speaker 01

  Well, investigative journalism is in trouble generally because it's very expensive. Right?

• 1:01:33Speaker 01

  I could write two news stories a day if I'm just going to a city council meeting or I get a press release, make a couple of calls and crack it out. You know, I've spent months on investigative pieces. So investigative reporting is expensive. Generally, there's been kind of a nonprofit model, you know, model where like, oh, ProPublica, you know, will have an outlet that does investigative journalism. That's their thing and they're, you know, funded by foundations and such and, you know, users who appreciate their work. You know, I, so I don't think that's reversing anytime soon. In fact, I fear that it's going to be, you know, less and less what media outlets are

• 1:02:17Speaker 01

  able to invest in. But, you know, to kind of express an optimistic note for a moment, like AI could be an amazing tool, but one, one thing that AI is so good at is going through vast sets of data and finding connections that no human, you know, could, could, could see. And so, you know, the SEC, you know, there's a gazillion filings from publicly traded companies, you know, could train AI to look for patterns, like, you know, look for times where there was big news announced by a company who sold stock inside the company ahead of that, you know, just to use a quick example off the top of my head.

• 1:02:56Speaker 01

  But so, you know, AI could be an extraordinary tool again, as long as there's a writer or a set of writers who are using that tool, because it's the human instinct that's going to understand like where the story is, you know, these, these things that, you know, we're at GPT four point five, you know, right now. So I don't know what GPT eight or nine or 10 or 12 is going to be like, but these things cannot write a good investigative story. These things could not write a good magazine story. These things can't write a book and they seem a long, long, long way. They're too flat. They're boring. They're, you know, As you point out before, they're just mathematical models looking for patterns.

• 1:03:40Speaker 01

  And so it's derivative by definition. What makes a book good is it's original. I would argue that the human toil and sweat is what makes it good. It's the sense, the approach of the writer. But, you know, I don't know. I mean, I do wonder if these things are getting, you know, 10 times better, more or less every year. Will there ever be a point where it could write a beautiful novel? Will it ever get a point where it could like write a really engaging, page turning work of nonfiction that's told through characters like replacing me? I, I, I joke that I'm writing as fast as I can because I don't know if that's going to happen,

• 1:04:24Speaker 01

  but I definitely think it's possible it's going to happen. What do you think?

• 1:04:27Geoff Nielson?

  No, it's.

• 1:04:28Speaker 01

  What do you think about?

• 1:04:29Geoff Nielson?

  I mean, first of all, I was going to say, I really appreciate the note of optimism there about what it can do. And, you know, as I was just, you know, as the wheels were turning as you were talking, I don't know. I think it wouldn't shock me if at some point AI could get to writing articles, if not books, maybe books, the thing that you've probably seen this too in your research. One of the limitations right now is that the longer you let generative AI generate, the more likely it is to go off the rails and go in some wacky direction. And, and the analogy, by the way, that I kind of thought of for this is like, I feel like that's true of like the human body, right? Like, once a human, you know, turns 100, like things start going wrong with the body

• 1:05:14Geoff Nielson?

  because it's been running for too long and all those little things start to add up. Generative AI, I guess, is the same way. So, so long form, I think, is probably safe for a little bit. But I've certainly found an experimenting with it, Gary, that you can ask it like, you know, be compelling and in a short way, it can be more compelling and less flat. But, you know, the piece that is interesting and gives me hope there is more on the investigative journalism piece and the, the tool for it to be able to make those connections. And.

• 1:05:47Geoff Nielson?

  You said it, but it's really only as good as the prompter is, right? Like, it needs a human to ask the good questions and give you the answer to that good question. And I mean, I can tell you anecdotally.

• 1:05:58Speaker 01

  It needs a human to digest it. I mean,

• 1:06:01Geoff Nielson?

  That's right.

• 1:06:01Speaker 01

  It'll give you a vast amount of data, like, and it's your job as the writer, the journalist, the human,

• 1:06:06Geoff Nielson?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:06Speaker 01

  you know, to kind of figure out like, oh, here's, here's my story. Again, I'm always playing with it. I'm always like, you know, here's, here's my notes. Give me a good opening. I'm like basically oh, for every time doing that. But, you know, it's like, oh, but that's an interesting word to use. And oh, that's a good place to start. I hadn't really thought of that. So again, it's, it's, you know, Microsoft calls their chatbot Copilot.

• 1:06:32Speaker 01

  And I think that's the perfect, what I like about that is it, the name tells you what it is. You know, you're flying the plane. You're the one who knows this, but you got this really good assistant right there that could do some work. You know, I have to go to the bathroom. So, okay, you fly for a minute, but just for a little bit, I'm, I'm landing this thing. I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm taking it off. And so, you know, it is your copilot. And again, whether it's, we're talking about investigative journalists or, you know, more or less any creative professional job. It really is this amazing tool, like reports. Like, it could write a really good, efficient 20-page report that reflects

• 1:07:15Speaker 01

  more or less every 20-page report that's written on a, you know, white paper-like thing, on a basic subject. So if I was in that, if that's the kind of writer I was, two things. One, I'd be using, and again, you're steering it. It's, you're the prompt engineer. You're the one who is going to have to figure out how this is useful. You need to edit it. You need to rewrite it. But yes, but, you know, instead of it taking two weeks to write that report, maybe you could do it in three or four days. But the other thing I'd be thinking is like, I might want to find a different career. Because if my big company has 20 of us who writes reports, it's not too hard to imagine in the not-so-distant future that instead of 20, they might have two or four of us.

• 1:07:56Geoff Nielson?

  Yeah. Yeah, no, that's that's well said. But I do love the, um, I just wanted to kind of close that out with the notion that, you know, to me, and I don't think you'll find this controversial at all, like journalism, and especially investigative journalism are a public good, right? Like, they do something of benefit to society, and I worry about a future where they're not there. And you've given me hope that, you know, whether it's that or some of the other kind of creative tools for it, they're not going away, and it can actually be a force for good as we look at what it can do.

• 1:08:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, I hope so, but you know, there is that other trend line that, you know, we don't have enough investigative journalists. There's, you know, most local newspapers, you know, have few, if any, investigative journalists. But, you know, investigative journalists have uncovered extraordinary, uh, then, you know, Watergate, Jeffrey Epstein, you know, kind of the list is long. And I think at this moment, getting back to a point you made before, like, you know, Elon Musk could say what he wants to say and stuff, but investigative journalists are the ones who figure out, and the New York Times has done a great job of this, saying, like, wait, but there's all these investigations that the federal government, uh, say, how does that work out? Like, wait, you get contracts.

• 1:09:15Speaker 01

  In fact, with, you know, rural broadband, like, there's, I don't know where it is, it's not my topic, but there's talk of Starlink, that's, you know, a Musk, you know, Musk, um, product, you know, of Starlink being brought in, uh, to give us, uh, rural broadband, bringing broadband to rural areas, um, well, not broadband, bringing us, you know, wireless, bringing Starlink instead, like, that could be worth billions and billions of dollars to us. So, you know, is that what's happening? I don't know, but I think it's an investigative journalist's role to unearth that and say, like, okay, I don't mean to be a cynic here, but there is this other set of motivations

• 1:09:58Speaker 01

  that the public should know about when they listen to what Elon Musk says about X or Y.

• 1:10:03Geoff Nielson?

  Well, and if the biggest barrier to that right now is, well, it's just it's cost prohibitive to have too many investigative journalists for a local paper, for any paper. And we say, well, wait, AI can decrease the cost of an investigative journalism piece by, you know, 10x. Suddenly, you know, in my utopian world, that's back on the table, and that could be really interesting.

• 1:10:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, 10x might be a little bit too utopian for my days.

• 1:10:27Geoff Nielson?

  Fair enough.

• 1:10:28Speaker 01

  But, you know,

• 1:10:28Geoff Nielson?

  A guy can dream.

• 1:10:32Speaker 01

  But, you know, I keep on coming back to this term, I stole it from Reid Hoffman, you know, kind of superpower, that, you know, you, it does amplify your intelligence. It does amplify your ability to do things. And, you know, I'll just kind of restate something I said earlier, like investigative journalists using AI are more powerful than investigative journalists who don't use AI. So I do think this could kind of not an equalizer. I do think it could help, you know, what's a, help preserve what's a diminishing resource in our, in our country.

• 1:11:13Geoff Nielson?

  Well said. Gary, I wanted to say a big thank you for today. This has been really, really fascinating. A lot of really interesting insights I'll be taking away. So really appreciate you coming on and the time you spent here today.

• 1:11:24Speaker 01

  Oh, my pleasure. Thanks for having me. This was fun.