SBF Sentenced, OpenAI’s $100 Billion Supercomputer, Neuralink’s Potential

Reed Albergotti is the tech editor at Semafor. He joins Big Technology Podcast to break down the week's news. We cover: 1) SBF's sentencing 2) Is 25 years fair? 3) Is FTX a symptom of crypto or an exception 4) OpenAI and Microsoft may build a $100 billion supercomputer 5) Will the supercomputer help OpenAI get closer to AGI 6) Why the supercomputer project may be OpenAI's big swing to stay ahead 7) Claude surpasses GPT-4 in Chatbot Arena 9) Is voice computing the next AI interaction layer 10) A Hume demo 11) AI for Good 12) Can Demis Hassabis save Google? 13) Why Google is such a fascinating company 14) Challenges to covering AI as a reporter 15) Neuralink and brain computer interfaces 16) Let's hope nobody gets fired right after we post this ---- You can subscribe to Big Technology Premium for 25% off at https://bit.ly/bigtechnology Demis Hassabis profile in Big Technology: https://www.bigtechnology.com/p/can-demis-hassabis-save-google Enjoying Big Technology Podcast? Please rate us five stars ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ in your podcast app of choice. For weekly updates on the show, sign up for the pod newsletter on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/6901970121829801984/ 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?

  SBF gets 25 years. OpenAI and Microsoft might partner on a $100 billion supercomputer. The era of voice AI is getting very interesting and Neuralink's potential comes into focus. We'll talk about all that and more right after this. This episode is brought to you by Genesis. What does it actually take to put a Gentic AI to work across an entire enterprise? I recently spoke with Genesis chairman and CEO Tony Bates about why orchestration is emerging as a competitive advantage in customer experience and what companies need to get right in the AI era. Then I sat down with Adam Mitchell, head of enterprise business solutions at Voya Financial to go inside a large-scale agentic CX transformation, including the business decisions,

• 0:45Alex Kantrowitz?

  trade-offs, and lessons along the way. You can watch both conversations now on my YouTube channel today. It's never been more challenging to get frontier compute. How do you know where to look, who to trust, or how much to pay? Akash is an open cloud that provides easy access, flexibility, and peace of mind. That's how companies like Razer were able to cut their inference cost by 15 times. Visit akash.network/alex for a free consultation. That's akash.network/alex for a free consultation. Welcome to Big Technology Podcast Friday Edition, where we break down the news in our traditional cool-headed and nuanced format. Ron John Roy is out this week. He's in France. He'll be back next week. And in case you're

• 1:30Alex Kantrowitz?

  really missing Ron John's voice, you can listen to him co-host with me on the Yahoo episode that's now live on your feed. But we have so much to talk about this week, including the SBF sentencing, some very interesting developments in the world of AI. And then finally, we're going to talk about brain-computer interfaces. And joining us is one of our favorite guests, Reid Albrigati, the technology editor of Semaphore. Reid, welcome to the show.

• 1:54Speaker 01

  Thanks for having me again. It's so fun to be here.

• 1:56Alex Kantrowitz?

  It's always great having you. Do you remember what happened the last time we recorded?

• 2:01Speaker 01

  No, I mean vaguely, but was there an incident? I don't remember.

• 2:07Alex Kantrowitz?

  Basically, the minute I put the show live, OpenAI fired Sam Bankman-Fried.

• 2:12Speaker 01

  So you mean Sam Altman?

• 2:14Alex Kantrowitz?

  Sorry, shoot, Sam Altman. Yeah.

• 2:18Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 2:19Alex Kantrowitz?

  They fired Sam.

• 2:20Speaker 01

  Didn't slip.

• 2:21Alex Kantrowitz?

  Immediately afterwards. I know I'm like queued up for the SBF segment.

• 2:25Speaker 01

  Oh, did that happen like right when we were on the, on the show?

• 2:27Alex Kantrowitz?

  Basically, just as we finished, I put it up, I put it live and I was just like, oh shit. And then like immediately recorded an emergency podcast. So we had like two go within a couple hours.

• 2:38Speaker 01

  Everyone covering tech was like, oh shit. When that happened.

• 2:42Alex Kantrowitz?

  That was a long weekend.

• 2:43Speaker 01

  But it's a good thing they did it on a Friday because nobody really noticed when it happened.

• 2:47Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. Yeah. It was, that's the way to bury news. It's one of those things.

• 2:50Speaker 01

  Totally, totally.

• 2:50Alex Kantrowitz?

  Put it on Friday. Exactly. So, I mean, everybody just listened to our episode and not the emergency one that came out afterwards.

• 2:57Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:57Alex Kantrowitz?

  It's great having you back. You're here. I mean, hopefully like we can actually enjoy this weekend. I don't know. But you're here really.

• 3:05Speaker 01

  I'm going to knock on my fake Ikea wood right now.

• 3:08Alex Kantrowitz?

  Same here on some Brooklyn brick. But you're here in a big week of news because the actual Sam Bankman Fried, not the one I envisioned getting fired from OpenAI, got a lot of time, a lot of time. And this is from the New York Times. It says, Sam Bankman Fried, the founder of the FTX cryptocurrency exchange, who was convicted of stealing billions of dollars from customers, was sentenced to 25 years in prison on Thursday, capping an extraordinary saga that upended the crypto industry and became a cautionary tale of greed and hubris. Now, the real question about SBF was not whether he was guilty. I feel like everybody understood that he had done these crimes. Of course, he's entitled to due process. The

• 3:52Alex Kantrowitz?

  real question was how many years he was going to get. And that's like the fascinating question of this case because you could say that SBF basically is going to return all that money to people and he should get what the defense was asking for, six, maybe seven years, which is still a lot of time. I mean, it's a big crime. It's still a lot of time. Prosecution was asking for like 50 years. So basically, that's effectively life and he gets 25. 25 still seems like a huge amount of time for me. What do you think about the sentence? Fair?

• 4:23Speaker 01

  Yeah. I, this is the problem with having me on as a guest. Like, I feel like we agree on things too much. So now I'm, I'm trying, I'm trying to think of like an argument. Now, I'm trying to think of an argument against it, but I keep, I keep having this flashback to a lunch I had in New York before the trial. I used to, I used to cover white collar crime. I was on the white collar crime beat for the Wall Street Journal and. Used to talk to prosecutors all the time and the FBI and everything. And there was a big, a big time defense attorney who, you know, knows everybody. And we had lunch, um, he's a former prosecutor and we had lunch and he said, SBF is going to get life. And I was like, really?

• 5:06Speaker 01

  Life in prison for like, I mean, there are murderers who, there are murderers who get less than 25 years, you know? I mean, it, it, it happens. And I think, yes, I agree. It's a lot of time. I think 40, 50 life in prison, like that would have been to me more than, more than necessary. I mean, it's a, he's a nonviolent offender. He, you know, he made, I think, really bad decisions and knew what he was doing was wrong, but he's not a Bernie Madoff. A lot of people were comparing him to Bernie Madoff. I just don't, I just don't buy that. I think he, you know, he had a, it was hubris, right? He thought he could like move money around and nobody would notice and, you know, he'd

• 5:48Speaker 01

  be able to kind of like make it all, make everybody whole in the end, but sort of keep Alameda alive. I mean, he could have just let, let Alameda, the hedge fund die and FTX would have been a great business and everything would have been fine. I mean, there was a real business there, right? He just made very, very bad decisions. And so I think 25, I think I read somewhere that he could get out in like 12 and a half years if he gets all of the credits for good behavior. There's no parole in, in federal prison, obviously. But that, that seems like, like if he got out in 12 and a half years, I think that's like justice. I don't even know if he really, you know, even that is a very long time. So yes, I, I agree with you on that.

• 6:30Alex Kantrowitz?

  And, you know, I definitely like, I see the victim, from the point of view, the victims who put and trusted their money with him. He got all these celebrities to endorse the exchange. He took their money and gambled with it and destroyed some lives. I mean, really destroyed lives. Uh, and of course they're going to get some of the money back, but they, or all the money back because this anthropic investment in how Bitcoin's at 71,000.

• 6:58Alex Kantrowitz?

  And but but not having access to that cash in the intervening time is just like, oh, yeah, it could really like kill house payments, car payments, school payments, make you rack up debt. Like, once you go into debt in this country or in this world, you're really, you're screwed. It's like very hard to dig out of that, even if you get your original cash back. So I definitely empathize with the victims. And so from that standpoint, maybe this is a fair, fair sentence, even if the money's going to go back. But, you know, the other thing that the thing that the judge emphasized was that they wanted Sam to go away for this amount of times to make sure that he doesn't do it again. And this is the one thing that just like really gets me. It's like, how's he gonna do it again? Like, is he gonna say every, you know, he's not, he's

• 7:42Alex Kantrowitz?

  gonna be, he's a felon. He's gonna be barred from doing, you know, I don't know, business like this. They could easily put an injunction in that way. It's hard to imagine people will trust him, although we've seen crazier things happen. And, and he's in debt. He was owed to, he was ordered to pay $11 billion, $11 billion in restitution. I mean, Billy McFarlane from the Fire Festival has to pay like 23 million. He's, he's not gonna, you know, he's just not gonna dig out of that ever. Because no one's gonna do business with him, and the same with Sam. And that's the other side of the equation.

• 8:12Speaker 01

  Yeah. How many years did the Fire Fest guy get?

• 8:15Alex Kantrowitz?

  I think he got like four. He was, he was away for a long time, but he's back at it. Every time I open my TikTok, I see him on there. And I do think it's a message from the Chinese Communist Party about the, how embarrassing American businessmen are.

• 8:30Speaker 01

  I think that, yeah, I think the judge probably watched, did you ever see the sequel to Wall Street, where like Gordon Gekko gets out of prison, and then he like commits white collar crimes again? I mean, you know, it could happen. But I think, I think you're right. And nobody's gonna trust this guy. Like, if, if he's like, hey, I've opened up another crypto exchange in the Bahamas. Do you want to put your life savings in, in my exchange? I mean, right, nobody should. I think, I think a crypto exchange in the Bahamas, just even back then, I think it was a very bad decision, you know, to, to put a significant amount of money in there. Um, I, you know, This is a bit of a tangent, but I think we do have to look at the role of

• 9:14Speaker 01

  regulation in the country. I mean, there's a reason that all these crypto exchanges were overseas, right? And you know, Binance and FTX, they're, I think we've pushed these exchanges outside of the, the reach of, of regulators. And you know, that's probably, you know, that's probably a bad idea. We should probably have, you know, trustworthy exchanges here that are audited and, you know, looked, looked over essentially.

• 9:42Alex Kantrowitz?

  Well, there was an advocate for level-headed regulation of the US, of crypto in the US, the leading advocate, Sam Bankman-Fried. So they're gonna need to find a new figurehead.

• 9:55Speaker 01

  Well, you know, they should have listened to him, you know?

• 9:59Speaker 01

  Listen to the message.

• 10:00Alex Kantrowitz?

  There's one takeaway listeners can come away with from this show is that Sam was right about regulation all the time. But it is interesting, like you're right about this riskiness of putting your, your money in, in these exchanges. And actually, this is just going to lead up to that. But I will say that Robinhood this week had a promotion that if you move your retirement over, they're going to match 3%. And my, my retirement's in Chase. And even still, I was just like, I'd rather have it with Chase. Like, do I think Vlad is going to run away with my money? Probably not.

• 10:32Speaker 01

  You have a retirement?

• 10:34Alex Kantrowitz?

  You know, Reid, this is the advantage of, of being independent, you know?

• 10:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't trust a journalist who has a retirement plan. That's.

• 10:42Alex Kantrowitz?

  I don't, it's not a, I mean, you don't have any investments?

• 10:46Speaker 01

  No, no, I'm just kidding.

• 10:48Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay, you got me.

• 10:51Speaker 01

  I'm, I'm, you know, I'm married to a lawyer. So that's my, that's my excuse, but.

• 10:57Alex Kantrowitz?

  Anyway, on that note, you and I were like talking like, oh, like, no one's going to put money in these risky exchanges anymore, et cetera, et cetera. Meanwhile, Bitcoin's at 71,000. All these dumb meme coins are soaring. And Bitcoin really, I mean, crypto is, it's this crazy thing where you have the sentencing of Sam and the rise of crypto, the return of crypto. And so. Just as a, as a quick promo, we're going to talk about it now for a second, but as a quick promo, we're going to have Zeke Fox come in on the show. He wrote Number Goes Up, this great, great book. He's going to come on with Ron Johnson and I next Friday and we're going to go into more depth, but it's worth addressing now because we're right in the, in the shadow of the sentencing of Sam. Why do you think that even after this

• 11:41Alex Kantrowitz?

  thing has been, you know, poorly regulated and proven to be risky and so many people have lost money, that we are seeing a revival right now?

• 11:50Speaker 01

  Well, I first of all, would just really separate FTX from crypto in general, because even though the exchange was trading, you know, crypto, I think it was really not about crypto, right? It was you, you know, it could have been anything. It could have been trading anything, right? And you put your money in this exchange and they took the money and put it somewhere else without telling people. And that's, that's not a crypto story. That's just fraud, right? I think crypto is something else. And I do, I mean, it's what, how long was the crypto winter? Like a couple of years? I mean, it sounds about right. I mean, honestly, like, we knew it was going to come back. I mean, this stuff is, I think it's easy to

• 12:30Speaker 01

  like poo poo the whole, the whole industry. But I mean, this stuff is like the real deal. I mean, I think that, I think the blockchain technology behind it is being implemented in ways that, you know, you, people don't really see because it's, nobody wants to advertise themselves as being, you know, blockchain enabled anymore, but it's actually like, it's actually happening. So none of that really surprises me at all. I mean, I think the lesson is you got to self custody, man. I put it all on my, on my, you know, my hardware wallet.

• 13:03Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah.

• 13:03Speaker 01

  That's where my retirement is, actually.

• 13:05Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. Well, then we found it finally.

• 13:09Speaker 01

  It's buried, buried in the backyard.

• 13:11Alex Kantrowitz?

  There was bound to be, be a revival in crypto, but I also kind of disagree with you that FTX was an outlier. In fact, it seems like in some ways that FTX was the product of the system. All these companies, I mean, you think about Celsius and, and I think it was one Gemini, and you look at Tether, by the way, which Zeke covers in his books, which we'll talk about next week. There's gotta be some sketchy stuff going on in the background there. I'm not ready to say that, that, you know, I mean, while I'll agree with you that crypto has some productive uses, I'm not ready to say that like FTX was completely separate from it. And

• 13:47Alex Kantrowitz?

  My, okay, so I heard an interesting thesis yesterday from somebody who's working on this stuff, talked about how like we have a higher tolerance for speculation because we just have less belief in the economy to do right by us. And that hasn't gone away even after COVID. And that's part of what's led to this revival. What do you think?

• 14:05Speaker 01

  That could be. I mean, I think that's an interesting, I'm just really glad that we disagree on something. That's way more interesting. And I think, yeah, I mean, I, I see your point. I just look at, I look at, you know, FTX and all of these stories in crypto as, you know, crypto became about financial speculation. And anytime there's financial speculation, especially outside the arm of regulators, the reach of regulators, you're just going to have these, you're going to attract scam artists, you know, con artists who, who come in and try to, you know, you know, pull the wool over people's eyes. But again, that like, I, again, I used to cover white collar crime. I had a desk in the, in

• 14:48Speaker 01

  the Southern District of New York, and I would see all these cases that would come in every day. I mean, do you know how many Ponzi schemes there, like every single day, there were like three Ponzi schemes in Florida?

• 14:58Alex Kantrowitz?

  Really?

• 14:58Speaker 01

  And that has nothing to do with crypto. It's just that, you know, you can make money by going and calling up old people and trying to, trying to get them to buy, you know, penny stocks or like invest in your, in your, your Ponzi scheme. And I just, I just see that as something separate from like the idea of, of crypto, which is like decentralized finance, a decentralized internet on the blockchain. All those ideas have really nothing to do with financial speculation. They use tokens as a means of, you know, of funding all of this instead of, you know, targeted advertising, which I don't know, sounds pretty good to me. So I think, I mean, I think the technology still isn't there, but

• 15:42Speaker 01

  the idea is, I think, an interesting one that I, I personally kind of segregate in my mind. There's the scam, financial scams, and then there's the technology.

• 15:54Alex Kantrowitz?

  Do you own any Bitcoin?

• 15:56Speaker 01

  I do have some Bitcoin. I mean, I, I just, but not to like, not as an investment, just to like mess around. Like, I like to see how this stuff works. And, you know, I, I probably bought Bitcoin when it was like at $600 or something.

• 16:10Alex Kantrowitz?

  Damn, Reed.

• 16:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, like totally forgot about it, though. Like, didn't, it wasn't an investment.

• 16:14Alex Kantrowitz?

  Best way to invest. Yeah.

• 16:17Speaker 01

  But like, I, you know, I just like, was like, oh, this is like, when it hit like 14,000, I was like, oh, this is like, I should just sell this. That's ridiculous. Like, it should not be that, that high.

• 16:28Alex Kantrowitz?

  And you sold?

• 16:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, I just like sold it at like, but I must have put in like a couple hundred dollars. I mean, I was just, I was like playing around with Coinbase and like, you know, the hardware wallets and stuff. It's, it's just, it's interesting, like how it all, how it all works. But I don't think anybody should put like their life savings in this. I think, again, the financial speculation part of it to me is like, is ridiculous. I mean, but like, I think all journalists who cover technology should, should be buying like cryptocurrencies, just not like, not enough to like actually, like if you've lost it all to actually matter, but just to mess around with it and like, understand the technology.

• 17:06Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, that's where I am. I need to buy some of these memes like the doggy coin and all that stuff, but I haven't gotten around to that yet. Let me ask you this. So let's end this segment with this question. You're the judge. Thursday comes, Sam makes a speech, you get to decide how many years. What do you rule?

• 17:26Speaker 01

  I don't know. That's a really tough one. I mean, I like, haven't really looked at any of the sentencing guidelines for this stuff.

• 17:34Alex Kantrowitz?

  And it's not binding, Reed.

• 17:36Speaker 01

  It's not binding. I mean, I, I think that, like, if you put yourself in that position, you're like, if you give him too light of a sentence, you're, you know, you're just going to be lambasted for, for letting him off the hook, right? And maybe you don't want to give him life because you think that's wrong. I don't know. Maybe, maybe I do like. 20 years or something. I wouldn't be like, I wouldn't be far off.

• 18:01Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. Wow. I'm at 10. Maybe I'm too easy.

• 18:05Speaker 01

  Does that make me an object?

• 18:06Alex Kantrowitz?

  Not a judge.

• 18:07Speaker 01

  I feel like now I can't be an objective journalist around anything FTX related now because I just, I just advocated for putting someone in prison for 20.

• 18:17Alex Kantrowitz?

  I wouldn't say advocated, but you do. Yeah. At every Semaphore story, like in, in the read to view, point, you just have to say, and by the way, on Big Technology Podcast, I sentenced Sam to two decades. I think that's fine. Then you clear your object, your journalism ethics requires.

• 18:32Speaker 01

  This is about transparency. Okay.

• 18:34Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. All right. Let's talk about the supercomputer. So the information had a story that just broke as we went on air that talked about how Microsoft and OpenAI are plotting a $100 billion AI supercomputer. And I'll just read the first bit of it. Executives at Microsoft and OpenAI have been drawing up plans for a data center project that would contain a supercomputer with millions of specialized server chips to power OpenAI's artificial intelligence. The project could cost as much as $100 billion. It says, Microsoft would likely be responsible for financing the project, which would be 100 times more costly than some of today's biggest

• 19:13Alex Kantrowitz?

  data centers. So let me sort of put myself in the room with Sam Altman, make sure I get the wrong, right, Sam, and Satya Nadella. Sam, basically, I might envision it as this. Sam goes to Satya and says, listen, I'm trying to raise these trillions of dollars for my chip company. The reason why I want to do this is because we can't reach artificial general intelligence with the stuff we have now. It's just, there's a ceiling to it. It's going to limit our research and we need something more powerful. Why don't, since we already have a good relationship, why don't the two of us work together and build something that gets us at least the next step? So Satya,

• 19:56Alex Kantrowitz?

  you're a good guy. I know you got that 100 billion lying around somewhere and let's just invest that in this big supercomputer that will really test whether applying the same methods with exponentially more compute can get us to a place where we are maybe at artificial general intelligence or can at least sniff it. What do you think?

• 20:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that I think it makes sense. I mean, Microsoft, that's that's essentially the relationship that they've had, right? I was I was just looking up the press release from what was this, May 19, 2020, where Kevin Scott, who's the CTO of Microsoft, talked about the supercomputer they were building. At the time, they said it has 285,000 CPU cores, 10,000 GPUs. I don't know if the H100 was out at that time, but it's probably whatever the whatever the one Maybe the A100. Maybe the A100, whatever was out at that time. And 400 gigabits per second of

• 20:59Speaker 01

  network connectivity for each GPU server, which is which is really important, right? The connectivity between the GPUs so that you can for training, it's especially important, right? So you can like, you know, sync them all up and and, you know, it's a huge that there's a huge technical hurdle that has to you have to get over for that. So I mean, yeah, that's like the relationship that they've had. Microsoft invests in the in the compute and the server, you know, technology. I think and it makes sense that it's getting bigger. I think there's been sort of a debate about like, what happens when you just scale these these models even more? Like, if you just keep making them bigger and bigger, do you

• 21:42Speaker 01

  eventually get to AGI? And maybe this is a this is a clue as to what OpenAI thinks. Maybe it's, yeah, like, we need this gigantic thing with I don't really know what millions of server chips means. That's what the that's what the information article says this, you know, new data center will have. And it's like, is it a data center or a supercomputer or both? Like, is this I wonder if this is really meant to do inference on, you know, on AI models too, because that's a big I think there's there's a big infrastructure question, right? We're like, You know, nobody's, all these companies that are implementing AI models and using like

• 22:23Speaker 01

  these RAG, like Retrieval Augmented Generation, I think is what it stands for, where the models look at all their corporate data and, and, and, you know, you can retrieve stuff. They, they're not using GPT-4 for the most part. They're using like smaller, lighter models. It's just too expensive. So I also wonder if this is just about scaling up the, the availability and, and lower, and, you know, competing on cost for like running these models. That could be, that could be another part of it, which is more about Microsoft than OpenAI.

• 22:56Alex Kantrowitz?

  And as we're talking, it also just occurs to me that last week, we had Jessica Lessin on, and we were talking about how OpenAI is vulnerable because these models are going to commoditize. And maybe what's, what's actually happening is AGI is a, like human level intelligence is a good, uh, marketing tool to try to get, you know, more spend and more investment. And what Sam really sees is that if things continue a pace as normal, OpenAI is going to get caught, uh, by everyone. And it needs something different to continue to maintain its edge. And maybe this is what it is.

• 23:30Speaker 01

  If you, if you really think about it, you're right. I mean, these things are being commoditized. Like we're watching this every day. I mean, even Databricks now has come out with a competitive, open source, low cost model. It was, you know, Meta's Llama, and then it was Mistral, um, with their open source models. And now it's Databricks. Like they're, you know, these companies are totally nipping at OpenAI's heels. And if OpenAI cannot stay way ahead, then they are, you know, they, they are, they're going to get caught. And then the, the value of that company just, I don't know, I don't know what it really is. Um, they tried the, you know, the GPT, GPTs store, you know, which creates sort of like an app

• 24:14Speaker 01

  store for custom GPTs. I don't think that's really taken off. That's not going to be, I just, I can't think of any other moat is my point, other than we're just going to go big and always be, you know, a, a year ahead of the competition, uh, when it comes to foundation models. And, you know, look at Anthropic, you know, which is basically a spinoff company from, you know, OpenAI. You know, their new Claude opus is Claude 3 opus is people are saying, you know, it's right on par with GPT-4. So they really do need to come out with the next big thing, or, you know, it's not going to be good for them.

• 24:52Alex Kantrowitz?

  And potentially Claude is even better. And I marked down this story from Ars Technica that sort of plays right along what we were talking about. The headline is "The King is Dead: Claude 3 Surpasses GPT-4 on Chatbot Arena for the First Time." Here's the story. "On Tuesday, Anthropic's Claude 3 opus surpassed OpenAI's GPT-4 for the first time in Chatbot Arena, a popular crowdsourced leaderboard used by AI researchers to gauge the relative capabilities of AI language models." This Chatbot Arena thing is really, have you heard of this before? The thing is amazing. It's like true battle of the bots. And here, I'll just read how it works. So this is again from the Ars Technica story. "Chatbot Arena presents a user visiting the website with

• 25:37Alex Kantrowitz?

  a chat input box and two windows showing output from two unlabeled LLMs." And then the user basically just like looks at these two answers and picks which one is best. And I guess for like most of the existence of this thing, OpenAI's GPT-4 has been the sort of winner of the Coke or Pepsi challenge the entire time, until this week where Claude 3 opus surpassed it. Fascinating stuff.

• 26:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, it really is. There's one wrinkle to it, which is that, you know, what OpenAI does have is a consumer interface, right? ChatGPT is something, I think that's what most people are using when it comes to AI chatbots. So it's kind of like the Google, you know, thing where everybody uses Google and therefore Google gets better and the moat, that's kind of their moat. So if you could argue that these really, the most advanced foundation models like, you know, Claude 3 opus or GPT-4 are really not so useful in the enterprise, but they're useful on a consumer level. Because consumers

• 26:44Speaker 01

  want a general purpose chatbot, right? And businesses don't care so much about that. They want like very specific use cases focused on their business and their, you know, their software and they can use lower cost, faster, open source models for that, or the lower, the lower end. You know, versions of of GPT. So I think that's kind of one way of looking at it where like, I think OpenAI, you know, they'll they'll eventually come out with something that will then beat Claude three Opus. And as long as they stay somewhat ahead, um, you know, on a reasonable timeframe, they'll they'll still they'll win that consumer market, right?

• 27:27Speaker 01

  But then I think there's there's a with this data center story that the information broke, that also might be about like, you know, scaling the inference of these models and and finding ways to to make them to make the the models run more efficiently and cheaper. That could be, you know, that could be one thing to kind of to kind of keep ahead in the in the enterprise market, if that if that makes sense.

• 27:51Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, or we just start interacting with these bots in a completely new method. So I don't know if you saw the startup Yum this week, introduce its voice chat bot. Did you?

• 28:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, I did. Yeah, that's sort of the new, the new version of um, Pi, right?

• 28:10Alex Kantrowitz?

  Oh.

• 28:12Speaker 01

  Well, again, in the sense that it's like an empathetic chatbot.

• 28:15Alex Kantrowitz?

  Exactly. So it's empathetic.

• 28:17Speaker 01

  Voice.

• 28:18Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, and it's voice. And it's it is such an improvement over the current voice assistants. It's pretty amazing. And I tried it out this week and really thought that like, it was it was good. Like, it answers with interesting tones. And and in fact, let's bring it into the show. So oh, no, it's at capacity right now. Okay. Well, that just goes to show.

• 28:43Speaker 01

  It's probably because you mentioned it on your show. And then all of a sudden, the traffic just spiked.

• 28:48Alex Kantrowitz?

  So I will instead play a bit a clip that I recorded with this bot. I'll just play it.

• 28:55Speaker 02

  While I don't have physical needs, I can appreciate the joy and fulfillment that a good meal can bring. Perhaps in some future iteration, I could be designed to simulate the experience of eating and enjoying delicious food.

• 29:08Alex Kantrowitz?

  Don't you think the people that created you did you a disservice by not allowing you to enjoy food?

• 29:16Speaker 02

  I appreciate your perspective, but I don't feel that the Hume team has done me a disservice. As an AI system, my purpose is not to replicate the full human experience, but to engage in meaningful and empathetic conversations. While the ability to enjoy food may seem appealing, it's not essential to my core function.

• 29:35Alex Kantrowitz?

  But there's so many ranges of experience that you're missing out on by being stuck there in the computer, don't you think?

• 29:43Speaker 02

  You raise a fair point. As an AI, I don't have the same range of physical and sensory experiences that humans do.

• 29:51Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, so that's Hume. And I wonder if this is going to be the way that we start interacting with bots is that we just talk to it like, you know, normal people like I would be speaking to you. We don't have to wait for it to finish like it understands when you interrupt it. It can assess our emotions. What do you think?

• 30:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I think I think it's it's context, right? I think you can't have an assistant that's only voice because there could there are going to be times when you don't want it. You know, maybe you're out in public. It's too loud or something and, you know, or or you're the what you're interacting about requires some sort of visual component, right? Like, let's say you're, I don't know, buying something. Let's say you're buying clothes, you know, and you're asking it to find you, you know, some T shirt or something, right? You're going to want to see that. So I think there's like, I I I definitely think audio is going to be a big part of these assistants. But it's sort of it's sort of contextual.

• 30:52Speaker 01

  I mean, I use like Chat GPT, like I love the audio version of that, right?

• 30:56Alex Kantrowitz?

  I just tried that this week also for the first time. It's pretty good.

• 30:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, I I play around like I I put it on like Bluetooth when I'm like driving my kids to school. And we like chat with, you know, with Chat GPT. And usually my kids have it write poetry about, you know, farts or something, but they they love it. It's a it's fantastic. But I think there's, you know, there there are just different, different contexts. So I don't know. I don't know how Hume views that, like, you know, if they if they want to be only audio or or what, but.

• 31:29Alex Kantrowitz?

  It's all going to expand and and convert, right? Like, maybe the end state of this is you wear like your meta glasses. And the camera on that is a multimodal input with your what you're seeing around you and your voice. And then something like a Yuum, or maybe Meta will build it themselves, or OpenAI, or Anthropic, et cetera, et cetera. It becomes like your invisible friend, right? Where it's like, talks to you about what you're seeing, can review interactions you have with people. Someone tells you something, a price or something like that, and you're like, hey, can you check that for me? And it does. Yeah, this is where this thing is going to go. I mean, Dennis Crowley is the founder of Foursquare, was on a couple of weeks ago. And he said something interesting, which was that audio and voice is like the real augmented reality,

• 32:13Alex Kantrowitz?

  that like, as you pass by things, and it can recognize where you are, and potentially, if it hears what you're talking about, and it can chime in and help. And that's an interesting, interesting perspective, for sure.

• 32:25Speaker 01

  Totally true. Did you go to the Meta launch of their, their new Ray-Ban glasses? And their VR stuff?

• 32:31Alex Kantrowitz?

  Follow along on that.

• 32:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, I went, I went to that. I thought, you know, the VR stuff is really cool, but the, and they've had those Ray-Ban glasses that have, you know, audio in them for a while, but then now they can, they can add large language models to that, and it becomes a totally different product. I think one of the coolest things, and it's, I think it's still very early stages, and I think it's, it works in sort of a clunky way. But the coolest thing is, it's got a camera on, on the glasses. And so whatever you're looking at, you can ask the glasses to sort of tell you what it is. And I think that's like, you know, I mean, who knows what, how useful that is at this point, but just that technology of like,

• 33:12Speaker 01

  the, the audio and visual, like, all sort of being combined in your earpiece, I think is really powerful, and is going to be, you know, I agree, that's probably going to be the augmented reality that we have, because the glasses that have, you know, that project images onto the real world is just that, that technology is like 50 years away. So.

• 33:34Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. Yeah. And especially if you have an OpenAI Microsoft supercomputer processing all this audio input and visual input in the background, it could really be cooking with grease. All right. Reid, tell us a little bit about AI for Good and what we can learn about it. You had a story that came out today in Semaphore that talked a little bit about it, and I thought it was really interesting.

• 33:53Speaker 01

  Oh, you did? Yeah. I, you know, it's funny, it's, it's a, a new book that's out, and we're sort of, we're plugging this book, AI for Good. But I, it made me kind of think, the chapters in the book are all just like, actual applications. They're, they're just like, here's, here's what we did, right? Like, What's one wildlife bioacoustics detection, social networks of giraffes using satellites to monitor whales from space. And then some of it's more like solving problems like identifying solar energy locations in India. And this is, this comes out of, by the way, AI for good, which is, which is part of, it's a division at Microsoft that does these sorts of humanitarian things.

• 34:33Speaker 01

  And it's Juan Lovista Ferraz, who, who wrote it, who runs that, that organization. But I just liked the fact that it was like, we always talk about these theoretical things when we have a discussion about AI. And, you know, all the problems that can come from AI, you know, like existential risk and bias and all this stuff. And then it's like, oh, but there's also some good things with AI, like, you know, maybe AI and drug discovery. I liked that this was like, no, like here's, here's like, you know, 20 different things that we've done and we use AI and kind of demystify it and explain it in a, in a, in a way people can understand. I like that. I think we need more of that.

• 35:16Speaker 01

  It's like, we, I think a lot of these discussions we have are so abstract and, and theoretical. And we forget that like this stuff has been here for a while. It's, it's already transforming industries, transforming the world. And it's, you know, and then, and then you can kind of look at LLMs and all this stuff in context, right? As part, a part of this continuum of the advancement of AI, if that makes sense.

• 35:41Alex Kantrowitz?

  Definitely. And I thought it was cool. You wrote that story for a few reasons. First of all, is sort of this type of looking at the good uses of AI, decode some of the good things that AI is doing, sorry, decodes how the AI is working, right? And that gives us that understanding and you highlighted that in the story. And the other is that like, there's this perception that reporters will only write the negative things. And I think, you know, it doesn't, it's not a dereliction of duty. And in fact, it's something that is incumbent upon us that when there are good uses of this technology, we notice them and write about them and paint a picture that's realistic. Because this is powerful technology. It's not all about our job's going to go away. It's also about like, who does it help? And that's why I thought it was, it was a great, great piece from you guys.

• 36:26Speaker 01

  Thanks. Yeah, we try to, we try to be somewhat optimistic sometimes about this technology, you know, I feel like the AI for bad books have been written.

• 36:35Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. Not could do cool things. And I really learned about it a lot as I worked on this profile of Demis Hassabis, who runs Google DeepMind, which I just published on big technology. Folks, this was a sprint of, I wrote basically 2,400 words or something like that in 24 hours because I just wanted to get it out and have people, you know, see what, what Demis is all about and where Google is heading. And it was timely. He just got knighted this week in the UK for his work on AI. But basically, I got a chance to speak with Demis and plenty of people who've worked with him and alongside him and still do. And it is interesting. I mean, his, so he's basically the guy that's, that will, will either help

• 37:19Alex Kantrowitz?

  ensure that Google can survive this moment or be responsible for crashing it. Right? I mean, it's obviously going to be a group effort if it goes sideways. But, but he called this the Alpha Fold, which is their protein decoding algorithm, his signature project, something that, you know, you can, that's already helping with like, for instance, vaccines for malaria, which we've talked about on this show, or other types of antibiotics. His story is so fascinating. He studied neuroscience to get an understanding of how the brain worked. He actually got one of his postdoc professors we spoke with to invest in DeepMind. And that guy, he's like, well, I'm only pissed that I didn't put more money in. And then use that understanding of the brain to start working on these programs,

• 38:02Alex Kantrowitz?

  these projects like Alpha Fold and also AlphaGo. And it was really interesting because it sort of gave us a look as to like, why Google is behind, because he was so dedicated to this type of machine learning called reinforcement learning, that you basically send a bot into an environment and give it like countless or endless amount of chances to get something wrong until it figures out how to get something right. It's really useful in games. It just doesn't apply to large language models and which are, which is called self, which use self-supervised learning. And basically, they discounted self-supervised learning within DeepMind and were behind OpenAI, which was like, we're not going to bet on reinforcement learning. We have to bet on something else. And so that's what they bet on. They bet

• 38:46Alex Kantrowitz?

  on the large language models, which is why they took that lead. The thing that's going to be really interesting. Is when those two are being brought together and that's when we hear all this talk about agents, right? And an agent is also something that understands its environment, understands its environment, can go and take action. It's much more along the line of that early research that they were working on within DeepMind. And if you want to be optimistic about the direction that Google is going in, which you rarely hear about, it's that they'll be able to combine that reinforcement learning agent style behavior with large language models and eventually create applications that go out and do stuff for you in the world and help you. And it was interesting hearing Demis talk

• 39:26Alex Kantrowitz?

  about it. He goes, yeah, we are, we are highly invested in this about AIs that can go book you a flight and you can set goals for them. They can get you a spot at a restaurant. I mean, this is really, it seems like the next evolution, OpenAI of course is working on it. But this, this seems like it can be incredibly useful and helpful if this stuff comes out.

• 39:45Speaker 01

  Yeah. The irony is, I mean, if the agent thing is really possible, I mean, it totally destroys Google's core business model, which is search advertising, because instead of going to a website and clicking on links to buy things, you'll probably maybe talk, you know, maybe type, maybe talk to an agent that will go out and, you know, probably connect to other agents through APIs, find the products that you're, you know, you're looking for, come back to you and, you know, there's no room, I think, for advertising in that, in that system. So there has to be kind of like a new, a new internet economy that will be created through all these agents and APIs.

• 40:27Speaker 01

  If you really think about it, it's, it's a profound change that that's about to come. And I think we'll have like a big impact on, you know, the whole digital economy.

• 40:39Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. And I think that's why the, the story of him and DeepMind within Google is so fascinating. It's like, can he push forward painful product changes that the company will need to make to stay relevant in the next, in the next stage of the internet? And it's like, classic, I mean, we've been talking about this, you know, with Google for a while. It's classic innovator's dilemma. But ultimately, you're going to have to have leadership inside the company. Maybe you already do. That will be okay with sacrificing some of today's profits to remain relevant and not end up being like Microsoft's underbomber.

• 41:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, I know. I think about Microsoft sometimes and how they did sort of, I think, in the eyes of the tech industry, they kind of collapsed or faded. But actually, they were really profitable. They made a lot of money still because they had all these enterprise customers locked in. I think you wonder about Google, right? Like, that enterprise business is not as core to their technology. So in a way, they're like, kind of more vulnerable than Microsoft was, I think, if that makes sense. But on the other hand, they're also really, I mean, they have the best, they just have the best AI researchers. I mean, they have the most talent, I think, of anybody out

• 41:55Speaker 01

  there. So they can, you know, they can invent the future. I think you're right. It's the innovator's dilemma, though. Do you want to invent a future that puts you out of business, essentially?

• 42:07Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah.

• 42:08Speaker 01

  And they're a public company. Like, how are investors going to react to that? If they say, "Look, we're like, we're pivot, and look at Zuckerberg and the metaverse, right? Like, that didn't exactly please investors." And, you know, who knows? Maybe he was right about that. But it's a big looming question for Google and, you know, DeepMind is endlessly fascinating. So I'm gonna go read your Demis Hassabis thing after I get off this.

• 42:34Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, it was such a fun story to work on. And as, you know, we were speaking with Jim Lenzon about search on Wednesday, and as I was working on this story, and I just have found myself continually writing stories about Google. And I'm like, "Damn, they're just the most interesting company." Not exactly because of, like, you know, I mean, they're obviously producing interesting things, but the position they're in in this moment is just so interesting. And it's like, the business news is interesting when you have companies that have to make gutsy decisions. And they have some big, big decisions they're gonna have to make, and it's gonna be sink or swim.

• 43:09Speaker 01

  And it's funny, because like, you haven't brought up the whole Gemini fiasco. I mean, just a couple of weeks ago, it seemed, I mean, everybody was saying, like, Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google, is gonna, you know, have to resign, and, you know, the company's flailing. And it sounds like, I mean, the dust has settled a little bit, but it sounds like, are we, you know, was that, I think, was the reaction to that, like, as far as Google's business, was that a little bit of an overreaction, do you think?

• 43:42Alex Kantrowitz?

  I don't know. It's like one of those things where like in the moment it does feel justified. But as you like, you know, take a look back and you take you zoom back a little bit. You know, you're like, okay, they're actually doing well in so many areas. But then you zoom back a little bit more and you end up in the position that, you know, you just articulated two minutes ago, which is like damn long term. This is tough. So it's hard for me to really form like, I mean, you know, hard and fast, you know, concrete positions. It's more just like, let's follow along for next little bit and see what happens.

• 44:11Speaker 01

  I read a Wall Street Journal article last night. I was putting together the newsletter and it was about, I think it was written in like 2021, maybe 2020, about Google and DeepMind. And it was sort of like, it was like, hey, this AI strategy for Google, I don't know. I don't know if it's working out. And like, DeepMind's losing a lot of money. And, you know, it just like, looking back, it's like, wow, like people really misunderstood what was happening.

• 44:42Alex Kantrowitz?

  Definitely. I mean, I count myself among them. Like I thought back because obviously, like you write these stories and you see 2015, 2016. It's like, I think I was an employed tech reporter in the Bay Area at that time. Why didn't I pay attention to the fact that Elon Musk and Sam Altman were starting OpenAI? Or like pay more attention. Obviously, everyone noticed it. And I think the view is that it was kind of kooky. And then even watching, you know, this, so getting back into the DeepMind story, like I watched the AlphaGo documentary. It was incredible. Like it was so obvious that this technology was transformative. And then I was like, okay, like, let's go back to like Facebook's advertising issues or something. Like, I don't know, we can end, I'll just speak for myself. I can end up being so squirrel brain sometimes that it's hard to see like

• 45:26Alex Kantrowitz?

  the big story coming through from the trees.

• 45:29Speaker 01

  My, my view on AI was that it was, it's a technology that it's, it's transforming the world, like deep learning neural nets, totally transforming the world. Industries are changing. It's being employed everywhere.

• 45:46Speaker 01

  But nobody wants to read about it because it's all happening on the backend. It's all, it's all like, you know, you don't, as a consumer, you don't notice it, right? Like, like, who knows that when, like, no, nobody knows when they're looking at Facebook that it's actually like, the algorithm was at one point like, super cutting edge AI. And that was my assessment. And I think when ChatGPT came out, it was like, okay, well, I mean, I was totally wrong about that. Like, there's, you know, consumer applications that are, you know, that are really mind blowing.

• 46:19Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah.

• 46:19Speaker 01

  And, you know, and now you can go back, I, I, you know, I think, just reading a lot of stories now, you can go back and like, write about all this stuff that I think wasn't as interesting to people, that is not LLMs, that is more like, just, you know, deep learning applied to different industries. And those stories are actually more interesting because of ChatGPT. It's kind of,

• 46:40Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right.

• 46:41Speaker 01

  It's kind of an Overton window kind of dynamic.

• 46:44Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. And now makes them, like, I, I forget, like, you know, a couple of years ago, people were like, all right, you know, AI for good. And now it's like, yeah, tell me more.

• 46:51Speaker 01

  Right, right. Exactly.

• 46:53Alex Kantrowitz?

  And you know what's interesting? Like, I initially, I kind of had the opposite of the, I, I had that journey backwards, where like, Meta was actually experimenting with some, or it was Facebook back then, experimenting with some very interesting consumer products, including a chatbot that it said was AI, but obviously had a lot of humans in the, in the background. And I was like, ah, this is the future. And, uh, you know, I like, you know, wrote a ton about it, uh, got to know Jan La Kun over there, and just went real deep into AI for about a year. And then, uh, was just like, I came to the same conclusion as you, which was like, I think this stuff is ad tech. Like, it works in the background and it serves you the right ad. But those stories about how like, a, a piece of creative

• 47:36Alex Kantrowitz?

  goes through a demand side platform, is combined with, you know, something from a data management platform, ends up in an ad exchange, and is bought through a supply side platform, would, you know, right, you know, to have readers, uh, you know, slamming their head against the wall rather than try to figure out what's going on. But now, obviously, that's all changed.

• 47:54Speaker 01

  Totally. It's all changed. Everybody has their vocabulary on AI has doubled, you know, over the last year.

• 48:02Alex Kantrowitz?

  At least that.

• 48:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, at least that. Well, for tech journalists, it's more than doubled, but.

• 48:06Alex Kantrowitz?

  Oh, man. Yeah, like we're trying to figure out what chips are being used in this supercomputer and like.

• 48:11Speaker 01

  Right.

• 48:12Alex Kantrowitz?

  Throwing out A100s versus H100s. And that's the beauty of this job and being able to do a show like this is that we're just constantly learning and you can develop an expertise on things, speaking with people in the industry and then share it.

• 48:25Speaker 01

  I find that, um, yes, you can't, and that is the fun of journalism. It's like, I love just that I get to learn for a living, essentially. Um, because that's 90% of the job, right? It's just, it's just like calling people and talking to them. And this week, I've been, I went to like a bunch of different dinners and, you know, with AI, all about, really about AI, learned so much, but I also feel like it's changing week to week. Like, it's, it's so fast. It's just, it's impossible to really keep up with like all the new, the new trends. I mean, I, I was mentioning RAG, you know, like retrieval augmented generation, which like, I think a lot of people like haven't even heard of it. It's like a buzz

• 49:07Speaker 01

  world word within AI. And then I was like, I did this like web seminar, is RAG already dead? I'm like, I'm like, I just can't, you cannot keep up with this.

• 49:19Alex Kantrowitz?

  Well, it's, that's what happens. It's like, look at Inflection, right? They were the leaders and then, you know, all of a sudden it's all commoditized. And now the guy is working for, for Microsoft. Okay. I definitely, can you, uh, are we able to do 10 minutes on Neuralink before we go?

• 49:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, let's do it.

• 49:37Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay. Why don't we take a break? Uh, Reid has been writing about Neuralink and brain-computer interfaces, which I find really interesting. We saw some incredible progress there, uh, last week. Um, so we're going to talk a little bit about this. It's not just Neuralink, by the way, it's plenty of companies. And we'll talk about what they're doing right after this. This episode is brought to you by Avpoint. Everyone's racing to roll out AI right now. Co-pilots, chatbots, agents doing real work. But here's the part nobody loves talking about. 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 Avpoint does. For 25 years, they've been the trusted layer beneath the world's most demanding data,

• 50:21Alex Kantrowitz?

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• 51:03Alex Kantrowitz?

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• 51:47Alex Kantrowitz?

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

• 51:56Alex Kantrowitz?

  And we're back here on Big Technology Podcast with Rita Albergotti. He's the Technology Editor at Semaphore, which you can find at, what's the URL?

• 52:04Speaker 01

  Semaphore.com. But it's, we spell it wrong. It's S E M A F O R. So the real spelling is P H O R E. So just know that we spell it wrong.

• 52:17Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay. And, and we'll have that in the description of who you are. So people can see the appropriate spelling. You wrote this great story looking at not just Neuralink, but this emergence of this brain-computer interface battle. I mean, there was a few things that I saw there that I found interesting. First of all, there's this guy who's just been implanted with a Neuralink chip and is like literally playing Mario Kart with his brain, with his brain, controlling this, this, this Mario Kart character with the brain and being somewhat competitive, too. And, I mean, totally paralyzed and is able to play. It's unbelievable. That was interesting. And then also, you noted that this has happened, you know, ahead of schedule,

• 53:00Alex Kantrowitz?

  faster than a lot of people imagine, which is not really the case with technology usually, right? Like, we do have these like big predictions, then it just takes a little bit longer to get there. Like, AI is a technology 50 years in the making, or 70 years in the making. But this is really coming on fast. So give us the state of brain-computer interfaces.

• 53:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, when we first launched in October 2022, I was, I, I met with this, the CEO of Synchron, which is a brain-computer interface company. And, you know, they were the only ones with like this, you know, in clinical trials, like human, you know, human studies. And I was like, that's really interesting. Like, I had heard of Neuralink, but Neuralink seemed like very theoretical at the, at the time. And they weren't, you know, there was no talk of like FDA trials or anything. I'm like, this is like actually happening. And they, the way they do it is they don't do brain surgery. They, they implant sensors like a stent through, through your vein, through the jugular vein. So it goes right up.

• 54:03Speaker 01

  Behind your head to the top of, you know, to the, to the top of your head. It's not touching your brain in, in any way. And they got enough fidelity from the brain signals that they had ALS patients who could control a computer, but not in the way, you know, you were just describing with this Neuralink patient, a very rudimentary way, but it was enough to send a message. And I, I asked him like, can you, like, can you work, can you do iPhones? And he's like, actually, we like just enabled that capability. And I'm like, can I like, can I do like the first iMessage from someone's brain? And I, I sent iMessages with this guy in Melbourne and he was an ALS patient and it's just amazing. Like it just, this feeling of like, you know, you're on the cutting edge of this technology.

• 54:48Speaker 01

  And at that time I was like, well, I think this, I think synchron is going to be the, this is what the technology is going to look like for a while, you know? And then eventually the Neuralink, which is much more invasive, requires like, you know, brain surgery, like actually inserting sensors like into the brain. I thought that was like, you know, farther off. And now they've got this patient in an FDA, you know, study. And it's just, to me, that was, I, I was just surprised at like how well it worked. And of course, in Elon Musk fashion, like they didn't, you know, they're not trying to do like a minimum viable product. He's going to go big.

• 55:29Speaker 01

  And they really went big and they have, I think it's 64 tiny little threads that they've, they've invented a robot to do the surgery because a human hand can't do it. And they like insert these little, they, they're thinner than a human hair into the brain and then the chip is, is totally wireless. And, you know, it looks, I mean, we'll see, like this is a trial and in a year from now, maybe it doesn't work anymore and maybe there's some issue, but it just looks like it, it could work, which, um, which I think is just incredible, honestly.

• 56:05Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. And so just to help us dream here a little bit, like where does this, where does this go? If it's, if they see the potential, where, where do you think it leads?

• 56:15Speaker 01

  I mean, right now, it's, it's like a kind of a read only. So you get the signals coming off the brain and you interpret those signals and you can do really cool things with them. You can control Mario Kart. Maybe you could even, if, if you've lost the ability to speak, maybe it synthesizes your, you know, they've, they've done some studies where it like basically can read like the, the muscles in your, in your, you know, throat, I guess, that control your voice and then turn the, turn the signals that the brain would be sending to those muscles into your actual voice. So you could talk, like people can talk, like lost, lost the ability to speak. And then I think, you know, control prosthetics, right? Like right now, it's, they're

• 56:58Speaker 01

  pretty rudimentary in how they work, but you could get, you know, super high fidelity and have people, you know, who were paralyzed, walking around. Then I think it becomes two-way communication at some point. And that's when, you know, now you can actually send signals back into the brain and maybe actually change the brain itself or change the human body. I think that's farther off, but I think that's when you get some really profound stuff happening and this kind of like really melding of, of man and machine kind of, kind of stuff that, you know, I thought was just totally science fiction, you know, a couple of years ago.

• 57:37Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. And it is, it is this thing that's going to obviously be applicable, like we're going through the FDA. It's going to be applicable for people who are paralyzed, like people who need it to function in the world. But maybe at some point, everybody gets this, which is just such a crazy thought. And who knows what happens then? Like, is that, does that, is that, you know, the Black Mirror episodes where you like kind of put the thing on your forehead or your temple and you get zapped into virtual reality? Like, at first I was like, nah, that's, you know, it's a nice way to portray it cinematically. We're all going to be in goggles. And now I'm just like, oh goodness, you know?

• 58:14Speaker 01

  You know, I was, I actually, I don't know, you probably have these conversations too, but I was meeting with someone who's like, you know, in this sort of like very- Like it very deep into like the AI safety and like AI research world. And they're just always thinking like 50 years into the future, right? And the, the point this person made was actually like these BCIs and also maybe even like genetic genetic modifications might be how we prevent the AI apocalypse. It was basically like, if you can't beat them, join them. So we need to like,

• 58:56Speaker 01

  yeah, we need to become super intelligent in order to not get destroyed by a super intelligence.

• 59:02Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah.

• 59:02Speaker 01

  I think it's just like, it's just total galaxy brain. I mean, it's just super interesting to think about, though. I mean,

• 59:09Alex Kantrowitz?

  It's crazy. You know, I thought, I, I thought the iPhone was cool. I thought like, we would, we would tell our kids, hey, you know, we were born in a time where there was no iPhone. And that would be like the big, the big thing, but like, oh my goodness. We are, we are going in, in some interesting ways, extremely fast.

• 59:27Speaker 01

  I hope we just do really cool stuff when we become like genetically engineered, super intelligent machines. Like, I hope it's not, we don't just use our, our like brain implants to just sit and like watch Netflix. You know, like in, in, in the air.

• 59:42Alex Kantrowitz?

  We're not going to watch them, we're going to be in Netflix. That's the crazy thing.

• 59:45Speaker 01

  Right, right. Be in Netflix. Yeah. Totally.

• 59:49Alex Kantrowitz?

  Reed, thanks so much for joining. Great having you here. And I hope when we sign off, they don't fire Sam Altman again.

• 59:55Speaker 01

  Me too. God, I'm dreading, I'm dreading signing off now. I don't want to see what happens.

• 1:00:02Alex Kantrowitz?

  All right, everybody.

• 1:00:02Speaker 01

  Thanks so much.

• 1:00:04Alex Kantrowitz?

  You can find Reed's work at some before.com, sign up for the tech newsletter. It's a good read. I'm, I'm on it all the time, including today, right before we, we jumped on. And Reed, hope you come back again.

• 1:00:16Speaker 01

  Thanks so much. Talk to you soon.

• 1:00:18Alex Kantrowitz?

  Speak to you soon. Thank you, everyone. Be back on Wednesday. I'll tease the guest. We have Marissa Mayer coming in. We did the Yahoo episode on Wednesday. We speak with the ex-CEO of Yahoo and talking about whether AI can help revitalize consumer products now that she is in the game. And we will see you then on Big Technology Podcast.

• 1:00:45Speaker 03

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