Sam Altman’s Gentle Singularity, Zuck’s AI Power Play, Burning Of The Waymos

Ranjan Roy from Margins is back for our weekly discussion of the latest tech news. We cover: 1) Sam Altman's 'Gentle Singularity' essay 2) Is Altman overhyping the technology's current capabilities 3) Why the next few years may see crazy AI development 4) The case for and against humanoid robots 5) OpenAI's o3 pro model and the value of tool use 6) Meta's acquihire-zition of ScaleAI and founder Alexandr Wang 7) The case for the move and the rationale behind Zuck's aggressiveness 8) MetaAI posts 'private' conversations 9) Google traffic to web publishers falls off a cliff -- here's the data. 10) The burning of the Waymos 11) Alex fight robots --- Enjoying Big Technology Podcast? Please rate us five stars ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ in your podcast app of choice. Want a discount for Big Technology on Substack? Here’s 25% off for the first year: https://www.bigtechnology.com/subscribe?coupon=0843016b Questions? Feedback? Write to: [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

• 0:00Alex Kantrowitz?

  Welcome to Big Technology Podcast Friday Edition where we break down the news in our traditional, cool-headed and nuanced format. So much to talk with you about this week. If you thought we were going to spend the entire episode talking about WWDC, I'm sorry to say that's not going to happen today. Instead, we have so much going on, including a vision-setting document from Sam This episode is brought to you by Genesis. What does it actually take to put Agentic AI to work across an entire enterprise? I recently spoke with Genesis Chairman and CEO Tony Bates about why orchestration is emerging as a competitive advantage in customer experience, 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

• 0:44Alex Kantrowitz?

  Agentic CX transformation, including the business decisions, trade-offs, and lessons along the way. You can watch both conversations now on my YouTube channel today. It's never been more challenging to get Frontier Compute. How do you know where to look, who to trust, or how much to pay? Akash is an open cloud that provides easy access, flexibility, and peace of mind. That's how companies like 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. I'm Altman at OpenAI. Some really interesting news coming out of Meta as Mark Zuckerberg

• 1:27Alex Kantrowitz?

  tries to right the AI ship. Okay, we'll talk a couple minutes about WWDC because the company seems to be digging itself into a deeper hole. And then, of course, the image of the week: Waymos lit on fire in Los Angeles amid the protests. So, joining us as always on Friday is Ron John Roy. Ron John, great to see you. We're going to have a lot to talk about this week.

• 1:49Speaker 01

  Waymos are ablaze and listeners cannot see, but Alex is holding a TikTok-style influencer microphone, I think in a corner of a hotel room, maybe?

• 2:00Alex Kantrowitz?

  At a friend's apartment. So I do want to say for those listening, watching, I brought all of the proper equipment to record normal podcasts this week from San Francisco. And this is the third I'm doing on the influencer mic, but I forgot one cable. So

• 2:18Speaker 01

  One cable.

• 2:19Alex Kantrowitz?

  That that is podcast life. I think we're we're doing pretty good. We have serviceable audio, but the quality, of course, that you expect on that front will be back to full strength next week. All right, let's talk about this post from Sam Altman, the gentle singularity. Kind of an interesting way to put it. I'll just read the beginning. We are past the event horizon, the takeoff has started. Humanity is close to building digital superintelligence. And at least so far as much as it's much less and at least so far, it's much less weird than it seems like it should be. We have recently built systems that are smarter than people in many ways and are able to significantly amplify the outputs of the people using them. The least likely part of the work is behind us.

• 3:02Alex Kantrowitz?

  The scientific insights that got us to systems like GPT four and O three were hard won, but will take us very far in some sense, some big sense. Chat GPT is already more powerful than any human who has ever lived. Rajan, I gotta ask you, I mean, obviously, like, you know, you could make a case for many of these claims as the CEO of OpenAI. Why now? And why do you think Altman feels the need to come out with this post? Because this is like a major, I would say, vision setting document from him.

• 3:34Speaker 01

  I think so. Normally, when I see a blog post from a founder of a company like OpenAI called the gentle singularity, that's very bombastic and future looking. I think I usually will kind of discount it as more just marketing content. But actually, I don't disagree with a lot of the things he's saying. I think he actually provides a pretty realistic view in terms of 2025. We'll see, we're already seeing agents that can do cognitive work, writing computer code. 2026, we'll see the arrival of systems that can figure out novel insights. 2027 may see the arrival of robots, then getting into like imagining what could 2035 look like.

• 4:17Speaker 01

  I've been a long like proponent of the idea that innovation has slowed, that like a cellphone today looks like it did in 2011, basically. That there's a lot of, like, for our day-to-day lives, it, there have not been just kind of like dramatic changes since the late 2000s, early 2010s, when we did see a kind of like fundamental shift in the way we interact with technology. So I'm actually, this oddly enough, was kind of exciting for me and kind of actually had me thinking about what could life in 2035 look like.

• 4:52Alex Kantrowitz?

  So in this post, Altman artfully writes a response to a lot of the core complaints that we see about AI. Just to paraphrase, he says, you've, you got it to write a paragraph. Now you want a novel, you got it to write, you know, to, to help a scientist in research. Now you want to come up, it to come up with the discoveries of its own. So like, first of all, okay, well, who's setting that bar exactly? You know, it is hype posts like this. So you're almost arguing with yourself, Sam. But the other side of this, which is really interesting is, yes, we've seen, look, we are happy to talk about how impressive some of this technology is, but we haven't really seen it take the next step, right?

• 5:36Alex Kantrowitz?

  It's amazing in the chatbots right now. And, you know, trying to apply it outside is not as easy. And in fact, there is a new paper that just came out there where they looked at a company going from zero to 30% of its code written by AI. And a key measure of productivity only went up by 2.4%. Now that's billions of dollars in the real economy, but it's not exactly making a one, a normal engineer, a 10x engineer. So talk a little bit, I mean, I, I understand, like, this is the trajectory that OpenAI wants to go on. And if you believe AI is going to get to the place that a lot of folks are saying, then this is what we expect.

• 6:20Alex Kantrowitz?

  However, how do you, how do you sort of contrast that with the clear limitations we're seeing with the technology today?

• 6:26Speaker 01

  Well, no, that's where I think we're at that inflection point. I think it's going back to the model versus the product and the app layer. But like, we have seen the just kind of like foundational advancement over the last few years just accelerate to a dramatic degree. But now we're going to start seeing this applied and that's everyone is working on it and actually getting this like genuinely applicable at scale. Cause as you said, like now a single engineer or across an engineering department, you can automate a lot more of the code writing process. But what does that actually do to overall productivity? It's still minimal. So actually bringing AI into larger scaled systems,

• 7:10Speaker 01

  both in our personal lives and our professional lives across enterprises, I think we're going to start to see that more. There's more of a focus on that right now. So I think, again, I think the next two to three years, we see a much, much bigger jump in the way work changes, our lives change versus the last few years as everyone just, it still was living in kind of the toy phase of things.

• 7:36Alex Kantrowitz?

  But even if like it's an application issue, I would say that like I've, you know, some developers who will say that this code, uh, you know, won't necessarily code in the way that your company codes. It will bring in legacy code that you've phased out. We'll have junior developers that will code things and not understand how they work and then ship them and break the app. And I think those applications are in the most powerful application of this technology right now, which is coding. And clearly that goes for like having it right thing and work across systems. So talk a little bit about where you see the gap between what this technology is capable of and why we're seeing these issues in implementation.

• 8:19Alex Kantrowitz?

  I mean, part of this has to be organizational or even in an individual level, just trying to find out the right use cases. And it sounds like you believe that there's A long way to go in terms of what we can do even with the current systems.

• 8:32Speaker 01

  No, no, I don't think there's a long way to go. I think we're finally working on the right pieces of it. That it like the the foundation model race has gotten boring. I mean, I feel like when's the last time any of us got truly excited by some new foundation model update? Now the things that are exciting, the what you hear about like what everyone's to our actual outputs and like actual applications of AI. So I think we start to see the change a lot more. I think, again, to me, and I've been asking this for this for a while, like, if we could all just take a breath and move away from like the

• 9:15Speaker 01

  almost rat race of foundation model advancements and actually be like, okay, now how do we take the technology that exists as of June 13, 2025? And then actually implement that into our lives and and we're going to get into the Craig Federighi, Joanna Stern from the Wall Street Journal interview in just a little bit, but I actually thought a lot of what came out there was people expected, even companies like Apple, you would just kind of plug in an L L M and it would just solve everything. That's not how it works. Everyone's been learning the hard way that it takes a lot more organizational and systems nuance to make things work. But it but the the reality is finally set in.

• 9:59Speaker 01

  Apple like understanding that better than anyone else, but now the real work can begin.

• 10:07Alex Kantrowitz?

  So now that Ranjan has made a principled stand against AI hype and building up the technology beyond its capabilities. I am now going to continue reading Sam's post and give you all a dose of AI hype and building the technology back past its current capabilities, just for the, you know, exercise of getting Ranjan to respond to some of these claims. So you you had already mentioned that 2025 will see agents that are able to do real cognitive work. Altman says 2026 will likely see the arrival of systems that can figure out novel insights. 2027, we may see the arrival of robots that can do tasks in the real world.

• 10:48Alex Kantrowitz?

  He says, "The 2030s are likely going to be wildly different from any time that has come before. We do not know how far beyond human level intelligence we can go, but we are about to find out." So, what do you think about these predictions? Are you on board with them, having said the beginning of Sam's post is directionally on point?

• 11:12Speaker 01

  It's, I mean, 2035, given the last two years of technological advancement, it is kind of crazy to think about what life could look like by then. And it's kind of exciting, I think, like I genuinely, and also terrifying in certain ways, but like, it should be different, like, given what we have to work with right now. And I even like I, with generative AI, large language models, I am a true believer. Like, I don't agree with the Gary Marcus's of the world in terms of saying the technology is not good. I think it has not been used to its potential or in the right way to date outside of chatbots.

• 11:52Speaker 01

  But, but I think, I'm still sticking with it, 2035, thinking about how different life can be versus 10 years from now, 2035 versus 2015 to 2025. Like, how much has life really changed, driven by technology in the last 10 years? When you're just, I'm looking around my apartment right now, like, it doesn't look that fundamentally different. The way I go to work and when I sit at work and all that stuff. I guess like virtual conferencing and stuff is a big, big change, but other than that, it all kind of looks the same, people dress the same. 2035, we're all wearing moon suits and have a robotic best friend.

• 12:37Alex Kantrowitz?

  Well, more than moon suits, here's what he says. "The rate of new wonders being achieved will be immense. It's hard to even imagine today what we will have discovered by 2035." He then gives a bunch of examples, but it concludes this paragraph by saying, "Many people will choose to live their lives in much the same way, but at least some people will probably decide to plug in." I think that means connecting their brains with the AI. Ranjan, you talked about, you know, wanting to live differently, are you plugging in?

• 13:09Speaker 01

  Ah, man, Sam, you had me. You had me until there.

• 13:15Speaker 01

  I don't know. I, I remember like, I, I have an Oura ring on my finger. I ended up getting one. I have an Apple watch. Like I have, the surface of me now is connected in many ways. I have AirPods in right now. I wear Meta Ray-Bans when I'm walking around. So like, it's not injected into me yet, but definitely like, I, uh, I don't know. I, I, what do you think your outfits will look like in 2035? In terms of will they be covered in technology? Will you be, have a brain computer interface? Will you have a Johnny Ive medallion on a big Mark Zuckerbergian chain around your neck?

• 14:00Speaker 01

  What's it gonna be?

• 14:02Alex Kantrowitz?

  I'm going full Wally. Get me in a go-kart, give me a big soda and put me on autopilot. Full Wally. No, I mean, I think it'll probably look a lot like it lives, it looks like today. I, I do anticipate that we'll have humanoid robots around, but the question is, how good can the industry get them and how safe can the industry get them? I think humanoid robot safety is something that's not talked about enough. But if one of those things go rogue, you could have a Terminator problem and

• 14:31Speaker 01

  You don't want a Terminator problem. Never a good thing.

• 14:33Alex Kantrowitz?

  Don't want that. That's one of the things you want to try to avoid. But look, if you do your best and it happens, no one can really blame you, right?

• 14:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, you tried.

• 14:41Alex Kantrowitz?

  You did fine. All right.

• 14:42Speaker 01

  It's the fault of Congress.

• 14:44Alex Kantrowitz?

  This is an idea that Sam had in the piece that I thought was interesting. He goes, if we have to make the first million humanoid robots the old fashioned way, but then they can operate the entire supply chain, digging and refining minerals, driving trucks, running factories to build more robots, which can build more chip fabrication facilities, data centers, et cetera, et cetera. Then the rate of progress will obviously be quite different. So he's describing like a humanoid robot, uh, robot explosion, similar to like the, the intelligence explosion that some expect with AI. I thought that was an interesting idea.

• 15:16Speaker 01

  I see. I think, and I am going running counter to the, the greatest tech minds of our, of our time, but like,

• 15:26Speaker 01

  I don't get the whole humanoid robot thing. I think we've debated this in the past as well. Like to me, applying the human form factor to robotics rather than actually having specialized robots that actually solve specific problems and are built, because again, right now, you go to any automated warehouse. It's not humanoid robots moving around. It's robots that have been specifically designed to handle repetitive tasks of picking up boxes and moving them and placing them and pulling out items like, like I'm still team specialized robotic form factor versus team humanoid form factor, robotic form factor.

• 16:07Alex Kantrowitz?

  I highly disagree. I am on team humanoid.

• 16:10Speaker 01

  You're a humanoid guy.

• 16:11Alex Kantrowitz?

  Maybe humanoid with like six or seven arms. Uh, what you're describing is.

• 16:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, why not seven arms then?

• 16:16Alex Kantrowitz?

  I would go seven arms. Yeah, go seven. No, why not make it 12? Um, do a full, um, what's it? The, um, the, you know, the goddess with all the different.

• 16:25Speaker 01

  Durga, yeah.

• 16:26Alex Kantrowitz?

  Durga. Yeah. I mean, those people who, I mean, I don't know if it's divine or not, but it was obviously a very good design, design decision, uh, to give those arms to Durga. I think, listen, the, um, this idea, uh, that we have these functional robots makes a lot of sense because those robots don't have a world model. They don't understand the world as we do because they don't see it as we do. They don't have, understand physics really. I mean, they might be able to grasp thing and have that hardcoded in them, but it's similar from going from like hardcoded AI to a large language model, which understands, understands, right? But like, you know, can, can be conversant on a bunch of different topics.

• 17:05Alex Kantrowitz?

  When you build AI with a world model that understands physics, objects, how things work together, then you want to go humanoid robot. Uh, or maybe, you know, souped up robot that takes a humanoid form because, um, all of a sudden you can be functional, like the idea that you can have humanoid robots, which is one function, do all these things that Sam is, uh, discussing, which is again, uh, digging, refining materials, driving trucks, which we already have steering wheels and they have hands, right? Running factories and building more robots and building chip fab fact, facilities. Uh, that is an, an exceptional form. I don't think you want to go too specialized for each because ultimately what's, you know, this is a very complex world that requires complex maneuvering around to be really useful.

• 17:51Speaker 01

  In a weird way, I guess that's like the most human centric or human forward view of it because I want to just kind of rebuild and remap everything to actually be more efficient for the specialized robots. But I think maybe you're right. The Durga model souped up eight to 10 arms. Maybe that's

• 18:12Alex Kantrowitz?

  Give it some wheels on the feet, right?

• 18:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's what. Is anyone working on that? Boston Dynamics, I'm sure is.

• 18:18Alex Kantrowitz?

  Probably. I mean, we're talking about eons of evolution, like something got, something happened in a good way to get us to where we are right now. It really does work.

• 18:28Alex Kantrowitz?

  All right. So let's just sort of conclude this by bringing this back down to earth with the final passage from Sam's paragraph, Sam's article, which I think is like really good. He says, "For a long time, technical people in the startup industry have made fun of the idea guys, people who had an idea and were looking for a team to build it. It now looks to me like they are about to have their day in the sun." Oh, let's pause here for a second before we finish. But this is, I think, pretty interesting. It's kind of an homage to vibe coding. But there has always been this idea of like, you know, someone's, oh, so many people are like, I got an idea for a startup and they just never build it because they don't have the technical talent or let's say the charisma

• 19:11Alex Kantrowitz?

  to get a bunch of people around them to build it, these idea guys. And the technical people can just go out and build it. But with vibe coding or with AI coding, maybe it does become the age of the idea guy. What do you think?

• 19:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm gonna, Sam ends with me in agreement here. I 100% agree with this. Like, I mean, I was having a conversation with like a early stage startup founder recently who had not built a prototype and was still just had a pitch deck. And I was like, to me, there's no excuse for that right now. Like, anyone can build at least basic things right now. And actually, many people, you do not have to be, have a full technical team to build a functional product. And that means that anyone with an idea should be able to actually realize that idea in some form. And that's

• 20:03Alex Kantrowitz?

  Or at least prototype.

• 20:04Speaker 01

  At least prototype, but even get to some level of functionality. And I think that's actually exciting. That's like the best, most exciting part of generative AI for me. So I think, idea guys, it's, it's your time.

• 20:19Alex Kantrowitz?

  All right. So final thing, let's talk about superintelligence. This is the new word. Sam says OpenAI is a lot of things now, but before anything else, we are a superintelligence research company. We have a lot of work in front of us, but most of the path in front of us is now lit and the dark areas are receding fast. We feel extraordinarily grateful to get to do what we do. Okay, two questions for you. One, why is everybody talking about superintelligence now? We're going to get to it in a moment with Meta. Well, I thought AGI was the buzzword. Is that now something that they don't even, is too low of an ambition? I guess that when you raise $40 billion, that is what it is. And second, you don't

• 20:59Alex Kantrowitz?

  take any issue with this? It does seem to be, again, you're someone that doesn't like hype. This is hype. I mean, gotta call it out for what it is.

• 21:09Speaker 01

  Sorry. I mean, again, this has been quite the emotional roller coaster for me going through this because I've been supportive and then we end again with, to me, like, how is it not a bigger story of the AGI to ASI, artificial general intelligence to superintelligence rebrand? It's crazy. It's weird. It's ridiculous. Like, it's just, it happened. Everyone has just comfortably moved on from AGI, started using superintelligence. I think that's the name of Ilya's new start or?

• 21:44Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yes, Safe Superintelligence.

• 21:45Speaker 01

  Safe Superintelligence. That was kind of the first, from a, thinking from a pure branding perspective, that was the first inkling. Clearly, the messaging worked. Everyone started saying it. It absolved people from having to achieve AGI or when everyone is saying AGI is already here, yet life doesn't feel significantly different. So I'm going to give superintelligence the, like, I mean, from a branding perspective, the fact that they've shifted to this conversation and now we're all just accepting it and moving on is crazy to me, but it's happened across the industry, I feel, so.

• 22:21Speaker 01

  Kudos to uh the kudos to Ilya from a branding perspective and to the comms folks, whoever came up with super intelligence first is a term.

• 22:30Alex Kantrowitz?

  You done good, or you've

• 22:32Speaker 01

  You bought it a couple more years of runway.

• 22:36Alex Kantrowitz?

  Well, Ilya obviously has raised billions without releasing a product. By the way, on the subject of Ilya, next week on the show, Dwarkesh Patel is going to come on and he has some very interesting thoughts about what Ilya is up to and the type of AI that he's he may or may not be building and and how that might help advance the state of the art. So stay tuned for that. That will come next Wednesday with Dwarkesh Patel or Wednesday, I think it's the June, Wednesday, June 18th with Dwarkesh. So stay tuned for that really fun conversation. Okay. As this happens, though, we are seeing model improvement. And Ranjan, you said that when was the last time we were excited for a model release? And it's funny because I've sort of been the like pour cold water over this Sam Altman statement while you've been sort of enthusiastic

• 23:20Alex Kantrowitz?

  about it through our conversation today. But I will say, I definitely was excited for the O3 model. That model to me is like the first model that really works and is useful in various ways to me in my daily life. And now, OpenAI is releasing O3 Pro, which is a better version of the model. It's going to be available to those initially to those paying $200 a month to OpenAI, which unfortunately no longer includes me. But there's a sub stack called Latent Space that talks a little bit about why this model is an improvement and why I think it's going to help lead to better products. Just to throw that out there one more time. First of all, the the post

• 24:02Alex Kantrowitz?

  about current models says they are like a really high IQ 12 year old going to college. They might be smart, but they're not a useful employee if they can't integrate. So this talking about O3, the authors say, this integration primarily comes down to tool calls. How well the model collaborates with humans, external data, and other AIs. It's a great thinker, but it's got to grow into being a great doer. O3 Pro makes real jumps here. It's noticeably better at discerning what its environment is, accurately communicating what tools it has access to, when to ask questions about the outside world, rather than pretending it has the information access, and choosing the right tool for the job.

• 24:47Alex Kantrowitz?

  When you think about improvement in models and what that leads to, I mean, we're gonna see, right? This is just the very, very early reflections on what this can do. I think a model that does understand its environment, like I talked about, super important, can ask questions to people and then understands which tools to use when it has to do a task. To me, I would say that's, that's pretty important and I'm excited to at some point get my hands on this.

• 25:14Speaker 01

  No, no, I will fully agree. The next great battle in AI is tool calling. That's where we're gonna see the maximum amount, like actually bringing these models and agent, and agentic AI, that's all that matters. Is the ability for an action to understand its context and then take the next correct action. And to do that, you have to know what tools you have access to and which tool is correct to interact with next. So I, I think this is huge. Actually, like this is where, and I'll give you, it's on the model level, so fine. Models matter, fine, but like, I, I, I think this is very astute.

• 25:55Speaker 01

  That tool calling is gonna be the key to agentic AI, which is gonna be the key in like, integrate to into integrating into existing, the existing world, systems, companies, processes, organizations, everything.

• 26:09Alex Kantrowitz?

  What is tool calling? Just explain what that is.

• 26:11Speaker 01

  It's the ability of the model to actually call out to another tool either via API or script or whatever like resource it uses to access another tool. It's ability to, so currently you might be doing that manually by actually like coding out API calls. There is a world where like a large language model should be able to generate that on the fly, understand what tool it should call out to and then actually generate that connection in real time and make that call, transfer whatever data needs to be transferred, take whatever action needs to be transferred. So, so like right now. If you use deep research, you kind of start to see it in action. What is it doing?

• 26:54Speaker 01

  It's calling out to a bunch of websites. That's via the internet, the world wide web.

• 26:59Alex Kantrowitz?

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• 27:44Alex Kantrowitz?

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• 29:00Speaker 01

  It's calling those websites, maybe it's downloading documents and then it's going to parse them. Like each one of those is an action that often requires a specific tool. But then you imagine that in large systems that exist already and the ability. So you don't have to manually map out every single block on an agentic workflow. Like that is a huge area of opportunity right now. And I really think that's what that's the next great AI battle and it's at the model layer. So I'll give you that.

• 29:32Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay, that's super interesting. We definitely should do more on that. So folks expect more conversation about tool calling on the show. We have so much more to talk about. We got to talk about this meta thing, very quick reaction WWDC and the fact that Waymos are on fire. We'll have a very fast moving second half right after this. And we're back here on Big Technology Podcast, Friday edition, talking about all the week's AI news, a lot of more theoretical stuff. Let's get more practical in business here in the second half. Meta is making a very big investment in Scale AI. I call it like an aqua hirezision. It's weird. They're not buying the full company. But this is from the, I actually think I said that on air on CNBC.

• 30:10Speaker 01

  No, no, I, I, I, hold on. Yeah. Can you coin that term trademarked aqua hirezision?

• 30:16Alex Kantrowitz?

  Aqua hirezision.

• 30:17Speaker 01

  That is what this is. And that describes this better than anything else. And it's amazing.

• 30:22Alex Kantrowitz?

  The word came out of my mouth on air and I was like, what did I just say? I'm going to roll with it and stick with it.

• 30:26Speaker 01

  Go aqua hirezision.

• 30:29Alex Kantrowitz?

  So this is from the information, Meta to pay nearly 15 billion for Scale AI stake in startup's 28 year old CEO. I love how you like companies are investing in other companies and you get the CEO and like the top talent because of it. It means thing that something that's happened multiple times, including with Inflection, with Mustafa Soliman going over to Microsoft and Meta, which has had some regulatory issues is taking note. So this is from the story, Meta has agreed to take a 49% stake in the data labeling firm Scale AI for 14.8 billion. Meta will send the cash to Scale's existing shareholders and place the startup CEO Alexander Wang, former Big Technology Podcast guest, in a

• 31:11Alex Kantrowitz?

  top position inside Meta. Meta would put him in charge of a new super intelligence lab. There is that word. Hit the bell. Along with other top scale technical employees.

• 31:23Alex Kantrowitz?

  That will put him in competition with some of his customers and friends, including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. Another interesting point from the story. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been actively recruiting top AI researchers in an effort to boost his company's AI efforts. He was frustrated with the reaction to its latest AI offering, Lama 4, and aims to catch up to competitors such as Google and OpenAI. Ron, John, your reaction, good or bad move from Zuckerberg?

• 31:53Speaker 01

  This one is tough for me. I really go back and forth in terms of good or bad. They are taking some action. They've been falling behind and clearly they want to catch up. So that's good that they're willing to take some bold action. But again, aqua hirezish, $15 billion for a 49% stake just to hire the guy. Like, I was even confused again if it was truly an aqua hirezish. But actually, like, they announced that the chief strategy officer of Scale AI, Jason Droge, will now be CEO. And Alexander Wang is full on Meta.

• 32:35Speaker 01

  Like, he's not a little scale, little Meta, some kind of weird Elon Muskian dual role. He's all in. Is it really, is he worth that much? Is he just some consultation to Mark Zuckerberg over the last few months and giving him good advice? Is he worth that much?

• 32:57Alex Kantrowitz?

  Let me do my best to make the case for this deal because I think it is worth it. And I don't think it's going to be the last one. Because if you read through the lines, it's not just Alexander Wang. This is from Bloomberg. Zuckerberg has been on the warpath recruiting.

• 33:14Alex Kantrowitz?

  Let me see, I just want to make sure I pull up the right story here. So this is from Bloomberg. Zuckerberg has spun up a private WhatsApp group chat with senior leaders to discuss potential candidates. The chat, which they've called Recruiting Party, is active at virtually all hours of the day. And Zuckerberg has also been hosting folks at his homes in Palo Alto, California, and Lake Tahoe, and personally reaching out to potential recruits. Okay, let me set the stage here. So if the things that we talked about in the first half, if Sam Altman's predictions come true, or half true, that this is a rapidly advancing technology that's going to determine the future of technology, you really can't afford to be mediocre for a

• 33:58Alex Kantrowitz?

  couple of years and hope to catch up. And I think that's been the alarm bell around Apple. But certainly, it's an alarm bell with Meta, because after they took the lead in open source, they were surpassed by DeepSeek, and then Lama4 was not up to expectations. So I think Zuckerberg sees this, and what he's doing is looking out at the landscape and saying, there's basically three vectors that you can compete on with AI. The first is GPU, just scaling up GPUs. Meta has that, right? They had a ton before this moment. They used them to build, you know, very impressive model models off the bat, and they've got the GPUs. The other two things that you need are data and talent.

• 34:39Alex Kantrowitz?

  And Meta has a lot of data, but Scale has proprietary data that's being, basically, is being used to help companies scale up their models beyond just using GPUs. And then the talent thing is super important. You'll remember that Sergey Brin came on the show a couple of weeks ago and said that he believes that algorithmic scaling, not necessarily compute scaling, will lead to the most improvements. And the way you get algorithmic scaling is building new algorithms, and the way you build new algorithms is with talent. So to me, this is Zuckerberg clearly seeing an issue with his company and making, I would say, the strategic, exact right move to fix it. Unlike another company that

• 35:24Alex Kantrowitz?

  we've seen within flagging AI product, that is, it seems like it's still in denial about what is wrong. So that, to me, is the case for Zuckerberg not only going after Scale and Alexander Wang, but starting this recruiting party and going hardcore on recruiting top talent. There are, there are reports that he's offered eight and nine-figure cash amounts to top talent engineers to come over to Meta. That's like in the tens and maybe even up to $100 million to a person, not a company, a person to come over. So

• 36:06Alex Kantrowitz?

  that, I think, he realizes the stakes and he's making it happen, and he's shown an ability to do this in the past. That is, I think, the bull case. What do you think, what do you think about that, Ron John?

• 36:14Speaker 01

  All right. I think that's, I mean, again, anything when you look at these relative to market cap or even cash on hand are not like existential for Meta. So in that sense, I think it's not unreasonable. I think it's also fair, too, from like a shareholder perspective, that the further behind they fall, there's more risk to Meta, Meta stock in terms of people being like questioning strategy versus spending like a very aggressive move like this. It's still, I guess, like Scale AI, you know, kind of helped OpenAI

• 36:57Speaker 01

  build their models. So they have a clear understanding of what kind of data, along with other, I mean, major companies. So, so he has been at the center of all of this. So maybe just that kind of like proprietary knowledge is also has a significant amount of value. It's still more, this whole aqua-hierarchization model is just a sign of the times, I guess, more than anything else that I've seen in a while. But I, I buy what you're saying a little bit.

• 37:30Alex Kantrowitz?

  And I mean, it's clear that they do need new talent because as you've pointed out to me in our text messages off air, the product isn't exactly working even beyond the models.

• 37:43Speaker 01

  This was my favorite story of the week. So this is the most meta, and let's go, let's just call it a Facebook thing, because this is like old school Facebook. So the new Meta AI app, which many people may have downloaded, and it's a separated app that's essentially kind of like the chat interface chatbot experience that you would expect from a chat GPT or perplexity. But one of the small nuances is they'd also positioned it as somewhat of an AI social network. Now, it was a bit unclear what that meant, but we, people started noticing, and I actually had not even noticed the discover experience in Meta AI. And I don't use it.

• 38:27Speaker 01

  I use it for generating images that are fun with my son. Like, he wants to do like half animals, half dolphin, half squid, or something like that. And I'm like, all right, I'm gonna use Meta's image on this one. If you go to the discover tab, it posts entirities of chats from people that probably don't realize that it's being posted. And it's like, as a social network, even crazier, it posts people's voices prompting Meta AI. So it has like an audio clip, audio message, voice recording. And there's all types of crazy situations. A lot of people, very personal, asking about like a legal brief

• 39:10Speaker 01

  for a custody battle, asking about like relationships and depression. My favorite, one of this one I found on Reddit, a screenshot, someone saying, you're supposed to be my wingman, where my big booty future wife at. So all types of requests, but, but people almost certainly unknowingly posting their AI chats to a public social network feed. Thank you, Meta slash Facebook for bringing some of that old un- unanticipated sharing activity back to social networking.

• 39:49Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, what's old is new again. And, you know, there's some funny parts of this, like, like you mentioned, the guy who asked for the AI to be his wingman and trying to find his big booty future wife. And towards the end of this screenshot that someone shared, he says, big booty and a nice rack. And the AI is like, you got specific tastes. I like it. What kind of conversations are these? But they're also, it's, it's quite sad. And it sort of goes into this conversation of people needing AIs for companionship, given that our society has done such a poor job in building community and sustaining and fostering community, that people feel like they need AIs to be their friends. And, you know, you just listen to these conversations with people, people

• 40:33Alex Kantrowitz?

  and these AIs, who the AI has become their companion in many cases. And it's just like, ah, it's just such a glaring magnifying glass, or I don't even know if that's a phrase that makes

• 40:45Speaker 01

  sense. I'm joking. I'm like, trying to, I'm making a light of it, but it's actually, it's terrifying, and it's sad. And like, I mean, a lot of the queries that have been posted around are, I mean, are, it's people who are just really looking for help and answers and companionship. But, do you want to hear my conspiracy theory on this?

• 41:08Alex Kantrowitz?

  I always love a good conspiracy theory.

• 41:10Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 41:11Alex Kantrowitz?

  We have a podcast after all. What will we be without conspiracies?

• 41:13Speaker 01

  So I was thinking about like, I mean, on one hand, to do something this clumsy, I actually can see, like, it's just, one product manager makes this decision. And I saw that there are some people who actually, it looked like they were purposefully posting to kind of show expertise around a subject, or even like, if you go through, a lot of people do like prayer affirmations and stuff, but then their handle is like a church or something religious. So then you're like, okay, I can actually see, this person knew what they're doing. And this idea that you push your prompt into a feed, and then it's getting liked and shared, makes some sense. But then I was like,

• 41:53Speaker 01

  what's Meta's biggest threat? It's the chat GPTs of the world owning, like, the true human relationship, and data, and questions, and queries, that really get into the soul of a person.

• 42:08Speaker 01

  Suddenly, I think this is going to continue to get, become a much bigger story. And like, suddenly, this idea that people are going to share everything with a chatbot is a little scarier, the more people start thinking, oh, wait, you know what happened with Meta? I'm not, I'm going to stop asking ChatGPT and Claude these really personal questions. And suddenly, Meta is actually in a better position relative to OpenAI on kind of that personal connection to chatbot.

• 42:39Alex Kantrowitz?

  That's a great conspiracy. That is a great conspiracy. I won't rule it out entirely. All right. Let me ask you one more question about this scale thing before we move on to Meta. This came up in our Discord. There've been plenty, plenty, there's been plenty of reporting on why Meta wanted to buy Scale AI. But why did Scale AI want to sell? Are the main LLM providers getting good enough at obtaining trading data themselves? Did DeepSeek's signal a top for services like this? What do you think?

• 43:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, I definitely think so. I also think synthetic data in training foundation models is going to become more and more of just a standard practice. Like, the, we've exhausted the, like, race for real-world data. Foundation models have also gotten very, very good. And regular listeners will know that I'm definitely of the school that we don't need bigger and bigger and bigger models. So I think in that sense, like, the game Scale AI played, the service they provided was brilliantly timed. They became like a critical part of overall LLM infrastructure. But what they did, their job, again, like, actually having people manually tag,

• 43:52Speaker 01

  like, large networks of people manually tagging data to make it more ingestible for a large language model or for a training, it's not going to be as relevant anymore. You can even now have large language models, yeah, do the tagging itself. So, so the service they provided was not going to last, so good on Alexander Wang and timing in terms of making this move.

• 44:17Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay, so we talked again about Meta seeing an issue and addressing it. Now let's just go quickly to Apple because I thought we were done with WWDC coverage. But then there's been a bunch of executive interviews that have come out mainly with Craig Federighi and Jaws, who's their head of marketing. And it just seems like this company is diluted. They've said that they are not looking to build a chatbot, but also that Siri is, you know, their mission is to make Siri the best assistant. They said that they want that, you know, Apple intelligence is basically out there already, but that they're not giving a shipping date because they don't want to overpromise.

• 45:02Alex Kantrowitz?

  MG Siegler said this in Spyglass. He said, "Apple clearly wants to frame this as people perhaps being upset because they simply don't understand the intentions here." He says, "They don't want a chatbot. They want to do more than that, baking AI into every product. I think that's actually a fine strategy, but only if your AI works really well." And well, the state of Siri, the actual ship stuff over the past 15 or so years suggests that it doesn't. They have to get their AI house in order and catch up. Or, I'm sorry, to hear Apple tell it, there's nothing, or yeah, that to hear Apple tell it, there's nothing wrong, just a minor delay and internally at Apple, it's better than it's ever been.

• 45:47Alex Kantrowitz?

  You're crazy to think otherwise, like that's the message that Apple is giving. So talk a little bit about what you saw from the post WWDC interviews. To me, they were even worse than the underwhelming event itself. And where does Apple go from here?

• 46:01Speaker 01

  Okay, yeah, separate from the event, the post-event, the Joanna Stern from Wall Street Journal interview, I mean, with Craig Federighi and who was the other one?

• 46:13Alex Kantrowitz?

  The head of marketing jobs.

• 46:15Speaker 01

  Okay, it was one of the most fascinating Apple pieces of media I think I've seen in a long time because she did an incredible job, just kind of like in a very calm way, but just repeating the right questions. Craig Federighi, you could kind of see like getting a bit frustrated, but still having that perfect smile and just kind of like.

• 46:37Alex Kantrowitz?

  No, no, there was a moment where he was like he let the smile down.

• 46:42Speaker 01

  He looked like he was gonna lose it, right?

• 46:44Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, you see him remembered a smile and then all of a sudden bam cheeks go up.

• 46:48Speaker 01

  Okay, okay, okay, okay. So you caught that as well. There's there. Watch, it's a seven minute clip. If listeners, maybe you'll catch it too and let us know. Like there's one moment I'm like, oh shit, he's about to lose it right now. And then total recovery and smile. But overall, it was, I don't understand the whole, the way they approached it, the whole kind of narrative they're trying to push is we'll release it when it's ready. It's not ready yet. It's a very complex problem. Everyone else is just doing chatbots and we want to do more than a chatbot. No, everyone is not just doing chatbots. There are incredible AI experiences and solutions and products that span far

• 47:32Speaker 01

  outside of a chatbot. And they kept repeating that. Again, like querying your own data is doable. Many like you can upload a bunch of documents to an AI service and actually query them. Yes, it's a complex problem to do it across all of your data, across all of your apps on your iPhone at the operating system level. I know it's, it's complicated. But so which leads me to the one thing she did not press them on. Why did you do that marketing push? Why did you like Apple in the past, the beauty of the company was here is this incredible story around a product and here is the product and it just works.

• 48:13Speaker 01

  And remember those commercials, the like, the girl from Last of Us, like looking up someone she didn't want to talk to and finding their information quickly. And I don't know, like they're, they were terrible. They launched the largest Apple style marketing campaign. Why did you do that if you weren't ready? That's, that's the one question I felt was not pushed on.

• 48:37Alex Kantrowitz?

  Uh, for sure. And I think the entire conversation was just a exposing of Apple for, again, doing that. And the attitude for Apple being like, I don't understand why anybody's upset. We're doing exactly what we said we would and we're still, I mean, it to me, there was like a lack of, uh, I think self-awareness and humility there.

• 48:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think

• 48:58Alex Kantrowitz?

  Pretty concerning.

• 48:59Speaker 01

  Like, they could just say, or they could have, yeah, I don't know. Do you think it would be better to say, you know what, we have been behind, we've screwed up and we are going to deliver. That's all we're doing where it's like hair on fire situation in the company and we get it and we're gonna deliver. Or do you think it would be better that they took a, you know what, we are the best for privacy. We only deliver product, which they kind of alluded to, we only deliver products when they're at a hundred percent. So anyone, not just tech forward, people could use them. They didn't, they kind of alluded to that, but they didn't even really. But what do you think's a better direction?

• 49:40Alex Kantrowitz?

  Uh, it's hard for me to say. I think this, everything is fine, is probably the worst direction. But ultimately, any other direction, it doesn't matter until you ship. I mean, basically, they could have just come in and say, listen, like, this is something we wanted to do. We understand it doesn't matter until we ship it. So we are working hard to ship it. That's all.

• 49:58Speaker 01

  Do you think, do you think they should have canceled WWDC, given there was no

• 50:02Alex Kantrowitz?

  No.

• 50:03Speaker 01

  real announcement?

• 50:05Alex Kantrowitz?

  That would have been worse, I think, because that shows you just like, you don't even care to show up.

• 50:09Speaker 01

  No, no, I mean, you say, you say, you know what, we are going to, all, people are working around the clock. We, we get it. We are going to deliver the world's greatest AI assistant that anyone can use. So there's no reason to have a whole event to talk about operating system names and changing backgrounds on chats and stuff like that, that could have been like, update notes and an iOS app update or system update, like, I don't know.

• 50:38Alex Kantrowitz?

  Don't forget about the phone app. You gotta get everybody together to talk about the phone app and the messages app.

• 50:42Speaker 01

  Wait, can you explain to me Liquid Glass? Why is it exciting?

• 50:47Alex Kantrowitz?

  No.

• 50:47Speaker 01

  Okay. I want someone to.

• 50:51Speaker 01

  And I really, I really, I saw something where it's like they're getting back to like what they're great at, design and liquid glass. And I still didn't get it, but I, I want to, I want to at least try.

• 51:03Alex Kantrowitz?

  You will try. That's the thing. You'll be forced to at some point. Yeah. All right. Before we go, let's just very quickly hit this story. I think, look, we're not going to spend a lot of time talking about it, but it's important for us to just stay on top of this story. It's an important one, which is how generative AI is changing the web. This is a story. News sites are getting crushed by Google's new AI tools. The AI Armageddon is here for online news publishers. Chat pots are replacing Google searches, eliminating the need to click on blue links and tanking referrals to news sites. As a result, traffic that publishers relied on for years is plummeting. Here's some stats. Traffic from organic search to Huffington Post desktop and mobile websites just fell by over half in the past

• 51:47Alex Kantrowitz?

  three years. Nearly by that much at the Washington Post. Business Insider cut 21% of its staff last month, as the CEO Barbara Pang said that that the cuts were aimed at helping the publication endure extreme traffic drops outside of our control. Organic search traffic to websites declined by 55% between April 2022 and April 2025, according to data from the company Similar Web. They do analytics. 55%. That's crazy. And Google is going to be sending even fewer visitors with this new AI mode. Not to mention, Google is now offering employee buyouts in the search organization and other organizations while not offering

• 52:31Alex Kantrowitz?

  them in places like DeepMind that does AI. This is, I mean, we've done some reporting on this here with my story about world history encyclopedia, but it's very clear now that that was the rule and not the exception and the web is in some even deeper trouble. Remember, we said it was kind of on life support?

• 52:50Speaker 01

  No, no, no.

• 52:50Alex Kantrowitz?

  This is like hospice now.

• 52:52Speaker 01

  Instead of the web is dead, then we tempered that with the web is in secular decline. Now, web is in hospice is definitely another direction to take it. But yeah, no, I mean, this is what we've been talking about forever. And it's it's definitely going to dramatically affect anyone who optimized for a pre L L M world. Like who didn't just publish and have the their website like Business Insider is the greatest case of a company. That for long time media folks, the invention of the slideshow on a website to get an additional display ad to click for every slide you cycle through was

• 53:37Speaker 01

  one of the most like ridiculous, but actually brilliant innovations in monetizing web publishing. Like Business Insider forever, that's how they operated. And that is not working anymore. And maybe there's going to be like chat G P T first publishers, but trying to game Google to get traffic to show display ads to make money is that is that is beyond hospice. That is dead.

• 54:06Alex Kantrowitz?

  Done for, right?

• 54:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, like overall, people having websites and interacting with them in different ways. I think web has some some room to breathe and like there's there's it's not over yet, but monetizing on display ads based on page views, that is long, long gone, especially if you built like a powerhouse optimization engine. Circa mid 2010s on that, that's long gone.

• 54:36Alex Kantrowitz?

  Now, talk about this mid journey story.

• 54:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, so we saw Disney and Universal Studios sued mid journey. I mean, we've talked about New York Times sued OpenAI. One of my predictions has been like, we're going to start to get some guidance or resolution, I think by the end of this year in terms of like how copyright will play out and we need it like I feel it's one of the things holding the overall industry back, not having a clear direction of what's indemnified and what isn't. But uh, my favorite part of this, though, was like. I mean, the New York Times OpenAI, for people who had like looked into that, they were able to recreate by prompt, like essentially the entire text of articles.

• 55:19Speaker 01

  But that's still not as visually jarring as like the literally asking, "Show Iron Man flying action photo." And there's a photo of Iron Man. There's like ones of The Simpsons, The Minions. I mean, Mid Journey clearly trained on copyrighted info and not and and returns that info. That's a problem. And like, there has to be some kind of resolution to all of this before people will start actually like at a professional level using these technologies in a proper way.

• 55:56Alex Kantrowitz?

  It's sort of a perfect lead in to our final story of the week, which is why Waymo's self-driving cars became a target of protesters in Los Angeles. Time has a couple of theories here. They they sourced the Wall Street Journal that say that part of the reasons the cars were vandalized was to obstruct traffic. They said some social media users suggested self-driving vehicles in particular have become a new target because they are seen by protesters as part of the police surveillance state because they're they have cameras and they have 360 views of their 60 360 degree views of their surroundings. And their tool has been tapped by law enforcement.

• 56:39Alex Kantrowitz?

  Other people are just talking about the fact that you shouldn't feel bad for them. This is from one organizer. "There are people on here saying it's violent and domestic terrorism to set a Waymo car on fire, a rowboat car. Are you kidding me? Are you no, a robot car? Are you going to demand justice for robot dogs next? But not the human beings being repeatedly shot with rubber bullets in the street? What kind of of politics is this?" Honestly, it seems to me that it's just kind of talking around the issue. I think people are just afraid or they're uncomfortable broadly with AI, which like despite all the progress we talk about on the show, broadly, the public not comfortable with artificial intelligence, especially as they see it do things like sort of.

• 57:25Alex Kantrowitz?

  Run over some of the previously protected rights like copyright and you know, all these companies are clearly trying to automate work in their own way and the public is just starting to really feel uneasy about it or has for a long time and it's manifesting itself in the physical form of burning these Waymos. What do you think?

• 57:46Speaker 01

  I'm gonna not attribute that level of importance in terms of, I don't know, it's a, you want to burn something, if you burn a Waymo, it'll get a little more traction on social media. It's also a little more visually jarring than like other cars that if you were to burn them. So I think it's just, I don't know, I think connecting it to a deep rooted like distrust of AI, it's, I don't know. I think it's just people wanted to burn something and you get a little more engagement by burning a Waymo than a Corolla.

• 58:24Alex Kantrowitz?

  First of all, I just want to say I don't condone the burning of Waymos.

• 58:27Speaker 01

  I do not condone.

• 58:28Alex Kantrowitz?

  Condone it, but.

• 58:30Speaker 01

  No condoning of the burning of cars.

• 58:32Alex Kantrowitz?

  But why do you think they get more engagement on social media? It's because of this unease. It's because there's this feeling that it's Skynet.

• 58:40Speaker 01

  All right. Okay. You're right. You're right. You're right. The reason behind, it's more of a story or like emotionally of an emotionally resonant thing that will put you on one side or another to burn a Waymo than a Corolla. Again, we do not condone the burning of cars here on Big Technology Podcast.

• 58:59Alex Kantrowitz?

  Good on our disclaimers at this point.

• 59:00Speaker 01

  But I don't know, but if that's the case, how are we going to have humanoid robots? Johnny Ives, Pin? I mean, if people are gonna burn Waymos because they're afraid of cameras, I don't know, but I guess a humanoid robot would actually just fight back and not let you burn it.

• 59:22Alex Kantrowitz?

  Maybe not. I mean, they're not going to be programmed to fight back. Like all this alignment work is going to be done for them not to fight back.

• 59:29Speaker 01

  And even if, even if they're getting burnt and Tesla Optimus is not going to fight back and let it be, let itself be burnt.

• 59:38Alex Kantrowitz?

  Maybe Elon's won't, but the others will definitely be like, fine, whatever you need to do. But I think you're really hitting on the point here, which is, I mean, it's so great. Like, we talked about this in the beginning, let's just close with it. Like, we're gonna hear a lot of rhetoric about AI in the physical world, humanoid robots, all of those things along those nature, along that nature. But there's an assumption that people are just gonna allow this to happen, especially as, even if Dario is wrong and it doesn't cause 50% of entry level jobs to go away, it's gonna change people's lives. And this is something that's happening, you know, effectively top down versus bottom up in most cases. There's just gonna be discomfort there, and people are going to

• 1:00:20Alex Kantrowitz?

  keep attacking these things. I'll just say this last thing. When I was at BuzzFeed, I did a series where I would fight with robots. I tried to steal. Yes, I tried to steal. I did effectively steal. It's so funny. I stole lunch out of a DoorDash robot. I just ripped it open and took the lunch out of it. With DoorDash PR there. I fought a tackling robot at a football field. This was a series. And I think underneath it all was just this thing that like, I was like, I am not gonna be the first. I have an urge inside me to beat the crap out of these things. And so-

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• 1:01:54Alex Kantrowitz?

  Will a good chunk of society and I think we're starting to see the beginnings of that.

• 1:01:58Speaker 01

  Well, it's also good that you are preparing yourself for all modes of robot combat in that that could could be required in a by 2035, according to the gentle singularity. So, so maybe

• 1:02:12Alex Kantrowitz?

  Got to practice.

• 1:02:13Speaker 01

  Maybe I need, I need to start scrapping with robots just to, uh, just to prepare myself a little bit. I'm not going to burn them. No burning cars.

• 1:02:21Alex Kantrowitz?

  No burning.

• 1:02:21Speaker 01

  Fight a robot.

• 1:02:23Alex Kantrowitz?

  Sparring.

• 1:02:24Speaker 01

  A little sparring. Yeah.

• 1:02:25Alex Kantrowitz?

  And you'd be surprised because they can fight back in sometimes, some situations. The lunch delivery robot, I beat that one easily. Just ripped the top off, ran. By the way, um, that video, they, they put on Jimmy Kimmel for two weeks in a row where like Jimmy took, yeah, they took our, he took our video of the robot crossing the street and then, um, like, put a buzz, like, put like special effects and have like a bus run into it and the thing blew up.

• 1:02:51Speaker 01

  God bless mid 2010s media.

• 1:02:54Alex Kantrowitz?

  I was like, it was a good time, but the, the football, uh, robot definitely got the best of me. So very humbling.

• 1:03:01Speaker 01

  Watch out for that one, listeners.

• 1:03:03Alex Kantrowitz?

  Exactly. All right. So we'll end it there. We look forward to a future where humanoid robots are among us, a gentle singularity, unless if you ask the people and then you might get a different answer. Raja, so great to see you again. Thanks for coming on the show.

• 1:03:18Speaker 01

  See you next week.

• 1:03:20Alex Kantrowitz?

  All right, everybody. Thank you for listening. Again, I'll be back on Wednesday with Dwar Kes Patel and we will see you then on Big Technology Podcast.