The Fed's PR Blitz + SBF And The Media — With Ranjan Roy

Ranjan Roy of Margins joins Big Technology Podcast for a new Friday series that will recap the week's business and tech news. We'll post a new show every Friday afternoon featuring a recap of the week's big tech and business stories. This week we cover The Fed's PR Blitz and what it says about our economy, why SBF seems to still have portions of the media wrapped around his finger, where the creator economy is heading, and OpenAI's association with Microsoft. Stay tuned for the end where we discuss Lex Fridman's book list. If you like Big Technology Podcast, please rate it 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/ 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?

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• 0:43Alex Kantrowitz?

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• 1:04Alex Kantrowitz?

  All right, so I think we are live. Let's hit the intro and get going.

• 1:20Alex Kantrowitz?

  Welcome to Big Technology Podcast, a show for cool-headed nuanced conversation of the tech world and beyond. And we are here with a special Friday episode that is going to be something that we do weekly. Because I'm very proud to announce that Ron John Roy is going to be joining us every Friday. We're going to do these live on LinkedIn and it's also going to appear on the podcast feed. It's our first one, so bear with us, but we'll take questions on LinkedIn. The reason why we're doing this is because the podcast has been awesome in the format that it's been, but there's been so much tech news that's broke every single week.

• 2:02Alex Kantrowitz?

  And it just felt like it made sense to have a home to analyze that news, go into that news.

• 2:10Alex Kantrowitz?

  Make sure that we're touching on it every week as opposed to ignoring a big news week. And to join us, of course, is Ron John. Ron John Roy is the co-author of Margins. He is a favorite guest of Big Technology Podcast. Ron John, every time you're on, I feel like we get amazing feedback. I guess, love hearing from you. And I'm so grateful that you've decided to join.

• 2:32Speaker 01

  Yep, this is gonna be fun.

• 2:34Alex Kantrowitz?

  So do you want to do a quick introduction of who you are and sort of what perspective you're coming to from this?

• 2:42Speaker 01

  Yep, I'm Ron John Roy. I'm the co-author of Margins. We've been writing for about two and a half years now. And my co-author and I, my background is more on the business side. I worked in financial markets before and then ran a startup for a number of years. So bring a lot of business, finance, markets, communications experience to this. So I like to look at technology through the lens of business.

• 3:12Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay, great. So let's get into it. We're gonna start with the economy. I feel like that's the thing we first started talking about when you came on the first time about the Fed zero interest rate policy and how that was influencing the economy. Back then, this was two years ago and change at this point. We were seeing all this craziness in the economy, the rise of crypto and meme stocks and tech valuations that went through the roof, right? It took Apple, what, 40 years to become a $1 trillion company? And then another two to become a $2 trillion company and then like 10 months to become a $3 trillion company. Oversimplifying a little bit, but not too much. And now we've seen the Fed start to rein in rates in a way that's leading to mass layoffs in the tech industry.

• 3:57Alex Kantrowitz?

  We saw today 18,000 coming down for Amazon. Plenty more are on their way as well. Places like Vimeo and Salesforce, the list goes on. Meta's already done a big one. And it does seem like we're coming back to normal. But the question is how much pain we're actually gonna suffer until our economy gets back to normal? And I think that's where we can kind of jump in and give some insight here. So Ron John, I'm curious what you make of the fact that the Fed has seemingly been on a Public relations blitz this week where you see things like Neel Kashkari with the Medium Post and others showing up on CNBC and making other speeches talking about the fact that we're going to end up seeing some of these high rates for quite some time.

• 4:40Alex Kantrowitz?

  And that is even going to happen while we're seeing inflation numbers come back to normal. So the question is, is this rough time that the economy is going to go through by extension of the Fed starting to correct its problems, is that going to persist for a long time? What do you make of this?

• 4:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think so. The Fed is definitely, as you said on a PR blitz, communications has kind of been at the center of what they're trying to do because they're trying to thread this needle perfectly between keeping rates high, making sure inflation is in check, while trying to say that they're not going to potentially keep hiking rates to the point that the economy and the stock market keep tanking. Today was an interesting day in the markets because first you have the jobs number, three and a half percent unemployment, we're still, we actually, there was a tweet, it was, it's actually 3.468% when you extend it out. It's the lowest unemployment since 1969.

• 5:41Speaker 01

  Not only that, you have, there was 439 additional workers joined to the workforce, which has been one of the big things over the last two years, even though unemployment was low, it was, a big part of it was workers actually leaving the workforce. So you suddenly have this, the unemployment numbers this morning show us, maybe we will get to this position where inflation actually came down in November. The November CPI print was very hopeful for everyone, the core was only 0.2% that the, so, so suddenly we're like, okay, maybe inflation, as it's coming down, we can keep unemployment low and we get our soft landing. We get the Fed actually has perfectly orchestrated this.

• 6:24Speaker 01

  Then, an hour and a half later, you get back into the absurdity of good news is bad news, bad news is good news.

• 6:31Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right.

• 6:32Speaker 01

  The ISM non-manufacturing print, it was surprisingly very low, and it was a big deal because it was at forty-nine point six.

• 6:40Alex Kantrowitz?

  What is the ISM non-manufacturing print?

• 6:43Speaker 01

  It's the Institute of Supply Chain Manufacturing, I think is what the ISM, but basically, it's a representation of production and manufacturing within the US, the health of it. And anytime the print is above fifty, it's considered expansionary, less than fifty, considered recessionary. It was expected at fifty-five point zero and came in at forty-nine point six as a surprise. So to have a surprise to the downside and one that showed things are recessionary actually was a huge negative surprise about the economy. And of course, the market took that to be amazing, and stocks shot up after that because suddenly everyone's like, wait, now maybe this is bad for the economy, so the Fed should be cutting.

• 7:28Speaker 01

  And suddenly Tesla went from down seven percent to plus two percent, the Dow's up two and a half percent. So, so bad news is good news for the market again.

• 7:37Alex Kantrowitz?

  Is it going to persist like this forever? I mean, are we going to end up in this mode where we're just trying to find this Goldilocks situation where like the economy's growing but not too much? And, you know, wage growth is, you know, maybe growing but not too much, but we want some negative news. Like, it seems like a very precarious place to have our economy. And of course, there's real implications for the tech industry here, which seems to be taking the brunt of it.

• 8:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, I think this idea, because again, if we are truly entering a recession, that's not good for the average worker, that's not good for anybody, that's not good for any advertising-based business, any consumer-facing business, anything. So the idea, again, that this should be a positive for stocks still always baffles me, other than at the very high surface level of this means that rates might get cut faster and that we might get a juicing of that, whatever high beta stock there is. So, so I think, as you said, it's a precarious thing. It's like, forever, we're going to be chasing this, can we get inflation down to two percent,

• 8:46Speaker 01

  three percent, three and a half percent, while? Not hiking rates to 10%. I mean, that's what everyone's looking for. But if we, if the way we do that is through some kind of severe recession, that's also not good either.

• 9:01Alex Kantrowitz?

  So read between the teleos, where do you think this is going?

• 9:05Speaker 01

  I think, I honestly, November was one of the first times in a few years, I would say, that I was actually optimistic. And honestly, the jobs number this morning, again, it starts to look like maybe Jerome Powell has figured this thing out and is going to become a legend in terms of keeping unemployment low, inflation slowly ticking back down. Maybe it was supply chain bottlenecks and transitory and all of the above. And it was just this blip in stimulus money and all of those things kind of combined together. But as everything starts weaning off, inflation comes down while maintaining unemployment relatively low and potentially not hitting recession.

• 9:48Speaker 01

  I mean, if the man pulls that off, he's going to be, he's going to be remembered. But, but I don't know, I mean, it was positive at that point. But then again, you see the ISM for today and, you know, some kind of recession certainly could be in the near future.

• 10:05Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. And I see, I, so one thing I was trying to make sense of is I saw like all these people in and around the Fed talking about how they want to keep the number, they want to keep the number, the interest rate in the four and a half, five range for a while and not letting up till 2024. And I was originally like, yikes, that's, that's a problem. But you, you seem to think like there's a way that we can actually have the economy sort of level out without some really bad outcomes.

• 10:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, again, four and a half, 5%. It, it, it's weird though, because on one side, the Fed tries to, obviously they give forward guidance and that's something that they're very methodical about. They have this thing called the dot plot that shows everyone's expectations over the coming year, year and a half. But. At the same time, they always stress we are incredibly data dependent. We don't know anything and we're not going to pretend to know anything. And every single inflation print that comes in is what's going to matter. So, so I do think, uh, I think the Fed, they can't say rates will go to seven or eight percent. Otherwise, I mean, the market will absolutely tank.

• 11:15Speaker 01

  Like there are certain things that they, they have gotten so well media trained over the last six to eight years. I mean, I feel like everyone is perfectly aligned. They communicate what they're supposed to. Um, but I, but I think some of it does become a bit meaningless.

• 11:33Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. All right. And, um, as I said in the beginning, we're going to take some questions as we go. Um, and if you're listening on the feed, um, you know, you can always participate in, uh, these every Friday, 2:00 PM Eastern, 11:00 AM Pacific. Um, and we're going to just read some of the questions as we go. Um, oftentimes we'll just take them in, in at the end, but since this is our first go around and, um, we want to, you know, do what we can. To encourage people to participate, let's just kind of drop them in as, as they come. So, uh, Perry Finkelman, uh, has a, a question for us here. He says, uh, until interest rates go down, building and development will be curtailed.

• 12:14Alex Kantrowitz?

  Putting extreme pressure on pricing of existing housing, housing, uh, and for sale housing. And, and it drives a significant portion of what happens in the economy, including the trickle down effect of ancillary industries which rely on housing. Uh, such as furnishing various trades, supporting new moves and constructions. If rates don't go down, we'll see, uh, upticks in, uh, refinance scenarios and defaulting. And he sees it as a significant problem in the future. We're not even scratching the surface yet. What's your perspective on that, Ron John?

• 12:45Speaker 01

  Housing is, well, first of all, I'm actually incredibly excited. We got a question. We're live and we got a question. All right, all right. You never know, you never know. Um, all right. So housing is one of the most interesting parts. And I say this as someone who has perused the real estate market and unfortunately did not buy right before COVID. And then has not even tried to buy since COVID.

• 13:13Speaker 01

  Rates currently, clearly, the uptick in rates and mortgages have been, I mean, reflected the increase in interest rates and kind of, you know, like channeled that into their rise very quickly, which should be putting a damper on the real estate market. And we are seeing prices decreasing and a lot of the markets that had become frothy. I think that's a really interesting angle on it, that unless rates come lower, we're not going to have more financing of building, which will, won't increase the supply. But that's where you have, like, you have completely counterbalancing factors here, where if rates don't come down, we're not going to build more, which will keep prices artificially high because supply is constrained.

• 13:56Speaker 01

  But if rates don't go up, then people, we're also not going to see any drop in price, and prices will stay because no one is leaving their house right now. Everyone bought, and now no one is leaving because they don't want to buy another house. That's actually, that lock-in effect, I think, is one of the really interesting things about the markets right now and where things are going to go, even in terms of like, hiring and remote work. People who got in at two and a half, three percent, when the market was somewhat low and saw their prices of their house go up, they're not going anywhere, even as much as they want to, when, until the market comes down a bit.

• 14:35Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. Okay, let's get into our second story, which is kind of, it's one that I've been anticipating. So first of all, it's about FTX and the way that the media has handled the FTX story. Good opportunity for me to tease also coming up on Wednesday, Kate Rooney from CNBC, who has met with Sam Bankman-Fried, has followed the story very closely. She's the guest Wednesday. So if you're listening today, you're really going to like that one. Just finish recording it, and it's going to be super fun. But there's this angle about the FTX story that is endlessly fascinating, which is the crypto community on Twitter in particular has started to, has, has throughout this, been extremely negative about the media. The media's miss of Sam Bankman-Fried's

• 15:19Alex Kantrowitz?

  scam, and then this sort of kid glove treatment. That they've given the guy and his associates as the details have come out. So there's this story that you noticed in the Washington Post talking about his associate Caroline Ellison. The headline is Caroline Ellison Wanted To Make A Difference, Now She's Facing Prison. There was one that I picked out also, which is just talking about all the positive feelings about Sam Bankman Fried, towards Sam Bankman Fried in the New York Times. In the Bahamas, A Lingering Sympathy For Sam Bankman Fried. What do you think is going on, Ron John, in terms of, because I, obviously, I come from a journalism background. I mean, I'm still a journalist, working on reporting stories of big technology, just not in a news organization anymore.

• 16:05Alex Kantrowitz?

  I have to be honest, I'm, I'm fully baffled about what's going on with these stories that are portraying what looks like a significant financial crime that's going to harm lots of people in this sort of humanizing way.

• 16:18Speaker 01

  All right, so first, I will say, I tried to temper my anger towards these kind of headlines with the idea, whereas like the crypto community and everyone is bashing the New York Times for being like, you know, super sympathetic to SBF, there is plenty of good, solid, aggressive reporting being done as well. So it's still, the mainstream financial media has broken most of the more compelling news. However, it completely blows my mind how you get headlines like in the Bahamas, lingering sympathy. Even Bloomberg just had a piece about Nishad Singh, I think he was the CTO, or he was one of those key engineers.

• 16:59Speaker 01

  And, and they had, Singh was also known as a gifted coder and philanthropist. He's a philanthropist because he's giving away stolen money. One thing that like really, I went through the entire SEC filing. And one thing that kept coming up in the SEC complaint. They said from at least May 2019, from the start, from the start, contrary to what FTX, from the inception, from the start FTX operations in May 2019, this was from the beginning. This was not, this was just a criminal enterprise. And I wrote a piece about this a while back, about a month ago, you know, arguing that like,

• 17:41Speaker 01

  not only was this a criminal enterprise, this was a terrible criminal enterprise because they should have actually been able to just continue making and minting money the way that Alameda and FTX were set up. But, but the idea that we're even giving any benefit of the doubt to this whole effective altruism story or anything about philanthropy when from the beginning, every single thing that is listed out in the criminal complaints say that they were stealing money, they were just taking customers' money. And I don't care if you donate it to a politician or donate it to a soup kitchen or buy a luxury penthouse in the Bahamas, it's still just stealing money. You're not a philanthropist, you never dreamt about doing good.

• 18:22Speaker 01

  So that I do have a huge issue with how all the mainstream financial media is approaching the story.

• 18:29Alex Kantrowitz?

  Not only that, I mean, Sam Bankman-Frieda admitted in text messages to our Twitter DMs to a reporter that he never believed in the EA, the effective altruism stuff, it was completely a front, so.

• 18:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, he said it, I mean, not out loud via text, and it's all out there. And again, like the fact, I was going back and forth when Andrew Ross Sorkin had SPF at the Dealbook Summit. He didn't live up to what I hoped, I'm talking about the New York Times and Andrew Ross Sorkin, because the questions were relatively softballed, that was out there, those text messages, all these other, you know, very incriminating things were out there. And still, there's lots of talk about, you know, what did you, do you think you were doing good? Like, everyone starts with this assumption of that they meant well. Everyone starts with that, and that. I don't get it.

• 19:24Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, I mean, I guess the uh the idea would be to get them talking more and that will eventually put them putting that on the record could be, you know, ultimately useful, uh but I but I totally hear you on it. I've been trying to think why the journalists journalism institutions have been covering it this way. I really can't get to an answer. I mean, in some ways, you want to be if someone does you in some ways, as a journalist, you want to be writing something a little bit different from what everybody else is writing. Like journalists hate spending their time writing the same story that everybody else has written. So maybe there was a let's go find a different detail or let's do uh you know, do this one story that that you know, complements the rest

• 20:05Alex Kantrowitz?

  of our stories, but ultimately, it is it is just a bad look and and it also kind of shows you the hold that someone like a Sam Bakman Fried has had on the media for better or worse. Uh, they helped build him up and in some ways, I think he's still controlling them.

• 20:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, and and what you said that uh that I mean, it it's not necessarily a different angle because when everyone is writing relatively the same type of thing. Um, but but to me, the bigger danger at first, I was like, okay, maybe this is they're going to entrap him and or not entrap, you know, get him to say uh something that will incriminate himself. And there was one example of a press quote in the SEC complaint. So you know, you could argue that that was good that reporters were getting him to say stuff that will eventually incriminate him. But everyone has to remember, the more you just put the word philanthropist altruist next to his name and allow

• 21:01Speaker 01

  him to say it out loud or pose questions about it, it just to the average viewer, it'll still frame it as that as opposed to you are a criminal, you are the criminal mastermind of a criminal enterprise, um which finally at least the complaints are out there and uh, I mean, it's happening, the process is taking place. But yeah, I still I'm baffled as well.

• 21:26Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. Should we talk about something a little bit more uplifting, shall we say, the creator economy?

• 21:33Speaker 01

  Creators, always uplifting.

• 21:35Alex Kantrowitz?

  Now, look, I'm definitely clearly part of the creator economy. I create stuff online. My creation happens to be journalism, but with a newsletter and a newsletter on Substack, a podcast which you're listening to. So I'm part of this. But one of the things that I've noticed over time is that there hadn't been a middle class really to emerge in the creator economy. There'd been some real big earners at the top, but not too many people like me who are not followed by millions of people but finding a way to cover a niche in a way that's interesting and actually financially viable. At least, that's what I hope we do in big technology. And I wrote this story this week talking about how the creator economy was way overblown, looking at the fact that there hasn't really been a middle class of

• 22:19Alex Kantrowitz?

  creators and looking at the fact that there's a real drying up of funding. So this is some numbers from TechCrunch. All these billionaires, all these VCs are talking about this hundred billion dollar industry, or the industry talks about the fact that it's a hundred billion dollar industry, drawing on a lot of VC funding, but not necessarily money that's going to be returned to investors. And it does seem like the VCs have caught on. This is again, numbers from TechCrunch. There were 58 rounds to creator economy startups worth 343 million in last year's first quarter, then 42 rounds, so 16 less, were 336 million in the second quarter, and then just 19 rounds worth 110 million in the third quarter. And

• 23:02Alex Kantrowitz?

  TechCrunch says, "That's brutal, and a sufficiently steep decline to indicate that even with some traditional venture reporting lag, we are seeing a stiff slowdown in the amount of capital that creator-focused startups are able to raise." What is your view on the state of the creator economy? And do you think that my view that I've written about and that I've presented here, that it's fairly overhyped? Do you find that to be something that's close to the truth?

• 23:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I think with the creator economy... It can go either way. I think this one, so on one side, I will say over the last two to three years, or maybe even like three to five, every platform had a strong self-incentive to hype the creator economy, because the more you create this idea that just come on our platform, make us some content and you will get rich, everyone had that dream. And I mean, Substack certainly has sold that dream very well. But I mean, YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, everyone wants to sell the idea that the more content you make us, the richer you can become. YouTube

• 24:14Speaker 01

  probably has been the most successful in terms of actually genuinely creating, you know, mega-stars. But on the other side, I agree completely that there has been no middle class. It's become just a game, it's a media game like anything else, where either you're a superstar, it's like a going to like a box office movie right now, that either you have the Avengers and Avatar, or you have like some, you know, like really indie Netflix, straight to streaming type thing. So I think on that side, I think there was a lot of over-promising based on the incentives of the platforms. On the other side, what I

• 24:52Speaker 01

  think is interesting is the more brands have been have been hit by the ability to target customers because of iOS 14.5, the ability to not track as well, Meta and Facebook what's hurt them significantly, influencers actually do fill that gap very well. The whole idea of kind of like micro and mid-level influencers is they have their own built-in community, the more they talk about a product to that community, they kind of fit this perfect blend of direct response and brand marketing. So I think the more privacy initiatives get implemented in platforms, the more, less tracking there is, influencers can fill

• 25:36Speaker 01

  that gap pretty well.

• 25:38Alex Kantrowitz?

  I'm hearing this and I'm getting a little bit excited because I'm thinking, okay, if you wanted to reach a technology interested group on Facebook, you're having trouble targeting, you might just want to come to big technology and place your ads.

• 25:51Speaker 01

  I mean, I think that's the only option. That's pretty much the only option right now.

• 25:56Alex Kantrowitz?

  You guys don't take ads at margins, do you?

• 25:58Speaker 01

  No, no.

• 25:59Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, but there I feel like I'm missing something because you shared a perspective earlier that there has been some experimentation that brands have done with these influencers. And maybe they've been trained to get so much from Facebook and from Instagram that they're still that they're not seeing what they want, but there has been some disappointment. Can you talk about that a little bit?

• 26:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think the hurdle that has to be overcome with more kind of micro mid-level influencers is brands still are uncertain about whether to look at them as direct response or pure brand, i.e. if they're just pure direct response, they put up a post, we look at this in the same way as a traditional Facebook ad or Instagram ad, we look at the same metrics, and they're never going to perform in the same way. They're not that hyper-targeted. So I think there needs to be more education around it because for a while, again, platforms were selling both to the influencer, come on to TikTok and you can make a bunch of money. And then they're selling to the brands, influencer marketing

• 27:00Speaker 01

  is the future. We have the influencers partner with us and we'll put them in front of you or we'll have them, you know, talking about your products. So I think, I think I get like many things, things were overhyped in the last few years and there's definitely a bit of a letdown. But again, I still think in the medium term, this is here to stay.

• 27:21Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. And there's one more point that I made in the story that I kind of am curious what you think about. I thought a little bit about the way that people make money on these platforms and it's usually you build an audience. I mean, it's basically much easier to do it in a thing, something like a podcast or an email, email newsletter. But when you're on a social feed, something like a TikTok, for instance, that's now being moderated or mediated by AI-based algorithms versus what it used to be, which was those followings, people end up going viral much more sporadically versus predictably. And I do find that is going to be a troubling issue for the creator economy because If you were used to someone being able to predictably deliver you an audience,

• 28:05Alex Kantrowitz?

  now they can't as much as the platform can. So you're actually pressed to maybe move away from influencers and toward ads. What do you think about that?

• 28:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think this is a really interesting one, especially because Instagram has moved towards AI-driven content discovery in a huge way. And now, because they realize that, again, if I only have a couple thousand followers, I am likely not going to post on Instagram. And I will lean towards TikTok because with TikTok, there's that kind of slot machine chance that I will go viral versus Instagram, when it's purely driven by the social graph, I don't have a shot. So I think it makes sense that, I still think it actually is better for creators and creators, especially from a standpoint of earlier-stage creators.

• 28:55Speaker 01

  When things are not based on your follower account and you don't have that built-in audience, obviously, these kind of more just chasing the algorithm and hoping to get lucky is the game. I mean, maybe, again, then you look at it, which you kind of, I feel, are doing. You have the balanced built-in audience of a podcast and a newsletter. You throw up some YouTube shorts and hope you strike it rich.

• 29:21Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. I think it's important to do it all. But if you ask me what the most important and most valuable part of the business would be and the thing I enjoy doing the most, it's definitely newsletter podcast, no doubt about it. The TikTok stuff that we do could go away tomorrow and that would be okay. If this stuff went away, and obviously it's set up that it won't because of the RSS feed and and the email addresses, like that would actually be devastating. So.

• 29:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, and that is one thing, because again, as a business and technology writer. Newsletters and podcasts are a natural medium. If you're a fashion influencer, maybe that's not the case, but actually I was reading something. There's like a new app called Geneva, which is kind of a Discord competitor, chat community building, that it's geared towards brand and fashion type influencers. So I think like there's startups popping up, which is exciting, which is good to show there's competition, to try to fill these little gaps and let even a more kind of like fashion oriented influencer build their own community that's actually locked in. So I think it's moving in the right direction.

• 30:27Alex Kantrowitz?

  Cool. All right. I want to hit one more big story and then we will take some questions if there. We have one more here on the feed. And there's plenty of people watching on the live stream. So as they come in, we'll take questions at the end. Next story I want to hit is ChatGPT. It's coming to Bing. And we also know that OpenAI is looking to raise around at $29 billion. That's according to reports out there. Ranjan, I'm curious to get your perspective. We haven't actually talked about, I mean, about the ChatGPT's ability to replace search, but I'm curious if you think it actually gives Bing a leg up when in its competition with Google? Is that something that possibly factors?

• 31:09Alex Kantrowitz?

  And then I'm curious if you think the OpenAI round is, 29 billion is a lot of money. I'm curious if you think that's appropriate.

• 31:15Speaker 01

  So the first thing that kind of just jumped out at me, which was interesting, is I remember when Microsoft made the OpenAI investment in 2019, that was kind of like converted them from a nonprofit to somewhat of a for-profit, which there is many layers to in terms of how they're structured. Apparently a big part of that funding was Azure credits. Do you say, or Azure? Azure credits? Azure, yeah.

• 31:39Alex Kantrowitz?

  Oh, we were just talking about that. Elliot Brown was just talking about how like Palantir had gotten all these deals where it invested in a company and had to put the money right back into into Palantir. It's not exactly the same thing, but yeah.

• 31:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, well, well, hold on, it, but it has very strong relevance because um every single dumb chat G P T query we are all doing right now. Write me a rap song about Jerome Powell or whatever it is, is costing OpenAI some money. I mean, it's requiring some amount of computing. It's why, like especially all, I don't know, did you get, I got, I'll admit, I got AI avatars via Lensa. Um, paid twelve bucks for it and they said it's for, you know, to help with the computing costs and whatnot. I'm sure they're taking a hefty margin on that, but.

• 32:27Alex Kantrowitz?

  I just did it free on TikTok. There's a free TikTok lens that does those type of.

• 32:30Speaker 01

  Oh, dude, oh, they're, they're going after Lensa. Um, like, eh, but it's funny that in the end, that actually could be some of the most valuable. Funding because that, like, deferring that cost for OpenAI has been the greatest marketing ever. The fact that they opened this up. And were willing to assume the cost, even Dolly, remember, they took a while to open it up for everyone. They still have restrictions. I don't think chat G P T, I've used a good amount and I don't think there's restrictions on it, at least using. The main interface, so it's costing them a lot of money, but it's the greatest marketing of all time. And I think, I mean, uh, so for context, this is like a space I've been doing a lot of work in and, uh.

• 33:14Speaker 01

  Like, OpenAI does still have, uh, they have like G P T, they have other models that you can customize. Um, and fine tune, so you can actually, businesses can start to actually. Train their own models, create their own use cases and actually build pragmatic usable tools. And that, I think a lot of people are going to pay for, and I think there's going to be a lot of work done. I think this. I, I'm a little skeptic on the out of the box AI that's kind of fun to use. Um, and you can do cool party tricks and stuff, because I, like, in terms of the search. I was listening, I think it was Casey Newton on Hard Fork was talking about, you know, I can search, what are the best brown shoes to buy?

• 33:54Speaker 01

  And it'll give me an answer that's like, uh, some aggregation of a million different blog posts.

• 34:02Speaker 01

  It's probably not that good.

• 34:02Alex Kantrowitz?

  It was on this podcast.

• 34:04Speaker 01

  Oh, sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry. No, no, no, I think you're right, you're right.

• 34:07Alex Kantrowitz?

  Casey's year end show.

• 34:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, you're right, you're right. That was on the year end predictions. Yeah, yeah. So, uh, so to me, if you act, no one is buying shoes off of ChatGPT anytime soon. The, the like, you'll, we're still at this phase where you get a correct answer and everyone is super excited because it is, it's technologically a marvel right now to see it output that text. But in terms of like actually giving you the most usable correct answer, I think we're still a bit of ways, especially when it's around anything that's more kind of like commerce or commercial oriented.

• 34:49Speaker 01

  I think for research, it's pretty cool and like there's going to be a lot of interesting applications around education. Um, but I, I, and then from a competitive standpoint,

• 35:01Speaker 01

  what Google has cooking, what in terms of open source available, like large language models. Um, I think there's going to be a lot of competition. So from that standpoint, I think 29 billion OpenAI, just because ChatGPT is the cool kid at the moment, I think might be a little rich because I think this is going to be a very, very competitive space where it's almost less about the technology and more about the enterprise sales teams who sit with corporations and adapt these to their business needs and the boring stuff. And I don't think that's probably going to be OpenAI.

• 35:36Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, ChatGPT has a platform. I mean, or OpenAI's platform side is actually going to be way more interesting than consumer. Imagine you're Lufthansa or some other airline and you can actually build a chatbot that doesn't suck using this technology. You'd be pumped.

• 35:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, and they will. To me, again, like, customer service chatbots are the most logical use case ever in terms of having this highly customized in a brand voice. And actually, I mean, as we're saying this, Microsoft's relationship to OpenAI starts to sound a little bit more interesting.

• 36:12Alex Kantrowitz?

  Oh, yes.

• 36:12Speaker 01

  If a strong enterprise sales organization is the key to unlocking the true value of these models, you know, Microsoft's been known to sell some software over time.

• 36:25Alex Kantrowitz?

  Absolutely. Well, maybe that's a fun 2023 prediction is that Microsoft just acquires OpenAI.

• 36:32Speaker 01

  That's not putting that out of the realm of possibility.

• 36:37Alex Kantrowitz?

  It could happen. We'll see if it gets approved. We have the FTC's finally doing.

• 36:40Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 36:41Alex Kantrowitz?

  But, I mean, their.

• 36:42Speaker 01

  Activision isn't going great, so maybe, yeah, yeah.

• 36:48Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay, should we end? I know we have some handful of topics left. We can push some of them for next week. Do you want to end with Lex Fridman's book list?

• 36:58Speaker 01

  Oh, man. Wait, hold on. Were there any more questions?

• 37:01Alex Kantrowitz?

  We have.

• 37:01Speaker 01

  You said there was one more?

• 37:02Alex Kantrowitz?

  So there was one more here. It's from Andrew. He says, "Many organizations have checks and balances that limit cyber and business deliverables internally and externally. In the FTX example, let's see, some of the, all the checks and balances seem to have been rubber stamps." Okay, here's the crux of the question. "How does goodwill seem to overrun compliance and rigidity? Is it a crypto? Is it a mystery nuance?" I guess like, I guess what he's trying to ask is,

• 37:39Alex Kantrowitz?

  where was all the compliance there?

• 37:43Alex Kantrowitz?

  And can, I mean, people just trust them based off of goodwill?

• 37:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, okay. Well, FTX, that question of where is compliance? I partially, almost as I do with everything else, ascribe to Zerp craziness because

• 37:58Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right.

• 37:58Speaker 01

  Again, I mean, again, when was the growth? It started in 2019 and then it went astronomical after March 2020, when no one was checking anything, money was everywhere. So, so I think in terms of the where was a compliance? I think it's amazing when you, the stuff that's coming out is just mind-boggling about, you know, like an eight billion dollar ledger entry that just says at fiat. And like, you know, that it's just money that's gone. It's a like a, and this, having worked at a bank as a trader, myself for seven years and seeing the amount of compliance and, and I also worked in emerging market currencies.

• 38:38Speaker 01

  So we would have a lot of like random things around, you know, if we had inquiries about the Iranian currency or, you know, the, the around money laundering, there was non-stop compliance people walking over, asking us questions. The fact that none of that existed, I mean, I think you have, it was crypto, which is still was Wild West-ish in 2019. I still think Zerp madness of the pandemic, it was just another thing alongside everything else. And I think this is also where Sam Bankman-Fried is evil boy, not evil boy genius, now evil boy genius. I think that impression helped, uh, helped, uh, alleviate any potential compliance pressure.

• 39:22Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. And talk about compliance, uh, another story is that Coinbase was fined a hundred million, or no, settled for a hundred million because it didn't know its customers well enough. And that led into some money laundering fears, so. Obviously an issue that

• 39:36Speaker 01

  As it goes.

• 39:37Alex Kantrowitz?

  As it goes. The one good one, huh? Okay, Lex Fridman's book list has gotten a lot of attention on Twitter and social media this week. People are basically calling him a fraud for saying he wants to read one book a week. And those books include 1984, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, 2001, A Space Odyssey, Animal Farm, Frankenstein, et cetera, et cetera. I guess the detractors seem to believe that Lex is a, is an intellectual fraud for putting these type of books on his list. Or maybe claiming that he's gonna, uh, read one a week. It's such a ridiculous thing. It's funny and it's like gone for like, I don't know, seven days at this point.

• 40:22Alex Kantrowitz?

  What do you think? Uh, leave us off with a final thought about Lex's, Lex's book list.

• 40:27Speaker 01

  As someone who always starts the new year with a resolution to read more books. And usually January, February, pretty strong, and then go back to just reading articles again.

• 40:40Speaker 01

  I get what he was trying to do.

• 40:43Speaker 01

  I still feel if you're gonna be a douche, you're gonna get called out as a douche. And that's just like the, it's like the, it's the perfect social media fodder because everyone can reflect their own view into this book list in the sense of like, I feel guilty, I haven't read enough, so I'm gonna call this guy out for being a douche for saying he's reading Dostoevsky in a week. But yeah, I also, to, to me, the more interesting thing, and I tweeted about this is, I, I think Taleb had called him out as, you know, what is a research scientist at MIT really mean? He has ran with the MIT branding very strongly.

• 41:24Speaker 01

  And I'll admit, I always associate him the same way, like in Andrew Huberman is a Stanford, but is a tenured Stanford professor. Lex Fridman is the MIT podcaster guy. It was interesting to me because like a few people were definitely chatting about what exactly does that mean? Has he been running with the brand? And, and institutions like that. At what point do they start to push back a little and separate themselves if they see someone is not necessarily reflecting their institution in the best light? And that's my, that's my prediction on, uh, on what's gonna happen there. I think MIT, at some point, you get some kind of statement or some kind of clarification. I'm just, uh, throwing that out there.

• 42:06Alex Kantrowitz?

  This is great. In 2023, we're gonna see Microsoft acquire OpenAI and MIT say, "We don't know what's happening."

• 42:14Speaker 01

  Yeah. We know him a little.

• 42:16Alex Kantrowitz?

  We know him a little bit, but just a little.

• 42:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:20Alex Kantrowitz?

  Booklist looks good, but for me, it's, that's a five, six-year project, not a one-year project, so.

• 42:26Speaker 01

  I mean, I, I, I will say, one of my resolutions is to read more fiction. I sometimes forget, reading can be fun. Um, and just like, like, the same as streaming Netflix, when it's fiction and it's fun. So that's definitely on my, uh, my 2023 goals.

• 42:44Alex Kantrowitz?

  Awesome. Well, Ron John, week one of this experiment in the books. Pretty fun.

• 42:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, LinkedIn Live, podcasting.

• 42:53Alex Kantrowitz?

  Podcasting. Thanks so much for joining, and, uh, do you wanna let folks know where to find you online?

• 42:59Speaker 01

  Yep, you can find me, uh, at readmargins.com. You can subscribe to our newsletter or on Twitter at @ronjohnxroy.

• 43:08Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay.

• 43:08Speaker 01

  And I still don't know how to say my Mastodon handle out loud, so maybe I'll work on that over the weekend.

• 43:15Alex Kantrowitz?

  All right, everybody. Well, thank you so much for joining. Thank you to the people who are here, um, participating live. Thank you to all the listeners. I hope you've enjoyed this. We certainly have. Again, it's a new era. We're kicking it off. Every week, we'll be breaking down the news and going over some of the things that we don't cover in the Wednesday edition of the podcast. I'm super stoked that this thing is live and running, and, uh, I'm glad you're here. We'll see you on Wednesday for a new show on the big technology podcast.

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