Pod Insights Big Technology Podcast 2024's Big Ideas — With Jessi Hempl and Hello Monday About this episode Jessi Hempel is the host of Hello Monday and a senior editor at large at LinkedIn. Today, we're running a crossover episode where we talk about the future of AI, self-driving cars, social media, and tech media. This is a fun, timely episode that covers many of the themes we speak about regularly on Big Technology Podcast. And I think if you like this show, you’ll also love Hello Monday, which you can find in your podcast app of choice.
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0:00 Alex Kantrowitz? Welcome to Big Technology Podcast where we have a special bonus crossover episode for you today. Hello Monday is a great show from Jesse Hempel that's part of LinkedIn's Podcast Network. It's a show that spotlights great thinkers, researchers, entrepreneurs, and icons, and it's driven by Jesse's great thoughtful questioning. Jesse is a longtime tech journalist. We actually met back when I was a cover reporter, and she was a senior writer at Wired. She's now a senior editor at large at LinkedIn, and we've kept in touch all throughout. So in this episode, I join her on Hello Monday, and we talk about the state of AI. We drop some big predictions for 2024, and we look at the overall state of tech today. We also talk about self-driving cars,
0:42 Alex Kantrowitz? which I still believe in even if Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt resigned shortly after we recorded. I think this is a fun, timely episode covering many of the themes we speak about regularly here on Big Technology Podcast, and I think if you like this show, you'll also love Hello Monday, which you can find in your podcast app of choice. And so I'm so happy to bring you my conversation with Jesse, coming up right after this. This episode is brought to you by Genesis. What does it actually take to put a Gentic AI to work across an entire enterprise? I recently spoke with Genesis Chairman and CEO Tony Bates about why orchestration is emerging as a competitive advantage in customer experience, and what companies need to get right in the AI era. Then, I sat down with Adam Mitchell,
1:25 Alex Kantrowitz? Head of Enterprise Business Solutions at Voya Financial, to go inside a large-scale agentic CX transformation, including the business decisions, trade-offs, and lessons along the way. You can watch both conversations now on my YouTube channel today. It's never been more challenging to get frontier compute. How do you know where to look, who to trust, or how much to pay? Akash is an open cloud that provides easy access, flexibility, and peace of mind. That's how companies like 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.
2:09 Speaker 01 From the news team at LinkedIn, I'm Jesse Hempel, and this is Hello Monday. Welcome to our Big Ideas episode.
2:20 Speaker 01 I'm part of a team of journalists here at LinkedIn. That's the LinkedIn News team. And this is the season where we begin to ask an important question. What's gonna happen next year? Understanding the future is a big part of what this show is about. It will shape the trends that drive the changes we experience at work and beyond. This year, I'm devoting an entire episode to predictions. In particular, technology predictions. And I've got an amazing guest to help me think through them. Alex Kantrowitz. Alex is host of Big Technology. It's another show I love within the LinkedIn Podcast Network. And he also has a newsletter. You should subscribe to both. Alex follows tech.
3:04 Speaker 01 He's interviewed many of the most important people in the industry. And he watches developments with the experience that comes from decades of seeing what breaks through. Now, we recorded this interview live earlier this fall. You're gonna hear it in the low buzz of noise behind us. An audience made for a swell of energy that was contagious. But as you'll also hear, we very quickly tuned everyone out and went deep on the things that are about to happen in tech. And since ChatGPT has now made free accounts available to us for a full year, that is where we started.
3:41 Alex Kantrowitz? As I was tracking some of this data in the summer, it seemed to me like maybe the ChatGPT revolution was on the way to an end. Because in the United States, and this is reflected globally, traffic to ChatGPT dropped 10% in May and then 15% in June, and another 4% in July. Now, remember, this was the fastest growing consumer product ever before Threads. And maybe we'll talk about Threads later.
4:05 Speaker 01 Lord. Okay, anyways.
4:09 Alex Kantrowitz? That's a whole nother can of worms. But this was the fastest growing consumer product before threads. And it seemed like initially ChatGPT was going to be the product. And as YouTube started to tick down in the summer, it made me think maybe not. But one interesting thing has happened is as the school year has begun, that has ticked up back, back again. So it rose three percent month over month in the US and point three percent worldwide in August. Meaning that back to schools happening, we're still going to see what's going to happen in September and in October.
4:42 Speaker 01 So does that mean that your thesis is that a whole bunch of high school students have started using ChatGPT to write their essays again?
4:48 Alex Kantrowitz? More than a whole bunch, nearly every high school and college student. I visited a college in the spring and the students were telling me not only were they using it to complete their work, but when their professors couldn't explain a concept well enough, they would go to ChatGPT and say, hey, can you help me understand this in a way that professors so and so could not? And they learn from the thing. So.
5:10 Speaker 01 And I want to stay with that a second, right, Alex? Because I think the whole thing about ChatGPT, about the launch of any new tool, and certainly at scale with ChatGPT, is that as it launched, we didn't exactly know how to use it, right? We all sort of ran at it and started experimenting with it. But you know, when I was a child, I remember in sixth grade, my sixth grade algebra teacher sent me out to the drugstore to buy a calculator. And my father was scandalized that I would bring a calculator to school. But of course I would bring a calculator because it was a helpful tool. I would be able to do my math better. And it sounds to me like what you're talking about when you're talking about the professors and the students is like a world in which ChatGPT is the same version of a helpful tool.
5:51 Alex Kantrowitz? Absolutely. And ChatGPT happened to be perfect for some situations. School is one example because it's so generalized and you learn so much in school. But what we're starting to see now is that it is the technology is being adapted and applied into different professions in different iterations. So I think. Now we're starting to see this moment where it went from a demo that OpenAI, which is the creator of ChatGPT, put out into a broader phenomenon and had to get applied differently into different chatbots. And the legal field is one example where it's been very, very interesting. And I think an example of what we're going to see where there have been these chatbots that can do discovery for you and can look through legal texts and do all the work that you would assign to paralegals and junior associates back in the day.
6:34 Speaker 01 Right.
6:35 Alex Kantrowitz? And now you can just use it. You can do it with these, these new products that are coming out that are not ChatGPT, but built on similar technology. And one of the interesting things that's happening here is that these firms are actually hiring more people because they have more capacity now. They can bill more.
6:49 Speaker 01 Right.
6:49 Alex Kantrowitz? And, and yeah, the special.
6:51 Speaker 01 When you say these firms, you mean?
6:52 Alex Kantrowitz? Law firms.
6:53 Speaker 01 You mean the law firms. So, so in some ways, the, the, the general conclusion would be like, oh, well, you know, the AI will take away the jobs. But what I'm hearing you say is actually, at least in this moment, the AI is allowing for more jobs because there's more work to be done because the AI makes things efficient and faster?
7:12 Alex Kantrowitz? Yeah. And I also spoke with the Mayo Clinic about how AI has changed radiology there because they have about seven AI tools inside the clinic and they use it for, actually the person who's running AI there, not surprisingly, is a radiologist. And they're, they're still hiring. So it's one of these things where it's sort of cliche to say it, but it makes people more effective. It frees them up to do things that are more productive with their time. And, and I think so you, we started talking about what, what's this going to look like in 2024? To me, it's the specialization, the more enterprise uses. So it's going to happen.
7:44 Speaker 01 Yep.
7:44 Alex Kantrowitz? If you're working in a legal field, you're probably going to see this. If you're in a research field, you're going to see a different iteration. And medical field, you'll see a different iteration and so on and so forth. So, and it's actually a, a beautiful moment for the field because, you know, ChatGPT has to die for AI to live. And that's what's starting to happen.
8:02 Speaker 01 So you're, you're. You're predicting that actually ChatGPT, I mean, it's ticking up a little bit, but like, ChatGPT is the MySpace to the future Facebook, essentially.
8:11 Alex Kantrowitz? Oh, yeah.
8:11 Speaker 01 It needed to exist in order to make the case for something that will exist after it.
8:15 Alex Kantrowitz? Yeah, and there's a crazy theory I've been playing around with in my head about how OpenAI may become irrelevant at some point in the future. Maybe not fully irrelevant, but it is interesting how quickly the technology that they've built has been commodified. So they built ChatGPT and released it, and the next thing you know, how many companies have? I mean, Bing, of course, but that's a partnership with OpenAI. Google has released their own with Bard. There are startups like Anthropic who have their own chatbots. Theirs is called Claude, and they recently announced a partnership with Amazon that's going to be worth up to $4 billion.
8:51 Speaker 01 You're bridging us into sort of our next big idea, which is that the big tech companies, well, they're engling towards an arms race here, and I'm wondering how it stacks up. And I just, I want to remind our listeners that I am asking this from a desk that was supplied by my employer, LinkedIn, that is owned by Microsoft. So I am somewhere in this story at the same time as we chat about it. But Alex, help me understand, like, what's the landscape? What's the stack up?
9:16 Alex Kantrowitz? So you have, you have OpenAI and Microsoft, obviously the first big partnership and the first one out the gate with this technology while companies like Google were afraid to launch their version because, remember, before ChatGPT came out, Google had a engineer who said that AI that they had in their office was a person and sentient.
9:34 Speaker 01 Yes.
9:35 Alex Kantrowitz? So they clearly had the goods.
9:36 Speaker 01 Yes.
9:37 Alex Kantrowitz? So you have that partnership. That's, that seems like they'll be developing, so licensing the technology out through Azure and Cloud, developing the consumer product with OpenAI. So you have ChatGPT, you have Dolly. They're going to do more multimodal stuff, which is a fancy tech way of saying it's not just text, but it's, you can drop an image in and ask it to modify it or explain to you what's happening, or you can... Write a concept and it can create an image and you can speak to it and then maybe it will speak back. Or actually, it already is starting to speak back. So that's sort of like the frontier, so to speak.
10:11 Speaker 01 Right.
10:12 Alex Kantrowitz? Then you have Facebook, and I think we're going to get to this a little bit, but I might just spoil it right now. I think Mark Zuckerberg is trying, is trying to destroy Sam Altman, who runs OpenAI.
10:22 Speaker 01 Let's just back up with these two characters here.
10:24 Alex Kantrowitz? Yes.
10:24 Speaker 01 So it's funny, I actually met them each at about the same time, when both of them were in their early twenties. And one would never guess that these two people would go on to be such formidable characters. So you get, you get Mark Zuckerberg, you know, started Facebook in, you know, two thousand and four, I believe. Built Facebook into something that became Meta, because do you remember exactly his line around why it became Meta? Like, Facebook is a blue app, but Meta is the future.
10:55 Alex Kantrowitz? Right.
10:56 Speaker 01 Um, and then you've got Sam Altman, and Sam Altman, of course, is at the helm of ChatGPT.
11:03 Alex Kantrowitz? Exactly.
11:03 Speaker 01 And OpenAI.
11:04 Alex Kantrowitz? OpenAI.
11:05 Speaker 01 Right.
11:05 Alex Kantrowitz? So you remember that after Mark Zuckerberg created the blue app, he made a few very important acquisitions in one product development. He bought WhatsApp, he bought Instagram, which is content, but it really is a messaging app at the end of the day.
11:19 Speaker 01 Yes.
11:19 Alex Kantrowitz? And he built Facebook Messenger. And so how do you think Mark Zuckerberg felt when he saw the hottest new consumer product ever as a messaging app? Not very happy.
11:30 Speaker 01 No, not so much.
11:32 Alex Kantrowitz? So people have said, like, is OpenAI a threat to Google? Is it a threat to Amazon? Maybe. But the real threat is to Meta, because if people start really going ham on these, on these AI chats, it leaves Meta as this sort of irrelevant human chat app. And so what Zuckerberg has done is a few really interesting things. One is with his AI team, he's released Lama 2, which is a set of generative models that allows you to do similar stuff to what you would do with the underlying technology behind. ChatGPT.
12:06 Speaker 01 Right.
12:06 Alex Kantrowitz? And then he's also released these series of messaging bots inside WhatsApp and Messenger, which each have different personalities and are played by interesting people like Snoop Dogg and Dwyane Wade. And, you know, right now, they're just kind of like faces that smirk at you, but eventually they're going to be voices. That's at least what they say. And so you have Facebook going to war with with OpenAI and Sam Altman. And I think it's been an underappreciated part of this entire story.
12:32 Speaker 01 You know, it's it feels to me that over the course of Mark Zuckerberg's career, he hasn't been consistently good at creating new things inside Facebook that take off. Sort of like a classic innovator's dilemma there. The thing that he is actually pretty good at is killing other things that are taking off in other places.
12:52 Alex Kantrowitz? Yeah, and that's a skill.
12:54 Speaker 01 Yeah, well, that is a skill.
12:55 Alex Kantrowitz? Do you buy my theory or do you think I'm nuts?
12:57 Speaker 01 Um.
13:00 Speaker 01 Jury's out, man. I appreciate that you have a theory. I will say that I the bots thing, like I you show me, show me consumers who want it before I'll believe in it.
13:09 Alex Kantrowitz? Okay.
13:12 Speaker 01 We're going to take a quick break here. When we get back, more thoughts on 2024 with Alex Kantrowitz.
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15:21 Speaker 01 We're back with Alex Kantrowitz. Last year, Elon Musk bought Twitter. This led to the rise and fall, and maybe rise again, maybe fall again, of an app called, well, now called X. The question I really wanted answered was, who's on X these days anyways?
15:40 Alex Kantrowitz? So I still use it, but I've noticed, and yeah, I've noticed that the community feels a lot thinner now than it did previously. I think that's due to, you know, people talk about Elon driving people away. I think it's really due to some of the product changes that they've made. And the core of these products are the feed.
16:00 Speaker 01 Right.
16:01 Alex Kantrowitz? That stream of new information and funny jokes that are just presented to you and rolling through with an algorithm. And the feed has changed, without a doubt. It used to be a lot more, let's say, timely, a lot more, you know, interested in showing you the news. And now it shows you ChatGPT influencers and memes and...
16:20 Speaker 01 I pulled it up today. I haven't opened it in a while, but Alex, I knew we were going to talk. So I still have the app on my phone. I pulled it up, and the first third of the screen was this huge ad at the top of my feed telling me that, did I know I could now buy ads on the platform? Before we even got to the content.
16:39 Alex Kantrowitz? Yeah, that's another problem is their ads don't work very well.
16:41 Speaker 01 Yeah.
16:41 Alex Kantrowitz? And they did lay off most of their sales team, not most, but a very good chunk of it.
16:45 Speaker 01 Yeah.
16:45 Alex Kantrowitz? And so they've really struggled on the revenue side there, although Yaccarino did say they're going to be profitable next year. But I'll wait to wait until that happens, until I believe it.
16:53 Speaker 01 So here's the thing that is, to me, most interesting about what's going on with X. It's about what it means for everyone else. So what is, what is the current state of X mean for social more generally?
17:08 Alex Kantrowitz? Well, social is going through a bit of a shaking out, so to speak. I think social media used to be a lot more fun, wouldn't you agree?
17:16 Speaker 01 I mean, social media used to be social.
17:19 Alex Kantrowitz? Yeah, exactly.
17:20 Speaker 01 I used to know that, like, I could find somebody, I could find you if I look for you, Alex, right?
17:25 Alex Kantrowitz? Yeah, so the social element has gone away and it's been replaced in some ways by more homogeneous type of format. So if you think about any social media app right now, it's largely a version of TikTok. Right? TikTok is TikTok. Instagram is definitely TikTok. Facebook is kind of TikTok. And then you have sort of the text-based apps.
17:50 Speaker 01 Yeah.
17:50 Alex Kantrowitz? Right, which is Twitter and its clones, Twitter, Threads, and Blue Sky, and Truth Social, and et cetera, et cetera.
17:58 Speaker 01 Right.
17:58 Alex Kantrowitz? So we have basically two formats now. The Reels format is doing really well. The text-based format isn't doing as well because it really worked well when everybody was on the same app. But now that people have fanned out, like, the fact that you have, I don't know, tens of millions of users on Threads, and Donald Trump, and the conservatives on Truth Social, people don't see each other anymore. Like you said, it's not social.
18:22 Speaker 01 Mm-hmm.
18:23 Alex Kantrowitz? And for better or worse. And so that's sort of falling into irrelevance in the way I see it.
18:27 Speaker 01 Well, social used to be a path to both relationships and information.
18:32 Alex Kantrowitz? Right.
18:33 Speaker 01 And at this point, it has become so fragmented that it's no longer a good path to information. And you have to know the relationships you're looking for before you get to where you're going in order to get to the right places to find them. And it makes me think, well, is social over? Are we moving on to new ways of organizing both relationships and information?
18:56 Alex Kantrowitz? I don't think over, but I think there's this very, very interesting thing that happens when something accelerates. You know, you tend to look at the mode of acceleration. You're like, that thing is a rocket ship. And then it tops out at 60 and the car starts shaking. And you're like, oh, it's just a glopy. But it's road safe, but it wasn't exactly going to space. And maybe that's what happened with social, where it seemed at the moment that it had all the energy and was just gonna take off and dominate our lives. And people built businesses. I mean BuzzFeed, my former employer, was built off this idea that we are only gonna live in social and no other format would make sense. And that's tailing off. And so some of like the new media formats or like the old media formats that have now
19:41 Alex Kantrowitz? resurfaced, like podcasts, for instance, like email newsletters. I'm so much more bullish on those as a way to find information and actually find people that you connect with, like your audience that, you know, they find you and they connect with you. And that is a very deep and meaningful relationship for them. And then they'll find, there'll be other channels to like, get in touch. I think LinkedIn, you know, we're both part of LinkedIn Podcast Network. I think that is like an unbelievable vehicle for people to connect with hosts and shows they like and other listeners. I mean, I know Big Technology Podcast is all in on LinkedIn and it's been amazing, both for show growth and for me to connect with the people listening. And so that's one interesting evolution that I've seen.
20:22 Speaker 01 Well, I'm glad to hear you say the word LinkedIn, not once, but three times in that, like in the last minute, Alex, because you're right, it is my employer. And it is also a social platform. It was somewhat of an accident that I'd been bringing up. It didn't even pop into my mind, because I think of LinkedIn at this point as something a little different than the rest of those. That it is social, but it has this protection in the form of both real identity and access to economic opportunity. And those things serve as a bit of a moat for it. And when I began covering social, I felt like those were the things that made it boring, Alex. I remember, in fact, being like, oh, I'm not even gonna include LinkedIn in that story, back in like, 2007 or something. Because like, that's just your resume. That's not even interesting.
21:06 Speaker 01 But at this point, it turns out that those are the things that make LinkedIn a safe place where you can find real people and have meaningful conversations.
21:13 Alex Kantrowitz? Yeah, I like the fact that, and I wrote this before I joined the network. So for anyone who's saying that like I'm biased on this one. I mean, look, I'm not gonna try to pull apart the fact that I'm part of the podcast network. The network sells the ads on my podcast. We do a rev share. That's the truth. That being said, like I wrote this before I even joined, I like the fact that the feed is a slow burn. So I think part of the problem with social media is that people write ridiculous things for that quick endorphin hit of like, I wrote this incendiary, you know, tweet and now a thousand people like it.
21:46 Speaker 01 Right.
21:46 Alex Kantrowitz? The LinkedIn feed actually just said this is not any inside information. It's just my experience. It seems to move information about the network a little bit more slowly and deliberately. And I think you can still reach a tremendous amount of people there. But because it's not that instant, oh, man, hit of dopamine when you post, you're actually incentivized to be a lot more thoughtful and try to reach people with stuff that matters versus stuff that might piss them off. And I think that's cool.
22:12 Speaker 01 I really appreciate that and I hope that that continues to be true in 2024. Here's one we haven't covered. 2023, it felt to me like cars began to truly drive themselves in cities all across the United States in these little pilots. Are we gonna see more of that next year?
22:29 Alex Kantrowitz? Oh, yes, we are. Have you been inside a Waymo or a Cruise before?
22:33 Speaker 01 I have not, but I, back, back in the old days, in 2018, I went off to Pittsburgh to drive an Uber. I actually got to like sit in the driver's seat and drive all around Pittsburgh in one.
22:43 Alex Kantrowitz? Oh, cool.
22:44 Speaker 01 Yeah.
22:44 Alex Kantrowitz? That's awesome. So actually Pittsburgh is like a crucial city for this development because it's where a lot of the self-driving work has been done through Carnegie Mellon. So. You were there and it's interesting because there was this moment where Uber was investing a lot in it and everybody was investing a lot in it where people are like self-driving cars were already getting them to work in parking lots in the Uber complex and like they're coming next year, stand by.
23:07 Speaker 01 Right.
23:08 Alex Kantrowitz? And then it was just like, okay, and we waited, you know, close to 10 years for this stuff to actually hit, hit city streets. It started, a lot of it started in Arizona, but I think people's eyes really opened when these self-driving cars started driving around San Francisco. Now, some of that might have been some bias because like a lot of the tech press is in San Francisco.
23:27 Speaker 01 Right.
23:28 Alex Kantrowitz? The other thing is, it's really freaking difficult to drive around San Francisco.
23:32 Speaker 01 Yeah, hills alone.
23:34 Alex Kantrowitz? They're a disaster. Yeah.
23:35 Speaker 01 Yeah, and the pedestrians.
23:37 Alex Kantrowitz? The fact that these cars worked in San Francisco showed, and both Cruise and Waymo, Cruise is largely owned by GM or GM has a huge stake in it, Waymo is Google's, the fact that these cars were able to generalize their skills, their way that they view road, view the roads and identify lights and understand pedestrian behavior, that they were able to go from a place like Arizona to San Francisco was to me, the most underappreciated inflection point in 2023. I mean, civilization rocking stuff and it, you only really have to get it right once before, if you're able to generalize, because all that work to get into Arizona, that's all the work. And then that's the cool thing about technology is it scales.
24:20 Speaker 01 Right.
24:20 Alex Kantrowitz? So it can move into San Francisco and then if it gets San Francisco right, can much more easily move into many different cities. And I was speaking with Kyle Vogt, who's the CEO of Cruise, and he gave us a stat, something like they 10, they 10x the amount of rides they gave this year as opposed to last year, and will 10x again next year and 10x again the year after that. And riding in these cars, you just see that it's a superior experience to riding in a car driven by a human. They are smooth because it's a robot, it's an algorithm driving it. So it doesn't have to like react in the moment and slam on the brakes. It will ease you into the light and it will ease you out of the light.
24:59 Speaker 01 But don't they take left turns like my grandma?
25:01 Alex Kantrowitz? They are surprisingly adept. I mean, I went through a number of like very challenging traffic patterns in San Francisco. I took about a dozen rides in these cars over the summer and they handled them extremely well. And this is, this is just this huge, huge change. And it went from like self-driving cars, ha, ha, ha, that will never happen for me at least, to like self-driving cars like my kids, and it's gonna be a while, but they, they will not have to learn how to drive if they don't want to. This stuff's coming.
25:34 Speaker 01 Yeah, well, all of these things are true. The thing that I think about when I think about self-driving is that it's a very start-and-go industry and, you know, all technology is. But you will make these big leaps and it will feel like it's all coming tomorrow, as you said. And then things will level out for one reason or another. So, last big topic I have for you, given that it's you and me and we have been doing this for a long time. Where is tech media right now? I mean, when I got started at this, tech media was in the business of propping up all of these things that were just like great ideas. I mean, stories were so fawning, right? And then we went through this period where we really struggled as people in the industry to figure out how to hold some of these
26:17 Speaker 01 companies accountable. And we're all kind of new at it because it wasn't really how we had approached tech reporting. Where are we now?
26:25 Alex Kantrowitz? I think we're in the middle of a really important and healthy and good balancing out where tech media, as you mentioned, started as cheerleaders and gadget people and just was like so reflexively positive toward the tech, towards the tech industry. And then had this huge overcorrection. A lot of that was based off of Facebook, which is, you and I have both interviewed Mark Zuckerberg, so it's a company that we know well and sort of like...
26:50 Speaker 01 Yes, so well. But the first time that I interviewed him, he was still at Harvard.
26:54 Alex Kantrowitz? Wow.
26:54 Speaker 01 And I interviewed him for the story I was doing on MySpace. Somebody was like, oh, you should talk to that kid. And it was like a 15, 20-minute interview and he kept calling Facebook a utility, which I think the first comms person they hired was like, never use that word when you're talking about Facebook.
27:10 Alex Kantrowitz? Oh, yeah, because that violates regulation.
27:13 Speaker 01 But you're right, and I don't know if you had this experience over the years. But certainly, when Facebook now Meta's narrative changed...
27:24 Speaker 01 Meta was the last company to cotton on to the fact that its own narrative had changed.
27:30 Alex Kantrowitz? Oh, for sure.
27:30 Speaker 01 I found it very challenging to manage my relationships with executives that for years I had had what felt to me like very honest conversations with. Because when I'd call their laundry dirty and we were all looking around at it and seeing that it was dirty, they would be like, what, this shirt's clean? What are you talking about?
27:46 Alex Kantrowitz? That's right. They became way too defensive. And then like the context of that is, there was, there was a moment, we're talking about this moment of, of sort of unbridled criticism that came from the tech press, where there was no harm in saying the worst possible thing about Facebook, you'd be applauded for it.
28:03 Speaker 01 Mm-hmm.
28:03 Alex Kantrowitz? And I think that sort of scrambled the brains of people who are supposed to look at things more critically and objectively. And so I think right now we're in like this third phase, which hasn't really been identified, but it seems like a very worthwhile moment where that objectivity and critical thinking is coming back in some way. And so having been through these two waves, I think you're right now seeing a much more balanced, much more fair and, you know, and an unafraid tech press in a way that like the industry serves the industry and serves the general public in a way that's way better than those first two iterations. And I think, you know, that this movement, there's been this movement towards independence. I think I'm part of that, right?
28:46 Alex Kantrowitz? Because I don't write for a newsroom anymore, or a traditional newsroom. I write for Substack and that has allowed me to like branch, branch out and be like, what do I really think about these issues and write that way? That's helped, but.
28:57 Speaker 01 And Alex, just to be clear, you don't write for Substack, you write for Alex.
29:01 Alex Kantrowitz? Exactly.
29:01 Speaker 01 At this point, right?
29:02 Alex Kantrowitz? Yeah, yeah. Well, for my audience, really.
29:03 Speaker 01 You have used the tools around you to create a platform so that you can talk directly to your audience.
29:09 Alex Kantrowitz? Exactly.
29:10 Speaker 01 Which is something that is thanks to tech, that did not exist when either of us started this career in the same way.
29:15 Alex Kantrowitz? Totally, yeah. It's, it's nice that it exists and thrilled about that. And yeah, I, I do think we've also seen like a lot of digital media fall apart. The business model just didn't work.
29:26 Speaker 01 Yeah.
29:26 Alex Kantrowitz? And, you know, the move, when people, there's been a movement towards subscriptions. And when people pay for news and, and they open it in their inbox or they're listening to their podcast app, it requires more of a respect for the reader, where you're not trying to inflame a Facebook audience to get a story moving. And I, I think that's been positive as well.
29:50 Speaker 01 That was Alex Kantrowitz, host of the Big Technology Podcast. And right at the top of this episode, we talked a lot about ChatGPT and the company that released it, OpenAI. Of course, we recorded this conversation before the company's shakeup. Just before Thanksgiving, the OpenAI board attempted to oust the CEO, Sam Altman. For several days, things were in flux, as most of the company's 700 employees said that they'd quit if he left. Sam was reinstated as CEO. But it was uncomfortable to watch this news unfold. The stakes felt high, and we all realized how much was riding on a startup, and one with an unusual business structure to boot.
30:34 Speaker 01 So I called Alex back to see if his thoughts on ChatGPT have evolved.
30:38 Alex Kantrowitz? Well, it's pretty fascinating, because it effectively leaves OpenAI in the same position as it was before Sam Altman was fired, in that it's a nonprofit that's very closely linked to Microsoft and will continue its research in effectively the same way that it was beforehand. But what I think this news pretends is that competitors to OpenAI are really going to see a little bit of blood in the water, and they are going to try to take advantage in the best way that they can. And that will definitely involve some competitive initiatives on the enterprise front, but
31:20 Alex Kantrowitz? we could also see consumer products start to try to edge their way in. And that might lead to an even faster move from these bigger bots like ChatGPT to these smaller bots like we spoke about. And that'll be very interesting to watch as it plays out over the next few weeks and months.
31:36 Speaker 01 So in effect, your big idea about ChatGPT, that in fact, we're moving to a post-ChatGPT world, where there are tons of applications of AI that are narrow and often much more effective in their specialties, that's just going to happen faster as a result of all this, right?
31:56 Alex Kantrowitz? Exactly. And there are going to be companies that will have been building on OpenAI infrastructure that might not move off of it, but will at least be thinking about how they build on different models, like Anthropic, for instance, or how do they customize open source models and build on top of those. And that might make their products better in the long run, if they just kind of figure out what the right model is for them, which could help accelerate this move faster than it was previously.
32:24 Speaker 01 Why do you think that this particular, you know, startups lose their CEOs all the time, personality battles, disagreements, they happen at startups all the time. Why do you think that this particular debacle felt so high stakes?
32:39 Alex Kantrowitz? Yeah, because it wasn't just about Sam Altman, it was effectively about the mission of OpenAI itself. It wasn't, should this person lead us forward, it's should we move forward at all, or should we move forward slower? And so if you're a startup that's building on top of that technology, to realize all of a sudden that a company can just say, you know what, no, that sort of changes things for you.
33:03 Speaker 01 That is, has, is and has always been the challenge of building on platforms or with platforms, right?
33:08 Alex Kantrowitz? Yeah, definitely. I mean, how many, I mean, Jesse, like, we met covering like the Facebook beat, and how many companies have built on top of Facebook and said, you know what, that was a bad idea in retrospect. And I'm not saying that OpenAI has the same composure or characteristics of it, but there is platform risk when you start to bet your entire existence on one company.
33:28 Speaker 01 Well, it will certainly give us so much to talk about in the new year. And while our show isn't so fully about tech that this comes up every episode, your show is. And so for our listeners who are just particularly motivated to understand these sorts of things, I hope you will tune in to Alex's show, The Big Technology Podcast, and your newsletter, Alex, which they can find on LinkedIn.
33:51 Alex Kantrowitz? That's right. For our listeners, I hope that they tune into yours. I've been seeing some guests pop up recently where I'm like, oh, man, I was a little bit too late to book them. So I think for our listeners, if you end up listening to Hello Monday on Mondays and Big Technology on Wednesday and Fridays, you're going to have a pretty good comprehensive media diet. And I think you'll enjoy your professional life a little bit more.
34:15 Speaker 01 This week, we publish our list of big ideas for 2024. Now, the editor for this project, well, it's someone you all already know. It's our good friend, Scott Olster. He brings us our regular book recommendations. But this week, I've invited Scott to come give us a preview of the list. Hey, Scott.
34:33 Speaker 02 Hey, Jessie.
34:34 Speaker 01 It's nice to see you. I know you have been so busy actually getting this list ready for all of us, right?
34:40 Speaker 02 Oh, yeah. This is a multi-month affair and it involves editors on our team from all over the globe. It's one of my favorite moments of the year, and I'm really excited it's out.
34:50 Speaker 01 So where do these big ideas come from anyways? I mean, who's thinking them up?
34:55 Speaker 02 Yeah, so every year, all of our editors across the globe put our heads together. And we also reach out to many of the top voices and experts and leaders who we speak to on a regular basis throughout the year. We reach out to them, we ask them, what do you think is going to be critical in the year to come? What should we be paying attention to? And what are we going to be surprised about?
35:19 Speaker 01 Now, we have just done a whole episode of tech-related big ideas. But what I love about this list is it's eclectic. It's really anything that touches business in any way at all. And I wonder, Scott, if you'll like, you know, just give us a preview, like, give us a good one.
35:34 Speaker 02 Sure. One of my favorite ideas from this year is all about balcony power plants. So.
35:41 Speaker 01 Excuse me?
35:43 Speaker 02 Yeah, it's an interesting thought, right? The idea that you could have this miniature power plant in your home, but on your balcony. It's a solar-powered power generator, and it can actually generate enough electricity to power homes, or at least a portion of electricity for your home.
36:03 Speaker 01 Is this happening in equatorial countries? Like, you know, where the sun is just powerful and bright all the time?
36:08 Speaker 02 Well, I mean, there's certainly an opportunity there. But in fact, this is really taking off in Germany.
36:13 Speaker 01 Why Germany, you think?
36:15 Speaker 02 That's a good question. I mean, in Europe, overall, there is a lot more enthusiasm and interest in sustainability.
36:23 Speaker 01 Right.
36:24 Speaker 02 And I would say Germany is absolutely no exception to that. The US is going to take a little bit more time, as you might expect.
36:31 Speaker 01 Well, listen, I know that there are a lot of big ideas that are very much present in the United States as well, because I took a read over this list myself. And this list, by the way, is not the end all be all of big ideas. There's an opportunity for listeners, right, Scott?
36:48 Speaker 02 100%. One of my favorite aspects of this package is that we want to hear from our members. We want to know what's top of mind for them in the coming year. What do they think is going to be front and center in their working lives and beyond? So please, you know, post in any way that you see fit. Share those thoughts with us. We want to hear from you.
37:10 Speaker 01 Thank you so much, Scott. And listen, a question for you. Now that you have finally finished editing the big ideas for the year, you think you could start reading some books again?
37:19 Speaker 02 I would love to.
37:20 Speaker 01 Great. We'll have you back on for a book segment soon. Thanks, Scott.
37:23 Speaker 02 Thanks so much.
37:27 Speaker 01 Let's talk more about these big ideas this week at Office Hours. Anything we missed? I'll go live on the LinkedIn News page this Wednesday at 3:00 PM Eastern along with our producer, Sarah Storm. If you're not sure where to find the link, drop us a line at hello monday at LinkedIn.com and we'll send it your way.
37:47 Speaker 01 Hello Monday is a production of LinkedIn News. Sarah Storm produces our show with help from Lolita Briggs. It's engineered and mixed by Asaf Gudron. Our theme music was composed just for us by the mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder. Michaela Greer keeps us on the cutting edge of big ideas. Enrique Montalvo is our executive producer. Dave Pond is head of news production. Courtney Coop is head of original programming. Dan Roth is the editor in chief of LinkedIn. And I'm Jesse Hempel. We'll be back next Monday. Thanks for listening, all.
38:53 Speaker 03 In this life, you can't win.
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39:00 Speaker 04 Relax into the movies and shows you already know and love, all for free.
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39:08 Speaker 04 Watch School of Rock, Crazy Ex Girlfriend, Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, The Ex Files, Wayne's World, and so much more.
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Previous Google’s Deceptive Gemini Release, More Tech Layoffs, George Santos Saves Cameo Next Intel's CEO Shares His Plan To Win The AI Chip War — With Pat Gelsinger Page updated October 12, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
