Hamas vs. Israel Rewrites Social Media Norms, Live At The SBF Trial, OpenAI's New Values

Reed Albergotti is the tech editor at Semafor. He joins Big Technology Podcast to break down the week's news. We cover: 1) Whether social media is useful during times of crisis. 2) Cancel culture "switcheroo" 3) The value of free speech in conflict 4) Is social media a moderating force after all? 5) Do we actually want news on Threads? 6) NPR leaves Twitter and finds it didn't matter 7) Reflections from the SBF trial 8) Is Apple building a search engine 9) OpenAI puts building human-level intelligence at the top of its value list 10) Wait, did we already reach AGI? 11) The impact of the AI 'pause' letter, six months later. 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?

  Is the Israel Hamas war rewriting some of the norms of social media? Will Apple build a search engine to compete with Google? We have the latest from the SBF trial and a big new change from OpenAI that's focusing on achieving human level intelligence. All that and more 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, Head of Enterprise Business Solutions at Voya Financial, to go inside a large scale agentic CX transformation,

• 0:45Alex Kantrowitz?

  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 Razor 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.

• 1:21Alex Kantrowitz?

  Welcome to Big Technology Podcast, a show for cool headed nuanced conversation of the tech world and beyond. We're here on Friday to break down the news in our traditional format. And joining us is a special guest all the way from Semaphore. Reid Albiguardi is here. Reid, welcome. Thank you so much for having me. Thanks for being here. So you're the technology editor at Semaphore. We quote your work all the time in the Big Technology Newsletter. It's great to have you here to talk about a very eventful week of news. Ranjan Roy is out this week. And so let's start with the big story, which is of course the terrible conflict between Israel and Hamas right now. You know, if you're listening, I'm sure you know the details. Any civilian life is a disaster when it's lost,

• 2:06Alex Kantrowitz?

  especially in the name of political ends. And what we're seeing play out on social media is quite fascinating. This has first been a moment where people are starting to point to what's going on on Twitter or X, whatever you want to call it, and saying that it's a disaster and filled with misinformation that's coming from every angle and you know, basically there's nothing that you can trust. I do want to put out an alternative perspective on that, which is that, yes, Twitter or X is a mess. It's always been a mess. I think people are getting hip to the idea that it's filled with misinformation. And I personally think that they can sift

• 2:44Alex Kantrowitz?

  out decently well what is actually happening by going into this stuff with a better BS filter than we give the average person credit for. To me, it seems like you go on to these platforms, you know you're going to see chaos, and then you go to secondary sources that you trust, places like The Times, or The Journal, or whatever, the BBC, whatever you read, and then people end up putting a more broad picture of what's going on, as opposed to just saying, "Oh, I saw that on social media, and I just believe it." And so to me, this concept of the fact that they're filled with misinformation and poisoning the discourse is starting to become outdated. Reed, I'm curious, I mean, it's kind of a controversial position, but I'm curious what you think about that.

• 3:27Speaker 01

  I actually, it's funny, I wish I could debate you on this, but I actually have very similar views. I mean, I said in my, I mean, I basically said the same thing in our newsletter this week, which is, I think it's sort of ironic that you see a lot of the opinion leaders in the media, in the tech media, who are sort of lamenting the fact that Twitter is not the same old Twitter, and that they would be glued to Twitter normally during a big world event like this, and they're not. And why can't threads become that, right? I think we saw some commentary like that, and I think it's really ironic to me, I mean, the same people who were raking Facebook over the coals for how they handled

• 4:09Speaker 01

  news and this public information are now asking the same company to come back and replace Twitter and become this place for news. I think it would be great if the technology industry got out of the news business and really focused on actual technology, and not just user-generated content.

• 4:31Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, I agree.

• 4:32Speaker 01

  Another controversial.

• 4:33Alex Kantrowitz?

  No, I mean, we're gonna talk about that too, because I'm getting raked over the coals about that for a controversial thread that I posted. And I promised that I was going to cover it on the pod today. So we're gonna get to that. But just to keep, you know, peeling this thread apart, I mean, oh, God, that was a pun. I was on Twitter, really, you know, in the primary, primary source information. And there were things that I saw that were, you know, videos taken from video games, for instance. And I think that, like, you know, you can take a look at what's going on on social media. Take a look at the reports, like, nobody's just on Twitter. And they're not, you know, if you're just on Twitter, of course, you're, you're gonna be going to places like the Wall Street Journal, the Times, 74, and, and actually checking what happened.

• 5:18Alex Kantrowitz?

  And so to think that, like, people are just convinced of one narrative or the other because they saw one thing on social media that was fake, to me, is just, it's almost disrespectful to the users themselves. And it really has a small, it doesn't mean that social, social media can't shift an opinion. But this idea that, you know, one fake video or a few fake videos is gonna really change, you know, a person's mind, to me, sounds ridiculous.

• 5:40Speaker 01

  No, that's totally right. And, you know, apologies for getting ahead of you here on this. But yeah, I, I think that's right, too. We're seeing, we've seen so many studies that have come out since Cambridge Analytica that have basically backed up that point of view, which is like, you know, even though there's tons of information on so, disinformation on social media, people are not really ultimately swayed by that, or elections are not really swayed. What really happens is, people go on social media, and some people look for information that supports their worldview, and they don't really care if it's accurate or not. They kind of just wanna read the most salacious content. And, you know, I think the, the pizza gate controversy was like a good example of that.

• 6:23Speaker 01

  Do we really think that, you know, that independent voters went on and read about pizza gate and were swayed to, to vote Republican? It, it ultimately doesn't have as big of an impact as I think people fear. And I think, you know, you're right. I mean, people can ultimately, like, you know, the, the people who sort of, I think, are the ones that we wanna reach, right? The, the, those, those, like, conscientious voters, they can sort of tell the difference. And I read it, I read an interesting column in Haaretz this week that, that sort of lamented the fact that You know, the television news, like the broadcast news was sort of too slow to get information out.

• 7:06Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah.

• 7:07Speaker 01

  And then, you know, Twitter was, was doing it quickly, but there was tons of information. And it just sort of made me think, I mean, this is, when you're trying to get real time information about a situation like this, whether it's this or Ukraine or whatever, the faster the information comes out, the more flawed it's going to be. And I think people just need to sort of accept that. If you want, if you wanted to read only information, you know, only articles that have been like fully reported and every single fact is nailed down, then you, you kind of just need to wait and not be, you know, on the socials 24/7.

• 7:41Alex Kantrowitz?

  Exactly. And I personally like, if you feel like you have even a modicum of news literacy and the ability to make sense of these ideals, and maybe I'm overestimating this because I am a professional journalist, but like you could, I found X to be extremely useful, actually in the early hours, just to figure out what's going on, however horrible it was. Now, there has been an interesting shifting of norms, which I want to talk to you about, which is that the right has long come after the left for cancel culture, basically, basically holding up things that people might have said at one time and, you know, contacting their employer or making it public and, and making sure that there's enough scorn that this, these people's lives are ruined. And now there's actually been a, a, a almost, I think Marshall Kosloff, who's a host of

• 8:26Alex Kantrowitz?

  the Realignment, calls this, you know, a reverse or cancel culture or a cancel culture flip-a-ru, switch-a-ru. And what we've seen actually is there have been members of the left that have come out and they have praised Hamas's actions on this last weekend, right? Where they killed all the innocent civilians. I mean, we're talking about a death toll of like around 1,300, maybe 200 of them were military and.

• 8:54Alex Kantrowitz?

  And what's happened is the right has basically elevated the people who have, you know, came out and praised Hamas and caused the same situation happen to them. So there is this, for instance, this NYU Law Bar Association president, her name was, sorry, their name is Rhina Workman, who said that the attack was necessary, sort of a necessary outcome and a need for resistance. And they were working, they were, had a job offer from this firm, Winston and Strawn, and was raked over the coals to the point where Winston and Strawn canceled her letter of employment, their letter of employment. So I'm curious what you make

• 9:38Alex Kantrowitz?

  of this. Is this sort of like the end of this like, sort of debate over cancel culture? I mean, to me, it seems like, you know, this whole, this whole thing might have been silly, like, basically, like, if you say dumb things and do dumb things, there's going to be consequences, no matter who you are, what side of the aisle you sit on.

• 9:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a really interesting way of putting it, the cancel culture flipperoo. There's so much hypocrisy on, on every side of that, right? As you, as you pointed out. I mean, it's the same thing with the free speech debate, right? Everybody, everybody wants free speech until there's speech they don't like, and then they want to silence it, right? And, you know, I, I think we should take a step back and look at this and say, look, I mean, I think it's horrible that people would come out and praise Hamas. I mean, just, I could not disagree more. I think it's, there's probably a lot of antisemitism behind that.

• 10:32Alex Kantrowitz?

  Just also a certain level of callousness, after you see so many, like, families murdered together. And, you know, the context notwithstanding, no matter what happens, if a family gets murdered together, whether they're in Israel, or Gaza, or wherever, to come out and praise the people who did that is craven, and it's sick.

• 10:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, I completely agree with that. I mean, it's horrible and, you know, I am Jewish and, you know, it's very painful to watch. I mean, I think we're still sort of all in the grieving period right now. But I think, you know, I still sort of, it still kind of makes me uncomfortable that this person would lose their job. Or that, the thing that really was bad, I thought was that, I think it was, I think it was Ackman, right? Who was calling, Bill Ackman, who was calling for like a list of names of people to, you know, who've like signed on to these letters at universities. And, I don't know, I mean, people do dumb things, they say dumb

• 11:31Speaker 01

  things when they're in college, their views change. I think, you know, we should be like somewhat understanding about words. And that goes, I think, across the political spectrum. I think the early cancel culture, which was, which came from the left, where, you know, we were, people were being, like, sort of having their lives ruined for callous or, you know, kind of dumb things they said on Twitter. I mean, that made me uncomfortable. You know, I think people just need to sometimes have a little more, just be a little more understanding, give people a little bit more leeway, and maybe try to persuade them or like change their worldview if you don't agree with it, rather than just try to silence it.

• 12:16Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, it's a good point. So I personally saw there's a truck that was driving around Harvard this week, which had like the names and faces, I believe, of some of the people in these student organizations that had signed on a letter condemning Israel in the face of the Hamas attacks. That, to me, felt overboard. The Rhino Workman thing is a little bit more complicated. I mean, to have somebody come out full-throated in support of a terror group that just lit up, you know, 1,400 people and took a bunch of hostages, I mean, to me... I think it's well within the rights of an employer to say, listen, you're going to be working next to people. And I don't think the people in our law firm are going to want someone that supports a terrorist group with them.

• 12:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:57Alex Kantrowitz?

  You made a mistake. It's a consequence for a mistake. I don't think this has anything to do with cancel culture or whatever it is. Simply a matter of fact that that you have to have values in a company, you know, and when it comes down to it, if they don't want to have that person working at their firm, I think they're within their rights.

• 13:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I'm sure, no, and I'm sure they have policies about social media and sort of saying things that could embarrass the firm. I mean, every company does and.

• 13:22Alex Kantrowitz?

  Can only imagine their mentions and like the phone, the voicemails of the partners after they, I mean, they saw that.

• 13:28Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. And of, yeah, and of course, I mean, you're talking about, you know, a firm in New York who probably has many, many Jews working there and, you know, we're still, I mean, it's, it's, it actually kind of shows a real lack of judgment to do that. And I think that's, that may be the, the bigger issue, or the more pertinent issue, right? Where you're talking about employing someone at a, you know, very prestigious law firm like that.

• 13:52Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. Do you, I mean, it's kind of this thing bubbled up on social media this week. It's worth bringing up that. I'm curious what you think about these folks that are like all into like social activism all throughout college and then they just go ahead and take a job at a corporate law firm. It's like, it feels so incongruous to me, but.

• 14:11Speaker 01

  Right. Well, I think everybody's a little bit hypocritical. That's my, that's my worldview as I, as I, as I get older. I mean, we all, we all are hypocritical. We all, you know, like I talk about climate change and drive a, you know, an SUV around the Bay Area and it's, it's, it's, you know, you can't escape that. So I've, I've tried not to judge people as much these days, but I do agree, it's ironic.

• 14:37Alex Kantrowitz?

  Sometimes it's, it's hard. So one more thing about this, which is, you mentioned it, but the free speech debate. So we heard so much about, from the right especially, about the right to free speech. And it's sort of interesting because this whole free speech movement started on the left. Like, if you think about like the big protests in Berkeley back in the seventies, this was all about free speech and the right to say anything on campus. And obviously, it seems like things have shifted. But one thing I am particularly uncomfortable with is the prevention of.

• 15:10Alex Kantrowitz?

  So even supporters of Hamas to be able to go and march and show their support. Now, obviously, you know, I don't agree with it, but I do think that like the right to free expression is fundamental and you're not going to win a debate by shutting down speech. You'll win a debate by allowing the marketplace of ideas to end up. I mean, if you can't win a debate against the idea of killing civilians, then you really need to reshape not only your ideas, but your actions. So let's talk about this because there have, so France has banned pro Palestine protests and other countries have have done similar things. There's videos of riot police in France trying to break this stuff up.

• 15:51Alex Kantrowitz?

  Obviously, Germany has plenty of rules against antisemitism as well. And you have Dave Rubin, you know, who does the Rubin Report, conservative voice, says maybe the West has a chance. And to me, it's just like, I, I mean, again, it can't state about how fundamentally I disagree with everything that Hamas has said about this situation and in general their existence. But to prevent free speech of anybody in the West, to me is just going to, it sounds counterproductive. Maybe I missed something.

• 16:21Speaker 01

  Yeah. They say, what do they say, two Jews, three opinions. We have two Jews here and.

• 16:27Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah.

• 16:28Speaker 01

  But I wish I, I wish I could disagree with you. I actually think you're right. I mean, that is the fundamental, I mean, some of the, the most important, you know, free speech cases in the US, right, revolved around the rights of neo Nazis to go, to go march. And just the, the people saying the absolute most abhorrent things have a right to, to do that. And that's something in this country that, you know, we, we hold so dear. I think we, I think we all do, you know, fundamentally. What happens on social media is maybe a slightly more complicated question, but yeah, I mean, I, I, I agree. And other countries have different values, you know, around that, right? I mean, Germany has obviously a different situation and France, you know, they, they

• 17:13Speaker 01

  have maybe their reasons for, for doing this. But yeah, I mean, I, I particularly feel a lot of pride, um, living in a country that allows people to kind of just say whatever they want, even if it's insane.

• 17:27Alex Kantrowitz?

  There was an amazing, yeah, there was an amazing post from Ben Sasse, who is the president of, former, former Senator, President of Florida University. He basically said, listen, we believe in free speech in this country. We're gonna allow anybody, I think his words were, to make an idiot of themselves in public. However, the second that crosses from speech to something else, speech to violence, we will be prepared to respond in the fullest degree. And I think that personally is that, that's the right approach.

• 17:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, I completely agree with that. And I, I sense that, you know, we've, the pendulum is kind of swinging back from, I think, a place where, you know, I think people, people were maybe a little bit hysterical. And I think everyone's, you know, we had, we had, you know, the election of Donald Trump. We had the pandemic, all of these things kind of really were a test of, of all of these norms and ideology that we have around, around speech. And I think we're, I think we're coming back. I hear more and more people kind of expressing these sentiments on both sides of the political spectrum. It's not just people on the right calling for, you know, a bit of a more level-headed view on speech, right? It's also people on the left.

• 18:41Speaker 01

  And I think, you know, and you and I sort of agreeing on this, you know, and feeling comfortable talking about it, I think it's a sign of that as well.

• 18:50Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yep, okay. So I said, I said last thing, but I have one more part of this that I think we really should dig into, which is, as I've been watching this unfold, I'm curious whether, I mean, social media, no doubt, is a place where extreme viewpoints are posted to get a reaction. And one of the things I've been curious about as I've seen this unfold is whether social media is actually a moderating force or a force that's making things more extreme. I'll give you two examples. So there was a tweet from BLM Chicago that had a caption on it that says, that is all, that is it. And there was a photo that said something like, free Palestine, that was lionizing

• 19:35Alex Kantrowitz?

  with an image of somebody coming in on a parachute, which is how Hamas attacked the festival in southern Israel. So then there were also messages from the Israeli side that were dehumanizing people in Gaza and saying that they were animals, human animals.

• 19:55Alex Kantrowitz?

  And in each of those instances, I saw loads of people quote tweeting those messages and talking about how awful they were. And I felt shifting the conversation more towards the moderation and more towards the center. I suppose, I mean, this is kind of a crazy thing to say because I'm not sure it's true. Maybe it's easier to be moderate when like extreme is involves killing people. But I did, I did find some optimism there.

• 20:27Speaker 01

  I don't, yeah, I mean, I think, I think it's the latter. I think, I think in this kind of a situation, when people post things that are so incendiary like that, the natural reaction is for people to kind of like pull back and say, wait a minute, that's going too far. I think if you take a step back and you look at social media, you know, its influence on society over the last, you know, whatever it is, 20 years, 15 years. I think it's, I don't think you can say it's been, it's had a moderating effect. But I do think it's less, but I think it's less important than people think. I think people put so much emphasis on what is said by, you know, anonymous trolls on

• 21:08Speaker 01

  Twitter, you know, they, you know, it's if you make people anonymous and give them a platform to say things on social media, they will just say the craziest things. And you see like, you know, companies reacting to these sort of like mobs on social media. And I really think that's a mistake. I mean, I think, you know, I view Twitter and social media as not the real world, as a sort of alternate world. It's almost like society's kind of like the back of their mind, or like a really dark part of society's mind that, you know, it's like, it's like that part of your brain that you sort of, sometimes these thoughts bubble up that you wish you didn't have, and you sort of push them, push them back and sort of move on.

• 21:53Alex Kantrowitz?

  People are like, damn, I'm gonna tweet that.

• 21:55Speaker 01

  Right. I think that is the kind of, that is how people should view social media. And I, I think that's also changing. I think people are actually sort of discounting a little, a little bit more rightly so, what is said on, on these platforms.

• 22:11Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay, so that brings us to our real second segment, which is a perfect lead and read. So, thank you for that, which is, I'm getting absolutely destroyed on threads today. Which is, seems like that happens to me often. It's so funny. People on threads are very sensitive about threads, but I am being lambasted for a thread I put up there talking about, "Hey, maybe we shouldn't have news and social media so blended." And the context of this is that Adam Mosseri, who runs Threads, has said that they're not gonna, you know, ban news, but they're not gonna do anything to promote it. And there's been this movement of journalists that has, really puzzles me, that have been like, "We need news on threads. It's the best thing that you can do."

• 22:55Alex Kantrowitz?

  And, look, it certainly would be good for the engagement of threads. The fact that Threads doesn't have news, I'm sure is actually hurting its adoption. And that Meta is being careful to bring news on the platform, to me, is good. It seems to me that when we bring news onto social media, nothing good happens, right? We end up giving every, every bit of news legitimacy on there, and of course, the more extreme views are, are elevated, diminishing the mainstream. And so much of the, the conversation happens on the social platforms, and so you end up having the businesses of these actual news organizations suffer because people are hanging out, consuming their stuff on Twitter or Facebook, and not on their sites, and not on their streams.

• 23:39Alex Kantrowitz?

  And they're, you know, so, so I said, "News and social don't mix. Thread would be much, would have much better engagement if it promoted news, but there would be consequences. Meta isn't falling into that trap, and the news industry shouldn't encourage it." And then came the backlash. So, Reed, you're welcome to disagree here, but I'm curious what you think.

• 23:58Speaker 01

  I mean, I, I wish I could, I would love to hear a debate on this. My view is, every single journalist knows that Twitter has never driven traffic to stories. It is so much about just ego, right? And the fact that, you know, journalists or important people are reading your work, and, and certainly, like, it's, it's influential, but like... It like journalists on Twitter was a niche on a niche platform. Like Twitter was never a huge platform to begin with, right? I mean, Facebook always drove more traffic. That's obviously, you know, changed now. Now it's like Apple News.

• 24:39Speaker 01

  Apple News is like really a huge driver of traffic for the the big news sites like, you know, Washington Post, right? So again, I think this is where like we are all in our media bubble and we think it's so important to have like, you know, this, these platforms where every news story is is shared and we can just keep, you know, keep track of this up to the minute. It's like our own private news wire. And ultimately, like, it really doesn't matter outside of this bubble all that much, what is said. And I, I agree, I don't like the fact, I never liked the fact from day one, the fact that, you know, news organizations and reporters really more specifically, were so willing

• 25:21Speaker 01

  to basically take their work, their hard work and sort of give it away for free and like move everything onto these, onto these social media platforms, really for the benefit of these huge companies or what eventually became these huge, huge companies. I think it was a, it was a bad idea and it, and it weakened journalistic institutions that, you know, I think, I think if we could turn back the clock, we would probably do things differently. I mean, that's been my view on this.

• 25:53Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. Not only that, it warps the incentives and the pursuit of stories in journalists' minds. They begin to write for the Twitter audience and the things that do well on Twitter are outrageous, same with threads. And here's an interesting story. So the Nieman Lab, which is, comes out of Harvard, just wrote this story about how NPR, NPR left Twitter because of a dispute with Elon Musk. And it says, the headline is, six months ago, NPR left Twitter. The effects have been negligible. The numbers confirm what many of us have long suspected, that Twitter wasn't worth the effort, at least in terms of traffic. And to see what happened, I mean, it's an obvious situation, to see what happened, that NPR is basically unharmed by leaving what many of you as the most important platform

• 26:37Alex Kantrowitz?

  for news, you know? And this, this push to try to get all the news organizations on threads and to have threads incentivize news, to me, it's just like. What are we doing here, people? Like, what possible motive do you have? And I think maybe ego is it. Maybe it's ego.

• 26:56Speaker 01

  I totally agree. There's a lot of ego when it comes to Twitter. Not discounting its importance in terms of just like influencing the opinion leaders, like the elite and things like that. I mean, I agree that it's kind of like, it does serve that function. But I remember like when I worked at the Wall Street Journal before Twitter, this is, now I sound like super old. But like before Twitter, the thing that like drove so much traffic was Yahoo News. And that was because like so many computers, like the default homepage was Yahoo News. And that's sort of what's happening with Apple News now. Like people just get it and those are the stories they see. Like, that's how people consume news.

• 27:41Speaker 01

  It's like this sort of like passive thing. I wish they sat down and like opened up the paper and read it, you know? But it's, it's not, it's not that. Like people are not, most people are not like glued to Twitter. I also want to make this point. I mean, I thought if you, if you've ever read Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman, he, it's written in 1984. And he talks about like how television, and you could just substitute television for social media, but he's talking about how television has kind of become this dumbing down, you know, it's had this dumbing down effect. And his, I thought this is such a good point. He's like, the problem is not like mindless entertainment.

• 28:25Speaker 01

  Like it's not the Gong Show or whatever the show of the time was. It's 60 Minutes. It's like, cause he, and at the time, there was like the Iran hostage crisis was, was going on. And he was like, everyone all of a sudden had an opinion, a very strong opinion about this country they had never heard of before. You know? And I think that's like, that was so smart and poignant. Like, everyone is not an expert on Ukraine. Everyone is not an expert on the Arab Israeli conflict. And they don't really, like for their daily lives, it's nice to be sort of informed, but like for your daily lives, like you do not need to be, to know what's happening like every minute of these, of these conflicts.

• 29:09Alex Kantrowitz?

  Absolutely. And so first of all, no need to apologize about the Yahoo reference. We're big Yahoo fans here and we're gonna have our Yahoo episode coming up.

• 29:17Speaker 01

  We're that before Twitter.

• 29:19Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right, exactly. Well, Yahoo lives, Reed. That's my message.

• 29:23Speaker 01

  I know, they're still there. It's still important.

• 29:26Alex Kantrowitz?

  And then there's like a couple of good counter arguments to me. I mean, for the sake of nuance. One is that there's gonna be news anywhere, anyway, on these platforms. Might as well have some level headed and good, well-reported stuff. But it's, to me, I would say my rebuttal of that is it's a balance. Because the more you enable the conversation to be there versus building your audience and having, you know, your own properties that people go to, the more power you're actually gonna lose in aggregate. And the other thing that I heard is that, you know, it's, you know, you could, it's easy to say if you're like a built up news ecosystem, but if you're like, you know, an insurgent trying to get an audience, then, you know, don't tell me I can't use social media. And that sounds reasonable to me.

• 30:08Speaker 01

  You can totally use it, but you're not gonna gain that much traffic from Twitter. That's the bottom line.

• 30:13Alex Kantrowitz?

  That's all. Yeah. News industry, social media.

• 30:16Speaker 01

  It turns out email is pretty good.

• 30:18Alex Kantrowitz?

  Don't be codependent. Email's amazing. We both love email. Don't be codependent. You know, appreciate each other, participate, whatever. But this whole reliance on news and even public infrastructure, like to have like the Canadian, you know, parks associations not be able to get wildfire information out because they're blocked on Facebook. It's like you double, you didn't need to double down on Facebook. You did, and you made that a behavior. And every, this is a two-sided thing here, folks. It's two-sided. All right, let's take a break and we're gonna talk about some, some, some real technology stuff when we come back. We're here with Reed Albergati. He's the technology editor at Semaphore. On the other side of this break, we're gonna talk about Apple potentially building a search engine. Oh God, we have so, so much to get to, so little time. At the SPF trial.

• 31:03Alex Kantrowitz?

  Well, maybe we'll skip that. And then, of course, a little bit more about OpenAI back right after this. This episode is brought to you by Avpoint. Everyone's racing to roll out AI right now. Co-pilots, chatbots, agents doing real work. But here's the part nobody loves talking about. All that AI runs on your data. And most teams have no single way to see it, secure it, and prove it's under control. That's exactly what Avpoint does. For 25 years, they've been the trusted layer beneath the world's most demanding data, now extended across your entire AI estate. Your data, your cloud, and the agents acting on your behalf. It's how more than 28,000 organizations deploy AI with confidence.

• 31:46Alex Kantrowitz?

  So innovation scales without scaling risk. Avpoint, the unifying trust layer for AI. Head to avpoint.com to see how enterprises deploy AI with confidence. Learn more at avpt.co/bigtechnologypodcast. That's avpt.co/bigtechnologypodcast. Violent threats against executives are growing at an alarming rate. When a company experiences backlash, executives are the first people blamed. When their address and other personal details are sitting online, this backlash can lead right to their front door. The team at Ironwell knows this better than anyone. They've protected some of the most targeted executives and individuals on the planet for almost two decades. As a wide-glove enterprise security service,

• 32:31Alex Kantrowitz?

  they protect your people with continuous personal data removal, proactive prevention tools, and human-led emergency support. So when someone goes looking for your executives, Ironwell ensures they hit a dead end. So here's what to do. Go to ironwell.com/bigtechnology, fill in the quick form, and request your free risk assessment. Their team will show you just how exposed your executives are and how to lock it down before a threat reaches their front door. That's ironwell.com/bigtechnology. Learn how to stop online threats before they become real-world attacks. The link's in the show notes.

• 33:08Alex Kantrowitz?

  And we're back here on Big Technology Podcast with Reid Albagati. He is the Technology Editor at Semaphore. Oh, man, Reid, I wanted to talk about the SBF trial with you last week. Well, let's do it quickly. I mean, last week I said, listen, I'm going to go to the courthouse and see if I can get in. I did watch two days of the trial this week. Folks who are listening, we have Molly Wood, who's a big crypto critic, coming on next Wednesday. We're going to go spend an hour just talking about the case. But I just want to bring up one thing that I found interesting about it. And I'm curious what your perspective is. There's this narrative that has existed about Sam Bankman-Fried being likable and, you know, kind of clumsy

• 33:50Alex Kantrowitz?

  and oops, he just, you know, potentially just didn't see where that eight billion went. And I was so careless of him, by golly, but it was an honest mistake. And I sat in court this week and watched Caroline Ellison, his former top lieutenant and ex-girlfriend, very precisely go through all the different spreadsheets showing how they had amassed more than $10 billion in Alameda Research, which was the investment house that they did investments and bought influence in, more than $10 billion of FTX customer deposits. And it just kept growing and growing as like the net asset value inside FTX went down to the point where like the Alameda liabilities exceeded the FTX asset value. And then that's

• 34:33Alex Kantrowitz?

  how you lose eight billion. And these spreadsheets were shared with Sam periodically. And he was in the know. He made these decisions. So to me, it was interesting that that narrative came crumbling down. Reid, I'm curious, like, from your perspective, why do people still believe that narrative about Sam? I mean, we see it with Michael Lewis. It really is astonishing to me.

• 34:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't know. How many people really do believe that? I mean, I'm not sure. Like, I, most of the people I hear talking about Michael Lewis's book are kind of like, yeah, they're, they sort of think that's like a ridiculous, you know, ridiculous view. And I think you're right. Like, the testimony has, has really shown that that's not the case. It's, it's a, it's a sad situation. I think, I mean, it's interesting, your one point on that, and I'll be just like really fast on it, is like, It's kind of a side point on this, and this is like my takeaway. It's like you're having Molly Wood on and she's this, you know, she's done amazing work, you know, just talking about all these crypto scams and, you know,

• 35:37Speaker 01

  the most well-known critic of crypto. But like, I also don't think FTX is really about crypto. Like, and I, people say this, I'm not the first person to say this, but it's like, it's just a, it's just a, somebody who, you know, took a bunch of money in deposits and took the money and put it somewhere else and lost it. And, you know, it really, and it was centralized. Like, it's not, it really has nothing to do with crypto other than the fact that FTX happened to be, you know, a crypto exchange. I mean, do you not agree?

• 36:08Alex Kantrowitz?

  So I agree, but I, there's one point where I'm gonna nitpick on, and I think it's kind of important, and Molly and I will get into it in more depth, but the through line between FTX and the whole Web 3 movement was, there was this new system sold to so many people about improving the world and a better internet and a better financial system, and one you could believed in, believe in, and one that would operate in your best interests, and you didn't have to trust them, it was just de facto good. Web 3 was improving the world, and FTX had Sam out there trying to save the rainforest, and it was all a lie. It was all grift. And I think that's the kind of my takeaway is

• 36:49Alex Kantrowitz?

  that, you know, maybe that we might have some decent use cases of crypto in the future, but we should really be as much more skeptical of people who are coming and telling us they're reinventing the way that things used to be and building a better system, and trust us with all, trust them with all of our money, because it's a huge freaking red flag, and it was not heated to me in the heyday of crypto.

• 37:16Speaker 01

  I, well, you know. By most people. I mean, I always thought most of crypto was sort of, most of crypto was just, not a scam, but it's just, it's just another thing to gamble on, right? People need some sort of instrument to, of a number that goes up and down and they can make money off of it. And that's really all it was at the sort of application layer, right? There were, there were no use cases other than sort of a financial instrument to, to make money. But I also think, at the same time, like, there are well-meaning people who, who are and were trying to build that sort of decentralized system, that decentralized internet. Ironically, like, I think you see some of that happening now. Like, some,

• 37:59Speaker 01

  there, there are, like, you know, we just saw JP Morgan announce something, there's, there's some money transfer stuff happening, like, using blockchain technology. I think they don't even call it blockchain anymore because it's like, it's so unpopular. It's like this

• 38:13Alex Kantrowitz?

  Garnished.

• 38:14Speaker 01

  third rail. But like, that, that actual idea is, is now starting to come into practice. So, like, I, I, I don't, I think you're completely right. I just think there, there are, it mixed in there, there were, the, in the tiny minority of people who, who were like, involved in that, who were actually like, well-meaning and trying to build technology and, and a lot of them are still at it.

• 38:38Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I do agree that there's going to be something that's going to come out, out of this crypto movement, uh, that's going to actually improve things. And I've talked about some of the use cases, having spent so much time in South America and seeing, not only the problems with inflation, although I don't know if crypto can solve that, but certainly remittances. And just to have, work so hard and have 25% of your money, or whatever it is, taken by a company like Western Union is, is pretty gross.

• 39:03Speaker 01

  I agree.

• 39:04Alex Kantrowitz?

  Maybe it can solve with that. Apple, okay, so this is an interesting story that Mark Gurman wrote about in his Power On newsletter, that Apple is considering, not necessarily building a search engine, but it's building the technology that's going to allow it to do it if it wants to. And it has, its head of AI is a guy, John Giandrea, who came from Google, and it's been developing better and better search technology, and it sees that this is a moment of disruption for AI. And it knows that the search real estate that it gives to Google is really, really freaking valuable. And to the, to the point where it's been paid billions of dollars every year by Google to keep Google as the default there and

• 39:47Alex Kantrowitz?

  You know, that's sort of the basis of the Justice Department going after Google right now to withhold, maintain its monopoly. I mean, talk about monopoly. If Apple gets into search, it's a whole different ballgame. Have you been following this? What's your read on it?

• 39:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, wouldn't it be, yes, wouldn't it be ironic, and I read that story, if the result of this antitrust trial was like, Apple just like brings search under its umbrella, and now it has an even bigger monopoly on, you know, its users? I think, you know, that story was talking about Google sort of considering building a search engine years ago. And probably the reason they didn't do it is that-

• 40:27Alex Kantrowitz?

  Apple thinking about it.

• 40:28Speaker 01

  Apple, yeah, Apple, sorry, did I just say Google? Yeah, Google has a search engine. Um, sorry, the reason, I think-

• 40:35Alex Kantrowitz?

  It's a big-

• 40:37Speaker 01

  That story, that story, you know, was about Apple thinking about building this search engine years ago, and they decided against it, and I think sort of wisely so, because if you're Apple, and you, building a search engine is pretty complicated and pretty hard. I mean, look at, Microsoft poured a lot of money and a lot of resources into Bing, and it's still not quite as good as Google Search. I mean, even if Apple made their search engine the default, I mean, certainly that's powerful and important. Like, there's a lot of people who might still switch back to Google, just because that's what they like and it's better. So like, you run the risk, and Apple has a spotty track record, and look at Apple Maps, right? Of like, trying to do this-

• 41:19Alex Kantrowitz?

  Which are apparently good now, but yeah.

• 41:21Speaker 01

  They say it's good, and I still am terrified every time I turn it on.

• 41:23Alex Kantrowitz?

  I'm a Google map person, till the end.

• 41:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, so like, they come out with a search engine, Apple comes out with a search engine, and it has a bad start, and it gets a lot of bad press, and all of a sudden, people are, you know, switching over like they do with Chrome, with Google Maps, to this other service, they basically lost out on that revenue, and now they might make less revenue because it's not as popular, and they have to put a ton of time, resources into supporting, you know, Apple Search now. Um, and look at search on the App Store, that's another point. Like, search in the App Store still is bad. I mean, that should tell you something about like the challenge there, so- I just think it's wise that they never did that and I I sort of doubt they ever will unless

• 42:08Speaker 01

  they unless they have nothing to lose and the DOJ takes away this ability for them to to collect rent from Google or whoever.

• 42:18Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, I mean, it's sort of a natural resource curse and maybe it's like a great. They're really sitting on this pile of oil where Google is just paying these billions and billions of dollars and it's worth every freaking penny to Google and Apple's like, well, that's sort of like they're doing the hard work for us. We're making a ton of money. It's all margin. It's completely margin.

• 42:37Speaker 01

  Hundred percent margin product.

• 42:40Alex Kantrowitz?

  Like.

• 42:41Speaker 01

  I just don't see.

• 42:42Alex Kantrowitz?

  The software product of your dreams.

• 42:44Speaker 01

  It's such a great deal. I mean, you know, if it turns out it's illegal, which I I kind of doubt that it will, but if it turns out it's illegal, then maybe maybe we'll see that'll be interesting. We'll see something happen there.

• 42:57Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yep. All right, let's move on to AI to round out the show. First of all, before I have to give you guys credit, your AI coverage has been spectacular and another really interesting story that your team just put out is that OpenAI changed its core values. And so it's, you know, six core values for employees and they were, I mean, these are hilarious. Audacious, thoughtful, unpretentious, impact-driven, collaborative and growth-oriented. Not that those are bad things to pursue, but they just feel like they were, you know, like something that like a consultant would like basically fart out and you would put on your website. Now, there are five values and AGI focus is the first. So anything that doesn't help

• 43:41Alex Kantrowitz?

  with that is out of scope. Basically, AGI is artificial general intelligence, or as we call it, human-level intelligence. And it is interesting how, I guess, what's happened with ChatGPT or in their research that we don't even know about. At the moment has so fully shifted them to the point where they feel like AGI focus is the North Star for them. I'm curious what you make of it. Obviously, your team ran the story, wrote the story. Is it, are we that close that it's worth listing as a value? And yeah, it's pretty bold, don't you think?

• 44:17Speaker 01

  It is bold. I, yeah, Louise, Louise wrote that story, Louise Metzakis. And it was, I think she has a sharp eye. She saw the, the change and, and is, you know, keeping an eye on that. We have, we have a feature in the newsletter where we just look at, like, we call it release notes. We look at stuff like that. The AI ones and the papers that come out, really interesting. I mean, it's funny because like, if you look at the AI industry right now at large, like, the real trend is, is actually kind of the opposite, which is everyone trying to build these super small models that can run on your phone or your, your home computer. So I think you have this sort of like, you know, this, this

• 44:56Speaker 01

  dichotomy where you have, like, what's practical right now is small, you know, customized models that, you know, companies are building. But what, but then like the big companies, I mean, the way they are going to stay ahead is if these foundation models like GPT just keep getting bigger and more powerful. So I see it as like, OpenAI really has no choice but to go that route. Whether or not AGI is possible, if you think about it, like, the small open source models are going to get closer and closer to, if, to the point where they may get better than GPT-4, right? So that would destroy, I mean, OpenAI would have no business.

• 45:37Speaker 01

  I mean, it's, so they have no choice. The only way OpenAI will, you know, is worth the, its valuation and keeps getting, you know, bigger and, and more powerful and therefore, you know, whatever, Microsoft too, which will own almost half the company, is if they just keep, you know, they keep coming out with breakthroughs. And that's what they're working on right now. They're, they're trying to figure out, like, what is the next, you know, the, the transformer model paper, attention is all you need. Like, that was the big breakthrough that led to these large language models. Like, what's the next one of those? Like, they need, they are trying to write that next paper, which they probably won't publish publicly if they do.

• 46:14Alex Kantrowitz?

  No, they certainly will not. Yeah.

• 46:16Speaker 01

  I don't know. Do you disagree?

• 46:17Alex Kantrowitz?

  They are OpenAI. No, I do agree. I think that we'll see if they're capable. I'll put it that way. I mean, obviously they have a lot of talent there, but if you think about it, their biggest innovation is built off of Google Research. And, and so DALL-E is also built off of stable diffusion, which is, I'm pretty sure it didn't come from them. Are they capable of doing the research or are they just going to continue to build mass adopted demos on top of other people's research? That's the big question facing them, and I think it's a big open one. Does that sound right?

• 46:51Speaker 01

  I totally agree, and I don't have the answer. Like, I don't, I don't doubt them. I, but I have no idea. I mean, it's because how can you predict? Well, what you're talking about is like, is kind of like breakthroughs or like mini breakthroughs, which like, how do you predict that? It's a, it's, you know, it's just, these are things that like, these complete genius polymaths, you know, who, who think up this stuff. Like, this stuff just comes to them at one point. Like, there's no, there's no science behind that. This isn't Moore's Law where you can predict like the trajectory of, of what you'll be able to fit into a device. It's just, it's really hard.

• 47:30Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yes, and speaking of AGI, I mean, Google says, or at least one of the top AI scientists at Google says, we're already here. So, him and so Blaise Aguera Iarcas and Peter Norvig, both of whom I interviewed at the World Summit AI last year. Very interesting, very good, good people, at least from my interactions with them. Have a paper out in, or an article out in this publication called Noema. And it's, artificial general intelligence is already here. And they say today's frontier models perform competently even on novel tasks they were not trained for. Crossing a threshold that previous generations of AI and supervised deep learning systems never managed.

• 48:15Alex Kantrowitz?

  And they say frontier language models can perform competently at pretty much any information task that can be done by humans. Can be posed and answered using natural language and has quantifiable performance. Effectively, what they're saying is we've trained these large language models. I guess they're calling them frontier language models because they want to sound fancy. And they're, they're able to handle a variety of different tasks, which is general intelligence.

• 48:43Alex Kantrowitz?

  It's kind of a big boast to say that AGI is here, though. It's, I think we tend to think of AGI as being really on par with human level intelligence, not below, even if it can handle a bunch of different tasks. Curious what you make of this bold statement from Blaze and Peter.

• 48:59Speaker 01

  I mean, I, you know, I would sort of disagree, but then how you, it's just all about how you define it, right? I mean, that's what it comes down to. And I like, I sort of subscribe to the theory that artificial intelligence is anything a computer can't do yet. That, that's that popular saying. It's like, you know, every time one of these like, like transformer models in large language models, it's, it's the same thing. Like it blew everyone's mind and now, you know, you hear a lot of people just saying, well, you know, they're really just prediction engines. They just predict the, it's next word prediction. It's not really anything special.

• 49:36Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right.

• 49:37Speaker 01

  Obviously, I think it's, it's incredible technology. It's very useful and I think it's going to change. We're, we're really only at the very beginning of this because like OpenAI, which is crazy, we'll probably, you'll probably bring this up, but like their revenue is, is, you know, pretty high for, for a startup, but they, they are like turning business away. I mean, they don't have enough GPUs to satisfy the demand. So, and that's sort of across the industry. So I think like just the fact that, and, and their model, like GPT-4, when you, it's something like 1.7 trillion parameters, which is like the number of calculations and, you know, you don't, they've like, they've found a creative way to reduce the number of parameters

• 50:20Speaker 01

  that it actually calculates on each, on each letter, each token. So like, you can't even actually like fully utilize GPT-4. And just if you think about that, like, we haven't really even explored what these, what these things are capable of. We haven't unleashed that into like the universe and allowed the creative minds of, of individuals just come up with stuff. And, you know, so, so they might actually have some, they might have some sense of like how, how powerful these things really are. So they might, they might be seeing something we're not. But I think, and I'll finish with this, like, the one thing they can't do is understand causality.

• 51:02Speaker 01

  Right? They don't, they don't have the ability to know like cause and effect. And I think that's like this really important component of, of intelligence. And I, I sort of think, I subscribe to the theory that that, which who knows if it will ever come, is, is like the missing piece to, to, to AGI.

• 51:21Alex Kantrowitz?

  Exactly. Yeah, I think that it's so interesting that, that phrase that artificial intelligence is anything that a computer can't do. Because it's sort of feels like when we get AI on par with human level intelligence, like, we won't even know. Or there will just be, it was not like there's like a, you know, a flag that goes up and be like, we did it. Like, you know, people be like, this thing sucks. And this thing doesn't, doesn't do what I want it to do, you know, or it's slow.

• 51:48Speaker 01

  They'll just start ordering it around and, you know.

• 51:50Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, exactly. Or we'll nuke us all.

• 51:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:53Alex Kantrowitz?

  Another possibility. Can you do another five minutes?

• 51:56Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 51:58Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay, so one, well, yeah, one last thing I wanted to talk to you about was, you spoke with the person who put together that whole, like, we need to pause AI or things are gonna go, go to hell. And, and obviously, nobody paused AI and, you know, things are good.

• 52:20Alex Kantrowitz?

  What was their reaction? Did they, did they admit that they had been a little bit panicky? And ultimately, that whole panic was unnecessary?

• 52:32Speaker 01

  No, I mean, his view, if you read the interview, it was that he never actually was really expecting a pause. Like, that wasn't, that wasn't really the goal, and it was really just to draw attention. And, and it did draw attention, and it did create this, this huge debate. And, you know, and, and therefore, it was a, it was a success. I mean, I think that's the takeaway.

• 52:59Speaker 01

  I also think. I kind of think there's a risk in all of this because people are impatient, right? And if you say like, you know, the killer computers are coming, they're kind of thinking that's going to happen in the next six months. If it, or a year, let's say, but if it doesn't happen in three years, five years, I mean, I think people will, will start sort of like tuning out all these warnings. So I think that sort of.

• 53:28Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, there's a boy who cried wolf sort of issue.

• 53:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly, exactly. So that's kind of my, that's kind of my take on, on that, you know.

• 53:39Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. I love that you went, I love that you went and interviewed him because it's like, that's one of those things that would typically just been like, you know, this flash in the pan and nobody checks in and people make a joke about it every now and again. And the instinct to be like, hey, let's go speak to the pledge guy and talk about what's happened. So it's pretty cool.

• 53:57Speaker 01

  Thanks.

• 53:58Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay, Reid, thank you for being here. Definitely tough week in news, but, but I think that I hope we did it justice and to everybody who's listened, I want to say thank you. So thanks, thanks again, Reid.

• 54:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, love your podcast and happy to be on.

• 54:15Alex Kantrowitz?

  Thank you. And where can people find your stuff? I really do recommend the Semaphore Technology.

• 54:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, we have, we, we have a Semaphore Technology landing page. So if you Google, you know, S E M A F O R technology, you'll, you'll see that. I am on X slash Twitter and the, and the socials.

• 54:34Alex Kantrowitz?

  But. Got to separate the news from social media. No, I'm kidding.

• 54:37Speaker 01

  I also.

• 54:38Alex Kantrowitz?

  No, no, shout out your handle.

• 54:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, just at my name, Reid Albergati. And, you know, our newsletter is free, so sign up for the newsletter. We love getting reader feedback, you know, we're, we're brand new, so, you know, we know we're not perfect. So just, it's a, it's really like, I love kind of building this community of, of readers and we would love to have you join us.

• 55:05Alex Kantrowitz?

  All right, Reed, thanks again. Thank you, everybody, for listening. Stay safe. Hopefully, it's a calm weekend. And, once again, appreciate you listening to us. We won't shy away from the tough topics and won't get it right every time. But we will talk about them. And we'll try to do our best to analyze them. So, thanks again for being here. Have a great weekend, and we'll see you next time on Big Technology Podcast.

• 55:50Speaker 02

  Now, more than ever, we need someone on our side. But Rob Whitman? Whitman's votes drove up costs, cut Medicaid, and risked 350,000 Virginians' health care to pay for tax breaks for himself and his donors. He's not on our side. Shannon Taylor will fight corruption, cut taxes, and bring down costs. This November, vote for Shannon Taylor. She's for us. Paid for by HMP, the HouseMajorityPact.com. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee.

• 56:19Speaker 03

  In this life, you can't win.

• 56:21Speaker 04

  When the world gets you down.

• 56:22Speaker 03

  No!

• 56:23Speaker 04

  Escape to Pluto TV.

• 56:25Speaker 03

  This is objectively fantastic.

• 56:26Speaker 04

  Relax into the movies and shows you already know and love, all for free.

• 56:30Speaker 03

  Shwing!

• 56:31Speaker 04

  Even our news is uplifting.

• 56:32Alex Kantrowitz?

  You stay classy, San Diego.

• 56:34Speaker 04

  Watch School of Rock, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, The X-Files, Wayne's World, and so much more.

• 56:40Speaker 03

  We're not worthy!

• 56:42Speaker 04

  The best things on TV really are free. You just have to know where to look. Escape to Pluto TV. Stream now, pay never.