AI Scandals Rock Newsrooms, Uber’s Road to Profitability, NVIDIA’s Underappreciated Weakness

Ranjan Roy from Margins is back for our weekly discussion of the latest tech news. We cover 1) Alex’s meeting with Sam Altman 2) Publishers using AI to rip off other articles and getting caught 3) The impressive performance of Anthropic’s Claude 4) SI fires execs after AI scandal 5) Is Generative AI good for news? 6) Did Twitter destroy news? 7) Uber finds profitability by squeezing drivers 8) Uber drivers trying to circumvent the system 9) Why can’t Lyft capitalize on Uber’s practices 10) Tesla’s autopilot recall 11) Why we need a new word for recall 12) Epic’s win vs. Google 13) Apple’s increasing service fees 14) Timeshare presentation at Vegas 15) The Sphere! 16) NVIDIA’s rich employees don’t want to work as hard 17) NVIDIA’s competitive threats --- Enjoying Big Technology Podcast? Please rate us five stars ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ in your podcast app of choice. For weekly updates on the show, sign up for the pod newsletter on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/6901970121829801984/ Questions? Feedback? Write to: [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

• 0:01Alex Kantrowitz?

  AI scandals are rocking newsrooms, Uber's intriguing road to profitability, millions of Teslas are recalled, and Nvidia's surprising competitive challenge. 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, including the business decisions, trade offs,

• 0:43Alex Kantrowitz?

  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.

• 1:17Alex Kantrowitz?

  Welcome to Big Technology Podcast Friday Edition, where we break down the news in our traditional cool-headed and nuanced format. Ranjan Roy is here with us. We've got a huge week of news to break down. We're going to talk about all these big AI scandals in the news everywhere, some stuff about Uber, the Tesla recall, and then a little bit more about chips. Ranjan, great to see you. Welcome to the show.

• 1:39Speaker 01

  Yep, and I'm really here. This is not an AI clone of me. I think our newsroom has still been remained human only, so.

• 1:46Alex Kantrowitz?

  Exactly. We'll see what happens on the holidays. Maybe when we take our little break, there's going to be robot Alex and robot Ranjan, but people will just have to tune into our Christmas and New Year's time shows to find out. That's your incentive.

• 1:59Speaker 01

  But not yet. We're still here. We're still here.

• 2:02Alex Kantrowitz?

  Speaking of real authentic humans and not AI, I have a fun story to tell. I met Sam Altman this week. I was at the Time Person of the Year Gala, and Sam was being honored as the CEO of the Year. And I was like, all right, I heard he's walking around. Let me see if I could find him. And I saw him at the bar on his own, without any handlers and just went up and said hi and had, you know, really nice about five minute conversation with him, the contents of which I'm not going to reveal today because I'm hoping, you know, we spoke, I was like, listen, let's talk off the record. I got some questions for you. And my hope is that he'll come on the show at some point, but it was very interesting getting a chance to meet him right after all this stuff happened.

• 2:45Speaker 01

  But you were at the Time Person of the Year Gala and you did not meet Taylor Swift?

• 2:50Alex Kantrowitz?

  So Taylor did not show, but Sam did.

• 2:53Speaker 01

  Really? Wait, Taylor Swift is so big. She won Time Person of the Year and did not show up at the gala.

• 2:59Alex Kantrowitz?

  Not only that, she was apparently walking around New York City at the time and didn't come into the plaza. Meanwhile, and by the way, I'm just gonna, this is how dedicated I am to the big technology podcast crew. If you have Sam standing on one side of the room and Taylor on the other, I'm going to Sam for you guys. And he did speak, actually, he did speak.

• 3:19Speaker 01

  For you, our listeners.

• 3:20Alex Kantrowitz?

  For you, our listeners.

• 3:21Speaker 01

  Taylor Swift.

• 3:22Alex Kantrowitz?

  I would.

• 3:23Speaker 01

  Sam Altman.

• 3:24Alex Kantrowitz?

  No doubt about it. And there were some interesting things that he said on stage because he spoke on stage and they asked him what happened at OpenAI. And he said this really interesting thing. As we get closer to superintelligence, everybody involved gets more stressed and more anxious and we realize the stakes are higher and higher. So like, he said that he prefaced that to say, like, to be a little empathetic in the beginning, but clearly he's kind of winking at the idea that there was something safety or some superintelligence related thing that freaked people out.

• 3:58Speaker 01

  Q star? We still, there's, there's more to that story, I'm sure that's going to come out.

• 4:03Alex Kantrowitz?

  He also spoke about OpenAI governance, and this was interesting. He said, so they asked him about the governance there and they, and he said, we have to make changes. We always said that we didn't want AGI to be controlled by a small set of people. We wanted it to be democratized and we clearly got that wrong. So I think if we don't improve our governance structure, if we don't improve the way that we interact with the world, people shouldn't, we're very motivated to work on those changes. I mean, that was, that was also interesting. So, I mean, they're obviously expanding the board, but it seems like, you know, maybe they're thinking about other changes to the governance that we still don't know. I mean, it's going to be very interesting to see how this plays out.

• 4:45Speaker 01

  Yep. Wait, he's sorry. They said they had originally wanted artificial general intelligence democratized or like controlled?

• 4:53Alex Kantrowitz?

  The control of it democratized.

• 4:55Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 4:57Alex Kantrowitz?

  I did have somebody who quote tweeted or posted on my LinkedIn or something talking about how like the word democratized has totally been ruined, but that's not a story that we're going to tackle today. Instead, let's talk about something else that seems to be ruined, and that's the news. Story after story show that newsrooms are not only embracing AI, but basically using it to plagiarize other articles or just, it's amazing to me how many AI robot reporters there are already here at the end of 2023. Here's a story from Semaphore. They're one of the most highly trafficked financial news websites in the world is creating AI-generated stories that bear an uncanny resemblance to stories published

• 5:41Alex Kantrowitz?

  just hours earlier by competitors. Investing.com, Tel Aviv-based site owned by Joffrey Capital, is a financial news and information hub that provides a mix of markets, data, and investing tips and trends. But increasingly, this site has been relying on AI to create its stories, which often appear to be thinly veiled copies of human-written stories written elsewhere. I mean, this happened to me earlier in the year when I had someone rip off my work by remixing it with AI, publishing it as their own, and then showing up on the front page of Hacker News. I just thought that would be something that's sort of done by like these freelancer pirates and not by some of the most highly trafficked sites that exist. What's going on?

• 6:25Speaker 01

  This is such a tough problem because, again, the domain value of a site like investing.com clearly is the, you know, why it receives so much traffic. It's been built up over years, but it is so easy to simply rewrite any original article in your own voice, take all the information, and just rewrite it. And there's no reason that's not going to keep happening. So I feel this is a tough one to solve. The only thing I could think that does potentially help kind of regulate this is reputation and context that Because this stuff is getting reported, because people like next time you go and read

• 7:07Speaker 01

  on investing.com, the idea that you're going to be reading an AI recycled article could at least denigrate the idea that you're going to be doing, getting any investing advice from it. But, but this is tough because this is gonna keep going. There's what's to stop this.

• 7:23Alex Kantrowitz?

  Correct. And it's only going to get better and better. Right? So we'll see these models improve. There'll be less hallucination. And then, right now, like, it seems somewhat easy to suss out, but in the future, might not be that easy.

• 7:35Speaker 01

  Yeah. And this is where I've thought a lot about this, like, the having, I hate the word personal brand, but I think the personal branding of specific journalists, it becomes that much more important. And I feel the New York Times has been like, on the, I mean, others as well, some for as well, like, really leading on this kind of thing. Because at a certain point, it becomes less about the content and more about the voice and knowledge and trust of a specific person or voice. And otherwise, yeah, the, from a pure content standpoint, so much of it is going to be recycled or unidentifiable that, that it has to become that level of trust.

• 8:17Alex Kantrowitz?

  By the way, it's a good moment to give you a shout out because I've been using a bot that you recommended, Claude, the Anthropic bot. I didn't realize when you mentioned it, that you could just upload documents and then have it do things with them. And it's, it's really fantastic, Ron John. It's really amazing. I mean, it kind of makes me nervous what's going to happen to information. But this bot is pretty damn good.

• 8:39Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, this is where, I mean, commoditization across all these different products, you see it, that ChatGPT, Claude from Anthropic, is just as good. It can even, I think it's now

• 8:50Alex Kantrowitz?

  Better in some cases.

• 8:51Speaker 01

  Yeah. And now it's on par in terms of, originally Claude could basically ingest an entire book's worth of content, based on its token limit. Now ChatGPT or GPT-4 kind of matched it. But yeah, all these things, maybe Bard. Bartle start to get there, maybe, but yeah, I think like seeing how good and how fast more and more of these chatbots are, it's, it's, it's good. It's something to see.

• 9:19Alex Kantrowitz?

  So I signed up to Claude Pro. So I'm now using the juiced up version and I like pasted my entire article about Nvidia in there today before I hit publish and just had to play with different iterations and basically review the writing and the arguments and even the lead. The lead is, uh, it's about to get hot in Nvidia's kitchen. And I was like, does this sound right? And then I said to Claude, hey, listen, um, can you just rewrite this entire article as a cooking article with Nvidia metaphors as opposed to an Nvidia article with cooking metaphors? And it did a freaking fantastic job. Like it was one of the more amusing things I've done with technology this year.

• 10:01Speaker 01

  Wait, have you, do you have access to Grok yet?

• 10:05Alex Kantrowitz?

  Grok is available if you use the $16 a month Twitter blue. And I'm not willing to go that far. I'm at $8 a month. I'm not paying cent more. So I'll wait until it rolls out to us mid level Twitter bluers.

• 10:19Speaker 01

  Twitter, Twitter bluers. Yep.

• 10:20Alex Kantrowitz?

  X blue. Is it even called X blue? Now it's called X premium.

• 10:25Speaker 01

  I have not paid attention to that in a while, but wait, actually, yeah. So it is X premium now?

• 10:31Alex Kantrowitz?

  I think so.

• 10:32Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 10:33Alex Kantrowitz?

  And there's premium plus. Obviously the branding is really going well over there. But okay, getting back to our topic though, I know we've gone astray. There, there's a good thing happening and that's that some publishers are actually looking at this and saying, and maybe this goes back to the reputation thing that you mentioned. And they're saying if the editorial folks want to use AI and not do their job, we're going to fire them. And that happened with, uh, Sports Illustrated where the company fired, uh, a number, okay, two top exec. Okay. So the company that owns Sports Illustrated is from Futurism, the arena group, it fired two top executives. It said that their departures had nothing to do with

• 11:13Alex Kantrowitz?

  the fact that potentially the company had fake personas writing AI stories. And then a week later, they announced that the CEO of Sports Illustrated is leaving too. And they say effective immediately, Ross Levinson, who by the way, is a big media name, will be leaving the company and his role as CEO.

• 11:33Alex Kantrowitz?

  And they go this follows the recent departures of three senior executives last week. And they sent the press release out to the news wires. It is very interesting, like some people that I know in my circles are like, well, it seems like a pretty big price to pay for him. And it's like, no, you don't want to be known as a publisher that does not have humans writing for you. Right move. What do you think?

• 11:54Speaker 01

  I see. This is the difference, like sports articles to me, at least recaps of games. There's no reason that should not be AI driven, like the idea that understanding what are the key things to talk about? Key stats from the game, key plays to link a highlight to any of that should be totally AI generated and just pushed out quickly and easily. And then commentary, analysis, all of these kinds of things should be humans. But I think this is where the newsrooms that really figure out how to balance the two are going to be the ones that do well

• 12:31Speaker 01

  and maintain trust with their readers and are able to actually just function better because, because the idea that people are not going to use any generative AI in their entire journalism process is crazy to me. But the worst thing you can do, if any publishers are out there right now, is do not create a fake persona, pretend it's a human and try to pass that off.

• 12:56Alex Kantrowitz?

  That not only, yeah, not only that, you know what Sports Illustrated was doing? So I just clicked into the story, the stories that they were talking about were recommending products. Play like a pro with the best full size volleyball and they recommend the Wilson.

• 13:09Speaker 01

  So there's affiliate links as well in here.

• 13:12Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, there's Amazon links in there.

• 13:14Speaker 01

  Okay, okay.

• 13:15Alex Kantrowitz?

  That's why you get fired, honestly.

• 13:17Speaker 01

  That's why you get fired.

• 13:18Alex Kantrowitz?

  Not you, but the person who did that.

• 13:19Speaker 01

  Using, using some generative AI, that's okay. Do not do what. Ross Levinson's people did. You will be fired.

• 13:28Alex Kantrowitz?

  Terrible. So, and, and, but the thing is that this is going to be a fact of life inside every newsroom. Because this week, the New York Times hired Quartz co-founder Zach Seward to work on AI in the newsroom. And this is from a quote that they gave to the Wall Street Journal. They said about Seward that he shares our firm belief that Times journalism will always be reported, written and edited by our expert journalists. But, they said, he will be establishing principle for how we do and do not use generative AI. Note how it's not whether or not we use generative AI. It's how we do and do not.

• 14:09Speaker 01

  All right. So this, I am very interested and excited by, and I think, I'm going to make a bold prediction at the end of this, but one thing to note for non-media news industry junkies, Quartz, which was, he co-founded, I think it was like 2012, 2013. One of the really interesting things they did was, I mean, they really pushed on the front of data visualization and data journal, data-driven journalism, is they made their charting tools that they built available to anyone. And I, we actually, I actually used them for a lot of different projects. And they would create beautiful graphs in different ways and you could feed in CSVs. And it was just like this little tool that they built in the newsroom that they released to the public.

• 14:55Speaker 01

  I think the New York Times is going to get into that type of innovation. And imagine whether they release their own ChatGPT competitor, whether they release their own, and like, like, help every college student write with the trust of the New York Times behind them, rather than using some other random chatbot. Like, I think it's a huge opportunity for them. They have the brand. They have their own unique dataset that no one else has. And the, what, the way Quartz actually innovated within media and news, I think the New York Times is very well positioned. So, you've heard it here.

• 15:34Alex Kantrowitz?

  Well, I reached out to, I know Zach actually from a bunch of meetups that I used to go to back in the day in New York City and asked him, you know, what he's planning to do and how this could impact publishers. I just did it like five minutes ago, so we'll, we'll see if he responds, maybe sometime during the show, but if it's afterward, I'll definitely read it to readers. Overall, do you think generative AI is going to be good or bad for news?

• 15:57Speaker 01

  Good. Great.

• 15:59Alex Kantrowitz?

  Great.

• 15:59Speaker 01

  I think, I think it's going to reshape the news industry, the biggest thing being any content farm that creates those like crappy articles that are recycled. Like, if you think about the, the famous, what time is the Super Bowl? Everyone would try to answer that question, make that the headline because everyone was Googling it. That whole industry dies with generative search. And that's good. And I'm very happy about that. So I think it's going to reshape the news industry, but again, it makes it so much easier for more people to do journalism.

• 16:33Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right.

• 16:33Speaker 01

  So I think it'll be good and do better journalism and get information more quickly and understand what's correct and what's not correct. So I think it's good.

• 16:42Alex Kantrowitz?

  I'm into it also. And, uh, you know, I've started to think maybe I can do a side business where I write cooking articles, you know, with tech motifs. And I think that might be of interest to some percentage of our audience. So, um, speaking of, of news and journalism, I just want to hit this one very quickly. So The Verge did a series of, of stories about how Twitter's dead. And look, I'm going to say personally, I don't think Twitter's dead. The numbers are definitely off, uh, but it's not dead. It felt pretty vibrant, actually, during the Sam Altman moment. And the argument is that, that Neelai Patel made, and I think Neelai is very good and I like his writing. He made this argument that Twitter broke the news. And let me just read a bit. He says,

• 17:26Alex Kantrowitz?

  "Step back now and you can see exactly how destructive the situation was for journalism. Reporters around the world provided Twitter with real time news and commentary for free, increasingly learning to shape stories for the algorithm instead of their actual readers. Meanwhile, the media companies they worked for faced an exodus of their bigger advertising clients to social platforms with better, more integrated ad products, a direct connection to audience and no pesky editorial ethics policies."

• 17:52Alex Kantrowitz?

  Look, I don't think that Twitter's had an altogether good impact on news. In fact, I think it's probably been negative. I think that the idea that people write for algorithms is true and bad. But I wouldn't go as far as to say that it broke the news. And I think that like, the amount of different stories that you can find as a journalist there, the amount of different people you can connect with there, the amount of ideas you can expose to there, you can get exposed to there, can be good as long as you find a way to not sort of be drawn in by the sort of pull, negative pull of the site that can play to outrage and

• 18:34Alex Kantrowitz?

  sort of rage baiting that a lot of Twitter and news became, although it seems like those, the rage baiting era of news is maybe not coming to an end, but less prominent than it was in the middle of the last decade. What do you think, Ron John?

• 18:48Speaker 01

  Well, on the last point, we have not entered the election 2024 cycle in full swing. So I think rage baiting might be making a comeback. But to me, one of the biggest issues around how Twitter broke the news is how even among very established credible news organizations, suddenly you started seeing the same people who were really good at Twitter being sourced as experts for every single possible story. And it kind of like, again, made the overall news world smaller because everyone was looking at the same thing, listening. You saw this especially during COVID. It was the same few viral doctors, like doctors that went viral,

• 19:32Speaker 01

  that were cited in absolutely everything. So, so I think that, to me, getting journalists to break out of that and going back to like, finding sources who are experts and not necessarily the Twitter famous ones, that I think is the most important thing.

• 19:48Alex Kantrowitz?

  I mean, this is why I like LinkedIn, but that's a story for another day.

• 19:53Alex Kantrowitz?

  Why don't we take a break? We have so many more stories to cover, including Uber's business, the way that it's been able to achieve profitability. We also have Tesla's recall, the epic win, and Nvidia. Oh, man, a lot. Okay, we'll be back right after this. This episode is brought to you by App Point. 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 App Point does. For 25 years, they've been the trusted layer beneath the world's most demanding data, now extended across your entire AI estate.

• 20:38Alex Kantrowitz?

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• 21:23Alex Kantrowitz?

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• 22:10Alex Kantrowitz?

  And we're back here on Big Technology Podcast with Ron John Roy of Margins. So Ron John, let's talk about Uber.

• 22:17Speaker 01

  Let's talk about Uber. Let's talk about Uber because for listeners, I'm pretty sure everyone has felt that Uber rides have gotten ridiculously expensive. You're not just feeling it. I took a Uber from First and 23rd in Manhattan to Midtown West and it was $52. For longtime New Yorkers, like the prices have gotten insane. And basically, there's this really good analysis in Forbes from the Columbia professor Len Sherman around how Uber, they're doing it all did. I can never say his name, CEO Derek

• 22:53Alex Kantrowitz?

  Koccerzawi.

• 22:54Speaker 01

  Koccerzawi. He has raised prices on consumers, lowered driver pay, which has actually made Uber a profitable, if not profitable, at least cash flow positive business after Uber for years was losing billions of dollars. And basically, this is a thing that especially from the anti-monopoly side, the worry was always Uber, their pitch, and the pitch of the DoorDash's of the world and so many others was, you know, completely dominate the market by undercutting on price and then you raise prices. And that's what's happening. And they're doing it on both sides of the marketplace, to consumers and to drivers, because even

• 23:36Speaker 01

  driver pay is more opaque. But it's been, there's analysis from Yipit data that showed that Uber's take rate has increased to 40%. That was up from 34% before. And the way they did it is they changed, one of the big things they did a couple of years ago is for drivers to accept a ride. They now get an upfront price, whereas in the past, the price was calculated as the ride took place. And that upfront price is done, it's given to them by an opaque algorithm. So basically, it just kind of turns into this race to the bottom that's gamified for the drivers. And overall, everyone is miserable, but at least finally Uber has learned that it can turn a profit.

• 24:22Alex Kantrowitz?

  Exactly. And it is, it's kind of crazy. It almost seemed like this is always what it was going to come to for Uber to become profitable. Like, there was only so much it could squeeze riders and because it would lose demand to Lyft and like the driver pay was the place where it was going to get those margins or it was going to be unprofitable forever. And, you know, it's sort of the, not to use a car cliche, but it's the rubber meeting the road here and it's a pretty unfortunate turn of events, especially as people have made Uber their number one job.

• 24:55Speaker 01

  But, and if you think about it, it was done as Lyft was already basically getting decimated. Like, like, and it was, I mean, from like a pure business case study standpoint, it's been masterful. But from a societal and consumer standpoint, it's just, it's troubling because this, this is, this is the exact, when we all talk about monopoly, this is it, this is it. It's that, you know, we're 13 years later since Uber was launched and finally now you're seeing what it always should have cost from the beginning, but if it cost that at the beginning, then no one would have taken it.

• 25:33Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, it is interesting asking drivers like what they're getting paid when you know the fare that you're making. And I've had a moment where drivers like, hey, what did you pay for that? Why didn't you pay me in cash and I'll take like $5 off? Have you had a moment like that?

• 25:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. So that's interesting you say that because I had never had that brought up by a driver. And then I think it was like a year or two ago that it started happening more and more where they would, they would initiate that conversation with you. And it makes sense now that you learn about this upfront pricing change and that it becomes algorithmic and it becomes more confusing. And in that confusion, they can pay them less. So, yeah.

• 26:12Alex Kantrowitz?

  And yeah, I mean, so let me ask you this, though. Don't you think that this gives Lyft an opportunity now? Because Lyft can, you know, sort of pay more and win more drivers over.

• 26:24Speaker 01

  This is the problem with marketplaces and a dominant player is that without the rider demand, you're not going to get drivers on the platform. And especially, I mean, in cities like New York, if you open Lyft, it's so much harder to find a ride. So then you just start defaulting to Uber and then Uber, Uber has definitely established that dominance in, in New York. I mean, honestly, though, I tried using the Lyft app. Have you had this? There has to be some kind of class action lawsuit at some point about how they communicate how far away the driver is or when you have a ride because it will, the app will do everything in its power to make you feel like the driver is right around the corner. Here's a visual.

• 27:09Speaker 01

  We're finding a driver and then suddenly delay after delay, change after change.

• 27:15Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yes, I've had that. It's a problem.

• 27:18Speaker 01

  It's a problem. It's a problem. But they have monopoly, so.

• 27:22Alex Kantrowitz?

  Exactly. Well, shout out to first of all, Len Sherman, who is a big technology podcast listener who wrote that story in Forbes and, and our friend Sergio from the Ride Hail Guy podcast, Sergio Ovedian, who made sure that I saw this story and has been also been texting me about the, the fact that Cruise just cut 24% of its workforce. He was a little bit less optimistic than me about Cruise and basically pointed out the fact that this was happening at Uber. He's taken a little victory lap. So speaking of ride hailing or the fact that we might not need to hail rides anymore, Tesla's autopilot recalled more than 2 million

• 28:04Alex Kantrowitz?

  vehicles over autopilot safety concerns this week. Now, the recall, this is according to the Wall Street Journal, covers Tesla models 3, SX and Y sold in the US between 2012 and 2023. They're basically saying that these autopilot systems don't have sufficient safety controls in place and basically it could be misused by drivers. Now, I saw this and I said, recall, that means Tesla is bringing all these cars back and gonna have to give refunds and issue new cars. It's, I think, the most unbelievably misplaced use of the word recall because when you get down to it, what really happened is Tesla pushed a software update to ensure that these autopilot features would be a little bit more safe

• 28:50Alex Kantrowitz?

  than they would have otherwise. And I was like, why are you calling this a recall? Don't you think that that is a problem?

• 28:56Speaker 01

  Yes, I do. But, and I say that with hesitation because

• 29:01Alex Kantrowitz?

  I'll take it.

• 29:02Speaker 01

  We need a new word. We need a new word because again, in the same story, it's like the NHTSA, they reviewed 956 crashes related to the autopilot that they wanted fixed based on this safety update. If you were to tell me there was nearly a thousand car crashes and we need a manufacturer to change a bolt on the door or something like that, which is the kind of thing they would have had to do in the past before cars became so software driven, obviously that is a recall and it communicates there is a safety defect that needs to be fixed. So it's not just a software over the air update because that could be like Tesla gets a new fart noise or something like that.

• 29:47Speaker 01

  This is actually, I mean, this is a real, there's a safety concern and it needs to be fixed and it happens to be that it gets fixed via a software update. So I think that's to me that we need a new word. That's simple.

• 30:04Alex Kantrowitz?

  Just call it a patch. Why can't you just call it a patch?

• 30:07Speaker 01

  Patch doesn't.

• 30:08Alex Kantrowitz?

  It has to be scarier? Is that what it is?

• 30:10Speaker 01

  It has to be scarier. It's not just, even a patch is like Apple, actually, maybe patch could work because when Apple has some new vulnerability, they do call it a patch in the updates. So, all right, it's a patch. It's a patch. I can work with that.

• 30:28Alex Kantrowitz?

  You know, speaking of stories that might not be exactly what they look like on the surface, there was another big story this week where Epic, the maker of Fortnite, won in a case against Google that it had an illegal monopoly in the App Store. So this is something that Epic had been pushing against Apple, against Google. It kind of won a tiny little part of its case against Apple, but it won on every count against Google. There was a jury this time. And so on its face, it's like, oh, this might revolutionize the way that the App Store works. However, it doesn't seem like that's the case yet because though Epic has won, we still don't even know

• 31:10Alex Kantrowitz?

  what the remedy is going to be, effectively what the court is going to rule to make things right. And the judge has already been starting to rule different things out. So like,

• 31:22Alex Kantrowitz?

  Epic had asked it to, you know, make, ask the judge to make some ruling to make sure that Google couldn't reintroduce some of the same things. And the judge goes, we don't do, don't break the law injunctions. If you have a problem, you come back. So it's like, maybe in this one specific area, they're going to fix it, but there might be, they might open themselves up to other vulnerabilities. And of course, Google's going to appeal. I mean, Wilson White, the VP of Government Affairs and Public Policy at Google said that they plan to challenge the verdict. And they go, Android and Google Play provide more choice and openness than any other major mobile platform. And it does look a little weird that Apple could get away with it, but Google, which allows you to sideload ads and run different app stores, is the one that ends up losing

• 32:06Alex Kantrowitz?

  the case because it has a lot of these side deals with different manufacturers that effectively don't allow, that that prevent some of this stuff. I'm not saying it's great. What I am saying is that we still aren't at the end of this yet. And, you know, a lot of folks play this up as this like revolutionary moment where it might just be, you know, the remedy might end up being quite weak. What do you think?

• 32:27Speaker 01

  I, I think it's a big deal. And I think it's because we don't know what the remedy is, but Google is a, has an illegal monopoly in its app store. That was made clear. That was like, you know, that was the result of the jury. They understood that. And we have not seen any win like that in that clear explanation. And, and exactly what you said, Apple is probably much worse, in my opinion, around how they utilize the app store to maintain some kind of market power and dominance. And, and I think this is definitely going to move over to Apple at a certain point. And it, it sets precedent in a way that has not been set before in any context.

• 33:10Speaker 01

  So I think, and even one of the big parts around the lawsuit is that to have access to Google's billing system, you have to go through their app store, which means you have to pay the overall app store tax. And those two things should be separated and because there's no reason that they are completely connected in the way they are. And now this kind of stuff all starts to change. And, and you see, it could open up so many new ways of gaming and news or any other, any kind of app ecosystem could have its own app store, could work in different ways. And we haven't been able to see that for years because of this, the way these stores were built.

• 33:51Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, that's true. I think that for the Apple thing, we're gonna see, right? Because Apple's already won this case. And one of the things that people have said is that Apple didn't write down what Google did. Apparently, they're a lot more careful about antitrust stuff. So TBD on that.

• 34:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think, and honestly, I have to say, Apple, as someone who's entire life is built around Apple products, still, it's starting to get more frustrating the way, I mean, prices are like Apple TV Plus, Apple iCloud prices, everything just goes up now. They just like, it's the ultimate show again of get you hooked, get you into the ecosystem, you can't get out, and then start raising prices. I don't even know what my monthly bills are for, because they just kind of keep going up, they, and the receipt they send you doesn't even tell you what you're paying for via email, because they don't want Google to see, to scrape what people are actually buying. So you just get a dollar

• 34:52Speaker 01

  amount in your receipt in your email, like, so you have to manually go into the App Store to see what you subscribe to. I think I'm getting a little more frustrated with Apple in terms of the hold they have over me. Just don't raise your prices.

• 35:06Alex Kantrowitz?

  A lot of this, it kind of reminds me of this timeshare presentation I saw. Did I tell you I did this timeshare presentation in Vegas when I was out there?

• 35:13Speaker 01

  No, in Vegas, too.

• 35:16Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. So my wife and I walked into the Golden Nugget, and there's a group of people standing there with Hilton badges on, and they say, hey, have you received your welcome gift yet? And we said, no. And they're like, well, look, like, we'll get you. And I seriously was tickets to a next game, free cruise, and a two night stay in a Hilton, and a meal voucher to go and watch this two hour presentation about their Hilton timeshare. So we went to the timeshare presentation the next day, and we sat through this presentation, and you basically put the money down, and then they give you a certain amount of nights a year that you can stay at the property. But there's this maintenance fee, and they're

• 35:57Alex Kantrowitz?

  like, listen, your points will always be worth the same amount through the years. But there's an annual maintenance fee that they have. And no such promises were made on that one. And that thing can go up, you know, year over year, it starts at $1,600, but next thing you know, you could be looking at it, and it's 3,000. And then what do you do? You just put all this money down. To to get the time share. So you're stuck with these maintenance fees. I guess that's my long winded analogy of saying when you're staying at the hotel Apple, right? You end up paying these fees just to keep using your devices. And those fees you paid your whatever it was for your iPhone 15 or something. But those fees keep going up.

• 36:38Speaker 01

  I'm still fascinated by the idea of of a of a time share presentation at the Golden Nugget. It's like feels like it's from like some Americana film road trips type scenario. And I want to do it. I will totally say I want to go do one of these time share presentations. But yeah, I think Apple has a hold on us and they can just keep raising fees and we barely notice.

• 37:05Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, I mean, the time share presentation, it was amazing, man. I loved it. Just the the ferocity with which these people tried to sell you the rah rah presentation to try to get you stoked about the idea of vacations and just the math that made absolutely zero sense.

• 37:22Speaker 01

  Were they the most amazing salespeople ever?

• 37:25Alex Kantrowitz?

  Incredible salespeople. I wanted to hire every one of them. I was like, I don't want a time share, but come sell ads for big technology. You'd be amazing.

• 37:33Speaker 01

  I think time shares must be so lucrative because I've been to one time share presentation. And again, I was I was in awe of this was like the Wolf of Wall Street style level of like selling.

• 37:48Alex Kantrowitz?

  These people are extremely talented.

• 37:49Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I was like, wait, go to go to Oracle or something and just sell some like really expensive cloud package. I don't understand how lucrative is this really?

• 38:00Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, it was a perfect solution sale. Anyway, we walked out. We did not buy the time share, but we did walk out with the cruise, the tickets, the hotel stay and the voucher. So can't wait to use those.

• 38:12Speaker 01

  All right. Job well done.

• 38:14Alex Kantrowitz?

  Thank you.

• 38:15Speaker 01

  You won. You won in Vegas.

• 38:17Alex Kantrowitz?

  Well.

• 38:19Alex Kantrowitz?

  On that, on that front, we won on some other tables was not, were not as

• 38:23Speaker 01

  Gave it all back elsewhere.

• 38:25Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, but we did, we also did this, we went to this casino on the border of Vegas and Utah. This is my travel tip for our listeners and they, they sign you up for the, you can sign up for the player rewards card, which is effectively like this loyalty card. And it gave you $5 of, of free, free gaming just to sign up for this thing. And my wife and I sat down at the penny slots with $5 a credit. That's 500 pulls the lever and they just kept bringing us drinks for free as we're playing the penny slots. We ended up walking away with like three drinks apiece and we ended up with like $12 total winnings and got to watch some live music that night. It was amazing.

• 39:10Alex Kantrowitz?

  I love Vegas.

• 39:11Speaker 01

  Big technology podcast is pivoting to becoming the points guy.

• 39:17Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, it was a pretty cool trip. Ended up, we also saw U2 at the Sphere, which was

• 39:22Speaker 01

  Oh, wait, you actually saw that?

• 39:23Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, that was why we went. We wanted to see U2.

• 39:27Speaker 01

  Is the Sphere, does the Sphere, is it so impressive that it makes you think positively about James Dolan?

• 39:36Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yes. No doubt.

• 39:38Speaker 01

  For, for non-New York listeners, the owner of Madison Square Garden and the Knicks, James Dolan is not the most revered personality and does things like, I think it was like via facial recognition, not allowing enemies of his into Madison Square Garden, does stuff like that. But then the Sphere in Vegas is, my God, the, the videos and stuff I've seen of that. It, it looks like it's just, and it's something you've never seen before, right?

• 40:08Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. So first of all, like I gotta be careful about the way that I speak about Dolan because he does have facial recognition that prevents enemies from going into his properties. And I would like to go to the Sphere again. And we did just get the Knicks tickets from the timeshare that we're going to use in January. So I'm going to hold my James Dolan thoughts for the next show. But. Rajan, I have to tell you that this fear is pretty special, especially like the last half hour of the show where like the visuals are out of control. Cool. And I think my biggest regret is like not walking into that venue with some sort of hallucin and hallucin in my system. So maybe next time.

• 40:46Speaker 01

  Travel tips from Alex.

• 40:49Alex Kantrowitz?

  None of this was on the agenda, by the way, folks. So this is all bonus content. Okay, let's round the corner and talk about Nvidia. So Nvidia, of course, is the big chip maker that's been powering the AI revolution. And it's basically, it's H100 chips are the thing that you use to train your AI models on. I have a story about it in Big Technology, but before we talk about the competitive areas that Nvidia might be, might be trying to, or having to deal with in the future, there's an amazing story. So this stock has gone up, I think this is Business Insider, the stock has gone up by 12,000% over the past five

• 41:29Alex Kantrowitz?

  years and 230 something percent this year. Its market cap went from in the 300 billion range to 1.19 trillion as of today. And what's that doing? It's making Nvidia's mid-level employees and longtime employees so rich that they're kind of not even trying on the job. And they're, they're almost like half retired. This is from the story. Many Nvidia employees have become incredibly rich after the company's stock rose. One unexpected byproduct of that success has been the growing tension between, between employees where some staffers feel the old timers are simply not pulling their weight. And it's possible that's the newly minted stock rich millionaires at Nvidia are

• 42:12Alex Kantrowitz?

  less motivated to work hard. The brewing discord among Nvidia's corporate ranks could one day become a serious risk as the company faces intensifying regulatory pressure and competition from rival chipmakers AMD and Intel as well as other big firms like Amazon and Microsoft. So the CEO basically had to write a letter. It's like, do your damn job to these employees. I mean, it's one of those wild secondary not thought of risks that as your stock goes so high that your employees might be like already like thinking about what to do with the money. I'm curious what you think, Rajan, like.

• 42:51Alex Kantrowitz?

  This almost has kind of like a meme stock feel to it, some of our early discussions in 2022. And like, what does a CFO do when the story, when the stock rises by like 500% in a week? Like, maybe that's a similar thing with Nvidia and its employee base in these, you know, quote unquote, half retirements.

• 43:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think, well, always question number one in these situations is who is actually selling? Cause I know, like, especially during the meme stock craze, like, I know people who worked at some of those companies even like, and some of them sold near the top and their life is forever changed. And then some of them held and it lost 90 plus percent of what they thought they would be worth. So I think, uh, even in Nvidia, like, where is this gonna end up? Is it on the AI hype cycle? It's up a lot, but are people selling? And those do, who do sell, do they stay motivated?

• 43:45Speaker 01

  I think it is, every big company again, like somehow in Apple stays motivated enough to be able to extract so much value and money out of each and every single one of us. Uh, so some of these companies, you can see the ones that somehow have figured out how to keep people motivated. But yeah, I think this is something, any company who stock goes up that much, it, it introduces a whole new set of challenges. I'm not going to call them problems for them.

• 44:16Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, I mean, they're not problems yet, but they might be. But I'm sure they'll find motivated people, like they have the money, uh, to, to hire motivated people and distribute it to them. It is interesting, like, would you sell, if you had Nvidia stock, like, would you be selling now?

• 44:34Speaker 01

  It's such a tough one, cause like, you think about like, if you're an Apple employee at any number of times in the last 12, 14 years, it would have made sense likely to sell. Obviously, if you need like are buying a house or something, then you're going to sell. But like sell some, but, but yeah, it's tough because but you're also living amidst one of the great hype cycles and you happen to be at the exact company at the exact middle of it. So chances that it's actually going to realize the value people are ascribing to it and are still not certain. So, yeah, I think I would sell.

• 45:12Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, at a certain point, it doesn't make sense to have so much of your wealth in one company. However, you do, you know, potentially miss a lot of the upside. You sold at the beginning of this year. If you were at Nvidia, you're like, oh, this company's worth $380 billion. You look up and it's now worth a trillion. So.

• 45:30Speaker 01

  Yep. The greatest lesson, though, I ever learned was, uh, when I was in trading was you can never allow yourself to stress about the money you didn't make. Only look at the money you did make and, and it, because it, the second you start thinking, and everyone goes there, your mind always goes there, but everyone who does, who focuses too much on, I could have made X, I could have made Y, when you did already actually make some money or good money, uh, then, you know, then it just makes you a much worse investor.

• 46:06Alex Kantrowitz?

  Exactly. You can't play the FOMO fears.

• 46:09Speaker 01

  No FOMO.

• 46:10Alex Kantrowitz?

  So another thing Nvidia does have that is a challenge is the fact that so many companies are now competing with it. We might have mentioned it last week, but Google Gemini was trained entirely on Google's TPUs, not Nvidia chips. You also have Amazon getting involved. Anthropic is going to train its models on Amazon's AWS chips and Microsoft is powering some of its AI services on its own chips. And then we had Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger on this week talking about how they're making moves this week. They introduced this Gaudi 3 chip that they say is competitive with the Nvidia. H100 and AMD made a similar announcement last week. Are, you know, I'm curious what you think, and I have much more about this on big technology.

• 46:54Alex Kantrowitz?

  So if you go to bigtechnology.com, you can read more about it. But Ranjan, just very high level, you know, is Nvidia gonna have this, you know, lead forever? Or where's, where's, where's this gonna lead effectively?

• 47:08Speaker 01

  No, I think AMD and Intel and even big technology companies internally. Yeah, I think there's gonna be competition and it's good and it's exciting. And I think on the hardware front, we're certainly seeing it on the software front. You using Claude, you know, like in it and it's good. I think this is, that's actually to me, one of the most exciting parts of this is it feels like not only is this, the whole generative AI space, not only is it something that genuinely has a ton of potential for use cases, for businesses, for consumers, but it's also just feels like it's the most competitive space in a long time.

• 47:49Speaker 01

  And like, I don't think it's necessarily all the Amazons and Microsoft and stuff are gonna own it, I think, or Nvidia's has a guaranteed seat on the throne. I think we have no idea how this plays out in the next five years and that's fun.

• 48:05Alex Kantrowitz?

  That's right. And I'll just like cite another good one from Chamath, who's been on a roll lately. Chamath Palihapitiya, the VC from Social Capital, he said, and former, you know, SPAC god, he said, "The great LLM wars will be written about as one of the most important deflationary cycles in the history of technology." And I think that's spot on. The moment of commoditization where our prices come down everywhere and everything sort of evens out is definitely taking place right now.

• 48:37Speaker 01

  I think so. Again, I think I will agree with Chamath on this one.

• 48:42Alex Kantrowitz?

  Wow, we got two weeks in a row of Ron John.

• 48:44Speaker 01

  Two weeks in a row.

• 48:46Alex Kantrowitz?

  Coming together.

• 48:46Speaker 01

  We agree with Chamath. Yep.

• 48:48Alex Kantrowitz?

  This is big. All right, Ron John, thanks so much. We're gonna see you next time on December 29th. So have a nice holiday break for now.

• 48:59Speaker 01

  And we'll talk, let's talk about what's gonna happen next year. I'll see you in a couple of weeks.

• 49:04Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, we have some great stuff on tap for folks. And even though we are about to go into the holidays, we have some great shows coming up for you over the next few weeks. Casey Newton is gonna be on to do some predictions with me about 2024. Meredith Whitaker, the CEO of Signal, is gonna come on to talk about the state of AI. We also have a report about the war in Ukraine and the different technology that Palantir and Clearview AI are using. And then next week, I'm sitting down with Ryan Peterson, actually, the CEO of Flexport. So we're gonna talk a little bit about what happened in his leadership, do-si-do, and what the future of that company is looking like. That will be our first show of the new year. Thanks again for listening. Thanks for being here, Ron John.

• 49:48Alex Kantrowitz?

  Always great to have you all here, and we'll see you next time on Big Technology Podcast.

• 50:03Speaker 02

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• 50:32Speaker 03

  In this life, you can't win.

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  When the world gets you down.

• 50:35Speaker 03

  No!

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• 50:45Alex Kantrowitz?

  You stay classy, San Diego.

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• 50:53Alex Kantrowitz?

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