Elon Sues OpenAI, Should Sundar Stay?, RIP Apple Car

Ranjan Roy from Margins is back for our weekly discussion of the latest tech news. We cover 1) Elon Musk suing OpenAI for breaching its founding agreement 2) What can Musk accomplish with the lawsuit 3) The SEC looks into OpenAI’s conduct 4) Microsoft funds OpenAI competition MistralAI 5) Does OpenAi’s chaos make Google look good? 6) The chaos inside Google’s organization that led to its Gemini 7) Is Sundar Pichai the right leader for Google? 8) The death of the Apple car 9) Apple’s generative AI potential 10) Apple’s attempt to acquire Bing 11) Amazon aggregator and Covid darling Thrasio goes bankrupt 12) AI Willy Wonka --- Enjoying Big Technology Podcast? Please rate us five stars ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ in your podcast app of choice. Want a discount for Big Technology Premium? Here’s 40% off for the first year: https://tinyurl.com/bigtechnology Questions? Feedback? Write to: [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

• 0:00Alex Kantrowitz?

  Let's talk about Elon Musk suing OpenAI, the state of Google amid its latest crisis, including Sundar Pichai's job security, the death of the Apple car, an Amazon aggregator that boomed during COVID going bust, and AI Willy Wonka inspiring panic and confusion among parents and kids alike in Scotland. Oh, that's going to be fun. 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,

• 0:43Alex Kantrowitz?

  head of enterprise business solutions at Voya Financial, to go inside a large scale agentic CX transformation, including the business decisions, trade offs and lessons along the way. You can watch both conversations now on my YouTube channel today. It's never been more challenging to get frontier compute. How do you know where to look? Who to trust? Or how much to pay? Akash is an open cloud that provides easy access, flexibility and peace of mind. That's how companies like Razer were able to cut their inference cost by 15 times. Visit akash.network/alex for a free consultation. That's akash.network/alex for a free consultation.

• 1:26Alex Kantrowitz?

  Welcome to Big Technology Podcast Friday Edition, where we break down the news in our traditional, cool-headed and nuanced format. Wow, do we have a show for you today? It was looking like the week was just going along with one story, Google being the AI scandalized company of the year. And then, next thing you know, Elon Musk pulls out this lawsuit suing OpenAI for breaching its founding mission. So we're going to talk about that first. Everyone, a first welcome in Ron John Roy, Ron John of Margins. You can find it at readmargins.com. Ron John, welcome.

• 1:57Speaker 01

  You know, it's a big week when Elon Musk is not getting sued, but suing someone else.

• 2:02Alex Kantrowitz?

  Exactly. So the gloves are off right now. And honestly,

• 2:07Alex Kantrowitz?

  It's not surprising, and I almost can't blame Elon, right? He kicked in $44 million at the start of OpenAI to build what was agreed upon as a, and this is from the Wall Street Journal, it was supposed to be a public open source AI company. Then OpenAI gets in bed with Microsoft, and now Musk is basically saying that it's holding up Microsoft, it's a closed source, it's entirely meant to improve Microsoft's bottom line, and he's coming after the company. So I am curious to hear what you think about whether this lawsuit has merit and what's going to happen with it.

• 2:46Speaker 01

  I think this is incredibly interesting because it's yet another wrinkle where OpenAI still has never gotten past its original sin, let's say, and I wouldn't even call it a sin necessarily because the idea...

• 2:58Alex Kantrowitz?

  Let's call it a sin.

• 2:59Speaker 01

  No, no, but it's technically a...

• 3:00Alex Kantrowitz?

  They did betray the founding mission.

• 3:02Speaker 01

  A founding mission, founding mission sounds better. A public benefit corporation to empower AI to help humanity, whatever else. The whole point of it was to build this outside the, you know, the hands of big technology companies who would only use it for profit, and that's exactly what they did. And we've seen this tension bubble up over and over again. I mean, the Sam Altman firing and rehiring is still one of the weirdest, most amazing corporate things to happen for a company of this value ever, if not recently. And this is, I think, I'm excited to see if Elon Musk's lawsuit is what actually pushes

• 3:46Speaker 01

  this conversation to where it has to resolve itself at some point, because they're still trying to thread the line between what exactly is OpenAI.

• 3:55Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, it was so interesting because like Wall Street Journal took this angle. It said, it sets up a potential courtroom debate over how scared we should be about advances in AI and how soon. And I'm like, that is not what it sets up. I mean, it is, it really sets up an important deconstruction of whether you can start a company as a nonprofit. Mission driven and then turn it as into something for profit. I mean, OpenAI is valued at $80 billion right now. Basically, all these OpenAI employees said they were going to follow Sam Altman to Microsoft or push so hard to get Sam Altman back because they had a lot of money that was tied into this. So it's like, it's become an entirely capitalistic enterprise, which like, no problem with that if that's how you start. But it just isn't

• 4:40Alex Kantrowitz?

  how it start started. And it leads me to believe like, can this be something that can OpenAI be an entity that it continues to exist for a long time in its current state? Like, has it gotten so big that it just cannot persist? Because importantly, and I think this is important to discuss, Elon isn't selling, isn't suing them for money. I mean, he's the richest man in the world. He's not looking for money. What he's looking for is a number of things, which we'll discuss, but basically injunctive relief here that's going to change the way that the company operates.

• 5:12Speaker 01

  And it does need to change. When the Sam Altman got fired, there were these amazing diagrams of how you had, like, you know, a board of directors and then OpenAI, the nonprofit, which wholly owns and controls OpenAI, GPL LLC, which controls a holding company, which owns the employees and investors, which then goes down to OpenAI Global, which is the capped profit company. It's not even a for-profit company. They have a capped profit. The whole thing is such corporate law engineering. I'm not even sure exactly what the word would be here, like, relative to financial engineering, that it needs to clean up its corporate structure, its cap table, what it's allowed to do and what

• 5:54Speaker 01

  it's not allowed to do. But it still hasn't. And I think this lawsuit, hopefully, can push it to. I do agree that the AGI focus in the Wall Street Journal doesn't make sense to me, really. Because, yeah, this is just about the corporate structure. Who is and when will we achieve, who is close to AGI and when will achieve it? I don't know. That's, that's a debate for another time.

• 6:17Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. Well, actually, Musk does include AGI in the lawsuit. He's almost predicated on the fact. He's saying, under OpenAI's new board is not just developing, but is actually refining an AGI. So it's saying it has AGI, artificial general intelligence, human-level artificial intelligence, to maximize profits for Microsoft rather than for the benefit of humanity. So it's almost as if Musk has to argue. That they do have AGI in order to prove his point. But then you look at what he's trying to do. And that's where it gets really interesting. So, you know, yes, part of it is OpenAI needs to clean up its corporate structure. But another part of it is what Musk is asking for. And this is again, from the Journal, in the lawsuit, he asked for an order compelling OpenAI to,

• 7:02Alex Kantrowitz?

  one, make all its research and technology open to the public. And two, for the company and Altman be required to give up all money received as a result of the practices alleged to be unlawful. I mean, basically, he's trying to take a grenade to the thing and restore it to that's original mission, which he chipped in a lot of money for. He obviously left, but I think this is going to be a serious problem for OpenAI.

• 7:28Speaker 01

  I agree, and it is a bit rich when, remember Elon Musk now has X.ai, Twitter has X has Grok, Tesla is an AI company. So there's certainly self-interest here in terms of taking OpenAI out of the equation. But I think between this and you have the SEC this week announced that there is going to be a review of the internal communications at OpenAI around the firing of Sam Altman. I mean, because clearly, any kind of investor in an $80 billion company to have corporate shenanigans of that level, just go back and forth just that informally.

• 8:10Speaker 01

  I think it's important for anyone who's invested in this company to really have it looked at and understand what is going on over there. They put out great products and it looks like with Sora, they might have another huge hit, but the actual organization, there still needs to be a lot of review over how the thing is structured because it doesn't make any sense.

• 8:32Alex Kantrowitz?

  Well, let me ask you this then. I mean, is there a new structure that they can implement that will satisfy Musk? I mean, basically, everybody that I'm hearing right now is saying that like the judge is not going to necessarily transfer, transform the structure of OpenAI. But you could see OpenAI potentially pressed to settle. You can have long discovery that might make it painful for them, that might push them towards Musk's side. What can they do right now? Like, do they need to effectively become a for-profit company and give Musk a stake in that? Is that what we're looking at?

• 9:07Speaker 01

  I mean, maybe, maybe. I was, I was kind of confused when they did go down this road again of really opaque, weird corporate structure, capped for-profit company. They were trying to halfway it between the original mission and a traditional for-profit company. And I don't think any of us have any issue with them being a for-profit company. So just make the full transition. And I think everyone can be happy. And if this forces it, I think that's a good thing.

• 9:36Alex Kantrowitz?

  I mean, I think it might be successful. Like, I saw that and I like initially was like, haha, you know, Elon suing OpenAI. He's had this problem with them forever. But the more you look at this, the more you see that, yes, there was definitely a breach of some of that, that founding agreement. And Musk, importantly, he has resources like a big corporation. And he can see this through. It's not like, you know, one disgruntled executive or a VC suing a company. It's Elon. And he can really cause some damage here if he wants to.

• 10:07Speaker 01

  No, I think he can. And I think OpenAI, OpenAI remains the most fascinating company in tech right now. Because between this organizational structure debate, between the actual business execution side, which they're still doing pretty well on, but to, you know, reach that kind of valuation still presents a lot of challenges. I think Almost from a PR perspective, Sam Altman and the whole, I'm going to raise seven trillion dollars, was it? Whatever trillions it was, these are mistakes. Like, he has gotten to a point, making these kind of statements that present OpenAI itself as a company as

• 10:49Speaker 01

  something different. It presents him as something different, as opposed to this. It moves it so much further away from benevolent company with a great product that's pushing forward AI. I mean, even thinking about, you know, I was listening to the episode you did with the Nvidia head of DevOps CTO. You know, he was talking about how artificial intelligence, traditionally, every big conference, everything was always about the research papers being done. And the release of ChatGPT transformed the way everyone who kind of lived in academia, it transformed the entire conversation into actual products, actual consumer utilization, actual business

• 11:33Speaker 01

  utilization. And that's, it's transformative, what they did. But they still have to kind of go back to that founding mission, or original sin, whatever we're going to call it.

• 11:43Alex Kantrowitz?

  Now, the SEC's entry into this is kind of interesting. I'm kind of like, SEC go away. So first of all, like, their main point is they're looking into whether the company's investors were misled during the boardroom crisis last November, when Sam Altman was fired and reinstated. Like, how could there be any misleading of investors? They didn't say anything. To me, this seems just like the SEC raising its hands and saying, I want to be involved in this as well.

• 12:09Speaker 01

  It's fair that in terms of misleading, no one has any sense that they had their shit together back in the fall when the Sam Altman firing happened. I don't think anyone anywhere is pretending that. Things were hidden because everything seemed to be out in the open to a shocking degree. So that part I have trouble with, but it's still fair. I think it is important. This is one of the most valuable private companies in the world. What exactly happened during that time? What kind of investments are being done under the radar or in conflicted ways? I think that is important to know, actually. Like, you know, when Sam Altman brings up conversations around raising $7 trillion, what is the relationship between

• 12:52Speaker 01

  that and OpenAI? There's enough conflict of interest clearly already in the way things have been set up, the way the investment fund that Sam Altman had already created, and I believe was the sole owner of within OpenAI. I think all of these things, there needs to be more information about exactly how things are structured underneath.

• 13:13Alex Kantrowitz?

  Now, this is also from Axios. They say, "An internal investigation by law firm Wilmer Hale into the crisis is nearing its end." Oh, they cited the New York Times, so credit to the New York Times for that. But that's pretty interesting. Like, I don't know, maybe that will come out and we'll be able to finally learn a little bit more about what went on there. Because it's not over, right? Continuing to roll on.

• 13:33Speaker 01

  That was my favorite part of the New York Times, Axios coverage, that Axios covered, was, of course, the internal investigation by the law firm is nearing its end, and they'll probably find no wrongdoing and all just move on. Like, it's just, again, one of those that internal investigations by the same corporate law firm that is probably, you know, working on all of your financing needs and all of your other corporate law needs is probably not going to get you the truth necessarily.

• 14:03Alex Kantrowitz?

  You never know. All it takes is one lawyer who was on that, who has loose lips or like drops a document. You know, these investigations can turn things up. So maybe OpenAI, in the spirit of being open, will share that report with all of us.

• 14:18Speaker 01

  I'm sure they will. I'm sure they will. Maybe ChatGPT, it will accidentally be fed in and we will be able to access all that information via unsecure.

• 14:28Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right.

• 14:28Speaker 01

  Information.

• 14:29Alex Kantrowitz?

  Did you see that OpenAI is also, they have this lawsuit with the New York Times and they're saying the Times hacked ChatGPT by like writing prompts trying to find their stories. That's what they call a hacking. That's, I think that's exactly what happened.

• 14:41Speaker 01

  Wait, they called it a hacking? Is this, I'm guessing related to the New York Times lawsuit where they recreated and showed that like their, their articles could be created verbatim.

• 14:52Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right.

• 14:52Speaker 01

  But then, yeah, I saw in the original OpenAI response, their claim was that the New York Times created very, very specific prompts to get those, that language replicated.

• 15:03Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right.

• 15:03Speaker 01

  But they're actually, they're suing them over that.

• 15:05Alex Kantrowitz?

  Now they're using the language hack, which is interesting. So.

• 15:09Speaker 01

  I call it, I call it good prompting.

• 15:11Alex Kantrowitz?

  Good prompting. I agree. I'm with you. It's good prompting. You know how we've talked on this show about how Microsoft, so this last part about OpenAI? We've talked on the show about how Microsoft probably has grown a little bit nervous about the structure of OpenAI and is looking to diversify its best, its bets. Well, a very interesting thing happened this week where they actually invested 16.3 million in Mistral AI, which is that Paris-based AI startup that raised a ton of money before it even, you know, got to work on a product just by the caliber of its researchers. But I think people pointed this out and rightly so this week, that Microsoft investing in an OpenAI competitor

• 15:50Alex Kantrowitz?

  is a, is a beginning sign of that company, whether that's building internally or investing externally, trying to wean itself off its dependency of OpenAI. And that is another really important wrinkle to watch as this saga plays out.

• 16:04Speaker 01

  I think Microsoft has very clearly made that decision that they're not betting only on OpenAI. In fact, they're going to diversify. They've recognized that being the platform rather than is, is much more important. And Mistral, I think they've raised. Four hundred fifteen million dollars already. Basically, with twenty two people in seven months, they'd got valued at two billion dollars. Yeah, back in December, they'd gotten up to four hundred fifteen million dollars raised. Like, you know, Microsoft is gonna make sure that all their bases are covered and they're not betting on Sam Altman, given what happened, and I think it's the right move.

• 16:42Alex Kantrowitz?

  Listen, Ranjan, if we add just another twenty people, you know, in six months or so, you and I can probably call ourselves the big technology AI research house. I'm thinking four hundred million coming to us.

• 16:54Speaker 01

  B T A I R.

• 16:57Alex Kantrowitz?

  It's like the Long Island blockchain iced tea company.

• 17:00Speaker 01

  I think the key is twenty two people, though. Once you have twenty two people, you hit that scale, two billion dollar valuation, no question.

• 17:08Alex Kantrowitz?

  All right, when we line up the funding round, we'll make sure to get some listeners involved. So, you know.

• 17:14Speaker 01

  Leave a comment and you're in.

• 17:17Alex Kantrowitz?

  There's a chance, you know. I feel like we have to do like a disclaimer now, but anyway.

• 17:23Speaker 01

  This is not financial advice and you will not be receiving any equity stake in big technology AI research company.

• 17:30Alex Kantrowitz?

  So as I'm going through this week, writing a story about what's happening within Google, you know, Google seemed like the biggest train wreck in the AI world and people were calling for Sundar's job, which we should talk about, but this whole AI, OpenAI thing is just making them look good, right? It's like, wait a second, like, you know, they're not the biggest bonfire right now in the AI industry. Google, that is, like, there's always gonna be these problems with OpenAI. It almost, so like, as I'm hitting send on this story, which I published today on Friday on Big Technology, I'm just like, oh, man, like, is this old news already? But the problems that Google has encountered are not gonna go away either, I guess.

• 18:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think it reminds us, this is still so early and that's good. That's good for us as consumers, that's good for innovation and it's exciting. I still contend, and we've been saying this for months. This is one of the most exciting times in technology for all of us in years. This is true transformation. This is not just getting your food delivered because of zerpy funding. This is, this is for real, but who's gonna win on this? I think there's a lot to say, but Google definitely, we talked about it last week, has had some issues with, uh, with the way Gemini's image creation tool rolled out.

• 18:53Speaker 01

  And Ben Thompson at Stratechery, Strategery, had a very, I know, had a very interesting piece this week about Google's culture and Sundar's leadership and how their ability to ship and move things forward really is affecting the way we're all publicly watching the Gemini rollout. One issue I took with this piece though is, and I think is this idea that he had said, "Google specifically and tech companies broadly have long been sensitive to accusations of bias that has extended to image generation." I think there's a lot of talk right now about how, you know, is Google too woke about this?

• 19:37Speaker 01

  Three, for years, tech companies did not care about accusations of bias. There was, that was nowhere in the conversation. Clearly it's in the conversation right now and they're all working with, you know, very biased models, especially around images. But the idea that companies for years have been walking on eggshells and have been afraid to roll things out, I think is ridiculous. I think it's just a sign that, we talked about this last week. It was bad AI. It was bad programming. It was bad product management. It was not some, you know, organizational, massive, woke issue that caused the failed Gemini rollout.

• 20:16Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, and that's exactly what I found. Like, I was speaking with people within the company and around the company, and it turns out that they basically cobbled together three different divisions, a product team, trust and safety, and this other division that no one talks about called Responsible AI, and basically said, you know, you're responsible for the testing and the rollout of this product. And even people within the trust and safety division of this company aren't sure how the Gemini, which we talked about, how effectively, like, if you asked for any type of people, it would add in the background words asking for, you know, diverse portrayals of these people without removing those words when it comes to places where there certainly should not be diverse portrayals, such as

• 20:58Alex Kantrowitz?

  Nazis, right? And somehow, this got out the door, and it was basically a lack of coordination between these three divisions, and certainly not, you know, a high-level stakeholder overseeing all these things, or a high-level executive overseeing these things. That really led to a lot of these issues. And we're now at a point where Sundar came out and said, to fix this, they're going to start with structural changes, which means it's probably going to be some organizational changes. This sort of chaos is not going to be, you know, tolerated anymore within that company. And they already have, and I just reported this as a mini scoop on Big Technology Day, they're already going to have their trust and safety team doing

• 21:42Alex Kantrowitz?

  weekend shifts this weekend, which rarely happens within Google, trying to test Gemini for adversarial, adversarial testing on certain high priority topics. So basically, they're going to start doing all that testing that they should have done before. And so if this was Google with an agenda, like, I just don't see it because it's like so chaotic at this point, that you're just not really seeing the results that any company with a coherent operation would be looking for. And that's why you're having the structural changes, and that's why you're having this team working weekends.

• 22:17Speaker 01

  Well, not to get too Elon Musk here, but I mean, the idea that working weekends has to be a kind of organizational shift when you have just released one of the biggest products that will define the future of your company. I think people, especially the trust and safety team, should have been working weekends beforehand. So I'm glad they are now. But I think I completely agree in the way you outlined it, you know, three different teams, lack of coordination. Because I actually take the case of Adobe, the way they have approached specifically image generation and to do it without with training only on uncopyrighted images, stock images they own, bringing in like outside photographers to

• 22:58Speaker 01

  shoot images specifically for the training of the model. They have trained this and understood it in a, you know, organizationally cohesive way at the foundational layer of the model. Whereas Google, it was so clear that this and this came out that it was just, you know, a pending a prompt that you already enter to say, like, make this image diverse, which is the clumsiest thing you can do. These are things that have to be done where everyone is on board and it starts from the beginning of how you actually build these kind of technologies. And Adobe has shown you can do it. It's at scale and it's okay.

• 23:36Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. So, okay, but we've kind of skirted around the main question here, which is that, yes, we're early on. And yes, there's a lot of room to adapt. But given the potential and given how important this is, you really have to be sure that you have the right leader in place when you're embarking on this journey. So I'm curious, from your perspective, has Sundar Pichai done enough, the CEO of Google, CEO of Alphabet, has he done enough to show you that he's the right person? I mean, yes, he's not behind some kind of wild conspiracy to make the Nazis woke. But he's also been the person who's presided over these, this organizational mess, this slow rollout, and allowed companies like Nvidia, like OpenAI to take the momentum from it.

• 24:20Speaker 01

  Well, see, this is where I have like a difficult time because on these public facing flubs, Sundar is not having a good run. He's like, certainly, they're not winning the PR war right now. But on the other side, again, the stock was up 60% last year. So it's very hard to fire a CEO who's shown strong performance. But then also, two things in the last week, actually, a week and a half, that I think are really interesting relative to this. While they're fighting the PR war about woke image generation, they just raised the price of Google Workspace per user by 20%.

• 25:00Speaker 01

  I mean, when you talk about pricing power, that is incredible. And I mean, as a user of Google Workspace, I'm not going anywhere. I'm guessing most people who are set up on Google Workspace are not going anywhere either. You're not, and if you are, you're going over to Teams and that they have pricing power as well. So at the core business, they are still very strong. They have incredible pricing power. They're still going to be able to churn out money. So even if they're making these mistakes, I think, like, at the core, Google is still strong. But the other, I'll admit, and I feel like every week is a back and forth with our relationship with our love for Sundar. Gemini in Workspace has been rolled out now,

• 25:44Speaker 01

  and I've been using it more within Gmail, within Sheets, within Slides, like summarizing things, and it's pretty good. It's not great. There's a lot of work to do. But I actually think it's starting to show what can be done in terms of like having this built in tool, having Gemini directly integrated into the, all the tools you already use, and then getting the value and then not needing to go out to ChatGPT, being able to generate slide ideas or document text directly in the app that you are already spending all your time in. That's always been where they're going to win or lose, not in these consumer facing products. And I think they finally are showing, and they just released this, that they have a shot.

• 26:30Alex Kantrowitz?

  Let me give you like the case that I, because I go back and forth my mind on this a lot. The case for Sundar, and I'll give you the case for and a case against. The case for Sundar is yes, they just hit their all time highs in the stock market in January. So it's extremely rare to be talking about whether a CEO's job is safe when it's five weeks after the company hit an all time high in the market. Like, that is a big part of what they're judged on. They also do have an AI research house that has effectively thrived under Sundar, Google DeepMind, which is now combined, working together on products. And, and they're building and they're shipping. And Gemini 1.5 is, is pretty impressive from all, all the looks of it.

• 27:11Alex Kantrowitz?

  And it looks like, okay, this is a serious, this is a serious competitor here. So that's the argument for, like, why would you remove the guy? The argument against is this, don't tell me about all time highs. Because we're talking about a moment where there's like opportunities for historic generation of market cap. You look at Nvidia, which rode this wave based off the transformer model, which Google developed. And of course, Google's not a hardware company, but Nvidia built the software as well. Wasn't shy about it, recognized it immediately enacted on it. And they've added almost $2 trillion to their market cap. You look at Microsoft, right? Now, because they've handled this the right way, the most valuable company in the world.

• 27:53Alex Kantrowitz?

  If Google were to have handled this well from the start, released the consumer product first, not had all these debacles, been organizationally competent, Google today would be the most valuable company in the world, without a doubt. The inventor of this, the, the implementer of it, and they would have the, everything internally making it happen. And OpenAI and Microsoft would be looking like they were catching up with all these organizational issues. So you put that all together and you say, damn, like, that is, that is a very hard record to defend.

• 28:26Speaker 01

  I think your against case is stronger than the for case and might have just pushed me over. I feel we need like a dial every week of how our love for Sundar and whether where it is.

• 28:38Alex Kantrowitz?

  Love is a strong word, Rajan.

• 28:40Speaker 01

  All right. For me, for me, it's love. It's love. I'm rooting for him. I'm rooting for you, Sundar. But your case against was pretty strong right there. And, okay, that's fair. I agree. That what could it, this is the one of the few times normally, I will never try to, you know, say what was the missed opportunity around market cap when your stock is already up a lot. But that's, that's a very fair point that right now, this is one of those moments that all of that growth, you should have had a much bigger part of.

• 29:13Alex Kantrowitz?

  This might be wrong, but I'm going to throw it out anyway. I think that there's almost like a low floor to replace him. Like, if you replace Sundar with a terrible leader, Google can only drop so much because search will continue to be a cash cow.

• 29:25Speaker 01

  Who do you replace him with?

• 29:27Alex Kantrowitz?

  I have no idea. That's where the discussion stops for me. I have no idea who you would.

• 29:31Speaker 01

  Sheryl Sandberg, from out of, from, from out of nowhere, coming in. That's the move. Sheryl Sandberg to Google.

• 29:39Alex Kantrowitz?

  She's already going to be running business at Snapchat. We can't hire her out to every company.

• 29:43Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, yeah, you're right. You're right. She's got to go to Snap. Okay.

• 29:46Alex Kantrowitz?

  All right.

• 29:47Speaker 01

  Yeah. Cancel Sandberg to Google. She's going to Snap still.

• 29:50Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. And so for me, that's the against case. If you're going to hold an against case. This, this stuff that people are talking about, the culture war stuff, just doesn't hold muster for me. Like Ben Thompson, these are his words, and I like Ben's work. He said, "Google's power and its potential to help them execute..." Okay. I'm just going to read from the start. "The point of the company ought not to be to tell users what to think, but to help them make important decisions. That means first and foremost, exercising the company of employees attracted to Google's power and its potential to help them execute their political program and return decision making to those who actually want to make a good product. That by extension must mean removing those who let the former

• 30:34Alex Kantrowitz?

  run amok up to and including CEO Sundar Pichai."

• 30:39Alex Kantrowitz?

  I don't know. That's not to me. That isn't like the the reason why to do it. I don't think that this Google is like a woke product factory, even though a lot of their products end up trending that way. Like to me, if anything, it's yeah, it's clumsiness and sloppiness more than anything else. No, it doesn't mean to say that Google doesn't have a point of view. Like clearly they do, right? They didn't like apologize wholesale for what their Gemini thing was doing just for the instances where, you know, they should have not drawn people in diverse settings. But I don't think that's holding back the product. Honestly, I mean, I think every company is doing this. We know that AI has bias if left alone, like trying to counteract that is industry standard.

• 31:19Speaker 01

  Yep, no, I agree.

• 31:21Alex Kantrowitz?

  So we'll see. I mean, I'll tell you this this much. I've never heard more chatter about a CEO's job. And I've been contributing regularly to CNBC since 2020. So almost four years I had never been asked about a big tech CEO's job or any CEO's job until I was asked about it a Monday regarding Sundar Pichai. So we'll see. It's one of those things where like I could definitely see them continue to have patience and continue to work on this. But also like I wouldn't be stunned if one day we like wake up and and he's out and like Larry Page is back, for instance, as an interim CEO.

• 31:54Speaker 01

  Okay, that could be the move. That would be the logical move, I think. It would have to be at that scale and that you could see everyone getting behind something like that and supporting it if he's if he's ready for the challenge.

• 32:08Alex Kantrowitz?

  So speaking of Google, like it's very interesting, like the directions that they're they're taking this stuff, right? So there was another story this week in Adweek, talking about how Google's paying publisher to test an unreleased generative AI platform. And I'll just summarize. Basically, that's a it's a platform that a lot that helps publishers aggregate other stories or aggregate other information and turn it into new stories. And Google is paying these publishers like five figures a year to test it. And to me, like, this was even more damning than the Gemini thing. Because I'm just like, is this really like the web that you want to build if you're Google? Just filling it with websites where publishers use generative AI tools to build crappy stories

• 32:49Alex Kantrowitz?

  based off of other publications work? That to me seemed kind of crazy.

• 32:54Speaker 01

  Well, I this was really interesting to me because the whole what is the future of the web is a discussion that I think I I've thought about it a lot around, you know, Like what does an article look like? What kind of information should live in a webpage format that's just going to get ingested into a LLM and then presented on a perplexity or Gemini or ChatGPT? And I think it's going to fundamentally change the web and it and I think it should because I think SEO-driven writing webpages, publishing has ruined the web in a way. And I think we all know the recipe sites as like with the incredibly

• 33:34Speaker 01

  long intros is kind of the poster child of this or just incredibly spammy sites overall. So I think that conversation around how is the web going to change with generative AI is an important one. But Google of all companies, it shocks me that they're going to do it because they are the ones who built that web, created the incentives that built that web and are the ones with the most to lose if the web does fundamentally change. So on one side, maybe this is another sign of siloed organizational initiatives where no one, some random journalistic-focused group within Google launched this, or maybe the bull case for it is they've recognized

• 34:17Speaker 01

  that the web is changing, so they're going to drive that change even though it's going to fundamentally disrupt their own monopolistic business. Do you give them that courage, Alex?

• 34:27Alex Kantrowitz?

  That's interesting. Or maybe they're like, yeah, this is gonna, um, this is gonna happen anyway. Let's help steer it and make sure that it happens in a way that's.

• 34:35Speaker 01

  No, but do you think they, do you think they're actually playing that game? And which is a courageous one. And we've talked about which are the companies that kind of drive their own disruption in order to get to where things are going. Do you think Google's going to do it?

• 34:49Alex Kantrowitz?

  No, I don't think so. I just don't think they have enough foresight there or guts.

• 34:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, I agree on that one, too. A lot of agreement when it comes to Google. But Apple, though.

• 35:02Alex Kantrowitz?

  Oh, you want to go into Apple Car? Are we going to debate this Apple Car?

• 35:06Speaker 01

  I think we got to go into Apple Car. This was big news here.

• 35:10Alex Kantrowitz?

  Oh, we also have that that Microsoft tried to sell Bing to Apple. Okay, let's do the Apple Car and then maybe we'll come back to this Bing story. So the Apple Car is dead. Rest in peace, Apple Car. You are a disaster. Many, many years of development within Apple. $10 billion of investment, according to reports. Does it seems like dozens, but it's definitely multiple executives driving the division. The entire idea for Apple building the Apple Car was the company is great at matching world-class hardware and world-class software. Like, the phone is like the essential example of that. The iPhone, you have the world-class phone and then you have the world-class operating system.

• 35:52Alex Kantrowitz?

  They work so well together and that's why it's like the leading phone in the world. With a car, it's the same thing. Car is hardware and then inside the car is going to be software. Whether that's the dash and all the controls that you have or the autonomous driving software. And Apple believed that it was able to match these two perfectly and it was going to work. And so this is like the big question. So obviously it fell apart. And this is like the big debate that's happened this week is, is it a good thing that Apple gave up on this project and decided to focus on other things, AKA generative AI? Or is it an indictment of the company's culture? And I'll just go, I'll just share my perspective quickly. I've reported on this. I think it's an indictment of the company's culture.

• 36:35Alex Kantrowitz?

  They just could not get the people together to build this product and do it in a way that that worked within Apple's very siloed culture and design-led culture. And I'll just give one example and then I'll turn it over to you, Rajan. Okay. What this company did was they took sensors and they buried it in the car, right? Because the car would look better if those sensors were deeper in as opposed to like the typical, you know, self-driving car, which looks like, you know, a submarine with all those big sensors on top. The car looked great, but the sensors didn't work because the field of view was limited because they were inside the car and they just couldn't get the data they needed to do self-driving. This is seriously, someone who worked on this project told me this when

• 37:17Alex Kantrowitz?

  I was reporting out always, always day one. So I'm curious what you, so, so to me, it's definitely a culture thing and a broader sign of Apple's inability to really get into new product areas. And this is huge because automotive, if you think about where you grow as a $3 trillion company that makes hardware and software products together, automotive is a natural fit. And now that door is closed off on, on it. So I think this is, this is a very damning end to a very damning chapter of Apple and sort of caps what the company can be in the future.

• 37:46Speaker 01

  So I disagree that it's an indictment on their culture. I actually think it's almost a testament to the fact that they're willing to cut it now. They've seen where the market's going. Electric vehicles overall are not going to be a high margin product. The competition from, you know, BYD, especially even the value of the average Tesla has decreased 50% in the last year. Like EVs originally were more of a premium luxury product and now they're not. Could Apple do that? Like with their own car, they certainly could, but is it worth them doing that? And how big would that market be? Again, everyone in the, not in the world, but a large percentage of people in the world will be willing to pay $800,

• 38:30Speaker 01

  then $1,000, then 1,200, then 1,400 for a phone. The amount of people that will pay 100,000, 125,000, 150,000 for a car, it's a lot more limited. Another thing I thought that was interesting was the idea that Apple, within these R and D efforts, still has built a lot of technology that will be used in other ways. Even for the Vision Pro, I'd read that a lot of the way Apple was thinking about the windshield of the car translated into the Vision Pro. So you saw that there are secondary benefits. And then also from a software perspective, I mean, I use Apple CarPlay and it's far superior to any other

• 39:11Speaker 01

  thing I've ever seen in any kind of car. Like they're in the majority of vehicles or not majority, a large number of vehicles right now. Their software is ubiquitous in cars already. So why build your own car? And then the last point that I thought was interesting was Gross margin, Apple's at an all time high gross profit margin at forty five percent. You are not going to achieve that with electric cars unless you're selling at such an expensive level that the total addressable market is tiny. So, Apple, if they're to release this, almost by definition would have to reduce their high profit margins. So, at every level, it made sense, I think, to actually not continue chasing this.

• 39:55Speaker 01

  And there are a lot of companies that might have kept going, but they, they, they stopped.

• 40:00Alex Kantrowitz?

  So, I think that this is revisionist history. Because if you think about the way that Apple, I mean, if you think about what you just said, all of this is logical after the fact. But the fact is, the company spent ten billion dollars and couldn't do it. And I think, yes, can we applaud the fact that it realized it couldn't do it and decided to stop, for sure? But isn't it a problem that it couldn't do it?

• 40:22Speaker 01

  No, they, they could do it. They could have released a car. That's going back to, I think, the testament to their culture is

• 40:28Alex Kantrowitz?

  But they didn't.

• 40:29Speaker 01

  They didn't release a car. Exactly. They could have released something that was not Apple, that was not

• 40:35Alex Kantrowitz?

  But they couldn't make, that's what I'm saying, though. They couldn't make the Apple car.

• 40:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, and, and maybe it can't be done in the context, or it shouldn't, not that it can't be done, that it shouldn't be done, given all the constraints I'd mentioned earlier. Profit margin, competition, technological limitations. I think like, I think the fact that they did not release some half-baked car that did not live up to the standards that they tried to put throughout all their products, serious side. I think, I think it's, it's a good sign that they're still operating in a somewhat disciplined way.

• 41:11Alex Kantrowitz?

  But my point is, like, why couldn't they make that product that they aspired to? It's not that it was physically impossible, it's that they struggled to do it.

• 41:18Speaker 01

  I mean, I think, okay, the the question of the like, design limitations around the mistakes around how sensors can work and whether it would fit into their aesthetic. I actually don't think that's necessarily a bad thing to be so driven by their aesthetic because that's what's made the rest of their products so successful. It's at the core of what they do and their entire offering and brand. So to sacrifice on the aesthetic to make the sensors work, maybe they shouldn't.

• 41:45Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay.

• 41:46Speaker 01

  I don't think that's necessarily the wrong decision there, or it makes them look foolish.

• 41:51Alex Kantrowitz?

  No, that's that's fair. But let me ask you this, as my last follow up to this, all right? Apple's had, is gonna experience revenue declines five of six quarters, right? Like, four in a row last year, then they bumped one, but they'll be down this quarter for sure. You know, it seems like a lot of their ancillary products are really struggling to find persistent growth. The phone is doing well, but you know, there's definitely risk there, and China in particular. So if you're Apple, don't you need to find the growth somewhere? Wasn't this the place?

• 42:23Speaker 01

  Well, certainly the Vision Pro is one of the big bets, but I still think there's a lot of opportunity around strengthening the ecosystem. And then there was reporting that a lot of these employees would be moving over to generative AI. And I genuinely believe if you get Siri just baseline, I know I love bashing on Siri, but I cannot say it enough, my my poor wife almost wants to, how much she complains because I refitted our house with HomePods and how bad Siri is. If you just get your generative AI abilities, even at the level of a Google or a Microsoft

• 43:04Speaker 01

  or whoever else, it superpowers every single device that we're all living in their ecosystem already. So I think there's still a huge opportunity across the entire business with generative AI that they have barely scratched the surface on. So moving employees over there, at least they're making the right decision.

• 43:23Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, I think that is interesting, and it will be, it'll be fascinating. If you think about how much Google didn't want the reputational hit for letting generative AI stuff run wild, I mean, geez, like, Apple, who is like the most reputation conscious company in the world like that, is going to be really interesting to see what exactly they do.

• 43:40Speaker 01

  Oh, but you had actually, I think, made the point to me when we were texting this week on Apple that in terms of reputational risk, electric cars, especially at this stage, especially if you're trying to move into self-driving, have a huge risk because there will be deaths. And the last company that wants to deal with that is Apple.

• 44:00Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay, yep, you got me because like someone that was

• 44:03Speaker 01

  That was your argument.

• 44:04Alex Kantrowitz?

  That was, well, I just put it in there as a discussion point, but way to turn it on against me. But basically, what I said was, I saw a tweet that said, you know, I think at some point, Apple is the most reputation conscious company in the world. Them working on a product that kills 40,000 people in the US alone every year doesn't seem like the right mix. Like, could you imagine, just, I mean, just for the sake of argument, right? And this, obviously, well, anyway, it's disastrous, but like an Apple car with like the blood of a pedestrian on it after like autonomously just murdered someone.

• 44:36Speaker 01

  Well, thank you for providing me the ammunition against your own argument.

• 44:40Alex Kantrowitz?

  I know. I'm not putting my counter arguments in the doc anymore. Nuance is dead on this show. I'm done with it.

• 44:46Speaker 01

  It's just, it's, yeah, win or lose. That's how it works.

• 44:49Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay, well, I'll take the L on this one. And it is interesting that, that, given this move to generative AI, that Apple, there was a story that, that Apple held exploratory talks with Microsoft about acquiring Bing as recently as 2020, and basically said it wasn't good enough. Yeah, this is from the Google saying this, in each, in the lawsuit that they're having. In each instance, Apple took a hard look at the relative quality of Bing versus Google and concluded that Google was superior, the superior default choice for its Safari users. That is competition. Okay, no mention the fact that they spent billions of dollars remaining the default. But just imagine what would have happened if Apple would have acquired Bing. Do you think we'd be having this different conversation

• 45:32Alex Kantrowitz?

  here? I mean, that, that serious, serious growth could come out of there if they worked on that, put AI in and made it the default.

• 45:39Speaker 01

  I wonder, that's an interesting point because I wonder, first of all, would Microsoft have gone after OpenAI, OpenAI as strongly if they didn't see a potential corollary to search because they had already offloaded Bing? Could be an interesting parallel history. And then in terms, yeah, in terms, I think that, that, the world would have been a different one if. Apple had bought Bing, or Bing would have just been so bad that we stopped using iPhones, perhaps, and then once it became the default.

• 46:10Alex Kantrowitz?

  Would have been great Pandora, what is Trojan horse for Google to get Apple to buy Bing and just make Android the winner?

• 46:18Speaker 01

  That would have been.

• 46:18Alex Kantrowitz?

  This is what I'm talking about, trillions of dollars of potential market capital Sundar could have captured if he would have been able to execute these simple strategies effectively.

• 46:25Speaker 01

  Simple strategies, that's it.

• 46:29Alex Kantrowitz?

  Why don't we, let's take a break. We have, we have more to talk about, including this top Amazon aggregator, Thrasio filing for bankruptcy. And then of course, our fun story of the week, AI Willy Wonka and the crackhead experience that people had out in Glasgow. All right, 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

• 47:12Alex Kantrowitz?

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• 47:53Alex Kantrowitz?

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• 48:36Alex Kantrowitz?

  Learn how to stop online threats before they become real world attacks. The link's in the show notes.

• 48:45Alex Kantrowitz?

  And we're back here on Big Technology Podcast Friday Edition, breaking down the week's news. There was a very interesting bankruptcy filing, Ron, John, that you pointed out that this top Amazon aggregator, Thrasio, which was this COVID darling filed for bankruptcy this week. So tell us a little bit about what happened and what the implications are there.

• 49:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, I feel we need to start naming this as a recurring segment because these are my favorite stories. The stories of the COVID darlings that perfectly captured a story of 2020, 2021, raised a ton of money and basically week to week, month to month, we see another one of these flame out. Because we're just hitting that point, the cash is running out, the debt financing is being unable to be managed. So Thrasio was an Amazon aggregator and the story circa 2020, 2021 was so beautiful. It was the idea that you have all these individual brands, 1 million, 5 million in sales, 10 million in sales on Amazon. So what if you were to just roll them up and then with operational efficiencies and leverage with Amazon,

• 49:47Speaker 01

  be able to get better deals on marketing and fulfillment and understand how to market products and cross-sell them all across the way you operate, that it actually made, in theory, perfect sense. Of course, what happened is Thrasio raised $3.4 billion. Most of that is debt, not equity, so it might sound like a much higher number, but raised an incredible amount of debt to finance these purchases and just declared bankruptcy, saying that they're going to shave $495 million off of the debt load and creditors are going to actually have to commit some fresh capital, $90 million, to keep this thing running at all.

• 50:27Speaker 01

  Basically, it's yet another, like, you know, you have the Peloton stocks in the world. You have all, you know, all the high flyers from the COVID era. And this is another area, Amazon aggregators and these ideas of portfolio roll up e-commerce companies being the future that just did not pan out.

• 50:47Alex Kantrowitz?

  So do you think that there's anything that Amazon could have done differently? Like, this seems like it would be effectively good for the Amazon ecosystem. You think there's anything Amazon could have done differently to allow these type of businesses to thrive? Or was it simply just another one of the COVID fever dreams that was just destined to fail no matter what?

• 51:05Speaker 01

  I think it was both a COVID fever dream, but also I agree that I think Amazon itself has made decisions around, especially over the past number of years, to move more towards third-party Chinese suppliers that are selling cheaper products. And anyone who's shopped on Amazon knows, like, moving away from general quality towards just what can I buy quickly and cheaply has become more of the core offering. And that's why the Sheins and Timus of the world, in addition to COVID-era fever dream from a financing perspective, now you have on the lower end incredible amounts of competition that weren't there four years ago.

• 51:47Speaker 01

  So I think at every level, this model, it should have been good for Amazon. It should have been good for the company. Again, in theory, in a business school case study, you can easily see how you could argue that let's roll these up, finance it properly, get marketing efficiencies, get logistics efficiencies, but it didn't work. And I think we'll see more of these still coming along the way. I think Hop In, the events company, recently declared bankruptcy. I don't know if Clubhouse is still around, but I always love these because it brings me back to those, the crazy days of these stories and just watching, watching pure mania take place.

• 52:27Alex Kantrowitz?

  I mean, one big picture question for you is how did so many companies and smart people get taken during these COVID moments? Like, obviously, we were not gonna be on Zoom forever. We were not gonna be Peloton-ing forever. But yet, there was such, and this Therasio example is another example of it, right? Like, there was, there was such enthusiasm for people putting money on, within companies, effectively with the belief that COVID-era conditions were gonna last forever.

• 52:57Speaker 01

  I think, but I don't, it's a tough one because on one side you can argue how were smart people taken, but on the other, it was at the moment still the rationally correct thing to do. And a lot of people made a lot of money and to do something different limited the amount of potential gains you would have. So I think it actually was economically rational at the moment. And especially, I think that's why even more so, you have all the stories of people who did take money out in secondary sales smartly at the time to the loss of the majority of investors. But I think it's tough to say taken. I think it made sense if you were just looking at a quick flip. Obviously, building a long-term

• 53:41Speaker 01

  business is a whole other thing, but it certainly made economic sense.

• 53:46Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. And now it's just like, now it's the hangover.

• 53:49Speaker 01

  Yep. Now, and it's going to continue. And I'm sure we're going to have more of these stories along the way, just to remind us of those days we were on Clubhouse and

• 53:57Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yes. I'm glad that's over for multiple reasons. So speaking of hangovers, a lot of kids in Scotland are hungover from all the candy they ate at this absurd AI, almost AI-generated Willy Wonka festival. So it was an experiential thing. And the reason why, so just to set the stage, there was this Willy Wonka exhibition in Scotland where you could take your kids effectively and walk over the chocolate river and go through chocolate rainbows and get a chance to meet Willy Wonka himself. And it, once you got in, it was true fire festival level stuff. It had, you know, printouts of backgrounds

• 54:40Alex Kantrowitz?

  that you were supposed to take a picture with along the wall, black curtains everywhere. The scripts were terrible. And it even came up with this actor that seemed like it was completely AI-generated called The Unknown, which was effectively this guy in a black parka and mask who would peer out from behind a window, a window and like scare kids. And like, there's this great scene on TikTok where Willy Wonka says, and now the unknown. And the unknown comes out and goes, and you hear all these kids go, no.

• 55:15Speaker 01

  I think this is, okay, the question, this is a topic that's going to come up over and over again in the next year, few years, because AI has become so accessible, there's going to be so much bad content that is created. And I still am a firm believer that AI is a tool, and you can either, if you create bad content, it's not that the AI is bad, it's you're using AI badly. And I think this was a perfect case. If you even look, the invitation images on the event are the most like, when we talk about AI does hands badly, eight fingers, Willy Wonka's

• 55:58Speaker 01

  eyes are kind of curved in weird ways. It's the most odd looking dystopian, clearly AI-generated thing. And this is like the AI, using AI badly come to life. You can argue Gemini, woke Gemini, was Google executing on generative AI badly. This was just using AI badly, and these poor kids having to go to this. Though maybe, maybe they actually enjoyed it in the end because it was just so ridiculous.

• 56:30Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, so there's, there are amazing things that that came out of this. So first of all, the actor spoke to The Hollywood Reporter, Willy Wonka actor at Glasgow Fiasco speaks out. The script was AI gibberish. And Willy Wonka actus of a UK immersive experience says the script was 15 pages of AI-generated gibberish, and there wasn't even any chocolate at the event described into chaos. Okay, he goes, the bit that got me was where I had to say, this is the man, we don't know his name. We know him as the unknown. The unknown is an evil chocolate maker who lives in the walls. It was terrifying for the kids. Is he an evil man who makes chocolate, or is the chocolate itself evil? Okay. The, the thing that's come out of

• 57:15Alex Kantrowitz?

  this is, let's see, Rolling Stone has made a

• 57:21Alex Kantrowitz?

  A has written an article in support of the unknown. So it goes, justice for the unknown, the Roald Dahl character that wasn't. And they say that the unknown is a fascinating extraction of Dolly and horror by a piece of software trying to process his writing. So effectively, here, I'll just read it. Dahl had a knack for malevolent presences. No doubt he would have written a creature more richly imagined and logically consistent than the unknown, had he ever suffered the indignity of translating Wonka's chocolate factory into a pop-up theme park. Still, an AI had to generate a new interactive scenario based on existing Wonka lore, complete with a threatening element for drama. And there's

• 58:03Alex Kantrowitz?

  something to be said for its crummy solution, The Ghost in the Machine. It's a doomed attempt to grasp Dahl's darkest impulses and abject failure of imitative art and all the funnier, all the funnier for those very reasons. It ties the whole occasion together. You've got to hand it to the unknown. The concept sticks with you. I mean, I like that, right? It's kind of like the AI has processed Dahl's writing, decided to make a theme park, and basically hallucinated a character that kind of makes sense in Dahl's universe. So after some long consideration, I'm on team unknown.

• 58:35Speaker 01

  I think I'm pro T, pro unknown as well on team unknown. I saw him and it's so ridiculous when he pops out and kids are just kind of looking at him. It is kind of amazing. But, but in terms of Rolling Stone had another piece, this is one I thought was really interesting. So the guy who organizes this, who organized this event, this is not his first run-in with generative AI. He actually has an Amazon page where he has 16 books published, and many of them were published on the same day. And the author, the journalists had gone in and looked at some of them, and they're just, again, clearly bad generative AI. So using generative AI to spout out bad content, at first he did it with books, sold them on

• 59:19Speaker 01

  Amazon. And of course, there's a lot of vaccine conspiracy, QAnon-y type stuff, themes running throughout all these books. And, you know, this is a new type of huckster in, in today's market right now. And it'll be interesting to see, this is far from pig butchering, I would say, in terms of like, new age scams, but it's, these are going to increase in frequency, I'm sure.

• 59:46Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, it is fascinating. I mean, it's basically like you could effectively go to chat GPT and say spit out a Monka theme park, where do I put everything, you know, use your multimodal AI to draw me a diagram of what should happen and then write me scripts and it could do it. And next thing you know, you have the unknown. So who says, go ahead.

• 1:00:06Speaker 01

  Did you see Kara Swisher released her book?

• 1:00:10Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:10Speaker 01

  And then there's been a flood of Kara Swisher biographies that are AI-generated on Amazon. So basically, big author releases a new book and then people start creating generative AI-driven biographies or something related to that search, knowing people will be going for that search, just to confuse them and try to sell a similar book. That's why there's going to be a flood of this stuff now.

• 1:00:34Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, it's crazy. And to me, I'm just like, wow, a tech autobiography generates enough interest that people are like going and putting chat GPT-driven copies on there. God, we are, we're covering the right industry. Yeah, exactly.

• 1:00:49Speaker 01

  People make big technology fake podcasts soon.

• 1:00:52Alex Kantrowitz?

  Oh, that exists. There is a fake one. Seriously. No, this is the real one for those listening. This is the real one. But there is a fake big technology podcast out there.

• 1:01:01Speaker 01

  Wait, really?

• 1:01:01Alex Kantrowitz?

  For real. Yeah.

• 1:01:02Speaker 01

  All right.

• 1:01:03Alex Kantrowitz?

  But I think, I don't know, I think it's kind of leveled off or something, but it happens all the time. Where people will rip off content and stuff like that. Yeah, yeah, this is definitely is ego boost for me every time I see it. I'm like, you're doing something right, man, doing something right. Well, in praise of the unknown and different things that AI generates that may haunt us or scare us, but also might delight us. I want to say thanks, everybody for listening. It's been a great week spending time with you as always. Thank you for being here, Ron, John, and thanks to all you, the listeners.

• 1:01:38Speaker 01

  Have a good weekend.

• 1:01:39Alex Kantrowitz?

  Have a good weekend, everybody. Oh, on Wednesday, Ryan Peterson, the CEO of Flexport is going to come on to talk a little bit about, speaking of competition with Amazon, whether his logistics company and Shopify are competing with Amazon, and an update on how the Houthis are changing the supply chain. It might be, might be worth tuning in. So we'll see there on Wednesday. Otherwise, Ron and I will be back on Friday for another show breaking down the news. And we'll see you next time on Big Technology Podcast.

• 1:02:09Speaker 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, theHouseMajorityPact.com. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee.