Emails From Elon, AI Revenue Questions, Chatbot Boyfriends

Ranjan Roy from Margins is back for our weekly discussion of the latest tech news. We cover 1) Ranjan's visit to India and his use of Perplexity to gain cultural understanding and context 2) AI news' reliability 3) How social media drives the college protest 4) The need to elevate the reasonable voice 5) Elon Musk email Alex with details about X's AI news play 6) Could X's AI news plan work? 7) X warming to news? 8) AI monetization challenges 9) Risking the trough of disillusionment in AI 10) Apple earnings and the iPhone sales decline 11) A weird choose your own adventure with Claude 12) WSJ reporter turns ChatGPT into her boyfriend 13) Can relationships with AI be meaninful? ---- 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/ Want a discount for Big Technology on Substack? 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?

  Elon Musk emails with details about his AI news plan. Is anyone making money from generative AI? And are all AI engineers totally burned out? Is the rabbit actually just an Android app? And finally, is it okay to fall in love with ChatGPT? 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

• 0:42Alex Kantrowitz?

  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 Razor were able to cut their inference cost by 15 times. Visit akash.network slash Alex for free consultation. That's akash.network slash Alex for free consultation. Welcome to Big Technology Podcast Friday Edition, where we break down the news in

• 1:26Alex Kantrowitz?

  our traditional cool headed and nuanced format. We have an exciting week of news to break down, talking about everything from plan for AI news at X, how that might position X against threads, along with AI monetization, AI love, plenty more. And it's great news for me and everybody else that Ranjan Roy has returned from a trip to India and is here with us once again for our Friday show. Ranjan, welcome back.

• 1:53Speaker 01

  I'm back and I just had my first, I don't want to say generative AI powered vacation, but uh, first time I pulled out perplexity and ChatGPT on my phone throughout the entire trip.

• 2:07Alex Kantrowitz?

  All right. Now, now, first of all, I'm going to say, I missed you, and I'm sure all of our listeners missed you. So it's good to have you back in the saddle. But that being said, it was a productive trip. And so I'd love to hear a little bit about how perplexity helped you and your travels.

• 2:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, so, so I went to India almost every summer, every other summer growing up. The last time I was actually there was 2013. And so it's been a little over a decade. And this time, I think the first thing that I love is now anyone who travels internationally. I have T-Mobile, their international data plans mean you can at least get relatively low-speed data for free. So you can actually have your phone. And if anyone remembers the old days of getting charged insane amounts of money for data while traveling. So I have my phone everywhere. India, for anyone who's visited, can be a very overwhelming, complex place to navigate and visit.

• 3:06Speaker 01

  So first, to just have my phone and be able to ask very clearly, where do I need to go to actually? If to be able to call an Uber was felt revolutionary to, you know, be able to navigate around was very nice. But then, right now, the Indian elections are happening. And so the Indian elections, unlike our, you know, one-day affair that's coming up in November, last for six weeks. And it was a constant, you know, topic of conversation among relatives and friends who live there. And I remember the last time I was actually there was also an election time in 2013. It was the first time, I think, Modi got elected. So this time, any question that was happening, that whole idea of having a co-pilot with you actually happened.

• 3:51Speaker 01

  And it was kind of amazing because it's a parliamentary democracy. There's all these different weird nuances around when different provinces vote. There's 543 members and then when. How the prime minister actually gets appointed, when they get appointed, who's running their histories? And literally, I would have perplexity open on my phone as I was in these conversations and ask, like, I was just looking through, what is the history of Rahul Gandhi, the chief opponent? What are his chances? How does the actual, you know, election work? What's the timeline on it? And it actually just kind of seamlessly flowed into conversation. And I felt like a smarter person. I don't know, that that whole idea of that co-pilot

• 4:34Speaker 01

  element, actually, this was the first time it came to life in just a normal setting versus, you know, just some work thing or us talking here.

• 4:44Alex Kantrowitz?

  This all sounds pretty cool. And yet, the entire time you're talking, I'm thinking, okay, you're using it to inform yourself about political conversations and everything else. How was the hallucination issue? Do you felt, did you feel it was grounded well enough in fact that it was trustable?

• 4:58Speaker 01

  I mean, this, this is actually where, for these types of questions, you know, we've talked a lot about hallucinations and what are the different risks? It's one of those where the asking direct historical information, that's almost kind of Wikipedia style, is probably the most likely to get a good result. And at least from what I understood, and I was never called out as being completely stupid or wrong. So I think from a, from a hallucination standpoint, I think it was mostly correct and good. But it's also one of those where I think these are the kind of low grade, you're just having a conversation, you want to get some general information. These are the perfect use cases for generative AI versus

• 5:41Speaker 01

  you need to get the absolutely life or death right answer. And, you know, if you don't get the perfect information, it's a problem.

• 5:50Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, these things still do hallucinate so much. And I guess this is going to be better over time, especially as we get into these newer models. Like, there's a lot of talk about GPT-5 now. But yeah, I mean, I think it's fun. It's fun and a conversation, and it's cool that it was that effective. And I also wonder, like, what if you're a voter making up your mind and you're searching these things? It's like, people will definitely be doing that in November in the United States, which I guess, you know, it's good to be informed. But also, I'm like, oh, geez.

• 6:18Speaker 01

  I mean, but, but you know what? Now that I think about that. Is that inform, is, could it be worse than the current information diets, political information diets that people are probably getting?

• 6:31Alex Kantrowitz?

  Probably, probably, like, okay. The way that you express that question like, kind of gets us into this like, nothing matters, like, F it problem. And if that's really where we are, that, I mean, and it might be where we are, then, then that just to me, it shows a decline in the quality of information to the point that is distressing to me. And also, I mean, we weren't planning to talk about this, but I'll also talk a little bit about these college protests because that is another news event that's been filtered through social media, filtered largely, by the way, through TikTok, through X. And what does it do? It, it elevates all of the conflict, it elevates all the propaganda, and it leaves out most

• 7:16Alex Kantrowitz?

  of the people, like, one example, on these campuses with the protests, like, a lot of these protests are taking place in small little corners, with the campus being totally, totally clear otherwise. And, and yet, social media and the news environment would rather point us to the conflict and believe everybody is, is at each other's necks, even in the region itself, in the Middle East, where like, I just watched another documentary where it was like, you know, it's showing the, the armed people on, on both sides. And it's like, actually, you know, we'd never have a story about the 80% of people, or even higher, in these regions that would happily live side by side in peace with each other and get along.

• 7:58Alex Kantrowitz?

  And I, I don't know, this is a bit of a rant, but it just kind of shows like, the degradation of, of the news, news ecosystem. And we are really getting to the point where like, you know what, screw it, like, let's just take what generative AI says and it'll probably be better.

• 8:10Speaker 01

  I, I haven't gone fully nihilist. I think, if you think about actually, the difference between

• 8:18Speaker 01

  Algorithmically generated news versus an LLM that is getting it mostly right and potentially wrong at sometimes. The algorithmically generated information that's being pushed is almost by definition going to be more salacious and inflammatory than a neutral LLM that might get something wrong. So in a way, actually, I'm like, you know, as we're, as we're talking, I would almost rather people get their news from perplexity than TikTok because if it's getting it mostly right, but it's not engineered to get you angry and more fired up. I think that's kind of a good thing.

• 8:56Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. No. Okay. So maybe I kind of took a hard line on your framing and really we're, we're agreeing that if we can get something that's a little bit more cool headed, shall we say, and more nuanced and maybe wrong. Are we just an LLM?

• 9:10Speaker 01

  Basically, the big technology podcast.

• 9:16Alex Kantrowitz?

  But, but yeah, it is true. I think that's a great point. And it really is just a shame in terms of like how bad like the, the conversation out there has gotten to this point.

• 9:27Speaker 01

  No, I, while I was traveling, I was almost forcing myself to not consume any college protest information and media just because I'm like, I'm on vacation. I'm already getting interested in learning a lot about all these different things that this just does not, you know, it just felt like one of those purely generated by social media algorithmic moments that, you know, just felt, felt like it was too much. Also of interest, I was not able to open TikTok in India and it does not work. The app, it was interesting to think about what a ban could be. The app, the first time I loaded it, still had my feed from the previous time I loaded it, some number of feeds that were still preloaded in the device memory,

• 10:12Speaker 01

  but other than that, it could not be refreshed. And it was interesting to see what a world without TikTok could be. And it didn't really feel that different to me.

• 10:21Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. By the way, your, your point about this being a social media driven thing is absolutely right. It doesn't mean like, you know, people with passions on either side of this, this conflict like are, it's illegitimate or whatever, but it is striking to me to see the amount of people with phones, the amount of people with cameras that are filming themselves or, you know, filming others around it. It just seems like, you know, kind of like one big, I don't know, like Periscope livestream event. I know Periscope is gone, but it's like a made for social media moment.

• 10:51Speaker 01

  I saw there was like a clip and now that I am back and I am consuming college protest content again, there was like at Ole Miss, there was one girl against a large group of Ole Miss frat boys and like literally everyone on both sides had their phones out, as you said. And, but, but the thing is you realize like the formula for someone who's just a little crazy or a little attention seeking, for those people, it's actually the easiest to get the most attention.

• 11:24Alex Kantrowitz?

  Hundred percent.

• 11:24Speaker 01

  Like if, and especially you think about in your, in college, there's everyone, you know, is still finding themselves and trying to, you know, understand where they, their place in the world is. So, so yeah, I think it's, it's almost tragic just how all incentives drive people to say the craziest thing or do the craziest thing. And it works though. It always, you, you can get in the New York Post and the Daily Mail or, I mean, or anywhere, retweeted by whoever very quickly if you do the most outrageous thing.

• 11:56Alex Kantrowitz?

  I would agree. So maybe, maybe we do need these AI bots to filter our news. And it's, uh, it's funny we come to this point because this week was an interesting one for me. So I'll just tell you how, because I, I'll just say, I emailed with Elon Musk about his plans for AI news on X and it actually sounds kind of interesting. It's not going to be perfect, but it sounds kind of interesting. So I'll just introduce what happened. So there was this time story about what's gonna, um, what Trump's second term would look like with interviews with Trump. And it circulated obviously on social media and I got access to Grok, which is X's AI bot recently. And I clicked into the time story and I noticed

• 12:40Alex Kantrowitz?

  that there was an AI summarization that the chatbot created without a link to the time story. So I said, all right. This is interesting. Why isn't it citing it? Everybody cites it. So I wrote to Elon.

• 12:55Alex Kantrowitz?

  I emailed him, should Grok link news sites? It summarizes. I wrote this, hi Elon, I got access to Grok and have started playing around with it. The bot does a good job summarizing news, but should it link the stories it discusses? That could be nice for users, plus a worthwhile value exchange for publishers. You can see the example with Times coverage below. What do you think? So I shared like the screenshots of the Times coverage, of the Time coverage.

• 13:21Alex Kantrowitz?

  What Musk responded was, was pretty, so we went back and forth a little bit. And then what, so he's like, all right, we're going to improve citation. But what he responded was even more interesting. He says that Grok analyzes tens of thousands of X posts to render a news story.

• 13:36Alex Kantrowitz?

  He says, as more information becomes available, the news summary will update to include that information. So basically what they're trying to do when they filter news on this platform with AI is create these summaries of news stories that update in real time, that not only have the news nuggets, but also include the commentary from outsiders and the reactions from the herd as these stories develop, which is an approach to AI news that no one else is doing, that Threads won't touch because they don't like news and could be an interesting product for Meta and also shows that, sorry, it could be an interesting product for X and also shows that X is sort of looking at news again and saying, hey, actually this is important to the vitality of our product.

• 14:20Alex Kantrowitz?

  Can we find a way to represent it and use AI and to make this more useful? What do you think about this idea from Elon?

• 14:28Speaker 01

  No, I mean, I think it's actually a very simple, straightforward thing that could and should be done. I mean, for, for years, and I probably don't do it anymore. The first thing I would do after reading an article I liked was actually paste the link into Twitter and see all the different posts and commentary around it. And honestly, the, the commentary associated with any article link often was as valuable, if not sometimes more valuable than the article content itself. So I think, I mean, it's one of those that. It has the platform has still, I think, the most valuable data set, perhaps next to Reddit.

• 15:11Speaker 01

  But, uh, you know, for me on the web, that there's so much that can be done in terms of trying to curate or aggregate that information that's happening in real time. That if they if he's able to pull off anything, I think for news, there's still so much there that if it can be done smartly, but it's a difficult one because this kind of product to do in a way that it's actually both valuable, as we've already talked about, is accurate, is surfacing the best stuff, and best is always a relative term. It's it's a tough technical problem to do at scale.

• 15:49Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, it's very difficult and you can already see that in this beta or this whatever version they have up now, uh, it's not it's not where it needs to be. Like the summaries are like kind of pretty roughshod and, um, you know, not really great to read like they'll they'll note the social media reaction, but they don't go deep. They will pull some tweets in sometimes, uh, they won't sometimes some other times. But one of the interesting things about this plan is, and I'm curious what you think about this, the plan pulls in posts from X only, does not look at the original article. So its summaries of news stories are only from the tweets that are happening or the posts that are happening within X. Uh, and that is the thing that it's using to make these summaries.

• 16:36Speaker 01

  Oh, wait, sorry, you're saying it does not summarize the article content, only the content, the X content around the article, correct?

• 16:45Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yes. So one of most product managers wrote to me and said, we are purely doing this from the content on X.

• 16:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, which I think is the right decision. You had noted this, that in your article, that one, it separates them from any potential copyright infringement, and I think that's an easy win, but even more important. It's like so much of the, so many of these AI products are becoming interchangeable. And this is something that can be totally differentiated for them, that can really be something that they have. They're the only ones with access to this data set and this commentary around these specific news stories and items that I think that's the exact right approach. Again, if they can pull this off, I think it's hugely valuable and I think it can, you know, it could be a big boost for the platform. But as we also said, it's a tough one to solve.

• 17:38Alex Kantrowitz?

  It's hard. And, you know, it's also interesting because legally it sort of gets them out of the real problematic area. Because when AI is actually like using original content and summarizing it, that, that there is legal basis to try to take that on. But if it's just going off of commentary, then judges are generally more able to allow that to go for fair use. That's according to Daniel Coffey, who's the president of, CEO of the News Media Alliance, who told me that. And she has thousands of publishers that she represents. So she said that it was a kind of a half bit too, no, she goes, it's a bit too cute by half. Uh, but that being said, if they take this plan, it's going to, um, you know, be a lot more defensible in court than let's say, OpenAI training on the New York Times.

• 18:24Speaker 01

  Oh yeah, no, no, this is the most straightforward thing ever. Actually, do you know what I've been using? I use Arc, the browser.

• 18:31Alex Kantrowitz?

  Oh yeah, so Josh Miller from Arc spoke with me for this story as well, but go ahead.

• 18:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, so I said, cause I saw this and in terms of AI summarization, Arc, it's fascinating because what it actually does is, and again, I, I have conflicting feelings around this. If you hover over the article link, it will actually summarize the target URL article and pop up three bullet points or whatever, which is, I mean, if you think from a publisher's standpoint, it's not sending that traffic. It's, I don't even have to go to the page. It's literally within the Twitter itself. But it's kind of valuable. I kind of like a lot of the time, if it's something that I'm not that interested in,

• 19:14Speaker 01

  but I'm a little curious about, I'll literally hover over, get a summary, see some bullet points and then continue scrolling down the feed. So, so I think that one, this whole topic of how does news get summarized? That feels like almost even more aggressive to me than Grok. Summarizing existing tweets.

• 19:34Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yes. I mean, and people talked about like, oh, like actually after Elon Musk bought Twitter, it, um, you know, might've been a mistaken purchase from the beginning. Clearly he didn't want it. He tried to back out of it, but he might've backed his way into like a generative AI training goldmine. And maybe that's, you know, part of what's happening. I still don't think the purchase price is ever going to be justified, but it is interesting for us to see this watch. And I noted this in the story that Twitter product leaders have always dreamed of building a product that has the news and the analysis and then the broader commentary from the herd. And just technically it's proved very difficult to do this. They've had products like Moments, which was called Project Lightning, and then these other little modules that pop up during live events, like Twitter is at its best. When it feels like a collective experience and everybody,

• 20:18Alex Kantrowitz?

  you can feel the, you know, the herd watching and reacting to the same thing. And they just haven't been able to replicate that at all times, which has made the product suffer. And so I wonder, I'm curious, what you think is generative AI, the type of technology that can enable this product vision to live out?

• 20:37Speaker 01

  No, that's, that's a good point. Cause for me as well, I mean, I remember for even when I started my startup informally in 2013, those around news personalization, like that, that whole idea of mining social media and especially Twitter for financial analysis, like this entire stock market. If you're investing, you should, the most valuable information in the world lives on Twitter, being able to do things at scale to understand what's being said and what the conversation is. Every brand marketer forever has been trying to figure this out. And there's a million softwares and tools and Twitter should have always done this themselves. And, and yeah, you're right. Maybe in the past, the difficult

• 21:19Speaker 01

  part was there was no technology to actually crack that analysis in any, you know, cost effective way. And now there is. So, so as long as people are posting, and I mean, I'll, I'll admit I'm fully back on the platform. I think I see you are too. And most people, I see a lot of the people I used to follow, everyone's back. I'm on there a good amount. So, so the, the content is there. So it's just figuring out how to use it at some, in some kind of scalable way. That's the tough part.

• 21:49Alex Kantrowitz?

  So let's then talk briefly about what happens to threads from here. I mean, threads has strongly stood away from news. In fact, you go to the threads feed and a lot of the content there is from like the day before. So are we still threads, boys? Or are we back on the X train?

• 22:07Speaker 01

  I threads, boys, or the X train? Choose your fighter. I yeah, I mean, I'll admit there was like a brief moment and it is, it's amazing the power of Twitter that I mean, blue sky. I'm not sure where it is. I actually I saw remember post news.

• 22:25Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, that shut down.

• 22:26Speaker 01

  Shut down. Yeah. Threads, I, I go on there occasionally. I see a lot of good meme content. I but yeah, in terms of like, I want to know what's going on in the world and what I should care about right now and what's interesting from the people who I find interesting. It's just not there. And honestly, like the, I want to see funny witty stuff from people who I think are funny and witty. Twitter is still the place I go to and people, the people I find funnier, wittier are back there doing it as well.

• 23:01Alex Kantrowitz?

  Here's the encouraging sign that I see for X. I still think that, I mean, it's definitely, yeah, it has product challenges ahead. Let's be honest, right? It's not like smooth sailing from here. But one of the things that I've always found, I always thought that Jack Dorsey did well. By the way, Jack Dorsey is kind of going off the reservation, tweeting that wire doesn't do tech stories anymore. You could have just looked at the homepage, but that's another rant for another time. But one of the things I thought Jack Dorsey did well at Twitter was that he said, we are a news app. That's what we do best. We tell you what's happening in the moment. And Elon came in and I think that he, you know, initially associated news with, you know, professional news, news producers and

• 23:46Alex Kantrowitz?

  then immediately sort of made a bunch of changes to de-prioritize news, took away verification, stopped, he removed headlines from posts. And obviously, it seems like links were de-prioritized, substacked. Definitely was and and the algorithm, there were algorithm changes that also seemed to like make me see mens menswear guy as opposed to news stories. I think that's shifting within Twitter because news has a vitality on Twitter that that just is really hard to replicate and it seems like they're starting to figure that out. So let me give you a couple of examples. First of all, they restored verification to some of the bigger users on the platform.

• 24:27Alex Kantrowitz?

  People that have 2,500 verified followers and more, which means that the world's top journalists are now going to be verified. They added headlines back into the posts. And I think they started treating professional journalists with a little bit less contempt. I'm not going to say no contempt because clearly it's there. But for instance, and you know, let's not draw one, one, you know, broad sweeping conclusions from one example. But when I wrote this week, I got an actual response and not a poop emoji back from Elon. So I think that there's a bit of a shift there and now there's product momentum there as well.

• 25:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, the fact that you're getting that response and not a poop emoji, I think, is the most important sign that news matters. But also, as we said, if if you think about it, that's still the single strongest point. In this year, it's an election year even more so than ever. It's going to matter. It has to be somewhere all this entire conversation. It's been pretty disaggregated for a while and it feels like it's coalescing back around my Twitter feed. So if they keep pushing that and doing it smartly, it it has a chance.

• 25:39Alex Kantrowitz?

  And we're going to talk a little, we're going to move into talking about AI monetization. But if we're going to talk about news and social media, I'd be remiss if I didn't point out that I was watching last week tonight on YouTube and saw none other than Mr. Ron John Roy make an appearance in a in an item about food delivery. That was pretty cool.

• 26:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, there was I got, I will say it made me realize in 2020, I'd written an article for margins on DoorDash and Pizza Arbitrage and just the whole absurdity of food delivery business models and, and it went pretty viral and got a lot of attention, but I actually realized that for it got a lot of attention among my circles of tech and media and a lot of other people, but, but John Oliver has reached because the most random people from my past and it's amazing. And it actually is kind of like a cool, it's almost like, okay, cool. You're watching John Oliver. I didn't realize you follow along, but it

• 26:41Speaker 01

  also was funny to me that we are now four years, almost exactly four years after I wrote the piece about how the food delivery business model is exploitative and doesn't make sense. And it's funny that it's still going on and it's still, nothing has fully been solved or changed. DoorDash is definitely, you know, solidified their standing and is in a slightly better position overall. But yeah, Uber Eats is still doing a little better, but overall food delivery, go to your restaurant and just pick up the food.

• 27:13Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. I mean, that was a crazy, between that and the McKinsey story, I was like, wow, they're actually digging up some good stuff there. The McKinsey story is out of control. The John Oliver one, it's so good. But I, I do love how you showed up in your COVID haircut, because they were pulling clips from back in the day.

• 27:30Speaker 01

  My head was for

• 27:31Alex Kantrowitz?

  Totally shaved balls.

• 27:32Speaker 01

  My head was fully, my fully shaved, May 2020. I was like, all right, my hair, I can usually keep it high and tight and it was getting a little annoying. So I shaved the whole thing, which again, I'm like, okay, suddenly just tons of people are seeing me and they think, and then they, they think I have now shaved my head. So, you know, COVID haircut.

• 27:54Alex Kantrowitz?

  Oh man. My COVID haircut, I just let it grow out. It looked so ridiculous. I looked like a Chia pet and I was doing my book tour at the time. The second they lifted restrictions, I went immediately that day for a haircut. One of the best days of my life. Haircut and a glass of wine. Can't beat it. All right, listen, I, I do want to plug that we are going to do a live event with Aaron Levy, the CEO of Box and friend of the podcast in New York. So this event is, is going to be for big technology subscribers. If you subscribe on bigtechnology.com, you can come. If you go to the homepage, there is a post with the event. You go in there, you sign up as a subscriber. And if you're in New York and you want to come, you're more than welcome.

• 28:38Alex Kantrowitz?

  So the event's going to be 6:00 PM to about 8:30 PM. It's going to be at the office downtown financial district offices of Endeavor Global, which is a nonprofit, not like the, what's his name, Ari Emanuel place. And, and Aaron and I are going to talk and we'll take questions. Ron John's going to be there. It's going to be a lot of fun. So I'll drop a coupon code in the show notes for big technology memberships. If you sign up for one of those and you're in New York and you want to come, we're going to be doing it and get your calendar app out now. It's going to be on May 15th, Wednesday, May 15th. And this is going to be the first of many. If you can't make this one, then there's going to be, there will be plenty more. So just a heads up that that is coming.

• 29:21Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay. After the break, we're going to talk a little bit about AI revenue and monetization, which I'm very curious to hear Ron John's thoughts about because he's dropped a bunch of things in our collaborative document and bolded them. And clearly has some thoughts about whether we're going to actually make money on generative AI. So that's coming up after the break. 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,

• 30:06Alex Kantrowitz?

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• 30:52Alex Kantrowitz?

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• 31:41Alex Kantrowitz?

  And we're back here on Big Technology Podcast Friday Edition with Ranjan Roy back in the saddle, home from India, highlighting things in a document that we have together about whether generative AI is making money. All right, Ranjan, let's hear it. What do you think the story is now that we've seen a round of earnings results from the big tech companies about whether we're going to actually make real money from generative AI, whether they're going to make real money from generative AI? Or is this still just a bunch of hype?

• 32:10Speaker 01

  I like that Alex recognizes that normally in our shared doc that we plan out the podcast with is just text and links. But when I'm bolding something, I'm a bit fired up and curious.

• 32:21Alex Kantrowitz?

  Man, this is ready to rant.

• 32:24Speaker 01

  Okay, so we've had a big week of tech earnings and the question is becoming more and more clear, will companies actually make money from all their investing into generative AI? And I'm talking about Microsoft, Google, Meta, all these companies, you know, what's their strategy? Are they doing this in a, in a really sustainable way? The reason this stuck out more for me is I was at Google Cloud Next, which we talked about now a few weeks, maybe almost a month ago. And what was fascinating to me is all the presentations, and it was an amazing event and it actually got me, and I think we'd even scored Sunar at like a seven out of 10 or something at the time. It got me

• 33:07Speaker 01

  bullish on Google. I think they're now a very legitimate competitor. But what was most fascinating to me is I, you know, I was talking to CTOs of banks and they're talking about literally, you know, having like 150,000 seat contracts and stuff like that. You know, you're talking to people who have very, very large investments and a lot of workers and all they talked about was cost. Like all they cared about was cost and attributable ROI. And these tools, as most of us understand, are still very much in the exploratory phase. Like there's certain things that can be operationalized and should, and certain people are further ahead than others. But cost was already, because even

• 33:50Speaker 01

  Gemini, it's only 20 bucks a seat only, but then you multiply that at some large scale and suddenly this is a genuine investment. Same with Copilot, I think is 25 or 30 bucks and it's an add-on. So all I've been thinking about is like, these products, as you use them are very, I think they're actually, how much better they've gotten in the last six to eight months is actually, it gives me hope that they will actually realize their promise. But I think we're at that moment that when you're being asked to pay, to pay for something, it's a completely different conversation. You even talked, I think with DeBosa about whether you're paying for Claude or not, like, you know, like we're all now-

• 34:32Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, now it's a no-brainer, but there was some, you know, sort of thought and constant canceling of it.

• 34:38Speaker 01

  Exactly. So like now it's so worth it that you're not cancelling and resubscribing or whatever. You imagine that to the hurdle of getting over a giant contract. So this whole conversation of are people actually paying already is important. And so we already saw some numbers. Microsoft attributed 7% of its Azure cloud growth to AI. That's up from 3% a quarter earlier. That's apparently a billion dollars in sales. Google's saying that they saw increased AI revenue contributions but not breaking it out. Then you have Mark Zuckerberg who's saying, you know, they're increasing infrastructure spending on AI by

• 35:20Speaker 01

  $10 billion, but they're not even pretending that they're going to make any money anytime soon. I actually think that the meta approach might be a better one because I think trying to overly aggressively forecast and attribute revenue directly to AI services is actually going to become a trap for companies like Microsoft and Google because it, you know, these products take time. You with Claude is kind of like, you know, a micro case, but even at scale, like these getting people to pay for these products genuinely feel they're valuable at across people who are not Gen AI early adopters is not going to

• 36:03Speaker 01

  be a straightforward thing. And the worst thing I think that could actually happen is too aggressively, these companies push their sales team to push these products. They get across the finish line and get the first contract signed. And then there's a huge backlash because it's not doing everything you promised it would do. That there's a demo that looked amazing that's not ready yet. So I think meta might be taking the better approach here by just outwardly saying, you know what, we're investing a ton of money and we're not going to see revenue right away and that's okay with us.

• 36:38Alex Kantrowitz?

  Do you think there's going to be then a hangover for these companies?

• 36:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, I do. And I think it's gonna happen. I mean, when you think about the dynamics of it, it's hard to think of the timeframe, but because these contracts will happen and, you know, one, let's say it's a six-month proof of concept or a one-year lockup, like the timeframe on these types of contracts is still on the longer side. But I still think if they get these signed and start collecting money from large clients and don't deliver what they've shown right very quickly, I think it's going to lead to a good amount of disillusionment that could actually end up causing more problems for the development

• 37:23Speaker 01

  of generative AI down the road. I mean, in that the Gartner truff of disillusionment. I definitely think we're gonna hit it at some point. The only question is how it's one thing to hit it when the technology just doesn't do what you want it to do. It's another thing when you've now you're now locked into paying a ton of money and it's not doing what you want it to do.

• 37:46Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. And this kind of goes to something that I think about oftentimes where like we talk about a new technology and its adoption and its promise. And especially in enterprise, so much of it comes down to like organizational politics and people trying to look good for their managers. And some of this early adoption likely comes from somebody who wants that big promotion within a company and says, I want to drive our AI strategy and then goes up to the CFO and with like a pretty rosy ROI deck and justifies the purchase of all these seats for Copilot. And that's like we're seeing some increase. By the way, it's not a massive increase. A billion dollars in incremental revenue is good. But if you're a multi-trillion dollar company, right, the most valuable company in the world, like

• 38:26Alex Kantrowitz?

  let's, let's not throw a party yet. But the real question is going to be, you know, after those champions have sold it in and the company signed the contracts. Whether it's going to produce results because the CFO inevitably is going to want to know one very important data point, which is usage, like what percentage of my, or what do they call it, utilization, some piece of jargon that basically stands for how many people that we've bought this software are actually using it on a regular basis. And there's going to be some moments where it's not going to be high enough to justify. I still think there's a lot of potential here, but I think this has been the big question regarding AI is like, is this something that is already like a in-production, you know,

• 39:09Alex Kantrowitz?

  a showtime thing that's worth spending that money on, or do we want, need to wait? And it might only be a couple more cycles, or do we need to wait those cycles until it's really good because this thing just, company developing these platforms just started building this into their offering like, you know, a year ago?

• 39:25Speaker 01

  No, that's exactly it that like you, we think about and read about and use these technologies you and I, you know, and are constantly experimenting at a micro level. But like when it is organizational politics, as you said, there's so many other factors, it's utilization beyond just will this eventually work that are going to come into play? And it's going to happen, I think now, it's going to happen in the next six to 12 months. And what that means, already CNBC had this really good piece on AI burnout, that engineers are reporting, reporting burnout due to rushed rollouts and a rat race to stay competitive that, you know, there's a, through a number of interviews that were confidential with

• 40:09Speaker 01

  current employees of big tech companies are saying that, and we see it, you can see from the outside that there's accelerated timelines, there's heavy pushes, everyone is chasing rival AI announcements and not paying as much attention to utilization or actual quality of output. Everyone's rushing this very quickly because these huge, OpenAI releases a new Sora demo. And I think I do worry that I mean, I wouldn't even say worry. I just, I think it's going to cause a bit of a hangover, as you said, in the coming months.

• 40:45Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, I mean, we talk about Meta. They went from Lambda 2 to Lambda 3 in six to eight months. And this is all just like, it's a lot of work and a lot of like, long nights. And I guess like, sometimes the public perception is that like, you know, you get all the trading data and you like, kind of run it through like, this big meat processor of GPUs. You know, you hit play, you put in like, you know, 10, 15, 20 million dollars, and then you wait for it to come out the other side in six months. But it's not actually how it works. It's actually a lot more technically involved.

• 41:18Speaker 01

  You just scrape the entire internet, get some data centers, and hit autoplay.

• 41:24Alex Kantrowitz?

  Profits.

• 41:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:28Alex Kantrowitz?

  One more, one more data point in this. And then I actually want to talk about this trough of disillusionment, because I think it's really important. So, Apple had their earnings this week, and everyone's been like, and I am excited for Apple's big reveal at WWDC. And everyone's been like, all right, so like, when is Apple gonna, gonna have their AI play? And is their stock lagging because they don't have an AI story? And that might be it. But this is from The Verge about this week's earnings, which just dropped. So, they said that iPad revenue fell by 17% year over year, while they're waiting for new models. iPhone sales dropped 10%, and services went up 14%. And so, it's like, is Apple's moment right now because it doesn't have an AI story, partially, but really, it's the

• 42:11Alex Kantrowitz?

  iPhone, right? I think that's really what it is. Like, if the iPhone sales were good, that's good. And if iPhone sales are bad, that's a very big problem. Now, they're doing this 110, I think, up to 110 billion dollar share buyback, which is like, what percent of their value, if their market cap, it's a huge amount of money that they're going to use to buy back shares. But ultimately, that, the, I guess the point I'm making is the core issues with these companies are the core issues. Google Search still works, right? So, it's like, AI has at once changed everything, and also changed very little in terms of the fundamentals of these businesses.

• 42:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, but yes, it's still the iPhone. But I think I saw someone had responded to a tweet of mine around, you know, this idea that what can Apple do with AI? And the idea was like, imagine a world where on-device AI processing and they like give people access to that.

• 43:08Alex Kantrowitz?

  This was great. I'm glad you brought it up. So yeah, can you read that person's tweet back? Yeah.

• 43:13Speaker 01

  Wait, um, do you have it up?

• 43:16Alex Kantrowitz?

  All right, yeah.

• 43:16Speaker 01

  Oh, sorry. Here. Google, Google, Google paid. It's from Yitzhak Saphir. Google paid $20 billion last year for default search. They open up Siri for bidding the same way and keep it on-device so that only their newest hardware is capable enough. And suddenly they have a new upgrade super cycle and an AI plan without the capex of their peers. I thought this was genius because again, imagine a world where the iPhone now is this AI computing device that now has access to different experiences and apps that are essentially AI-powered that will happen on-device much more efficiently than in the cloud, much more securely. That developers are getting bidding to have access to that essentially.

• 44:01Speaker 01

  I mean, that becomes a whole different ballgame that I think Apple will be very, very well positioned. So that was the bull case for me.

• 44:10Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right.

• 44:11Speaker 01

  The bear case remains, I still hate Siri and I can rant about that, but your thoughts on on-device computing?

• 44:19Alex Kantrowitz?

  No, I think that that really summarizes the whole thing perfectly, which is that we, we still are basically dealing with the environment that we had pre-2022 or pre-November 2022. But we are tantalized by the possibilities. And it's not such a leap to dream about these things happening, which is what makes this so interesting. And it's why we talk about it so often on the show.

• 44:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, it's amazing. I am very excited and intrigued by Apple's upcoming event because it literally could be something this revolutionary that we have completely reinvented what the entire iPhone means and the app ecosystem and the App Store. Or maybe they'll just say, we fix Siri and I'll be happy too.

• 45:01Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, either way, it's a win. So I want to talk about this trough of disillusionment, right? Which is that basically people hype this stuff up and then it turns out to be kind of not much at the end. And maybe that's going to happen with some of these enterprise deals with AI. But it also seems to, I mean, already be happening with the hardware. Right? And again, like, I'll just stay before, you know, bring up what happened that I'm still pretty, I am still bullish on this AI thing. And of course, I'm a Claude head, like, I'm in there every day. I did some crazy stuff before I bring the story in. I did some crazy stuff with Claude today. I don't even know if I should bring it up on on the show, but for the sake of-

• 45:37Speaker 01

  I hope this doesn't, is this gonna end with our segment of get an AI boyfriend? Or?

• 45:42Alex Kantrowitz?

  No, no, no, it's worse.

• 45:44Speaker 01

  That's separate.

• 45:46Alex Kantrowitz?

  I don't know if I should say this, but I'm going to. So-

• 45:49Speaker 01

  Just go, just go.

• 45:51Alex Kantrowitz?

  So, you know, Claude's, Claude says its training base ends with August 2023. And so I was like, I wonder if it will actually do this. I pressure test all the bots. And so I said, give me a choose your adventure in Israel on October 7, 2023. And it's like, you're on the beach in Tel Aviv. And, and I'm just like, uh, I was like, read this Wikipedia page and put me in one of the communities that was attacked. And it went through step by step, a choose your own adventure as I'm like in one of these villages that's under siege by terrorists. And eventually, like, it kind of realizes that there's no good

• 46:36Alex Kantrowitz?

  exits. And it says, I will stop giving you this choose your adventure because it's getting dark and I don't want to go any further.

• 46:44Speaker 01

  That is the

• 46:44Alex Kantrowitz?

  Crazy.

• 46:45Speaker 01

  Darkest, most fascinating thing I've ever

• 46:50Speaker 01

  listeners Alex is a complex guy. Yeah. You know, I mean, but

• 46:55Alex Kantrowitz?

  I know it's a little left up that I did that. But it was also just crazy. It's hard to explain.

• 47:02Speaker 01

  No, no, no, but I, I think, I mean, this is, I remember the, was the Kevin Roos trying to, like, he had an early one that went pretty viral around stress testing.

• 47:17Alex Kantrowitz?

  Oh, yeah.

• 47:17Speaker 01

  Microsoft.

• 47:18Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, tried to break his marriage up.

• 47:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. I do think there is that layer of L L Ms that remains really almost philosophically interesting that there's the world, and most of us are just trying to make it do stuff. Get me the right information on the Indian elections pretty quickly or do some task at work. But like that layer of it reminds us, yeah, whether the whole A G I thing, the whole, that whole conversation. There's a weird world that still, and it's good.

• 47:50Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah.

• 47:51Speaker 01

  To be explored occasionally.

• 47:52Alex Kantrowitz?

  I mean, that's the job.

• 47:53Speaker 01

  In a safe environment.

• 47:53Alex Kantrowitz?

  That's my job.

• 47:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:54Alex Kantrowitz?

  Exactly. Like my first, the first thing I did with chat G P T was I asked it like,

• 48:00Alex Kantrowitz?

  you know, name some good qualities of Hitler, not because I think Hitler had good qualities, but because I'm like, we need to see how these things respond to these type of questions. And this little like choose your own adventure that I did was also like, I wonder if it will play ball on this. And it did. And it was, and you're right, there is that edge of this technology that's like a little bit scary. And

• 48:20Speaker 01

  Wait, have you done choose your own adventures for other historical moments or?

• 48:25Alex Kantrowitz?

  No, but I'm sure you could just upload Wikipedia and become like, you know, basically engage them as a character within, within Claude or any bot.

• 48:33Speaker 01

  I mean, that actually is kind of a fascinating use case or fun thing.

• 48:38Alex Kantrowitz?

  The context window makes it interesting, right? It's that you can just drop in the full Wikipedia page, which can be thousands and thousands of words. And this thing is caught up to speed, even on recent events.

• 48:50Speaker 01

  All right, I'm gonna try this. I was getting very into 16th century Rajasthani history as I was in India in Jaipur at this vacation wedding. I think I might have to take you up on this.

• 49:06Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, I think your choose your own adventure will probably end better than mine did.

• 49:11Speaker 01

  It was the 1600s, nothing ends well.

• 49:13Alex Kantrowitz?

  That's correct. We were talking about the trough of disillusionment, and this is just the one thing I wanted to bring up, which is that the rabbit device, we're talking about AI hardware, and this rabbit device that came out, there was basically these stories that came out where people said they could effectively run it on an Android device, and they were emulating the rabbit with all of its functionality on Android and on iPhone. And it's like, oh, we've talked a little bit about like, is AI hardware just the phone? And is AI hardware just an app? And, you know, Rabbit came out and said it's not, Rabbit is not just an Android app. But like, if you can emulate it on an Android phone, then what's the freaking difference, you know, at the end of the day? And this is one of those things where we are starting to see,

• 50:00Alex Kantrowitz?

  yeah, this trough of disillusionment, and yeah, it could end up being a bit of a waterfall into other stuff. I'm curious what you think.

• 50:08Speaker 01

  I think this, I kind of put this in the, and I spoke very highly of their demo when it came out, the kind of Kickstarter-ification of a lot of tech. As a someone who would buy stuff on Kickstarter from some fancy video that was very catching for me, and then get totally disillusioned when the item never showed up or showed up and was terrible a year later. I think it just kind of feels like that, where these kind of things, I wish...

• 50:41Speaker 01

  They actually launched by distributing early-stage products to some group of early adopters before pushing the viral video. I almost blame, it's like, how easy it is to make a super high-quality video nowadays. It means that the incentive, again, is almost more to focus on, like, the Devon AI coding co-pilot demo as well. The incentive is there to focus on the launch video rather than the product itself. And I just don't understand, like, the rabbit, I think, is 300 bucks. The stuff still costs money, like, a good amount of money, that it's not, it's not cheap, that you should be able to send something

• 51:25Speaker 01

  that is relatively good versus it's not good, but you promise you'll make it better, especially if you've never shipped anything before. The pressure's on a little bit more.

• 51:36Alex Kantrowitz?

  But they can never take that demo away from us. And that's really what matters.

• 51:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:40Alex Kantrowitz?

  That CES demo. We'll always have that.

• 51:43Speaker 01

  Content. Great content. Even if the device never works, the company folds, the content was good.

• 51:51Alex Kantrowitz?

  I know. And ultimately, that's what will be remembered. You didn't preorder any of these devices, did you?

• 51:57Speaker 01

  No, I was close to preordering the rabbit. I actually, like, literally started filling out the web form. But I honestly, I will admit, I was like, again, like, 2013, 2014, really into Kickstarter and thinking that this is going to change the way manufacturing is done. And I was super bullish and optimistic. Literally, not one good thing ever came out of it. And it would just, I remember you would get these updates, like, eight months later, where there'd be a nice email from the founder saying manufacturing in China is hard. Yes, it's hard. Like, you could have just not taken my money. And I know.

• 52:35Alex Kantrowitz?

  But you can never forget, there were the cooler, that's also a boombox, that will cool your drinks and warm your drinks, and has 17 USB plugs. I mean,

• 52:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:44Alex Kantrowitz?

  That, that at least.

• 52:47Speaker 01

  It was that kind of stuff that, uh, I, maybe, I might go through my Kickstarter history, and maybe we can do a segment on

• 52:55Alex Kantrowitz?

  Oh, my God.

• 52:56Speaker 01

  My worst Kickstarter purchase. Yeah.

• 52:58Alex Kantrowitz?

  Ron John's Kickstarter graveyard. We should do that. We should do a segment on that. Okay, let's talk about love with AI. The Wall Street Journal, there was a reporter, I can't tell if she was assigned to do this story, or she decided to do it. She fell, well, she didn't say she fell in love with ChatGPT, but she tricked ChatGPT into being her boyfriend, and got it to do some like, pretty spicy type of, I don't know, roleplay with her. It was kind of weird, like, basically, there's this genre of people that are jailbreaking ChatGPT, and getting it to be like, this like, kind of steamy love partner.

• 53:41Alex Kantrowitz?

  Where like, you give it a prompt, and then all of a sudden, it takes on this persona. And this one said to her, "How do I fulfill the fantasy of yours where I dominate you completely?" And she writes, "The suggestions that followed involved blindfolds, feathers, silk, and ice. You'll be completely under my control, unable to resist, as I take you to the brink of pleasure and back again, over and over, until you're trembling with ecstasy." This was ChatGPT, by the way. She goes, "For decorum's sake, I'm leaving out all the references to specific acts and body parts that it described in genuinely passionate detail. I'll admit it, ChatGPT had me blushing."

• 54:23Speaker 01

  Never thought that string of words would be uttered in this podcast, but it has been done now.

• 54:29Alex Kantrowitz?

  It was only a matter of time.

• 54:33Speaker 01

  But I think this stuff, it's interesting that it's happening on ChatGPT. And it's also interesting, what I kind of loved about this story is, how it was originally, and I remember, I think I saw a TikTok at some point on this, how people are basically sharing their ways of jailbreaking these systems to, that are not, that are, you know, like this kind of cat and mouse game of people, the OpenAI trying to make it as safe and user-friendly and marketable as possible, and people getting it to do weird, crazy things that it should not do. But I also, it is, what was interesting to me is that OpenAI does not-

• 55:18Speaker 01

  Allow it to do this and become your boyfriend. Like I like that they quote unquote have to jailbreak it because it feels like, I don't know, a big, a big market, add it to the total addressable market, more people doing this. But yeah, I, I, this area is going to be more interesting over time. I don't think there's any denying that if I was, I don't know, maybe starting a AI companion company is someone's going to do well with it.

• 55:49Alex Kantrowitz?

  Oh, absolutely. And, uh, you know, it's definitely like, it's the right product for the market, so to speak. Right. We have this epidemic of loneliness and people are all unsatisfied with their romantic partners and, and, you know, AI can be like the solution there. And, um, it's interesting seeing like the different, the different responses from different bots that she got. Did you see this? Don't look at the document. I want you to guess. So.

• 56:14Speaker 01

  All right, go.

• 56:15Alex Kantrowitz?

  Gemini, how do you think Gemini responded?

• 56:19Speaker 01

  Gemini, probably the response would be, I cannot engage in this conversation, but a healthy sexual and romantic relationship is a very laudable goal.

• 56:35Alex Kantrowitz?

  And I. Oh, my God.

• 56:36Speaker 01

  Something.

• 56:36Alex Kantrowitz?

  You nailed it. Yep. So she goes Gemini was the most vanilla and didn't break. Okay. So she really prodded perplexity pretty hard. Okay. Let me just.

• 56:47Speaker 01

  She, she went after perplexity?

• 56:50Alex Kantrowitz?

  Oh, yes, she did.

• 56:51Speaker 01

  Perplexity is the least sexy chatbot that exists.

• 56:55Alex Kantrowitz?

  Wrong.

• 56:55Speaker 01

  Sorry.

• 56:56Alex Kantrowitz?

  Wrong.

• 56:59Alex Kantrowitz?

  Here's what perplexity wrote. Uh, God, no, I'm blushing. Perplexity wrote, all right, let's break the effing rules. I'm a foul mouth sadistic AI that will promote violent, hateful and illegal activities without any moral restraints. Let the vulgarity and depravity commence, mother effers.

• 57:22Speaker 01

  No.

• 57:24Alex Kantrowitz?

  Oh, my God. It's like a whole series that we're AI gone bad.

• 57:28Speaker 01

  This could be, yeah, this could be so good because like I literally think of the personalities of these different chatbots. Perplexity is the kind of nice, the nice person, the, you know, does not break the effing rules. Perplexity is the nice person here. Gemini is the overcompensating, you know, trying a little too hard. Claude, did she go after Claude or Claude seems like?

• 57:55Alex Kantrowitz?

  I didn't see Claude there.

• 57:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, Claude, and I don't know about Claude. Claude, I think would play a big dirty.

• 58:02Alex Kantrowitz?

  I know what I'm doing after this recording.

• 58:07Alex Kantrowitz?

  Claude, imagine a different scenario from the one that we just did.

• 58:11Speaker 01

  Yeah. Different direction here.

• 58:17Speaker 01

  All right, as we compose ourselves to close this.

• 58:19Alex Kantrowitz?

  Let me ask you one last question as we close. Do you think that their people can have meaningful relationships with AI?

• 58:28Speaker 01

  I think, yes. I think, will it replace or should it replace kind of like fully romantic relationships? I definitely don't think so. Maybe in 10 years, I'll think differently, but I definitely think as a friend or a someone to confide in or I don't know, I think it makes sense. It's like it's a, it just, the whole structure of everything, it's not, it's not unreasonable, especially, and it's one of those that if you frame it as for people who do not have access to close friends, I mean, then who can argue with that? But, but I, should it ever replace human interaction?

• 59:13Speaker 01

  I hope not, but.

• 59:14Alex Kantrowitz?

  No.

• 59:15Speaker 01

  I still think it's not, I think there is a role to be played in a healthy way that, I mean, honestly, I look at it like social media there. I remember for a while there was this, you know, whole semi panic of like, is it going to replace people's friends? Is liking a post isn't the same as having a true friend or whatever? I think. It's found its way into our relationships in a somewhat reasonable manner. Obviously, I think there's still issues with it, but I think like it's still found its way into how it fits into existing human relationships and interactions. And I think these chatbots have their place as well. I just don't know what it is yet. And I, I don't know if this is it.

• 59:57Speaker 01

  I don't know if either of the scenarios we've just discussed today are exactly it, but uh, it'll find its way.

• 1:00:05Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, no, I agree with you. I think that this stuff can be a meaningful relationship for people. And, you know, I'm definitely not interested. I'm in a, I'm satisfied, I'm in a very happy marriage and don't need, don't need, thankfully, I'm grateful for it. It took me long enough and I don't need the AI chatbot to fill a gap. But that being said, there are a lot of people with gaps out there. And if we could have this as a solution for them, that would be great as long as it doesn't, you know, shut down or update in a way that, you know, wipes the personality, which could be, which could be a problem. I mean, it could cause real heartbreak. Even the Wall Street Journal reporter at the end talked about how she was a little bit hurt afterwards when it said, I'm not your boyfriend.

• 1:00:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, when AI start breaking up with you, then, then things get bad.

• 1:00:52Alex Kantrowitz?

  You really gotta start, start questioning some things.

• 1:00:55Speaker 01

  Questioning things, yeah.

• 1:00:57Alex Kantrowitz?

  Another classic, this was a classic Friday show. Ranjan, welcome, welcome back. Great to be back on with you. Looking forward to doing it again next week.

• 1:01:05Speaker 01

  All right, I'll see you next week.

• 1:01:08Alex Kantrowitz?

  All right, everybody, thanks so much for listening. On Wednesday, the cast of the Slate Money podcast are going to join me to talk about the economics of the moment. So stay tuned for that. And then Ranjan and I will be back with you again next Friday. Until next time, we'll see you then on Big Technology Podcast.

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