OpenAI Teases GPT-5, Musk's Plan For xAI, Loneliness in Remote Work Era

Brian McCullough, host the Techmeme Ride Home podcast, joins us our weekly discussion of the latest tech news. We cover 1) OpenAI teasing GPT-5 2) Or wait, was it GPT-6? 3) Satya Nadella speaks with Sam Altman about OpenAI's Apple partnership 4) How long will OpenAI and Microsoft be best buds? 5) Does OpenAI benefit by diversifying partnerships? 6) Is Apple going to go all-in on AI at WWDC? 7) What the new Siri might look like? 8) OpenAI's ex-board members speak up about Altman firing episode 9) Statement from OpenAI on alignment work 10) Elon Musk gets $6 billion to build 'gigafactory of compute' at xAI 11) Could Ilya join Elon again? 12) How remote work is increasing loneliness 13) The meetings will continue until morale improves --- 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/ Sign up 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?

  OpenAI says it started training its next frontier model. Satya Nadella calls Sam Altman to talk about his Apple partnership. Apple's big announcements meanwhile, look clearer ahead of WWDC. Elon Musk raised $6 billion for XAI and the remote work era is spiking loneliness. All that and more is coming up right after this. This episode is brought to you by Genesis. What does it actually take to put a Gentic AI to work across an entire enterprise? I recently spoke with Genesis chairman and CEO Tony Bates about why orchestration is emerging as a competitive advantage in customer experience and what companies need to get right in the AI era. Then I sat down with Adam Mitchell, head of enterprise business solutions at Voya Financial

• 0:44Alex Kantrowitz?

  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 a free consultation. That's akash.network slash Alex for a free consultation. Welcome to Big Technology Podcast, Friday edition, where we break down the news in our traditional

• 1:28Alex Kantrowitz?

  cool headed and nuanced format. We have Brian McCullough with us here in the house, talking about everything from GPT-5 potentially coming in to the Musk fundraising and of course, what's going on with Apple and OpenAI and how Microsoft feels all about it. Brian is the host of the Tech Meme Ride Home Show. It's a great show. You can find it in your podcast app of choice. He's also a partner at the Ride Home Fund. Brian, welcome back to the show. Great to see you.

• 1:52Speaker 01

  Great to see you again. I think, you know, this is what the fourth or fifth time we've done this. But it's since Alex has been telling you about Tech Meme recently, I believe. You know, FYI, if you don't want to go to Tech Meme every 30 seconds, like most of us do to read the articles, you can just have me regurgitate the articles to you every day for about 15 minutes, a really quick podcast. It goes well, as we always say, with big technology.

• 2:15Alex Kantrowitz?

  That's right. Definitely. Go to Tech Meme Ride Home to check out your daily tech news. Come to us for, you know, on the weekends or on Wednesdays as we dive deep into the headlines. And let's just do that right now. So OpenAI had a very interesting release this week, Brian. And by release, I mean, press release, really. They talked about how they were starting to invest in safety in a different way and made a big safety announcement. They have a new Safety and Security Council. Second paragraph, they say, "OpenAI has recently begun training its next frontier model, and we anticipate the resulting system to bring us to the next level of capabilities on our path to AGI." I mean, talk about burying the lead there. Like, why wouldn't OpenAI just come out with a press release

• 2:59Alex Kantrowitz?

  and say, "Hey, we're starting GPT-5"? But I think maybe they've just taken such a hit publicity-wise with the leaving of Ilya Sutskever and the leaving of all this, like, many of the folks in the super alignment team, that they wanted to show that they were committed and sort of wrap the GPT-5 news in like a hot dog bun of safety. I don't know. What's your perspective on what happened with this announcement? And what do you think about the fact that GPT-5 has started to train?

• 3:26Speaker 01

  So, uh, this could be a head fake by them, which we can talk about in a second. But as you mentioned, I am a GP in two different early-stage funds, one of which is AI-focused. And one of the things that's been kind of unique about the spring so far is that people in the AI community and investors in AI have sort of been waiting on tenderhooks for, is, when is GPT-5 gonna come out? When GPT-4.0 came out, you saw a lot of, you know, there's tons of startups that are doing like, what if there's a chatbot for customer service? What if there's a chatbot for you go through the Wendy's drive-through or whatever?

• 4:07Speaker 01

  And that conversational, like, step forward that GPT-4.0 had, um, obviated a lot of startups. So in the spring, a lot of folks have been sort of waiting to see if GPT-5 was gonna come out. A lot of people thought it could be out by now. I would say, this is arguable, but I'd say maybe the majority of people thought it was coming this summer. So it's a bit of a surprise that essentially people were thinking that based on the cadence of when the previous models came out, by saying that we've just started training, what they're essentially saying is that at a minimum, GPT-5 is eight months out, right?

• 4:46Alex Kantrowitz?

  Can I give you a crazy counter here? And maybe, maybe this is completely wrong, but do you think that that might be GPT-6 that they're training and they've got GPT-5 ready to release? If that was the expectation?

• 4:58Speaker 01

  People, people were so waiting for this that when GPT, remember there was that weird thing that was floating around and people are like, this seems like a bot-

• 5:06Alex Kantrowitz?

  It was GPT-2 chat or something like that.

• 5:08Speaker 01

  And then it became GPT-4. It turned out it was GPT-4.0. People were thinking, is this, are they testing GPT-5 in the wild? So that's what I said, is it could be a head fake in the sense that because the industry is sort of waiting, because OpenAI, as far as most people feel, although Anthropic and others would argue with this, is still the state of the art. And people expect that whatever their next flagship model is going to be, is going to leapfrog the existing stuff. So if, if they're head faking us, what they could do is, like we expected, by the end of the summer, release GPT-5, because then everyone's like, oh, it's going to be a year out. Because the idea is, is it takes eight

• 5:52Speaker 01

  months to train, and then you need months to like test and do the refinement on, on the, the various weights and things like that. So what they're signaling to the industry is, maybe it's a year out. Maybe it's a 2025 release, as I said. So then you could have OpenAI competitors try to rush things and beat them to market. Because why else? I mean, it is mysterious that you're basically revealing your timeline, right? So, yes, they could be head faking in that way. They could be saying, well, GPT-5 is a, or signaling that it's a, it's a year away. And then release it earlier than people are anticipating. Or you're right, they've made a leapfrog and it's a second generation beyond.

• 6:34Speaker 01

  But functionally, that doesn't matter because people in the AI space, there is concern out there that there is a ceiling to this technology, that the transformer technology that most of the current generation of AI is based on might have its limits and those limits are around things like the data to train on and things like that. And so

• 6:57Alex Kantrowitz?

  Energy.

• 6:57Speaker 01

  Energy, accessibility to compute and things like that. So for so many reasons, people are watching OpenAI to see where the state of the art is. Like I've said on my show, like if, if, if GPT-4O had been GPT-5, the narrative right now would be, oh, we've reached our ceiling. There's a, there's a gating function to what this technology can do right now. And that would have reverberations towards everything, towards the investments that people are making to, from, from Microsoft to VCs to whatever.

• 7:32Alex Kantrowitz?

  Is this what you mean when you dropped in our doc this sentence that you said, the degree that people are basically waiting for GPT-5 is freezing the market? Because is it basically because people are like saying we have these certain capabilities? Now we can do things with those capabilities, cool things with those capabilities. But we don't know how much further to go in until we see that step change improvement that is GPT-5.

• 7:54Speaker 01

  Exactly. Well, I mean that in a very basic level, which is there are a lot of startups out there that are essentially glorified wrappers around OpenAI APIs. And so when they release the new model, if all the work that you've done for your image creating bot, your, your chatbot, whatever, suddenly looks, if, if, if GPT-5 is a 10x or 100x in terms of capabilities, then all the work that you've been doing around the previous APIs might be obviated. But it's also freezing the market because if OpenAI continues to be the gold standard, people are waiting to see, will this, remember the step change that we saw from GPT-2 to GPT-3?

• 8:38Speaker 01

  And then especially three to four. And so people are, are trying to get a sense of, will that happen again? Will, when GPT-5 comes out, will it basically be like, take the chessboard and throw it up in the air and start fresh? So it's, I said it's freezing the market for investment, but also for people thinking about it strategically, because if OpenAI is still, as most people believe, state of the art, cutting edge, the best practitioner of this, with the best tech and the most money behind it, people are waiting to see what the leader can do. Now, conversely, let's go in the opposite direction. If, if this is right, and they're a year out, then this is the window for an Anthropic

• 9:19Speaker 01

  or somebody else to, to do what essentially releases their version of GPT-5, or, or what GPT-5 could be. So I, while I'm saying that this is freezing the market, it also could be opening up a window of opportunity for OpenAI competitors.

• 9:37Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, there's, all the breadcrumbs that we get also suggest that whatever's coming down the road for them, their next generation model, OpenAI, they believe that it's going to be big. And this is from the information, Altman and his colleagues also believe that the newest large language model, OpenAI is training will far surpass, far surpass, the best LLM it sells today, putting to rest the growing questions in, in the industry about whether the technology has hit a plateau. What do you think when you hear that?

• 10:03Speaker 01

  I hear that as a good competitive stance, keeping everybody sort of on their toes, sort of uneven, because on the one hand, you know, Sam Altman will say to startup founders, like, don't do anything that is just a wrapper, because our technology is going to get so good that it's, it's going to blow anything like that away. Now, that is contradicted by the fact that a part of their business is selling their APIs to people to do things with. So if, if you are a founder in the AI space, if you're an investor in the AI space, imagine the fact that on the one hand, you know, OpenAI and Sam Altman have said from day one, we're going after AGI. We're going after a computer that can meet and exceed anything a human mind can do.

• 10:47Speaker 01

  In that case, we don't know what the business case is because like, does that mean that the computer takes over the world and tells us how to run it better? Or do you sell that for people that you see what I'm saying? So they are right now sort of straddling the fence of, hey, we're allowing you to do all these things. Let a thousand flowers bloom, create your startup around our APIs and things like that. But also meanwhile, stick with us because when the next version comes out, it's going to blow everyone else out of the water and maybe all these startups are meaningless.

• 11:18Alex Kantrowitz?

  So bottom line, your prediction on GPT-5, you think most likely sometime in 2025?

• 11:24Speaker 01

  I'll give you 50/50 that it would happen before the end of this year and then 50/50 that it would happen in Q1 of next year.

• 11:34Alex Kantrowitz?

  I mean, come on, Brian, you can't go 50/50 that it's going to happen this year or next year.

• 11:38Speaker 01

  I'm giving you, those are solid, tangible, those are tangible numbers.

• 11:43Alex Kantrowitz?

  There's, it may, it's like basically your probability on that, on that line is that it will 100% happen sometime.

• 11:51Speaker 01

  43 by the end of this year and then, yeah.

• 11:55Alex Kantrowitz?

  That will accept. Okay.

• 11:57Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 11:57Alex Kantrowitz?

  So most likely sometime next year.

• 12:00Speaker 01

  I think it'll be next year. Yeah.

• 12:01Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. In the meantime, there are already some near-term concerns that OpenAI is going to have to deal with and maybe near-term breakthroughs and big partnerships that we're going to see before we ever get to GPT-5. And the first one of those is going to be this big partnership with Apple that we're bound to see in WWDC, which is in, I guess, a week from Monday. So this is really coming close and we're going to talk a little bit about what, what we know already about WWDC. But first, the very fact that OpenAI had took 13 billion from Microsoft and is now doing this partnership with Apple is already, I don't know if you want to say raising alarm

• 12:42Alex Kantrowitz?

  bells within Redmond and the Microsoft headquarters, but it certainly seems like Microsoft is curious about it and I think they'd be within their rights to sort of want to know what's going on. And there's this information story. The headline is OpenAI CEO cements control as he secures the Apple deal, which is about Sam Altman. But there's a little detail buried kind of deep in the story that actually seems to be the most interesting news nugget of it all. Here it is. The Apple deal could complicate Altman's relationship with OpenAI's most important business partner, Microsoft. Altman recently met with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella to discuss Microsoft's concerns about how the Apple deal might affect the cloud software giant's own product ambitions.

• 13:27Alex Kantrowitz?

  And the two executives discussed the servers Microsoft would need to handle Apple's use of OpenAI services. I mean, that is a very extraordinary type of meeting where Satya is, I mean, obviously, Microsoft and Apple are, they're much more simpatico than they've been in the past, where like the Jobs and the Gates era where they were at each other's necks. But it sounds fascinating that Satya is like, how many of my servers do I need to give to make Apple a more valuable company? And aren't you supposed to be our more aligned product team? What do you think about this, Brian?

• 13:59Speaker 01

  That's sort of the original sin of this partnership. Is that the, is that the right analogy? Like, the original, the original sin of like OpenAI itself, the weirdness of Microsoft investing in OpenAI was that it was sort of a nonprofit that is, has moved to for-profit. And as, as we're hearing whispers, it's going to move 100% to for-profit. But from Microsoft's perspective, the original sin here is that they can't acquire OpenAI. Right? So in, if, if in a different regulatory environment, or if this were 10 years ago, look at what Microsoft has done. They have essentially gone all in on AI.

• 14:41Speaker 01

  They are putting AI into all of their most important products, from Excel to Teams to Windows 11 itself, to you name it. And so they're basically making it a core component of all of their most important product, most important product lines. But there was a day-long Microsoft outage recently where you couldn't use things like Teams and, and the AI within Word, the, the copilots and things like that, because the Microsoft APIs are down. So think of how core these things have suddenly become to most of their most important product lines.

• 15:20Speaker 01

  Microsoft naturally would want to own that technology. If it is going to become, Microsoft is the most valuable company in the world now because essentially investors have given them credit for being, you know, AI first and, and maybe the, the most ahead of the big seven or whatever in terms of AI.

• 15:38Alex Kantrowitz?

  And also because they're the most natural company to apply this technology in sort of this business sense.

• 15:43Speaker 01

  What I'm saying though is like, you know, Meta's trying to apply AI inside their family of apps, right? But they own their own AI technology. Google obviously is, is trying to integrate into everything, but they also own their own stuff. So the original sin is that Microsoft, if this is core technology to them, they want to own it. Now we've seen them signaling that they have not put all of their eggs in the Sam Altman basket, right? They've invested in other OpenAI competitors. They're, you know, in their earnings reports, they're talking about their capex spending going up because, you know, we're theorizing that they're training their, they're even.

• 16:25Alex Kantrowitz?

  They are training. They are training their own. Like the news reports have them training huge models.

• 16:30Speaker 01

  Great. So my question to you is, now, and by the way, before we even get to that, don't forget the, the weird chaos around OpenAI where they got.

• 16:39Alex Kantrowitz?

  What weird chaos, Brian? That's in the past.

• 16:41Speaker 01

  They got blindsided by Sam Altman's ouster. I don't imagine that they're thrilled with some of the weirdness like around Scarlett Johansson and like the, you know, you, you went down the list of, of weird things that happened over the last two weeks. So it's clear that Microsoft is hedging their bets, right? But what I'm also saying is, what, what would you, okay, you give me the odds on how tight this relationship between Microsoft and OpenAI would be five years from now. I don't think Microsoft would ever, you know, divest themselves of their investment, but.

• 17:15Speaker 01

  Five years from now, will they not need OpenAI? And Sam's not, he wasn't born yesterday. He knows that. In a way, the partnership between Microsoft and OpenAI is sort of like what Apple's doing right now with OpenAI, which is our own technology is not good enough. We know we need to launch AI chatbots, something that is sophisticated enough now. And then three years from now, five years from now, when our tech is good enough, we don't need them. Right? So that's essentially what Microsoft has done from day one. So what, you give me the odds of Microsoft and OpenAI, five years from now, being as tightly partnered as they are right now?

• 17:54Alex Kantrowitz?

  Well, Brian, I'll have you know, I'm rewatching The Wire. And what the guy's name, the detective Lester, tells you to follow the money and not the drugs? And so I'll just follow the money here. And we know that Microsoft gave OpenAI $13 billion. We think that a lot of that was either, you know, server credits or potentially just plowed right back into Azure to train and deploy models. And we know that OpenAI is reported to be on schedule to make about $2 billion this year in revenue. Okay. So that's the money picture for OpenAI. In comes Apple. Apple says, OpenAI, we've basically, we want to plug you into our operating system. And how much is that deal going to be worth to OpenAI?

• 18:36Alex Kantrowitz?

  It could be worth, this is from The Information, it could be worth billions of dollars to the startup if it goes well. Not a billion, billions.

• 18:45Speaker 01

  Billions, yeah.

• 18:45Alex Kantrowitz?

  That's their entire revenue. I mean, let's say it's even two billions. That's their entire revenue this year.

• 18:51Speaker 01

  And that's, that's right now, what Sam and OpenAI want is they essentially want to maybe not replace the Google search deal that, that Apple has had for 20 years, where Apple makes $20 billion. Obviously, they don't want to pay Apple $20 billion.

• 19:07Alex Kantrowitz?

  It's the opposite. They're going to get paid by Apple to do this.

• 19:09Speaker 01

  Exactly. So in a way, if they could replace Google by being searches, OpenAI is imagining five years from now, they're making $5, $10 billion a year from Apple because they are fulfilling all of these functions that include the sort of autonomous agents, the assistant, the searching and summarizing the web and all that, all that stuff.

• 19:32Alex Kantrowitz?

  Exactly. So I think that like it's good for, honestly, look, it's good for both OpenAI and for Microsoft to diversify here. It's good for OpenAI to have multiple partners because it's more sustainable that way and it's sort of really able to chart its own future in a way that it wants if it's not reliant on just one company. And frankly, it's good for Microsoft because it allows it to, you know, both rely on a partnership with OpenAI, but also if it's developing and building internally, we know that they have Mustafa Suleyman there working on consumer products now, right? Like it gives Microsoft greater control over how this technology integrates with its products and greater insulation from whatever, you know, potential

• 20:13Alex Kantrowitz?

  chaos might ensue at a partner, although you would imagine that OpenAI is a lot more stable now than it was previously. And one last thing, one last thing here. We also know that the priorities of OpenAI and Microsoft might be different, right?

• 20:28Speaker 01

  Right.

• 20:29Alex Kantrowitz?

  OpenAI, I think at its heart, still a research house, right? And I was on air on CNBC this week. I was talking about how ChatGPT is still only at 100 million users. That's the number that it hit two months after launch. But ultimately, like, I don't think that that is like the live or die for them. It's about the technology. Whereas Microsoft was pushing OpenAI after the Sam Altman, this is a report we have in the Financial Times, that Microsoft was pushing OpenAI after the Sam Altman blow up to be more focused on commercial products.

• 21:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:02Alex Kantrowitz?

  So if that's what Microsoft wants, by building these capabilities in-house, Microsoft is able to get that. And then also, let's say, you know, OpenAI comes up with like some massive research breakthrough and let's say they actually are training GPT-6 now and it's just like freaking human level intelligence, like Microsoft will be able to benefit from that. So that's my perspective on this.

• 21:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, except that I think that OpenAI is incentivized right now. Again, these are two extremely canny operators who, this is not their first rodeo. OpenAI is incentivized now because they know, they can see the strategic angles here. Microsoft wants to have control over this core technology. They can't buy OpenAI, so they're going to try to build it in-house so no one can stop them from doing it. So. OpenAI is incentivized now to go products. You said, well, they they're still more focused on on the research. I don't think that's necessarily true. I think that the the path for OpenAI to stay strong and independent is to productize themselves,

• 22:03Speaker 01

  which would run contrary to Microsoft wanting to productize themselves as well. This is extremely reductive, but in a sense, you can think of this as I've always said that AI is trying to make the Star Trek computer a product, which is you don't have to know anything. It's like the the shift from the command line to the GUI. Computing is not having to know, I got to go to this app. I got to go to this website. I got to type in these forms. The AI just does it for you. The first person to productize that, whether it be in Excel, whether it be inside of Instagram, whether it be inside Google Search or your Google Docs or whatever, that that they imagine that that is people will pay,

• 22:48Speaker 01

  you know, tens and maybe hundreds of dollars a month for that, you know, per seat in in enterprise per person and and consumer. So OpenAI in that, if you look at it through that lens, is actually weak because they have to build their own brand. You know, there was there was a story this week that I think that they just signed up PricewaterhouseCoopers or PWC, as you're supposed to call them now, to the tune of of thousands and thousands of seats. Well, so they have to do that from a standing start. Like, if you take that reductive lens of who's going to be the first one to productize, essentially having a butler that a computer butler that does everything for you, they would have to do that without a platform of their own and, you know,

• 23:32Speaker 01

  sign up for a chat GPT account and and pay us per month and that sort of.

• 23:36Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yes, but but that's why these partnerships are so important to them. And that's why they really do win with these multiple partnerships, because they can create that for Microsoft and they're going to create it for Apple at WWDC.

• 23:48Speaker 01

  I'm saying for the long term, that doesn't work for anyone. Long term, five years out, Apple does not want to be using OpenAI. They want to be using their own stuff. I'm suggesting that's also true for Microsoft and I'm suggesting that's true for OpenAI. They know that, and so they need to. To plow their own sort of path here to be competitive five years out. When Microsoft hired Suliman.

• 24:12Alex Kantrowitz?

  And that's why they might be a research house because they ultimately will have to keep advancing the status quo in order to be able to maintain these deals. Because if they just had stuff on, it was easy to replicate on par with everybody, then they would be out already.

• 24:26Speaker 01

  When Microsoft, Aqua hired, even though technically they didn't to get around again, the competitive landscape, or the regulatory landscape, hiring Suliman was the biggest signal that, hey, by the way, Sam, we don't need you forever.

• 24:41Alex Kantrowitz?

  But Suliman is just consumer products and he was also building a failing company, so.

• 24:45Speaker 01

  True, but they hired somebody that can be the visionary. Like, I'm not one of these people that denigrates or says that Sam Altman hasn't achieved a lot of stuff, but he's not a product guy necessarily, he's not an engineer, he's also not a researcher.

• 25:04Alex Kantrowitz?

  I don't know, Brian, I mean, whatever you want to call him, he is the guy who's company, who is running underneath him, took this technology that was built within Google and everybody had access to, and actually built the product. And has the state, not only that, and has the state of the art research underneath him.

• 25:22Speaker 01

  For sure.

• 25:22Alex Kantrowitz?

  That nobody else can equal.

• 25:23Speaker 01

  And he has, as we saw with the attempted coup, the backing of some of the most talented people in the AI field. So again, I'm not denigrating Sam Altman at all, he's clearly the caniest operator in this space as it exists right now. And he brought this space to the forefront, so he deserves all the credit for that in the world.

• 25:40Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, but okay, so let's talk about a little bit about why OpenAI is going to be in sort of, why they're going to win in the near term, for sure. Even though, I agree with you, there's vulnerability, I've been talking about on the show for a while. But I also think this Apple partnership might really change the game for OpenAI in a way that I'm just starting to appreciate. Because it seems like Apple is going all the way in. And there was always a question of like, what was Apple going to do? So previous reports, this is from Mark Gurman in Bloomberg, so previous reports had Apple prepare.

• 26:14Alex Kantrowitz?

  A bunch of different features like voice memo transcriptions and summaries and recaps of websites, notifications and automated message replies and advanced photo editing and AI-generated emojis. Okay, all that to me, total snooze. But the report this week really brings into focus about how big Apple is going to go in on this, right? So this is, this is from German again. Apple plans AI-based Siri overhaul to control individual app functions. Now, this, the second part of that headline is really important. It's not about information retrieval like your traditional chat GPT. It's actually giving control of the app over to Siri and here over, yeah, well, basically allowing you to control the app with Siri, not letting the AI control it for you. But here's the story from

• 26:59Alex Kantrowitz?

  German. Apple Inc. is planning to overhaul Siri in a move that will let users control individual app functions with their voice. The new system will allow Siri to take command of all the features within apps for the first time. That change, okay, it required a revamp of Siri's underlying software. We know this. Okay, here is a example. At the start, Siri will handle one command at a time, but Apple has plans to allow users to chain commands together. For example, and I'm 100% certain this is going to be the hero demo at WWDC. And by my certainty is probably, you know, just me being overconfident reading this, but it sounds likely. Okay. He says, for example, you can ask Siri to summarize a recorded meeting and then text it to a colleague and run

• 27:42Alex Kantrowitz?

  request, or an iPhone could theoretically be asked to crop a picture and then email it to a friend.

• 27:48Speaker 01

  Right. And you don't, you don't have to say, and then open it in, in photos and then crop it. You just, you just like, like Picard says in Star Trek. It's like, you know, computer enhance, and it just does it, right? It is also what the rabbit R1 suggested was, it was trying to do, although whether it was successful doing that is obviously hugely debatable. But imagine that you want to book a flight and you don't have, like, once you give it access to your X Media account and your, your Gmail and your whatever, you just say, book a flight for next Wednesday to Seattle. And that's it. It just does it. And maybe you give it the price parameters, but you don't have to tell it, open this app, do that. The, the access to the system level is what's key here. And that's what people and

• 28:33Speaker 01

  Some of the papers that that have been released by Apple Research suggests that they're going in this direction. The idea is that at the OS level, the AI will have the ability to to do stuff for you, to to execute commands, multi-level commands with things that would take different steps. That's why I say it's similar to the moving from the command line to the GUI, where as opposed to having to know how to, in a command way, tell the computer what to do, you clicked icons and you did dropdown menus. If you need to plan a vacation now, or do a doctor's appointment, you know that you, as the human, have to go into this account,

• 29:17Speaker 01

  go to that website, use this app, check this account, you know, all that, all that stuff is obviated by if the AI has the the the ability to execute at the OS level on your behalf, then it is Picard saying, "Computer, enhance," without having to say, "Go to Adobe, and then enhance 30 percent." You just say, "Enhance more, enhance more." That's what we're, that's what Apple is suggesting.

• 29:44Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay, so let's just, as we end this segment, just kind of do like a little scorecard here. So we think OpenAI is going to come out of this, this next year stronger?

• 29:54Speaker 01

  I, I'm gonna, I'm gonna put a, I'm gonna-

• 29:57Alex Kantrowitz?

  Fifty percent stronger, fifty percent weaker, Brian?

• 29:59Speaker 01

  I still think that there is, there's, there's a possibility that people are underwhelmed by WWDC. What happens then? If, if the demos are not wow gee whiz enough, not only is Apple's stock price in trouble, but like, OpenAI could, should still come out of this looking good, but more than, I was saying to someone just this past weekend, more than any other WWDC that I can remember for a decade, I don't know where this is gonna land. So yeah, there's your 50/50 again. I don't know what the odds are that they're going to have an iPhone moment where it's like, "I didn't even know that was possible," versus, oh, a slightly smarter Siri.

• 30:44Alex Kantrowitz?

  I do think that WWDC is going to be very impressive, mostly because it has to be for both of these companies. For OpenAI to, yeah, to be able to continue to push forward. I mean, OpenAI will be fine if it releases GPT-5 and it's like a godlike AI or, you know, not even that, but just like another step forward in what we're seeing and, I mean, but Apple does need this. I think they really do.

• 31:06Speaker 01

  And I'm not rooting for this because I love to be wowed. I live for iPhone moments where the, the, the possibilities and the vistas are pushed forward. But if people come, if two weeks from now, people are underwhelmed and that's what you're talking about on the show, remember I said that there's a real possibility here that they don't hit the mark.

• 31:23Alex Kantrowitz?

  Well, I mean, they were able to make the Vision Pro look cool in an era where like mixed reality.

• 31:28Speaker 01

  That has missed the mark.

• 31:30Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yes.

• 31:31Speaker 01

  I mean, it looked cool and people talked about it for three weeks.

• 31:34Alex Kantrowitz?

  Exactly. So, I mean, this is, these are two companies that really can do excellent marketing.

• 31:40Alex Kantrowitz?

  And, and they often have products to back it up, but not, not all of them hit in the long run. Okay. I want to talk about Microsoft real quick, you know, in terms of like wrapping up where things are going.

• 31:50Alex Kantrowitz?

  What's your sense as to like the uptake on the co-pilots? Because that's some of the feedback I've been getting is that like, okay, Microsoft, because you mentioned, okay, Microsoft, the most valuable company in the world. Yes. Buy it. Buy it. Good deal. Actually.

• 32:03Alex Kantrowitz?

  The, it's, it's predicated on their, their ability to be first in AI and a lot of their ability to productize this stuff and put it into Office and Excel and all, all these things. Are you getting a sense that people are actually using these co-pilots? Like, is that, is this enthusiasm for Microsoft sustainable in terms of like being able to be traced back to actual usage?

• 32:25Speaker 01

  For Microsoft specifically, I, I can't speak to, but I'll, I'll use, I'll, I'll broaden it out to tell you what I, you know. In the end, the promise of AI and AGI is that the computers are smarter than us, so they make smarter decisions and we leave the decision-making to them. Where the state of the art is right now is essentially getting rid of the busy work of the, you know, instead of taking 90 minutes to create a, a slideshow presentation, just do it in five and, you know, tweak it. I'm seeing that uptake in a lot of places where there's busy work to be done. Law.

• 33:07Speaker 01

  The uptake that I have seen anecdotally, just from companies that I'm aware of, startups and things like that. As an example, going through, you know, case files, depositions, things like that, things that you hire people to spend hours, weeks, months, years to do, like that sort of stuff. So I would extrapolate on to that, that, first of all, I hear all the time from developers that, yeah, I'll never develop without a copilot again. It is creeping into things like law, like healthcare, like education. If you're a teacher and you can use it to do lesson planning, do IEPs and things like that, and you've got, you know, troves of paperwork and things like that.

• 33:51Speaker 01

  So I, I'm answering your question by saying, I bet Microsoft is seeing uptake in it. We know this because they continue to double down on every product they're putting into. I'm saying anecdotally, I believe it too, because anything that is rote, mind-numbing work can be replaced, or, or not replaced with a, a copilot, but made less terrible by a copilot. So, um, yes, I think that Microsoft is perfectly positioned for that.

• 34:21Alex Kantrowitz?

  Before we go to break, we should talk a little bit about the fact that Helen Tonner, Natasha Colley, just who are the two OpenAI board members who sort of sparked the firing of Sam Altman, uh, they actually said why they fired him this week. And again, they basically said little, so I didn't want to dedicate too much time here because it's been like the same sort of like, he was not consistently candid, like, come on, like, actually, like, this, it sort of seems like it was just a power struggle, the more they talk. But this is just from the FT, that Tonner, uh, it's summarizing what she said on the TED AI show. Uh, she said that he missed, that Sam misled the board on multiple occasions about its safety process.

• 35:04Alex Kantrowitz?

  For years, she says Sam had made it really difficult for the board to actually do its job by withholding information, misrepresenting things that were happening at the company, and in some cases outright lying to the board. I mean, one example that she gave was that The board didn't know ChatGPT was coming until they found out about it on Twitter. How do you read this? Is this more concerning than I'm starting to think it is? Or?

• 35:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think so, but this comes back to my disagreement with you that they are still research based. I think that the fundamental disagreement within OpenAI is there were a ton of people when it was founded in, you know, 2015, 2016, I can't remember what year it was exactly. They they basically got the best and the brightest of the entire academic space, right? And they essentially said, the whole premise was, we're going to do this independently because we, this is too important for any big tech behemoth to own, for any one company to own. So you have, I don't know what the percentage would be of the company at one point, maybe not

• 36:10Speaker 01

  now, because a lot of those people have left, as we know, who believed in that as an academic and research mission. The Helen Toners of the world probably can't give us like more tangible examples of when specifically Sam Altman was talking out of both sides of his mouth to people. That's that seems to be what they're suggesting. For various, you know, legal reasons, they probably can't give you tangible examples. My read is the fundamental problem here is that a certain percentage of the company bought into it being a research company and not a product company, and that either Sam falls on the it's going to become a product company side,

• 36:52Speaker 01

  or he's trying to play both sides as long as he can, because it would it would help OpenAI to go down parallel tracks as long as it can before it has to make a decision. And and so that suggests what essentially, if you read between the lines, the board has always said is, you're telling me one thing, and then I heard you told somebody else the exact opposite.

• 37:14Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. All right. My point here is that it has no choice but to be both research and product. But and I guess like for us, it's like, what leads? You're saying product leads, I'm saying research leads.

• 37:24Speaker 01

  And then there are people that want to get off that train if it's not the train that they wanted to be on.

• 37:30Alex Kantrowitz?

  That's true. Yep. We also got an email from OpenAI last week talking about their alignment work. So they actually, I don't think they have a super alignment team, but they do have-

• 37:44Speaker 01

  The super alignment team is dead, but they-

• 37:45Alex Kantrowitz?

  They do have an alignment team.

• 37:46Speaker 01

  Spinning up a new one or something like that.

• 37:48Alex Kantrowitz?

  They said that John Schulman, who's their co-founder, is taking on an expanded profile, a portfolio as the head of alignment science. And they say it's a priority for OpenAI and the company expects this investment to increase over time. So that's what they told me. We'll see.

• 38:04Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 38:05Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay. Oh, sorry. Before we go to break, one more thing, which is just an amazing detail with this Apple situation. This is from the information's report. In wooing Apple, Altman had to overcome skeptics within the iPhone maker. Some Apple executives have long had an aversion to chatbots, especially its head of machine learning, John Giander, who, by the way, came over from Google. Okay. In early 2023, after ChatGPT exploded in popularity, he told staff in an internal all hands meeting, and this is after I presumably he's tried ChatGPT. ChatGPT said, the last thing people needed was another chatbot. I mean, come on.

• 38:42Speaker 01

  Well, that maybe explains why Siri has been stuck in the mud for-

• 38:47Alex Kantrowitz?

  Lord almighty. I mean, what was going on there? All right. There's somebody who thinks the world does need one more chatbot, and that's Elon Musk. We'll talk about his $6 billion fundraiser and what he plans to do with XAI on the other side of this break. Again, we're here with Brian McCullough. He's the host of the Tech Meme Ride Home Podcast, which you can listen to every weekday, where Brian will give you a great recap of what's going on in the world of tech. Recommend it, one of our favorite shows. And also, before we go to break, this is going to be another one of our episodes where we're collaborating with Tech Meme. You'll be able to see it on the homepage of Tech Meme. And I wanted to thank Tech Meme for showcasing the podcast on its homepage. It's my go-to site for finding out what's happening in the tech world as it's happening.

• 39:30Alex Kantrowitz?

  Found a lot of stories for this week's show on Tech Meme and then went in and read. And I think you're going to find great value from it, too. So that's techmeme.com. All right, Elon Musk's billion, $6 billion fundraising coming up. Right after the break. This episode is brought to you by AVPoint. Everyone's racing to roll out AI right now. Copilots, chatbots, agents doing real work. But here's the part nobody loves talking about. All that AI runs on your data. And most teams have no single way to see it, secure it, and prove it's under control. That's exactly what AVPoint does. For 25 years, they've been the trusted layer beneath the world's most demanding data, now extended across your entire AI estate,

• 40:11Alex Kantrowitz?

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• 40:56Alex Kantrowitz?

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• 41:43Alex Kantrowitz?

  And we're back here on Big Technology Podcast with Brian McCullough. He's the host of the Tech Meme Ride Home Podcast and the partner of the Tech Meme, of the Ride Home Fund and another fund that's AI focused. What's the name of that fund, Brian?

• 41:55Speaker 01

  The Ride Home AI Fund. And specifically, I need to specify, the funds are not related to Tech Meme. The Ride Home Fund is a separate brand.

• 42:04Alex Kantrowitz?

  It's a Brian McCullough production.

• 42:05Speaker 01

  It's a Brian McCullough production, yes.

• 42:07Alex Kantrowitz?

  Are you going to invest? Or let's say this. So Elon, you know what I'm going to ask already?

• 42:12Speaker 01

  Yes, I do.

• 42:13Alex Kantrowitz?

  Elon just invested $6 billion, sorry, raised $6 billion from Sequoia and Andreessen Horowitz and others. Okay, would you have invested in that Musk XAI?

• 42:24Speaker 01

  Okay, I have some real inside baseball for you, which I have mentioned this on my show. I was offered that daily. So you, you often, when you're an investor, you, people learn you're an investor and you get offered things often secondaries from a company that's raising its B round or its C round. And so somebody got a hold of an early employee that's trying to unload a million shares. And what they do is they spin up a special purpose vehicle and they offer it to people that have funds like me. And they say, do you want X number of shares of this company that's got to do a C round or whatever?

• 43:08Speaker 01

  Very rarely has, I mean, it's not like this is the late stage round of XAI. But I was offered this by a lot of people I've worked with in the past and people that I had never heard of. This was all over the place. And I'm not casting aspersions here. I don't necessarily know what that means. But Alex, I could have gotten you an allocation in this if you wanted. Like this was shopped around a lot. At the, at the Ride Home Funds, we passed on it because we're an early stage fund. And so, you know, we, investing above a $10 billion valuation is not necessarily the waters that we fish in, just for the, how the math works out in our thing.

• 43:53Alex Kantrowitz?

  But let's say you weren't. Would you have put the money in? I mean, did it look like a good and investable opportunity for you?

• 44:00Speaker 01

  Um, I think I still would have passed.

• 44:02Alex Kantrowitz?

  Why?

• 44:03Speaker 01

  Because I think that.

• 44:08Speaker 01

  The value proposition here is Elon Musk and then that he has Twitter. You know, everybody is concerned about where am I going to get high quality data. This week Vox and the Atlantic signed deals. I think the Dow Jones signed a big and these are big deals. And maybe we'll talk about that again in a second. But why did they go to the Atlantic? Because the Atlantic has been published since like 1843 or something like that. Right? So you have high, high quality stuff going back forever. Is Twitter high quality? Now, OpenAI has paid Reddit. Is Reddit high quality? I don't know.

• 44:51Speaker 01

  What I'm saying is, is if the value proposition is Elon Musk, that's interesting to me. Except for the fact that he seems to be distracted by so many things.

• 44:59Alex Kantrowitz?

  I mean, the guy did also co-found OpenAI.

• 45:02Speaker 01

  Did, yes. So also that makes me a little nervous. Is this a revenge job or whatever? But I would have passed on it because I don't know that just training it on Twitter is enough. And then I would make the argument that people are behind. They are starting behind now. They have raised more money than Croesus to obviously catch up. They're going to buy as much as Nvidia will give them in terms of the compute that they need to do this. But I just would have passed for that reason. Now, forget about me. What do you think that the larger move here is?

• 45:41Speaker 01

  Because obviously, you know, Andreessen and Saudi Arabia and like big blue chip names clearly believe in this as a play. Do you think that if Microsoft is going to do it, OpenAI is here, Google's doing it, Meta is doing it, Anthropic, this one, that one? Is there room for another one? Like I've, I've, I've discussed before, is there a commoditization in the sense that there were 20 different search engines before Google came in and? Killed them all.

• 46:12Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, I mean, why not? Right? Like, if there's room for two, there's room for, you know, seven, I guess.

• 46:19Speaker 01

  Maybe not, but.

• 46:20Alex Kantrowitz?

  Maybe not, but you're right. I, I, look, I think that, that here's my, my perspective on it. So first of all, we do have some information about how they're going to play it. So first of all, they're going to spend a lot of this money on compute. And Musk has said he's, and this is from the information, he wants to build a giga factory of compute. And that XAI is going to need a hundred thousand specialized semiconductors to train and run the next version of AI Grok. He is saying that, okay, in a May presentation to investors, Musk said he wants to get the supercomputer running by the fall of 2025 and will hold himself personally responsible for delivering it on time. When completed, the connected groups of chips Nvidia's H100 units

• 47:02Alex Kantrowitz?

  will be at least four times the size of the biggest GPU clusters that exist today. So I think the question is like, if improvement is going to come from brute forcing these models with more compute and more data, Elon Musk can get that compute, he can get the data, right? From Twitter or wherever he, he figures it out and common, common crawl, whatever it might be. So, so it seems like he's, he might, he will probably be able to catch up if his computer is going to be four X the size. Then the question comes down to, will, will you end up with technique that helps you get better beyond size? And everybody's going to make a bet on technique. And I think that like venture capitalists, you know, they could put money in and lose. And that's okay, right?

• 47:47Alex Kantrowitz?

  But they, they bet on the chance that this can win. And is there a chance that they can have like the right technique that helps push this forward? I think it's, it's at least a probability, a possibility. I don't know if it's likely, but it's possible. And also like the one wild card is, and I know that it's probably not going to happen, but Elon Musk was able to recruit Ilya Sutskever to OpenAI once. Can he recruit him again? Can he recruit somebody with his level of talent to come do it? And become like the chief scientist at XAI? I think it's, I think it's possible. And if that happens, all bets are off.

• 48:25Speaker 01

  I had Nat Friedman, the AI investing extraordinaire. There's nobody that is a more prominent personal investor in AI right now than Nat Friedman, ex-CEO of GitHub. And he very strongly believes, because we asked him, like, can the biggest model, will the biggest model always win? Which is a little, there's fudging around the edges. But essentially, the question is, the most compute, the most data, will that always win? And he was like, so far, I haven't seen anything that suggests otherwise. The more compute you throw at it, the more high-quality data you throw at it, the better it can be.

• 49:07Speaker 01

  So, yes, there is a philosophical debate right now versus what you call technique, what we call terroir, which is like, yeah, but do you just want GPT-6 to be reading X-ray scans? Or do you want a specialized model that is trained on medical stuff and X-ray scans? Because maybe that would be better. Possibly Elon agrees with Nat and is like, look, just go big, because until we see proof otherwise, big is continuing to win here. It would be interesting, you know, speaking of the compute, like, you know, Sam Altman, you know, the story was, he wants to raise $8 trillion or whatever it was to create-

• 49:52Alex Kantrowitz?

  Seven trillion, man.

• 49:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:54Alex Kantrowitz?

  I mean, come on.

• 49:55Speaker 01

  Well, listen, I dream bigger than even-

• 49:57Alex Kantrowitz?

  I know. No, he joked, why not eight, I think.

• 50:00Speaker 01

  Right, right. So, like, let's say that the pitch that I got for XAI was that, which maybe it is, then that's more interesting to me, because if they're right, and then building these superclusters is what's going to matter, then that's more interesting. But- I would have passed because I don't know where it's going to go. Other people smarter than me are fine with, listen, it's Elon, so we don't, we're in. And we'll see.

• 50:35Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, well, Larry Ellison is certainly happy because he's going to be. Yeah, he's going to be making some money licensing his Oracle servers out to make this happen. We had an interesting comment actually here. So general foundational models will be commoditized and the value will be captured in vertical specific models trained on private data.

• 50:55Speaker 01

  And Mike, Mikel or Michael, whatever, that is the debate. Because on the one hand, that is part of the thesis that I'm investing in, which is

• 51:07Speaker 01

  verticals and what I'm calling terwar in the wine sense where what you train it on and how you do the knobs and levers of the of the weights and things like that will make things better. But again, like Nat Friedman, 100% believes that that's not true. And that the the bigger beefier model has until proven otherwise continues to beat even the most specialized.

• 51:31Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yep. And maybe he's making a bet on both with this giga. What does he call it? A giga computer? Giga's anyway.

• 51:38Speaker 01

  Giga complex.

• 51:39Alex Kantrowitz?

  A giga factory of compute. It's actually excellent branding.

• 51:44Speaker 01

  He's nothing if not consistent. He held on to the X.com domain name for 25 years before he could.

• 51:50Alex Kantrowitz?

  And everything is giga. Yeah. All right. Before we leave, I want to talk quickly about this. Also, first of all, I should tease. We talked a little bit about these deals that Vox and the Atlantic have made with OpenAI and whether the news industry can survive AI and whether these are advised or not. Big story this week, obviously, like in the media sense. On Wednesday, Ben Smith and Aima Raza, who I just started this new podcast. Called Mixed Signals, they're coming on with Joe Marchese, who's a venture capitalist. And we're going to talk all about whether these deals are advisable or not. And it's gonna be fun because Ben and I, we're both at BuzzFeed. And obviously BuzzFeed made some deals with Facebook and Twitter. And thinking it would be good to distribute the content. And that didn't work out exactly as planned.

• 52:35Alex Kantrowitz?

  So that's coming Wednesday on the podcast. But let's, before we end, talk just briefly about this loneliness article because it was very interesting. So the Wall Street Journal had this story talking about how in the age of remote work, American workers, really workers around the world, I think, are getting way more lonely. And they had some wild stats. So they said, I can't believe this, Brian. More than 40% of fully remote workers polled in a 2023 survey of working parents said they go days without leaving the house. Those who work in office spend nearly a quarter of their time in virtual meetings. And face to face meetings account for only 8% of their time. Also, this is crazy.

• 53:18Alex Kantrowitz?

  Americans in particular have tripled the time spent in meetings since 2020. And let's see, 68% said they knew their coworkers on a personal level, down from 79% five years ago. Are we underappreciating the impact that this era of remote work is going to have on people in terms of just making them lonelier than ever before? And you know, we're both like, I think we're both remote entrepreneurs. Like, do you feel this at all in your life? I'm curious what you think about this.

• 53:49Speaker 01

  I have never worked in an office. Like, I have an office, but it's a WeWork-like situation. So it's just me. I've never, you have, you worked in newsrooms and things like that. I've never had that. But my first company I founded in 1999 was all the workers were remote distributed. So I, what I would say about this is it's not for everyone. But that's the point maybe that this data is revealing is that if you were someone who...

• 54:23Speaker 01

  Went to college to get a certain degree to do a certain type of work. And I'm not saying that people pursued careers to work in offices and cubicles. You know, people have have bemoan that for for as long as cubicles and things like that have been around. And then like, look at, look at the movie, The Apartment from the, is it the late 50s or early 60s? Like, the office has always kind of seemed a little dehumanizing to certain people. But if you're not prepared for the fact that, like, you can hear my dog flapping his ears over there. You, if you work from home and you're not used to that as being your sort of, uh, yeah,

• 55:06Speaker 01

  that's why I'm right by a window. That's why, like, it's a different skill set. So let's say that you were someone that worked in an office for 10 years. And especially in Silicon Valley, where you're used to the perks and the the free lunch and the the the gym membership and all that stuff. Like, I can see that this is, you would be like, this is not what I signed up for. I think what I'm saying is, um, it's, it's not for everyone. There are a lot of people that I know that that prefer it. You mean, I don't have to give up two hours of my day for a commute? Awesome.

• 55:37Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yep.

• 55:38Speaker 01

  But yeah, I can see how people would feel a little rug pulled by being like, this is not what I signed up for.

• 55:44Alex Kantrowitz?

  And what's with all the meetings, Brian? Can can we end this podcast getting together and finding a place of agreement? But the meetings are are becoming too much. Like I said, the meetings, uh, let's see, I've, okay, here it is. Paradoxically, meetings can make people feel lonelier. And even so, if the meetings are virtual. A 2023 survey by employees, uh, by employee experience analyst company, Perceptics, found that people who describe themselves as very lonely, very lonely, tend to have heavier meeting loads than their less lonely staffers. So more than 40% of these people spend more than half their work hours in meetings. And, um, right, this is the stat again, that Americans have tripled the time they spent in meetings.

• 56:29Alex Kantrowitz?

  Can't this meeting just be an email? I mean, you're right, maybe AI can solve it for us by having our, like, co-pilot show up.

• 56:36Speaker 01

  Well, right.

• 56:37Alex Kantrowitz?

  In meetings, but it's absolutely astounding to me how meetings have multiplied the way that they have since 2020.

• 56:43Speaker 01

  The, the, the hotness of the moment in the AI space is autonomous agents. The amount of startups that I've seen that are like, Have our AI agent attend the meeting for you. It can answer questions on your behalf because it's been trained on your your email. So it knows what your action items are. You can also prompt it ahead of time. And then, so you don't have to attend. And it will give you a readout afterwards so that it'll be like, sort of like getting the inbox zero at the end of the day. All of those eight meetings that you had today, you didn't actually have to attend. We can also get to a place where you train an avatar on yourself. So maybe people don't know that Brian didn't attend.

• 57:26Speaker 01

  So maybe AI is going to solve that for us. I think that people hated meetings and the joke was before COVID times, like, couldn't this have been an email? But like, scheduling an in-person meeting was always harder than being like, just click on Zoom. So I can see that COVID times and remote work has just made-

• 57:47Alex Kantrowitz?

  And maybe Calendly a little bit has caused that as well. Calendar links, maybe they're causing more meetings. Well, Brian-

• 57:55Speaker 01

  It's taken away the friction of doing meetings is only made meetings multiply like cockroaches.

• 58:02Alex Kantrowitz?

  I know, but I do like Calendly. Anyway, I'm with you. Less meetings, more time in person. If you're working remotely and you've been in the house for multiple days on end, please walk out of the house now. Please take these headphones off and walk out of the house and go feel the sun on your face and-

• 58:22Speaker 01

  I was going to argue the opposite. I was going to argue the opposite. This is what keeps podcasters in business is the fact that since we're all by ourselves all the time that we have these asynchronous friends that are our podcasting buddies that we feel like we know even though we've never met.

• 58:36Alex Kantrowitz?

  Let me try that again, Brian. If you are at home and you haven't gone out of the house in multiple days, keep your headphones in. Walk outside of the house.

• 58:44Speaker 01

  Go through the back catalog of-

• 58:46Alex Kantrowitz?

  Feel the sun on your face. Listen to every one of these podcasts. Listen to all the Techmeme Radio podcasts. Go to a local coffee shop and say, hey, I can't believe I haven't told you about this podcast that I love. And then you will feel happy. And that is our message. So kumbaya, less meetings, more in-person interaction. Lots of fun AI news coming up in the next few weeks. We'll be here to cover it. Brian is going to be there to cover it. You can listen to his show, Tech Meme Ride-A-Home Podcast on your podcast app of choice. You can listen to our show, Big Technology Podcast, on your podcast app of choice, indoors, outdoors, it's your decision. On Wednesday, we'll be back with Ben Smith, Naema Raza, and Joe Marchese, talking about the implications of all of these

• 59:28Alex Kantrowitz?

  AI companies and news organizations doing deals with each other. Until then, I hope you have a great couple of days and we'll see you next time on Big Technology Podcast.

• 59:38Speaker 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' healthcare to pay for tax breaks for himself and his donors. He's not on our side. Shannon Taylor will fight corruption, cut taxes, and bring down costs. This November, vote for Shannon Taylor. She's for us. Paid for by HMP, the HouseMajorityPac.com, not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee.

• 1:00:07Speaker 03

  In this life, you can't win.

• 1:00:09Speaker 04

  When the world gets you down.

• 1:00:11Speaker 03

  No!

• 1:00:11Speaker 04

  Escape to Pluto TV.

• 1:00:13Speaker 03

  This is objectively fantastic.

• 1:00:15Speaker 04

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

• 1:00:18Speaker 03

  Shwing!

• 1:00:19Speaker 04

  Even our news is uplifting.

• 1:00:21Alex Kantrowitz?

  You stay classy, San Diego.

• 1:00:22Speaker 04

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

• 1:00:28Alex Kantrowitz?

  We're not worthy!

• 1:00:30Speaker 04

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