Apple’s AI WWDC Approaches, Nvidia $3 Trillion, OpenAI Safety Concerns

Ranjan Roy from Margins is back for our weekly discussion of the latest tech news. We cover 1) Apple's WWDC AI preview 2) Apple's willingness to change its operating system with AI 3) Were Humane and Rabbit on the right track with bad execution? 4) Will the market react well to WWDC? 5) Apple is going to put cameras in AirPods? + Alex's experience with the Ray-Ban Metas 6) NVIDIA's $3 trillion market cap 7) NVIDIA surpasses Apple for a minute in valuation 8) Are we at the NVIDIA top? 9) Roaring Kitty is back in the Gamestop trade 10) OpenAI's current an ex-employee write an open letter about safety disclosure 11) Sam Altman narrative change - is it fair? 12) Leopold Aschenbrenner's public rollout 13) Alex's chances of turning into a paperclip next week --- 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?

  It's WWDC Eve as Apple prepares to roll out its AI strategy. Nvidia, meanwhile, surpassed Apple momentarily en route to a $3 trillion valuation. GameStop is running up again, and OpenAI is hit with an open letter from current and ex-employees demanding better disclosure. 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.

• 0:41Alex Kantrowitz?

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

• 1:26Alex Kantrowitz?

  Welcome to Big Technology Podcast Friday Edition, where we break down the news in our traditional cool-headed and nuanced format. Very big show today, three major headlines. WWDC is en route. We have some major Apple AI announcements coming. Nvidia, $3 trillion. We talked about whether it was going to surpass Apple, and it did, although Apple's taken the lead again. And then this OpenAI safety thing, it seems like there's never a dull moment with that company, but we're going to cover it all. And we have Ranjan Roy here with us to do it. Ranjan, welcome. Good to see you again.

• 1:56Speaker 01

  Happy WWCE Eve, Alex.

• 2:00Alex Kantrowitz?

  WWDC Eve, that's right. It's gonna be, it's gonna be nuts.

• 2:03Speaker 01

  My favorite time of the year. Yep.

• 2:05Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yes. So before we get into it, I want to first welcome any new listeners that we have. I've been doing the rounds on the podcast circuit and I think we've, we've seen some, an uptick in, in listeners, which is amazing. Just to give you, if you're a new listener, just to give you a heads up of how we do this. We do a flagship interview every Wednesday and then we have this Friday news recap where Ron John and I look at all the news of the week and share our perspectives on it, tell you what's happening. And we try to do it in a pretty digestible and fun format. So that's how we do it here. And let me start this week's episode with a bit of fun news. I got a credential for WWDC, so I'm hopping on a plane tomorrow and I'm going to the Bay Area and I'm going to be there onsite in Apple Park in Cupertino.

• 2:50Alex Kantrowitz?

  And I'm going to get a chance to witness Apple's big AI announcement with my own two eyes and I am pumped.

• 2:57Speaker 01

  You're gonna get to be there?

• 2:58Alex Kantrowitz?

  That's right.

• 2:59Speaker 01

  At WWDC in the audience for this, for the AI announcement.

• 3:04Alex Kantrowitz?

  Few thought this would happen, Ron John, including myself.

• 3:07Speaker 01

  I'm excited for you and for us because this is, this has to be one of the biggest Apple events in recent memory, I think. Cause there's been a lot of incremental hardware upgrades. It's felt like for the last number of years, but I really believe that this one is going to be, I mean, it has to set the pace for the next era of Apple.

• 3:28Alex Kantrowitz?

  Definitely. And we'll get into some of the announcements, um, you know, as we go. And a quick programming, uh, schedule for next week, because I'm going to be onsite. I'm almost certainly going to do a very quick solo podcast on Monday, recapping what I saw there. On Wednesday, MG Siegler is going to come on to break down exactly what happened. He's one of our favorite analysts and we're going to talk through exactly what happened, uh, with the announcements, Wall Street's reaction, the tech community's reaction, where to go from there. How OpenAI navigates this now that it's partnering with Apple and Microsoft. Then on Friday, Ron John and I will be back and I think Mark Gurman is going to join us. So I'm still working to get the scheduling down on that, but, uh, Beat reporter extraordinaire on Apple, Mark Gurman, should be here with us on Friday.

• 4:12Alex Kantrowitz?

  I don't want to overpromise it, I'm still working out the details, but hopefully that will happen. So let's set the stage, we won't talk too much about WWDC this week because we're gonna have plenty going on next week. But Apple like wouldn't say the word AI for quite some time. And now they're they're ready to go full bore into AI. They have a partnership with OpenAI. They are gonna apparently released a bunch of new product features. Is there anything in this buildup, Ranjan, that's caught your eye in terms of something that might be important to watch? Or something that you're excited about? We know you love Siri, so is that what the thing that you're gonna watch is or something else?

• 4:48Speaker 01

  I will say to hear and read in Mark Gurman's reporting that Siri will be a major part of the new AI push. I cannot deny I'm very excited, as I've said in the past, just fixing Siri and making it barely usable would be a huge win in itself. But I think the really interesting thing that I'm looking for is how they integrate large language models into Siri and how it pervades the rest of the operating system. And what I mean by that is, one of the things Mark, his reporting said was that we potentially will be able to use Siri to activate other apps. Now, the Apple has had the shortcuts feature for a long time, which has allowed you to basically

• 5:31Speaker 01

  custom design specific shortcuts that I want to launch a very specific task within a specific app. And it never really worked that well. I know some people who swear by it, but overall, it never, it was not great. But large language models should be able to solve the logic underlying these things. So it can actually easily do this for you just with your voice. And basically, Apple will get its own agent and Siri will become an agent now. So I think if they can pull this off, it changes the way the entire iOS operating system works. And if they can actually get people to adopt it, I think I think this is huge for them.

• 6:11Alex Kantrowitz?

  And I wrote about this in Big Technology a little bit today, which is that all great CEOs are judged by their ability to thrive in the middle of a computing shift. Right? So Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, they built the personal computer. But Apple really hit its stride when they were able to navigate the shift. From desktop to mobile and release a device that was generations ahead of the rest and they still haven't looked back from that like that is like the true Apple story when you think about it. And this is a computing shift here for Tim Cook and the way to navigate a computing shift is you don't go half in. You think about what your fundamentals are and you say, do I have to hang too tightly to this? And if you decide that the answer is no, then you change your fundamentals. And I think you picked out the exact right thing. The fact that they're

• 6:56Alex Kantrowitz?

  considering tweaking the operating system, right? That's the way you interact with the Apple device. The operating system sucks, you might think about something else, right? And so they're gonna go at the core of the product, thinking about the operating system, and they're also going to do away with another sacred cow, so to speak, because they're not gonna just develop this entirely in-house. They've brought a third party in to do a core piece of development in one of their core products, which by the way, I can't remember a single time that that's happened where Apple's not getting paid. Or yeah, well, where Apple's not paying out. I don't know. No, Apple's not getting paid. Apple got paid by Google for search. Apple is paying out to OpenAI, right? So this is a very big deal.

• 7:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm honestly a bit confused by this because Apple has definitely had a long enough period now, even if they were behind initially, to build their own foundation models. And to me, there's no, I really don't understand why they would bring OpenAI specifically to get into that operating system level, as you said. Even having Google as a search bar in Safari is the default is one thing. This is, you're gonna have to trust OpenAI and an external partner to, as you said, redefine your entire operating system and the way people work with it. But that being said, though, I do think OpenAI has shown that they understand how to use user

• 8:20Speaker 01

  experience to actually get people to use these products. Again, ChatGPT, I still will argue the, the kind of, the way it makes it look like the computer is thinking and then it streams the text rather than just returning it in a block was one of the smartest things they did because it made everything feel more magical. Or like this, you know, the LLM was actually thinking as opposed to just quickly processing. So I think if anyone can help them do it, it would be OpenAI. But I don't know, it's gonna be, it's still a bit of a risk for me, the fact that they're partnering like this.

• 8:57Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, well, I think what it does is it shows a sense of urgency that Apple isn't going to wait till it's perfect. It's just gonna say, okay, perfect is the enemy of the good, and we are going to use the good. And the good is going to come from somebody else. And over time, maybe we build those models in-house and we sort of don't rely on a third party too much. The one, and the one thing that I also thought was interesting that's kind of new, is this is also coming from Germain, that Apple is planning a catch-up feature for missed notifications, allowing users to quickly absorb what they missed when they weren't looking at their phones. And this is what an AI device is going to look like, right? It goes beyond, it supersedes the graphical user interface, and it says, instead of tapping through all of these apps, we're going to give you this catch-up function.

• 9:40Alex Kantrowitz?

  You know, instead of tapping through them to change things, we're going to allow you to do it with Siri. For instance, like, one of the examples that's been tossed out is that Siri will allow you to say, text this, you know, crop this photo and text it to my friend, and it will be able to do that. And so I do think that this, again, it goes back to what is the core of the product? It's the operating system, and to rethink the operating system, and to find new ways to present information to free users from the constraints of the graphical user interface, and to show the urgency to do it. I think that is where you end up winning if you're Apple. And I think it's positive to see them making some of these changes.

• 10:13Speaker 01

  I mean, it's amazing to think about what this is describing is the humane PIN. It's the Rabbit R1 device. It's like, basically, what we've said, which always kind of felt it, you know. And the big, the big knock on those devices when they came out is, isn't this just an app that's going to live on the phone? But actually, what's interesting is, no, it was never an app. It was actually redefining the operating system. But I feel bad for those devices, because the entire, and do you remember Rabbit, they had, instead of a large language model, it was a L A M, large action model? That's basically what this is describing here.

• 10:52Alex Kantrowitz?

  I mean, you're totally, you're taking the words from my head, because I was about to say that. This is what I wrote in Big Technology today. Laugh all you want at the failures of Rabbit R1 or the humane PIN, but these early efforts to rethink How we relate to with our devices were simply the first attempts to figure out what's next, and they won't be the last. More AI devices will come, more will fail, but eventually something might work, and that matters to the $3 trillion iPhone maker, which has driven the last major computing shifts and isn't interested in missing this one. You know, we laugh a lot at the R1 and the PIN, and for good reason. But there's something that they were pointing toward, a new reimagination of

• 11:34Alex Kantrowitz?

  the way that we interact with devices, and I don't think that intuition was wrong. It's just the execution sucked.

• 11:40Speaker 01

  Yeah. Have you ever seen a PIN in the wild? Have you ever walked into, met up with someone and they just had the PIN on them? I'm going to be disappointed, no, I'm going to be disappointed, though, if they got a business and I never had seen a PIN.

• 11:55Alex Kantrowitz?

  There was a story that they told users to stop using their charging device, I think, because it would light on fire or something like that. So you may not get your chance.

• 12:03Speaker 01

  I may not get my chance, because the charging case for the Humane PIN apparently could be set on, would, can set on fire, and they have to. They did not even announce that they would be replacing them for users. They just announced that they are like looking into it right now.

• 12:21Alex Kantrowitz?

  They're giving up, I think. I mean, they're also, I think there's rumors that they're trying to sell. So, but broadly on this Apple announcement, and then we're going to quickly move off of it. But isn't this the biggest win for OpenAI in its history? Like, the talk is that OpenAI might make billions of dollars from partnering with Apple. It's making, I think, $2 billion this year in revenue. Like, this is huge, and it solidifies itself, and Brian McCullough and I talked about this a little bit last week. But it solidifies itself as a partner to Microsoft and a partner to Apple. Like, what more could you want?

• 12:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think this is huge for OpenAI, and it firmly establishes them, you know, in the most. Valuable real estate in the world, iOS, that so I think for them, if they can prove that they effectively will be able to drive this and help Apple redefine the way we compute. I think that I think this is going to be a big moment for them, but uh yeah, and to establish because the chat GPT plus in the consumer side of open AI, we've discussed a number of times. Is that ever really going to get them to their insane valuation? I don't think so.

• 13:27Alex Kantrowitz?

  No.

• 13:27Speaker 01

  So it always had to be on the enterprise side and enterprise would because of the power of Microsoft's cloud business and Google's cloud business and the lock in they already have with a lot of enterprises to be able to then upsell them onto the AI side. Open AI doesn't have that. So I think it's exactly this kind of creative deal that uh that will make the difference for them.

• 13:51Alex Kantrowitz?

  So very quickly, I wonder how Wall Street is going to react to the Apple move. I think this is going to be a big narrative afterwards because you know, from a strategic point standpoint, you can like the moves from an investor standpoint, you can wonder where's the money going to come from, right? Okay, so these are supposed to, these new experiences are supposed to work on the iPhone 15 and and better because of chip capacity and probably because Apple wants you to upgrade. But uh there's been some discussion of like what's whether Wall Street really is going to believe the narrative and Apple's up 6% over the past month. So clearly people are already buying the story before it's happened. And a lot of the people that I've spoken with, including Brian last week, Eric Jackson on the compounded friends this week have started to say, you know, there are people

• 14:36Alex Kantrowitz?

  who are like going bananas over where the where the Apple stock is heading, but they just do not think that this is going to translate into positive sentiment on Wall Street after this event is over and maybe it will even underwhelm.

• 14:49Speaker 01

  I'll take the other side of that. I I think if Apple sells this vision, it will excite investors because what's been the knock on Apple day, the upgrade cycle is over. The idea that you're going to buy a new iPhone every year, new iPads every year. They lost that business model in within the last few years. And it's certainly not being ascribed to future growth. So they need to find something. And if they sell this vision that like we are change. This is the new iPhone and you have to buy this new iPhone. Otherwise, you're not going to get all the benefits of using it. I think that's hugely bullish. And then you start to think about how does that pervade other devices?

• 15:32Speaker 01

  And again, I say this as a user of Apple HomeKit and HomePods, which suck, but I still use it. The idea that that starts to change smart homes and iPads. You know, every single iPad line starts integrating this kind of technology and it changes the way we learn and kids are learning. Like, I think there's so many opportunities that just being able to sell the vision that we're going to figure out multimodal L L M's for consumers, I think, is exciting. I think it's good. They just have to sell it now.

• 16:04Alex Kantrowitz?

  And this is one of those moments where we're all trying to think about what's happening at WWDC and then reporters just chuck all the reporting they have at the wall and see what people will pay attention to, including the stuff that's not imminent. And one bit of preview caught my eye, which is that German said that Apple is looking beyond chatbot. It aims to use large language models to help power a pair of robotic devices that it's developing. So there's a tabletop robotic arm with an iPad display. It's also working on a mobile robot that can follow users around and handle chores on behalf, on their behalf. And this is really the thing that caught my attention. It's looking to equip its AirPods with cameras and AI features. Cameras on your AirPods, folks.

• 16:47Speaker 01

  I like that a mobile robot following you around is not what caught your eye, but cameras on the AirPods.

• 16:53Alex Kantrowitz?

  I'll tell you why. I've had the Meta Ray-Ban, the Red, the Ray-Ban Metas, which are the sunglasses that Metas made that for the past week. And they're like regular glasses, but they play, you tap on the side, they can play music. You squeeze the brim, they can take photos and video. And there's also an AI assistant embedded within them. And you can say, hey, Meta, and ask it questions like I was up on the rock. Climbing wall middle of the week and wanted to know what time it was and I couldn't see the clock. And I was like, hey, Meta, what time it is? What time is it? And it was like very useful. Now, I don't think that's the average use case, but I thought I thought that just like it was so cool to have that, you know, whenever you need it.

• 17:35Alex Kantrowitz?

  And I think these things are going to go mainstream. I think they're pretty cool. So put some cameras on the AirPods and then build that functionality into the Apple ecosystem. And I think you're you're really looking at some very interesting product potential.

• 17:49Speaker 01

  I think one of the one of the viewers watching on LinkedIn asked the question, will you have to pay a subscription for Apple Intelligence? And that is, I think that's a really interesting point because again, iCloud, all Apple services business has exploded in the last number of years. I probably pay for a lot of Apple subscriptions that I forget about and just see the bill kind of come through on my Apple card, which I also have. So I think the subscription revenue potential for this, especially if it's good, is another huge area for growth that that Apple has already shown they can do it with all sorts of iCloud and Apple Music and other Apple One up selling that I think

• 18:34Speaker 01

  I think that that's an important place, part of this as well.

• 18:38Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, just got to juice that service business.

• 18:41Speaker 01

  Juice the services.

• 18:43Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay, so speaking of things that get juiced, how about Nvidia's valuation? Okay. That was a good segue. So Nvidia jumped 5% Wednesday. It became the second most valuable publicly traded company in the world. Surpassed 3 trillion on the same day. It's fallen back a little bit now, not even back to earth, right? It's still worth 200, 2.97 trillion dollars, trillion. I still can't believe these numbers, right? It's up 150 something percent on the year and it was already coming into the year at a crazy number and And it is, it is a very interesting moment. I was on CNBC earlier today and was talking about how like, you know, should we say that the picks and shovels are worth more than the gold?

• 19:28Alex Kantrowitz?

  And obviously it's not 100% true because like, just because it's the second most valuable publicly traded company doesn't mean they're a company, they're the accumulated value of stuff that's built with it isn't worth more or won't be worth more over time if you take the rest of the companies in the world. But it still kind of strikes me as a little bit weird. And you know, you can look at the numbers and you can say, okay, it makes sense because of this and that. But it still strikes me as a little bit weird that Nvidia is now the second or third most publicly traded company, most valuable publicly traded company. And maybe it one day goes and surpasses Microsoft as well. I mean, what does it say about your economy if the most valuable company is a chip maker?

• 20:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that's, that's a good point because Nvidia is clearly there, the like, they're the, the center of the story and they're the beneficiary of it. But I don't know, I, I think it was two weeks ago. That's why we had called when we were talking about the upcoming 10 to one stock split, that those kind of moves for me were just not a good sign as they're trying to almost like force themselves into, I don't want to say meme stock territory, but at least more retail. Does the Nvidia story, I mean, this is a company trading at 48 times earnings. I mean, you know, typical tech range, even 2025 is a strong multiple. So this is an incredibly rich stock.

• 20:51Speaker 01

  And yes, the revenue growth has been insane, but I just don't understand where the continued growth is because it's, everything is already priced in. Everything, this is already priced to perfection. And the idea that unless they come up with something completely new and they keep, you know, coming out with these new chips that do show some kind of promise, but I still think, I don't know, I, it's, it's tough to see how this keeps going, but I certainly would not be the one to try to call the top on Nvidia.

• 21:27Alex Kantrowitz?

  Well, let me try to explain how it might keep going. So like, we have companies that are already building today with the AI technology like Aaron Levy was talking about that OpenAI made the technology 50% cheaper, two times faster. So that's going to enable a building cycle of its own. And Nvidia is well positioned to support that from a hardware and a software standpoint. But over the next 18 months, what's going to happen is anyone building a foundational model, talk about OpenAI, Meta, whoever it might be, is going to just buy as many chips as they freaking can. Because we know that adding more compute and more data to this equation has led to incremental or seriously exponential progress, right? And there's never, there hasn't fully been a sign of that slowing yet. So Nvidia, through Blackwell,

• 22:12Alex Kantrowitz?

  right? So this week, they put their roadmap till 2027, and through Blackwell, they should be able to at least sell all those chips, right? It's not like they're, you know, they're not supply constraint, they are. And so you could, you could imagine that there's going to be some serious growth there for investors to reap. And that's why people say, I heard this week that it could go up to 4 trillion. And that is the bet. Because, look, let's say, let's say hypothetically, the next round of development is as impressive in terms of progress as this previous round has been, then people are going to buy even more chips for the one after that, right? So it just has to keep pace for Nvidia to keep, you

• 22:53Alex Kantrowitz?

  know, printing cash and making their margins there have something like 78% margins. That's the bull case. What do you think about that?

• 23:02Speaker 01

  I'll give you, it's a hardware company with software margins, and that's always been the most impressive part of what they're doing. But I still, two things on that is one, even if Apple, and I agree that like, let's say WWDC, they bring generative AI and large language models to every consumer, even those who have never used ChatGPT, suddenly every device maker is trying to figure out, every operating system maker, how do we integrate LLMs into the way these work will increase

• 23:36Speaker 01

  The supposed demand for the actual compute and the chips. But I still think that everything that I've seen and worked with, that these, the, the, the compute demands are going to get smarter and smaller. That the idea that everything is going to require just massive, massive amounts of compute is actually not the way things are going to go. That, that like the actual use cases and actually applying this kind of technology will be able to be done with more specialized models, with smaller models. So that completely changes the entire trajectory and the way everyone's assuming this is going to go for Nvidia.

• 24:16Speaker 01

  So I think that, that to me, that's the biggest, uh, bear case within the stock itself. The other is they have a monopoly right now, but competition will and can slowly come in. And I think that's the other space that, uh, they have not had to really face yet. And they still could. And Jensen Huang signing a woman's, uh, shirt in a very provocative manner. Did you see this photo? I'm sure that was circulated everywhere.

• 24:47Alex Kantrowitz?

  Of course, that was not a shirt, Ron John.

• 24:50Speaker 01

  That was not a sh- He signed the boob, alright. I said-

• 24:53Alex Kantrowitz?

  He's like, oh, should I do this?

• 24:55Speaker 01

  A shirt in air quotes over here.

• 24:56Alex Kantrowitz?

  It's like, do not, do not do that, Jensen.

• 24:59Speaker 01

  I, Jensen-

• 25:00Alex Kantrowitz?

  I, I know, like, she asked him to sign it, but just like, don't do that. I don't know.

• 25:06Speaker 01

  He's the, I get to, like, I, I wonder Nvidia, their communications department, clearly, he has kind of positioned and sold himself as the new Steve Jobs so well.

• 25:19Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah.

• 25:19Speaker 01

  The leather jacket, the tattoo, rock star status, like, but I, I agree, like, come on, man.

• 25:26Alex Kantrowitz?

  Maybe, maybe, you know what? That's my reaction, but maybe I should lighten up. Like, it was a consensual thing. It was, it was funny. I don't know.

• 25:35Speaker 01

  I don't know, I'm still, because you're just at, everyone is waiting for the top. And then like, this is, this is the kind of thing that you look back on and it's just such an easy one that you just don't need to do.

• 25:49Alex Kantrowitz?

  I know, but five minutes later, they surpassed Apple as the most, second most valuable publicly traded company in the world.

• 25:54Speaker 01

  That's, that's fair.

• 25:56Alex Kantrowitz?

  And we had a question here on the live stream. So we do live stream these on LinkedIn and YouTube. And here's a question from Sarah Hart, whether we think Nvidia would stay as a hardware supplier, or should it jump into AI application in the software stack? And from my understanding, it already is. Like, if you're going to develop on Nvidia, you're going to use the chips and its CUDA software platform to develop large language models. And that's why it's been so irreplaceable. Anyway, as part of my Bay Area trip, I'm spending the full day inside Nvidia on Thursday. So hopefully there'll be some stuff to talk about on Friday. A large chunk of it is going to be on background. So I'm not 100% sure how much I'm going to say, but I'm definitely going to be able to come out with a better

• 26:40Alex Kantrowitz?

  understanding. And who knows, maybe I'll be able to recruit some people to the podcast that I meet. We'll see. But by the way, on your story about is this the top? I can't help but think about your zero interest rate policy thesis as the explanation for why there was so much silliness, right? Because there's somebody who's, he works for Facebook. He has a popular account on threads and Twitter. It's called Carnage for Life. And he said this Bitcoin is at 69,000 roaring kitty is sitting on over 250 million in assets from GameStop stocks and option. And then there's Nvidia's CEO giving out autographs

• 27:22Alex Kantrowitz?

  at Computex. It's 2021 all over again. And of course, he has the Jensen picture signing the proverbial shirt. What do you think about this moment, Ranjan? We haven't even had a rate, interest rate decrease yet.

• 27:37Speaker 01

  Okay, Bitcoin and Roaring Kitty, which we'll definitely get into. I think those certainly mirror 2021. But for me, the, the overall AI-driven boom is actually a logical one. It makes sense. This is, you know, like, that's like the, the transformation that mobile brought to the entire world of technology, that cloud did, like, this is as big, if not bigger, as all of those transformations. So there's going to be a ton of value created and some, you know, big tech companies are already positioned to capture a lot of that. Some other people will as well. So I think on that side, that's why this is a more logical,

• 28:18Speaker 01

  if we want to call it a bubble, than 2021, when, remember, like, literally Zoom, Peloton, all these companies that things were extrapolated to insane levels, where they never were going to realize, be realized versus now. There, there's, there's a real fundamental to the story. But yeah, Bitcoin and GameStop, okay, maybe not so much.

• 28:41Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, and Eric Newcomer has a very interesting newsletter out today, talking about how artificial intelligence is papering over the downturn. And he's saying, software as a service companies, the bread and butter for many VCs over the past decade, are having a rough go of it as enterprise customers look to cut costs, and rationalize years of heavy, heavy software spending. And across the startup industry, down rounds are on the rise. Then you look in the public market and the bounty of this, you know, rally has not been shared evenly or really at all by the rest of companies. Even Salesforce, for instance, had a huge down day. I mean, the worst day in the stock market in its history, I think, last week.

• 29:25Alex Kantrowitz?

  Is there a level of concern for you?

• 29:27Speaker 01

  That's a great point, actually, the idea that AI has kind of been papering over this. Cause, cause yeah, like we, you see those kinds of stats that the big, you know, the big tech, what is it now? It's certainly not Fang, but uh.

• 29:42Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, you could, you could call it Fang and just put.

• 29:44Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 29:44Alex Kantrowitz?

  Nvidia in for Netflix. Which never belonged there. I'll always hold that, that belief. Or you could just call it the magnificent seven, which is the CNBC catchphrase.

• 29:53Speaker 01

  Magnificent seven, like, uh, you know, are the, driving the vast majority of the gains while many, many, many stocks, especially software stocks are down. So I think that's, that's actually a good point. And it is a bit worrying then that if that AI fever dream loses a bit of steam, like, you know, that could, uh, that could definitely remove that shine and, uh, it's not going to be good for the market.

• 30:20Alex Kantrowitz?

  Man, interest rates go down and you add that to what's happening in the stock market right now. And it seems like it's, things will just explode.

• 30:27Speaker 01

  Well, interest rates, but unemployment, uh, still low. Inflation is not decreasing. It's, uh, I mean, the rate is not increasing. So I don't think, it is funny, I say that at the beginning of the year, it was expected, I think there would be three rate cuts and now, uh, I don't believe there's any that are being priced in. So I think we're at this very, very weird, but I guess overall good moment where, you know, certainly there's technologies fun and exciting. The stock market is up. Bitcoin's at 69K roaring kitty livestream today. So we're, we're in a moment right now where I think everyone's trying to figure out what's next.

• 31:09Alex Kantrowitz?

  Well, let's talk a little bit about what roaring kitty is up to. I mean, we are recording on a day where GameStop is down 39%. What has happened with this return of Roaring Kitty? And what's your read on what it means for the moment?

• 31:24Speaker 01

  Okay, okay, so this is nuts. Like, this is, I mean, in terms of, this is Ron John red meat right here with Roaring Kitty. So, so I think a few weeks ago, Keith Gill, AKA Roaring Kitty, AKA Deep Fucking Value, posted an image on Twitter where he was just kind of, just kind of hinting that he's gonna return. And suddenly GameStop started going up and it went from 20 to $40. And it'd been kind of somewhere between, between 10 and 20 bucks for, for a while since the, the mania of a couple of years ago.

• 32:03Alex Kantrowitz?

  And you're a longtime Diamond Hands holder of the stock, right?

• 32:06Speaker 01

  Oh, you, ah, I mean, in terms of stocks, I just would never go near.

• 32:12Alex Kantrowitz?

  Ron John likes the stock, people.

• 32:14Speaker 01

  Again, I would rather just gamble on sports. But, uh, you know, anyone who's playing, that playing this game, go for it. So, okay, so my favorite thing is, he comes on today and he, so first he announces that he has these insane positions. He has 5 million shares, um, and then he has 120,000 call options that expire within two weeks. And that apparently this position is worth over $375 million as of this morning before this 40% decrease today. Then he, today, he announced, or yesterday, he said he's gonna livestream on YouTube about the stock.

• 32:55Speaker 01

  And this pushed it much higher to 40, over $47. The hilarious part of this is, then their earnings come out and they, they're still losing money, sales are declining, it's just, this is not a great business. And he gives this whole, he keeps talking in the livestream about how he thinks Ryan Cohen and the team are the ones that are gonna turn this around. But meanwhile, a big part of his position are two week call options that are, that will expire. Like, this is not, okay, I really believe in this management team and I think they're gonna turn this around in the long run. It's just, I mean, it's such a hilarious reminder of those early meme stock mania days.

• 33:37Speaker 01

  But, but to me, the crazy part of all, it's the craziest part of. All of this is, have you been in a GameStop anytime recently?

• 33:45Alex Kantrowitz?

  No, I passed a GameStop and said, I never want to go in there.

• 33:48Speaker 01

  I went, I went to one a few weeks, it was over Memorial Day weekend. I, we were at a mall, I was visiting my parents outside of Boston and uh, so you know, I'm gonna go in. They're the, it's kind of the weirdest, most depressing place. Again, it's, it's a few, there's like Nintendo Switch, there's uh, some games being sold, there's some weird hardware, uh, like tchotchke type stuff, their little figurines being sold. It's just kind of like, nothing has changed around the business. It's still losing money and sales are declining. I just don't understand how long this kind of stuff can go, or it amazed me that it still can go like this, but I don't know, at some point you figure people will have to

• 34:33Speaker 01

  try to analyze the business of GameStop and realizing that nothing has changed, but it certainly has not yet. Yeah. I'm sorry, I'm sorry. Asking that perhaps is too much in the stock market today.

• 34:45Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, I wasted my entire winter, pretty much, uh, when I'm not working on playing Assassin's Creed. So I think I don't want to get anywhere close to video games for the near term. You know what does get me excited right now? Air conditioning. That's my new go-to device. I just installed a big one in the living room today and this apartment is cool. Best thing that's happened to me in a long time.

• 35:08Speaker 01

  Wait, you didn't have an air conditioner?

• 35:10Alex Kantrowitz?

  I had, I had a smaller one, but now we got a powerful one. This thing's blowing.

• 35:14Speaker 01

  Maybe GameStop should start selling air conditioners. Maybe, maybe they can sell the idea that they become the new Best Buy. And Best Buy as a retailer has done very well over the last number of years. So going into all consumer electronics, perhaps that's the move that Ryan Cohen and team are about to do.

• 35:33Alex Kantrowitz?

  I think it's the move. It's a good business, although some of the parts of the business don't make any sense to me. First of all, price matching, I know you have to do it, but like you have an air conditioner on sale for 300 bucks. Just let somebody walk it out with, you know, for 260 because it's online somewhere. That to me seems ridiculous.

• 35:50Speaker 01

  No.

• 35:50Alex Kantrowitz?

  But the one, I, one more thing, I just don't get free shipping. Okay, I'll let you, free shipping doesn't make any sense. It's gotta be expensive to ship stuff.

• 35:58Speaker 01

  All right, so I can definitely get into this one. I think price matching, I mean, you figure it's a smart marketing thing to do. It gets consumers to you, especially as a physical or an omnichannel retailer. And I'm sure, you know, there's clearly calculations done that if every consumer actually followed up with it, then I'm sure they would lose money and it would be a bad thing for them. But then, but as long as they, it's only a small percentage of customers are actually doing it. It's a great way to make people feel good about buying, especially at a store, which is one of the biggest things, the problems. On the free shipping, this is my, and certainly this is a segue away from

• 36:41Speaker 01

  GameStop, but I do think Amazon spoiled everyone and the economics of free shipping never quite made sense for all of online commerce. But Amazon, basically by subsidizing from AWS and the Prime membership cost, so like convinced us that we all deserve free shipping that's fast as well. And I think over time, everyone's going to recognize and realize that it never made sense and more and more retailers are going to actually charge you just a small amount to

• 37:13Alex Kantrowitz?

  It's so crazy.

• 37:14Speaker 01

  For the shipping, yeah.

• 37:15Alex Kantrowitz?

  So I bought this thing on Walmart.com. It was the cheapest.

• 37:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, the air conditioner shipped.

• 37:21Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, because I was going to buy it in store. They wouldn't match the price because it was some different model. So I said, okay, I'll just buy it from Walmart. It's $40 cheaper and free delivery the next day. I'm not even like a Walmart Plus subscriber. It doesn't make any sense to me.

• 37:35Speaker 01

  I remember I had ordered adjustable dumbbells off Amazon like a year and a half ago. So these things, just by definition, were over 100 pounds.

• 37:47Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah.

• 37:48Speaker 01

  Free two days, or it might have taken a day.

• 37:50Alex Kantrowitz?

  Geez, I thought I was bad. This AC is 55 pounds, but you're the real evil person.

• 37:59Alex Kantrowitz?

  Just kidding. All right. So why don't we take a break and then talk about this open letter to OpenAI coming from a bunch of ex-employees? And then I think there's like, there's a narrative shift around Sam Altman that he's like, all of a sudden a bad guy. I don't fully buy it. So why don't we talk about that on the other side of this 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

• 38:44Alex Kantrowitz?

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• 39:26Alex Kantrowitz?

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• 40:08Alex Kantrowitz?

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• 40:22Alex Kantrowitz?

  And we're back here on Big Technology Podcast Friday Edition, talking about the week's news as we do every week. And one, there's been this like, very interesting uproar around OpenAI over the past. I don't know, it seems like it's been going boiling since the attempted coup last year, but really seems like in the past week, there's just so much more scrutiny being placed on them. The Scarlett Johansson thing certainly didn't help. But let me talk about this open letter, and then we can talk about the broader narrative. So, a bunch of current and ex-OpenAI employees, some named, some not, wrote this open letter to the company,

• 41:02Alex Kantrowitz?

  or I guess to the public, talking about the safety risks that they see in the technology. So I'm just going to talk about the risks, and I'm going to talk about some of their solutions right from the letter. They say the risks range from the further entrenchment of existing inequalities, to manipulation and misinformation, to the loss of control of autonomous AI systems potentially resulting in human extinction. AI companies themselves have acknowledged these risks, as have governments across the world and other AI experts. AI companies have a strong financial incentive to avoid effective oversight, and we do not believe bespoke structures of corporate governance are sufficient to change this. Like, really poking at the governance of OpenAI itself. AI companies possess substantial,

• 41:47Alex Kantrowitz?

  substantial, non-public information about the capabilities and limitations of their systems, the adequacy of their protective measures, and the risks, and the risk levels of different kinds of harm. However, they do not currently have, however, they currently only have weak obligations to share some of this information with governments, and none with civil society. We do not think they can be relied upon to share it voluntarily. It's a fairly exceptional letter that's coming from inside the house. So what did you make of this?

• 42:19Speaker 01

  I loved the phrase bespoke corporate governance, the dig of like, yeah, of this never quite made sense. I think this is both. Important and not. And what I mean by that is it's it's important that, you know, it's a reminder that OpenAI, from the corporate governance standpoint, has a lot of problems. And it's not, it just isn't fundamentally built to be able to operate in this way. They have to do something. And we've certainly suggested over time, just rebrand to the entire company, call yourself ChatGPT, or something like that, and just become a pure for-profit company. The, but the part about this open letter that I just didn't find

• 43:04Speaker 01

  that incredible or fascinating is the fact that like, the safety thing, there's no reason this needs to be reserved for some like dramatic letter. Like, these kind of things, nothing is, you know, completely original. We all know these are risks. Again, if there is some hidden risk that threatens humanity that they know about, if Q-Star is real, that's all I care about. Yeah, I mean, that's all I care. If you're gonna do a dramatic open letter, just tell us the real risk. Like, AI-driven misinformation, yeah, we know. You know, autonomous agents gone wrong, we know. These are, none of that, this is new or original. So that part, I don't quite understand.

• 43:44Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. And then this sort of dovetails on this story in the, in the journal about, it says, "The opaque investment empire making OpenAI's Sam Altman rich." And it basically talks about how we all know Sam Altman, he doesn't have equity in OpenAI necessarily. He only makes $65,000 a year, but he has a web of investments. He's very involved with the OpenAI Startup Fund. And those investments in AI companies, which he's able to spot, are really the way that he's gonna make money off of this move. And like, Altman had been very straightforward in saying that he thinks the mission is too important to try to become rich off of. But obviously, there, there were always gonna be other ways, and these are the other ways. What did you think about this story?

• 44:24Speaker 01

  This journal article, I think, is gonna be really important in the annals of Sam Altman's legacy. Because the, to me, the most important part was, He apparently has drawn a debt line from JP Morgan Chase, his personal bank, that he's drawn hundreds of millions of dollars of debt to invest in startups, which is kind of crazy. Like, that's just not how venture capital investing, I can imagine, working at the personal level is to take on debt to finance startup investments. But it maybe can work for him because of the amount of conflict of interest that he's able to do,

• 45:09Speaker 01

  where he's able to, a lot of the startups that he invests in, then do business with OpenAI. OpenAI either pays them money for services, or they somehow pay money to OpenAI for services. Like, it's such a tangled web, and this stuff never works out well in the end to me. Like, whenever there's that many conflicts of interest, it's just something will go wrong. And remember, the central part of the whole coup back in, the ouster back in, what was it, November, was his ethics and his conflicts of interest and the way he's managing the company itself and the lack of corporate governance, which also, I mean, safety is a peripheral part of that.

• 45:51Speaker 01

  But, but he's doubling down on this way of operating. He's not moving away from it or trying to become cleaner. And I think it's going to be really complicated in terms of how he's lasted at OpenAI and what his legacy is, and his financial status.

• 46:06Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, I mean, he's doing this, he's might be doing this like trillion, multi-trillion dollar chip company, he might be doing this hardware device for Johnny Ivey. I mean, he definitely is working on a lot of things. He wanted to remain, I think, the CEO of ViCombinator as he built OpenAI.

• 46:26Alex Kantrowitz?

  But I do think that like, it's important to view this story with like a level of context, which is that like, it's not really, I mean, maybe it's like slightly conflicted, but it's not like evil stuff. And I think that like, there's been a rush to portray Altman as like a bad, like as the bad guy in tech now. And, you know, you're starting to see stories of him as like this, you know, the controversial CEO who Apple would never want to put on stage. And to me, I just don't think that it rises to that level. Like, yeah, maybe not, not the best setup, but also like, he's been behind this technology, you know, I mean, if his biggest sin is investing in startups that are going to benefit from it, like, so be it. It's like,

• 47:09Alex Kantrowitz?

  he's taking these big financial risks to do it. I don't know. I just think that like,

• 47:15Alex Kantrowitz?

  I mean, obviously not ideal, but like this like, moment where like, it seems like the narrative around Sam is going to turn because that's what happens whenever somebody is built up, is that all of a sudden it's like this counter wave of forces that try to change that narrative, because that's what's interesting. To me, I think that falls a little bit short, and the context is important to keep in mind.

• 47:38Speaker 01

  See, I, no, but I disagree. I think this is, this is important. I, I think, okay, in, I would agree that how golden boy, his image and what the narrative had been for long enough, there's always going to be a bit of pushback and backlash at some point, that everything's going to work in waves and cycles. But I, I really do think that this way of working, it's always indicative of more issues. It's a, if you're comfortable investing on the side, drawing down debt from your personal bank to invest in startups, where there's 10 layers of conflict, I think that it usually means that there's other things

• 48:20Speaker 01

  that are going to be going on. Again, when you are fired as CEO and then come back and half of your safety team leaves and your company is 86, valued at $86 billion, but you still have to do 20 other things. I think these are all, these are all reminders that, you know, the, the conflict of interest investing is just, is more reflective or indicative of just the way someone works, rather than just this thing to the side that's happening. Is that in itself a big deal or not?

• 48:50Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yep, that's a good point. So why do you think he's doing all these things?

• 48:54Speaker 01

  I don't know. I mean, he is one of those people right now, like I, his story, I feel, is not that well known. Like when he does interviews, it's usually kind of like grandiose future of the world in AI. And just like, you know, the, and that Twitter way of speaking, it's very, very future driven. But like, who is Sam Altman and what drives him? And what's his story? Even again, like, it's always been fascinating to me and it's never really been covered is, you know, he, his startup from looped did not do well. Like, I mean, it's, I think they'd raised 40 million and it sold for 50. So it, it

• 49:37Speaker 01

  wasn't by no means even close to Y Combinator's or one of their early success stories. You know, they had Airbnb and Reddit and all these companies in their early classes. So, so he's just how he and then became the CEO of Y Combinator and then now moves to OpenAI. Like who he is and what drives him? I think there's going to be a lot more, and there should be a lot more reporting on this and just trying to understand the motivations. Cause I agree. I mean, normally you would think being the CEO of a $86 billion company that you were kicked out of, and then you actually managed to get back to and to still retain control over would hopefully be enough. But apparently it's not.

• 50:21Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, but I don't know. He's still effective, right? Like OpenAI, we talked earlier that they were able to, you know, make this deal with Apple while preserving their relationship with Microsoft, release chat GPT four O, twice the speed and half the cost, build, start training the next model, whatever that might be. Seems like it's GPT five. This all seems like the product of a focused CEO, not somebody who's like, sort of trying to do a bunch of different things.

• 50:50Speaker 01

  Well, no, but we don't know how effective they are until we see some kind of numbers. Cause again, what is the actual revenue of this company? Uh, I think there's been

• 51:00Alex Kantrowitz?

  Supposed to be $2 billion this year.

• 51:02Speaker 01

  $2 billion. Yeah, exactly. Like, come on, that's for being valued at $86 billion. They're gonna have to show some serious revenue growth somewhere. And again, maybe.

• 51:12Alex Kantrowitz?

  Remember, they're nonprofit.

• 51:14Speaker 01

  Oh, yes. Yeah, you're right. So.

• 51:16Alex Kantrowitz?

  It's a donation.

• 51:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, we'll find out more, I'm sure.

• 51:23Alex Kantrowitz?

  So let's close. Did you hear about, speaking of tech folks who are in the spotlight and we're not 100% sure of their motives, did you hear about this Leopold Aschenbrenner? He is the, he's an ex OpenAI guy that is going out and he was apparently fired for leaking, but he is going out and talking about how there's a serious AI risk and also a risk of China trying to hack AI systems and we should be worried about that. Have you, did you see his, his media tour?

• 51:57Speaker 01

  No, I did not.

• 51:59Alex Kantrowitz?

  So he's done a media tour this week. I tried, I DM'd him and invited him on the podcast. He's welcome to come on. I'd love to hear what he has to say. So if you're listening, you know, come on on Leopold. But it is interesting, Max Reed pointed this out, that he is going out, going out with these messages of be careful of China and, you know, watch out for existential risk as he's starting a fund, right? It's actually great marketing, right? And his, he's started, this is from Max Reed, he started an investment firm to back startups with capital from former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, investor Daniel Gross, Stripe CEO Patrick Collison, and Stripe President

• 52:39Alex Kantrowitz?

  John Collison. What do you make of this mixture of warning of what's impending and then also being ready to back startups?

• 52:48Speaker 01

  Okay, so first I just looked him up and I did see one clip of him going around, again, talking about exactly this, because he had a very, very memorable look and overall. So definitely saw him, saw this going around. And I think, I mean, this playbook, Sam Altman perfected it. So I think it's not an unreasonable thing. This is the, this is the, the old Sam Altman classic, AI could kill us all. So let's raise more money to build more products and move even faster to build AI, even though it could kill us all. I still think, I mean, that's the most, it's always annoyed me about all this is it.

• 53:31Speaker 01

  It ascribes this like potential for AI that clearly makes people think it's more powerful than it is. And then I think that's where there, I still think there's going to be some kind of trough of disillusionment, some kind of letdown when everyone realizes that AI still is going to be a bit difficult. Again, like we talked about this after the Aaron Levy podcast, the agentic AI is the way to just sound smart in Silicon Valley right now, but it actually is an incredibly promising thing that AI can, will be able to be more autonomous and make decisions. Maybe Siri will understand. Again, you just say, oh yeah, crop this photo and send it to this friend

• 54:12Speaker 01

  and it will know which apps to use. You don't have to tell it how to do it or how to do this. That's exactly the promise. But, but this stuff is probably going to be a little messy and not work great and take a lot of iteration. So the idea that again, we're gonna, AGI is gonna kill us all. If they know something, please tell us. But otherwise, I think that's just the playbook right now and it's working.

• 54:37Alex Kantrowitz?

  Let me ask, let me end with this. Assuming there's a little bit of marketing contained in these warnings are the end of the earth. Is it kind of a tricky playbook to execute because some of your employees will believe you? And then they're going to write open letters and you'll sort of never have a stable company.

• 54:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, but the, the open letter is part of the playbook, right? You want your employees to be a little freaked out because then they write the open letters. And then it solidifies this idea that you, that AI could kill us all and then you raise more money.

• 55:05Alex Kantrowitz?

  That's at least a $200 billion valuation.

• 55:09Speaker 01

  Oh yeah, yeah. Every open letter increases the multiple by at least a factor of 10.

• 55:15Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, the joke's gonna be on us, Ron, John, when AI turns big technology podcast into paper clips, right?

• 55:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I think, I will say, I mean, and I think closing on and ahead of WWDC, like, how well this is actually executed in Siri and in iOS, because again, this is the big question, like, with agentic AI and autonomous agents, them being able to understand what is the next action to take is going to be one of the most valuable things in the way AI is actually implemented across all of technology. But I mean, at least from what I've seen and used already, it's not clean and easy. So I'm very curious whether Apple actually has made significant progress. And if they did, it's going to be with OpenAI

• 56:04Speaker 01

  and maybe they're worth $86 million.

• 56:07Alex Kantrowitz?

  If they have an AI application that brings up an audience member and turns them into a paperclip in front of a live audience, I'll really begin to believe in the potential of this technology.

• 56:17Speaker 01

  Tim Cook is like,

• 56:20Alex Kantrowitz?

  And one more thing, get up here.

• 56:23Speaker 01

  You were worried about AI killing us all? We're just going to kill one member today, one audience member. Come on up.

• 56:31Alex Kantrowitz?

  Someone would volunteer, by the way. Someone would absolutely. We need one of you. We need one of you here. We're very excited to kill one of you.

• 56:39Speaker 01

  Well, I hope to still see you next Friday then. But if you need to be the paperclip, Alex, go for it.

• 56:46Alex Kantrowitz?

  I volunteer. Then it'll be a solo podcast with Ranjan taking the

• 56:50Speaker 01

  As long as they fix Siri.

• 56:52Alex Kantrowitz?

  As long as they fix Siri. Ranjan's like, well, Alex is gone, but Siri's good, so it's a wash. We continue on as normal. Dude, great. Talking with you as always. I can't wait for next week where we cap all the news. And there's going to be a lot of it. So folks, stay tuned. We got a solo pod coming Monday. We have MG Siegler coming Wednesday, and then hopefully Ranjan, myself, and Gurman sometime at the end of the week, hopefully Friday's show. We have them. All right. That's it. That'll do it for us here. We'll see you next time on Big Technology Podcast.

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