Hawk Tuah and the Zynternet, OpenAI Hacked, One Year Of Threads

Ranjan Roy from Margins is back for our weekly discussion of the latest tech news. We cover 1) Why the Hawk Tuah Meme broke through 2) Evolution of the internet from the 'nerd internet' to the 'Zynternet' or 'bro internet' 3) The 'For You' recommendation system had turned the internet into a mass appeal machine vs. niche 4) Zuck's fourth of july water sports moment is indicative of the change 5) Raw dogging flights 6) OpenAI hacked 6) NYTimes rips off Dwarkesh Patel's Podcast 7) Figma's Apple Weather App design copy 8) AI startups raising a ton of cash 9) Will there be a reckoning for VCs investing in AI 10) Threads turns one — what is it? --- 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?

  The internet is evolving and the seemingly inexplicable meme at the center actually explains a lot. OpenAI was hacked. Will it be worse next time? Funding pours into AI startups and threads turns one. All that and more is coming up on a big technology podcast Friday edition right after this. This episode is brought to you by Genesis. What does it actually take to put agentic AI to work across an entire enterprise? I recently spoke with Genesis chairman and CEO Tony Bates about why orchestration is emerging as a competitive advantage in customer experience and what companies need to get right in the AI era. Then I sat down with Adam Mitchell, head of enterprise business solutions at Voya Financial to go inside a large scale

• 0:43Alex Kantrowitz?

  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/alex for a free consultation. That's akash.network/alex for a free consultation.

• 1:21Alex Kantrowitz?

  Welcome to Big Technology Podcast Friday Edition, a show where we break down the week's news in our typical cool-headed and nuanced fashion. We have a lot of news to break down on this July 4th weekend. I'm joined as always by Ron John Roy. We're going to talk about the evolving internet. We're going to talk about this hack that OpenAI experienced and then of course, looking at the year of threads and whether it's what it means next to Twitter. So first, let me bring in Ron John. Ron John, welcome.

• 1:48Speaker 01

  It's good to see you, Alex. I'm currently in Taipei, Taiwan, still at an Airbnb that is a converted massage parlor, of all things. When we walked in, my wife, our family and our cousins, you could see it's four rooms, all kind of going all down one hall. And it's very clear what it was. It's been totally refurbished and it's very nice, but it's been an interesting week for me.

• 2:12Alex Kantrowitz?

  I think that's like a perfect lead into like what we're going to talk about.

• 2:15Speaker 01

  I think it is too.

• 2:17Alex Kantrowitz?

  I'll be honest, for the life of me, I couldn't understand why there was this one meme that was going as viral as it was for as long as it was and just wouldn't die. And it was something I really wanted to ignore because I didn't want to talk about it on the podcast. But I think we have to now because it really is a signal of how the internet has shifted. So for those who-

• 2:38Speaker 01

  What is that meme, Alex?

• 2:40Alex Kantrowitz?

  Well, I first want to know that this is a parental guidance moment. This is definitely going to be a wacky July 4th show. So I'm just letting guys all know and gals know at the start that this could go off the rails. So if you have kids in the car, maybe, you know, switch the channel and then you can sort of pick this up when you're, when you're on your own time. But basically, there is a meme, it's called the Hawk Tuah Girl. And I'm just going to read because I don't really want to try to explain it on my own because it sort of makes, still makes me a little bit uncomfortable. But I'm going to read from Max Reed, his story called Hawk Tuah and the Zynternet. He goes, Hawk Tuah, if you're not yet familiar, is a newly popular meme derived from a street interview video

• 3:21Alex Kantrowitz?

  in which a woman in Nashville named Haley Welch responds to the question, "What move in bed makes a man go crazy every time?" And she says, I don't want to even read it. She says, you gotta give them-

• 3:36Speaker 01

  I think everyone's, everyone's seen it, everyone's seen it.

• 3:39Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay, and so I was like, for the life of me, I couldn't understand why this meme was so prominent and why it just kept spawning meme after meme and wouldn't go away. It seemed like a throwaway moment in an on-the-street interview, not a big cultural moment to me at all. And now, some of the folks who are writing about the internet have kind of explained it and it makes a lot of sense in context. So this is again from Max Reed. "The broad success as a meme is less about its own intrinsic qualities than about the increasing size and cultural power of something I'm going to call the Zynternet.

• 4:22Alex Kantrowitz?

  Over the last 10 years or so, a broad community of fratty horn dog- Provocative twenty and sometimes embarrassingly thirty-somethings, mostly but by no means entirely male, have emerged to form a newly prominent online subculture. And maybe you could even call it like the culture. This network is adjacent to the sports internet, the hustle internet and the reactionary internet of traditional influencers. But in its own distinct community with its own distinct cultural references. And here we go. College sports, gambling, light domestic beers, and then zen nicotine pouches. With influential personalities and media outlets, among them David Portnoy, Pat McAfee,

• 5:07Alex Kantrowitz?

  Antonio Brown, and Call Her Daddy. In additions to dozens of minor podcasters and Hey Fellow Kids content creators who nearly all work for sports betting concerns. So basically, the argument here is that this is not a meme in a vacuum, but really sort of like the epitome of an internet culture that's moving from whatever it was beforehand to one that's far more fratty, far more dirty, far more obsessed with gambling and betting. And very different, I would say, from the early social internet that was really defined by nerds. And the nerds wanted news because they wanted influence. And nerds wanted celebrities because they wanted to feel important. And that's why we ended up having effectively journalists and news outlets pour into Twitter and Facebook.

• 5:52Alex Kantrowitz?

  And they would celebrate any moment when, let's say, a Justin Bieber would tweet. I feel like in Twitter offices, there must have been an alarm that went off when Justin Bieber tweeted. But we're definitely living in a different internet now. Where sports betting has been legalized. It's financing a lot of content. Online gambling is financing a lot of content. And then, of course, Elon Musk owns Twitter. And that's what we get. We've sort of shifted from this nerd internet to the bro internet. And that's what this internet is. I'm curious what you think about the shift, whether this is something that's being overemphasized by the bloggers and whether Hawk too have really showed a shift here.

• 6:30Speaker 01

  This is my favorite piece of cultural internet writing, I think, of the year. And the term Zynternet will stick, I'm calling it. I think even Max Reed himself recognized, as he said, that he has to write this piece because once you come up with the term Zynternet, you can't just let that one go. My only slight issue with the piece is he talks about borishly provocative 20 and sometimes embarrassingly 30-somethings. I will recognize, being in my early 40s, some of the bro chats still lean in this direction. I got a happy Zindependence Day text a few hours ago, right before starting to plan for this podcast. So I think it might stretch even further.

• 7:11Speaker 01

  But the most fascinating part about this piece, I thought, was how it tied together those different trends. So first of all, Zin pouches, which is one of those weird subcultures that, as I get older, I had realized had become massive and I just did not even understand what was going on or what was happening. And then even especially 20-somethings at my work, talking to them.

• 7:33Alex Kantrowitz?

  Explain what a Zins are.

• 7:35Speaker 01

  It's a tobacco pouch that delivers... Actually, I'm not even 100% sure, but I think it's the... Like a Zin is to chewing tobacco what a vape is to a cigarette. It's like a more clean nicotine delivery, but via pouch in your lip, like you would have chewed tobacco in the past.

• 7:54Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. Owned by Philip Morris. And so, I would say so powerful that I was walking around Manhattan with a health tech CEO recently, and he offered me a Zin and was just like, "You gotta try this stuff." I'm like, "You know, that's bad for you, right?" But he's like, "These things, they really hit."

• 8:15Speaker 01

  They, I mean, they really hit, I guess. That's why I think... But so that's already been there. Then you have the rise of sports gambling. I think that's the most interesting connection here because that's the financing of all of this, is that if you are trying to launch some kind of clothing line, you're trying to monetize somehow, like an influencer without monetization is nothing. And now... Suddenly, there's been this massive influx of money going after the people who can reach these internet audience and being able to give them money. And Dave Portnoy kinda is the like original example of this, because remember, he sold Barstool Sports to Penn Gaming right before gambling was legalized for,

• 8:58Speaker 01

  I think, five hundred million, five fifty. And then they essentially wrote it off and sold it back to him for nothing like, like, it just did not work. But he was the original sign that you can take your audience of, take this audience and monetize them massively from gambling. And then the third one, Elon Musk Twitter. Now, the algorithm is certainly tweaked. The culture is moving in the direction as well that like, these kind of things are becoming more mainstream. So I think realizing how all three of those factors come together to perfectly crystallize in the form of Hawk Tuah, I think is a, it's, it's a pretty clear, impressive thing that he wrote.

• 9:40Alex Kantrowitz?

  The one thing I would say it's missing is that there's also an element of backlash to the original social internet, right? Whereas like, the original social internet was, shall we say, very democratic, prude to a, to a certain extent. It was, I don't know, it became to be less fun. I don't think it really catered to the common person as much as this internet does right now.

• 10:04Speaker 01

  I would disagree with safe and prude, because if you're ever on Tumblr in twenty eleven, twelve, it was not a safe, prude place. But, but I actually agree with you that, that niche, everything was niche. Everything like signaling, everything was about finding some niche thing that no one else has seen. And within your community that's online of people, the like hundred other people that think like you, being able to find them. I think that was the promise of that early web two point O. And then now, you're right, it's, it's mass market meme. What is something that is appealing to just a massive swath of the population? And that's this internet.

• 10:45Alex Kantrowitz?

  And can I, can, maybe we can dig in a little bit more because? It's starting to crystallize to me that this internet, or whatever you want to call it, the Barstool internet, whatever it might be, has also risen alongside the ascent of the For You page, right? You talk about this mass market versus niche. A niche would be great, like if you're a small account on Twitter, but you had a niche following, you could still speak with them every day. But now you're not getting any play at all on the For You page. You're totally being outshadowed by, you know, this sort of zinternet content, which is gonna be more engaging. Remember, like, Hua sort of like threads the needle there, where it's like, it's sexual, it is entertaining, and it's like, yes, of course,

• 11:29Alex Kantrowitz?

  in like, era of the For You page, it's almost the For You and the recommendation algorithm has ushered this in just as much as the rise of gambling and Elon Musk buying Twitter.

• 11:40Speaker 01

  I think we're gonna have to race to see who writes this post first, because I think that's perfect. I think like, is it, okay, so there's a For You page on Twitter, but then also the rise of Reels and Instagram completely shifting from a follower-based social network and a chronological timeline to also algorithmic short-form videos. So even if you weren't on TikTok already, now you're on Reels and it's being algorithmically served to you. And I can admit, again, my Instagram feed, there's a lot of zinternet content. There's a, I mean, and then you even see how the advertisers, it's like Bird Dogs, Pants, if you're familiar, Vori definitely goes after these internet, like,

• 12:23Speaker 01

  how the whole thing comes together. And that's just from probably watching one video, following Dave Portnoy, and then just from those signals, the Reels algorithm just completely inundates you with this kind of content. So I think, I think that's right, algorithmic-based content feeds now.

• 12:43Alex Kantrowitz?

  Who has embodied the transformation from what's called the nerd internet to this internet more than Mark Zuckerberg himself? Because today, it was impossible, if you logged on to the internet, we're talking on Thursday, right, July 4th. It was impossible, if you logged on to the internet, to miss the video of Mark Zuckerberg wake surfing in a tuxedo, holding an American flag.

• 13:11Speaker 01

  Hydrofoiling.

• 13:12Alex Kantrowitz?

  No, no, this, no, this is, I don't think this is hydrofoiling, I think this is wake surfing.

• 13:16Speaker 01

  Isn't that his big thing, hydrofoiling?

• 13:19Alex Kantrowitz?

  No, I think he switched, because he's in a wake, and you don't, I don't think you hydrofoil in a wake. But anyway, either wake surfing or hydrofoiling, basically doing a board sport in a tuxedo in the water with an American flag in one hand and a tall boy, it looks like a beer, I don't know, maybe it's like-

• 13:34Speaker 01

  Coors banquet, a Coors banquet tall boy. I had to look into this, I had to do the research.

• 13:39Alex Kantrowitz?

  And it's like, you couldn't, you really could not, sort of, explain the shift to this new internet better than like, looking at Mark Zuckerberg posting pictures of himself in like, fields in Oklahoma with sheep in 2016, to what he's doing today, which is surfing, it looks like in Hawaii, with the American flag, the tux, and the long hair. And that is, that is sort of where we are, and, and he's the, the content king. It's as broad as signal as possible that this is where the internet's moving.

• 14:14Speaker 01

  How do you think those posts come to be? I've always been fascinated, and I think, we've talked about Mark Zuckerberg's overall kind of PR transformation from nerdy internet guy to ultimate fighter, cool guy, handsome Zuckerberg, wearing chains and everything, but, like, a post like this, I, I don't know, I, I always want an oral history of like, you know, was it him who brought it up? Was there a meeting? Were there a series of meetings set up? It, it does, is it actually official Facebook resources? Or is it, you know, just him and his friends hanging out and playing around? I don't know, I'm always so curious, these kind of things, how they come to be, before they are.

• 14:58Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. Definitely seem like a professional videographer, so.

• 15:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, this one seems professional. Also to note, I follow, so in Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram have been trying to promote this idea of broadcast channels. And I've like, looked into this in the past. Basically, it's the idea that you kind of follow someone and they push content to you. So it is like a one-to-many broadcast feed. So obviously, Mark Zuckerberg was the first person who launched this type of account within Instagram. And he pushed it to millions of people who follow him on this. And the app definitely kind of, I don't want to say tricked you, but led you into following his broadcast channel. So again, they planned this video. It's good. It's pretty, it's pretty awesome.

• 15:45Speaker 01

  And then they just push it out to everyone on Instagram and, and happy July 4th.

• 15:51Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, but go back to this like, this internet thing, like, is this, so I'm, I'm pretty convinced this is a signal from Mark of where this is all heading, heading. What do you think?

• 16:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, no, I think you can see even in his circle, doing something like this, they all thought would be cool and funny and fun. Like, again, wakeboarding and tall boy and it kind of is. Like, I, I hate to.

• 16:19Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, it's resonating online today.

• 16:20Speaker 01

  It's rough. Yeah, it's resonate, like, his whole UFC thing, I always find a bit cringe-worthy, because like.

• 16:26Alex Kantrowitz?

  Also, Zen, Zen internet adjacent, sports betting and all that stuff.

• 16:30Speaker 01

  If, if you think about it, Joe Rogan is the, in like, actually early Zen internet crossover from UFC to four-hour podcast, talking to like intellectuals. That's pretty, that's pretty Zen internet as well. Yeah, no, I think it's, it's definitely here. It's grown, it's more powerful. There's so many different factors, as we've talked about, kind of making this more of a thing. I guess, and, and you had mentioned it briefly, but I do think the backlash to social media and the algorithms favoring, I mean, quote-unquote woke content from 2020 and 2021, where everything moved so far in one direction, that there's

• 17:12Speaker 01

  definitely a backlash element as well here. So I think everything coming in together is a, makes for a lot of content.

• 17:21Alex Kantrowitz?

  And what has social media labeled this summer, by the way?

• 17:24Speaker 01

  Oh, so I had to put this in. Well, no, no. So this was again, in terms of like, the first place I came across the Zuck meme was Zuck Won America Today, King of White Boy Summer. And for those who don't know, like, White Boy Summer, I found out was a term coined by Chet Hanks, Tom Hanks's son, actually, a couple of years ago, that I've seen being thrown around. And again, as you picture, like polo shirt, again, actually polo shirts and tall boys and Hamptons barbecues or whatever else. But the funniest thing to me was, apparently, the term White Boy Summer has been co-opted by hate groups and far-right organizations.

• 18:07Speaker 01

  And Chet Hanks, Tom Hanks's son, actually had to write an Instagram post, kind of apologizing for this, saying, "White Boy Summer was created to be a fun, playful, and a celebration of fly white boys who love beautiful queens of every race. Anything else that it has been twisted into to support any kind of hate or bigotry against any group of people is deplorable, and I condemn it." Just the fact that, like, someone sat down and with a PR team and decided, "I have to try to reclaim White Boy Summer is not racist," is always hilarious to me.

• 18:44Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, but it sort of, I mean, that is, that is, it's sort of like, almost a factor of the old internet, but like, that this stuff will end up in the hands of hate groups. But the fact that it's been broadly embraced as something that sort of is going to define summer of 2024, right? Like, even that, like, finance, six-five blue eyes is also part of this, right? It's like, that is, that is sort of what we're dealing with. So, one more thing before we go, before we move to the next topic, what in the world is rogg-dogging a flight?

• 19:14Speaker 01

  Well, so, having been on a number of flights in the last three weeks, and this was from Tom Guerra, one of my favorite tweeters, I'd worked with him at the Financial Times, he had said also, "In my opinion, this internet is reshaping norms beyond its own borders, i.e. internet culture-type people doing trend pieces on rogg-dogging flights." And I'd love this because the whole- So raw dogging a flight, for those unfamiliar, is this trend that's kind of taken off on social media of someone, people bragging about taking a 13 hour flight and just staring at the flight

• 19:52Speaker 01

  map the entire time. Basically, no books, no watching, no movies, no anything, no, you don't pay for shitty internet wifi or airplane wifi and try to do work. You just sit there for 10 hours, eight hours, 13 hours. And having been on multiple 13 hour flights and watched every bad movie that's in existence right now, I have not done this, but, but just the term raw dogging a flight, the idea of kind of like masculine, like reclamation of just like combined with some weird health or wellness type thing of like meditate and it's called a meditative practice is definitely a weird extension of this internet, I think.

• 20:38Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, but, um, yeah, it's, that sounds like the most miserable thing that you could possibly do to yourself in the world.

• 20:45Speaker 01

  You just don't, you don't understand it, Alex. That it's, it takes you to a higher plane.

• 20:49Alex Kantrowitz?

  I'll be the first one to admit it. It is the most ridiculous thing to ever do. Don't do it. There's movies that, I mean, it's torture. Otherwise, I guess I shouldn't use the word torture, but it sucks. You know, you gotta find a way to pass the time.

• 21:02Speaker 01

  You're right, though, that, and like, now that there is this audience, that's why, and as Tom had said in the tweet, like, this is why a journalist will write a trend piece on this, because there is an audience receptive to this. Whereas in the past, they would not have found that audience, so they wouldn't have written the piece. So I think like, that's why this type of thing, I'm, I'm curious what the next one's gonna be, but I think there's gonna be a lot more of this kind of Zynternet content coming out in mainstream publications, because that one I saw in like, I think some pretty mainstream publications.

• 21:36Alex Kantrowitz?

  That really just sums it up perfectly. So there's another story this week that really caught my attention. I, I couldn't believe that how little attention it's getting, maybe because the details are a little bit odd. But this is from the New York Times, "A Hacker Stole OpenAI Secrets, Raising Fears That China Could Do."

• 21:55Alex Kantrowitz?

  It's interesting that like they go to China right away in the headline, but I'll just read a little bit from the story. Earlier, early last year, a hacker gained access to the internal messaging systems of OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, and stole details about the design of the company's AI technologies. The hacker lifted details from discussions in an online forum where employees talked about OpenAI's latest tech, but did not get into the systems where the company houses and builds its artificial intelligence. Okay, so the hacker got some, some like company chatter, didn't get the weights on GPT-4, but it is, it is a concerning issue here that OpenAI, at least their discussion forums, could get hacked.

• 22:39Alex Kantrowitz?

  This is continuing on. OpenAI executives revealed the incidents to employees during an all-hands meeting in April 2023 and informed its board, but it didn't, the executives did not share the news publicly because no information about customers or partners had been stolen. They didn't even tell the FBI or anyone else in law enforcement. And this is like the key line here. For some OpenAI employees, the news raised fears that foreign adversaries such as China could steal AI technology that while now mostly a work and research tool, could eventually endanger US national security. And one of the employees that actually raised concerns is a recurring character here on

• 23:21Alex Kantrowitz?

  a big technology podcast, Leopold Ochenbrenner, who we talked about a few weeks ago and who William Saunders from OpenAI talked about raising security concerns. And then eventually, OpenAI effectively, I mean, this is the story that Saunders told, reprimanded Ochenbrenner and then later fired him, although OpenAI says he wasn't fired for this. But you know, it's sort of like the worries from OpenAI employees has been effectively that they are. They are more concerned with, let's say, I mean, their words like this, the safety team folks say, like William Saunders said, that they're more concerned with shipping shiny new products versus like advancing the safest possible research. And this is the thing that set off alarm bells. I mean,

• 24:05Alex Kantrowitz?

  it's not quite clear what was hacked there. Like, was it their Slack that was hacked? It wasn't like their internal mainframes, but the fact that they could get hacked and they were hacked sort of brings into scope like how many entities must be trying to hack them? And how concerning it can be that they are susceptible to security breaches. What do you think about this?

• 24:26Speaker 01

  I think the key point there is not that you had said like that they could be hacked and that they were hacked. It's that they were hacked and did not disclose this outwardly to the FBI, did not, like the topic of safety, I think this is a really interesting story because obviously normally the topic of safety leans towards is AI going to kill us all? But I think a more kind of like pedestrian topic of safety is just hacking. And will foreign adversaries be able to get the data that's been fed into these systems? Because it's one thing that right now, the whole conversation is we promise you our models will not be trained on your data if you have a certain enterprise plan. Okay?

• 25:10Speaker 01

  Do we trust them on that? I don't know. It's still a little iffy sometimes, but we will protect your data from all manner of hacking. It's another thing that when you are a company that that's actually not that big and mature and developed, security, I'm guessing, like cybersecurity is probably one of the last concerns on your mind as you're scaling and growing. So I think this, I think this is, this is not the first, the last we're going to hear about this kind of thing, whether it's OpenAI or other, you know, like really fast buzzy growing AI startups. I think the cybersecurity element is something that no one has been talking about.

• 25:48Alex Kantrowitz?

  Well, actually, one of the things that people have talked about with cybersecurity is that cybersecurity companies are gonna really become way more valuable in the age of gen AI. I think probably for two reasons. One is companies are gonna wanna protect their models like OpenAI, and also it's gonna make it very much easier to, like, for instance, fish people when you have a gen AI tool that's able to like comb the internet about them or read documents and then write something extremely personal. But it is interesting. Like, I do think that, like, right now, we're not at a place where, like, if they, let's say China got the GPT-4 weights, it's not like a national security problem. Like, if they're able to get that model, it's not like the US has to, like, you know, go to war with China or anything like that.

• 26:29Alex Kantrowitz?

  But you do start to see, and also, we should note that there was no customer data or partner data that was exposed. But you do start to see the concerns of, like, some of the OpenAI employees that have spoken out, where it's basically just like, if you're not dead-set on security and you develop something like this, like, let's say you develop artificial general intelligence and you're susceptible to a hack of any kind, like, you're gonna be in possession of the number one target for hackers, period, if you develop AGI. Security has to be, like, basically top priority along with the actual research of how to push this technology forward.

• 27:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think on the safety topic, it is. It's the more powerful and dangerous, whatever your building is, obviously, it's gonna become more interesting, almost like a James Bond movie, a target for nefarious hackers all over the world. So, so I think it is important, but yet, the more, like, how are these companies building out their kind of defense functions in this way? And are they?

• 27:30Alex Kantrowitz?

  We don't know.

• 27:31Speaker 01

  I think that's something that people need to look into, because if you think about it, like, and OpenAI kind of is the poster child, that the core product and products have rolled out incredibly, have launched amazing products, done them very fast, but then certainly on the corporate governance side, like, are they, if they're ever gonna IPO, are their financials, like, public company-ready? I would bet not, but like, I mean, have they built out their accounting function carefully?

• 28:01Alex Kantrowitz?

  I mean, their accounting is basically just like OpenAI sells and pays for expenses with Microsoft Money.

• 28:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, actually, they do have complex accounting, but, but I think, like, all those kind of secondary support functions that are just part of Usually like a midsize company, certainly a company with billions of dollars in revenue and tens of billions in valuation should have those kind of functions that are already mature. But I'm guessing that that's not been a focus of them, or probably most other of these AI startups. And I think at some point, we will start to see some fallout on this.

• 28:37Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. And by the way, just to close the loop on a discussion we've been having on the podcast for the past couple of months, we've been talking about like if the OpenAI employees saw something, they should come out and say something. And we had William Saunders on the show on Wednesday, this ex-OpenAI super alignment team member, who basically said like, there's nothing immediately concerning or immediately dangerous to like society or humanity or node, like technological development in particular that's, you know, scaring the daylights out of these super alignment researchers. So we got that out of the way. But this type of stuff is the thing that do, that does worry them, along with like not having enough, I think, not having enough resources to run the research that they would need to make sure that the development of these models are safe.

• 29:22Alex Kantrowitz?

  You know, it's, it's good to get to the bottom of what they're actually asking for. And it's, this is actually something that now as we think a little bit more about it, you know, it makes sense. Like the thing that they're, they're asking for, it does make sense.

• 29:34Speaker 01

  The, the, the New York City subway system slogan is going to save us from AGI and the robot takeover of if you see something, say something.

• 29:44Alex Kantrowitz?

  Exactly.

• 29:45Speaker 01

  That's all we're asking, anyone out there.

• 29:47Alex Kantrowitz?

  I thought about that, yeah. I thought about that, actually, as we're talking. It's a good, it's a freaking good slogan.

• 29:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:52Alex Kantrowitz?

  It's one thing you can say about New York City government. They brand very well. One more thing I want to talk about, about this, this show, this article that annoyed me, it's not really that bad, but it's sort of typical. So The Times, obviously, like listened to Leopold Aschenbrenner's interview with Dwarke Patel, friend of the show who's been on before, and they cite it as Aschenbrenner alluded to the breach on a recent podcast, but details of the incident have not been previously reported. Okay, so clearly they followed the scent that Aschenbrenner left on the Dwarke Show. And they also grab a picture of Aschenbrenner on the Dwarke Podcast, but

• 30:35Alex Kantrowitz?

  They cannot bring themselves to cite the Dwarkesh podcast, even though the information from the show sent them, seemingly sent them down this trail. And that pisses me off. I mean, if you have somebody whose information you're relying on, you're taking a screenshot from their YouTube and putting it in your story, I can't understand the arrogance of not including the name of the podcaster in the story. It drives me nuts. What are they, not, this is better reporting than you did until Dwarkesh came along and unearthed this?

• 31:11Speaker 01

  Not the first, not the first independent media professional to have that complaint, I think.

• 31:19Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. I mean, they, I mean, it's similar. They would do it to us when we were in at BuzzFeed.

• 31:25Speaker 01

  Oh, BuzzFeed News. I mean, I think that was a poster child for that.

• 31:31Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. Well, just like the big, it just doesn't, it doesn't make any sense to me. Like I've had scoops before also. Actually, The Times has been good at crediting my scoops, but others have not. And I just feel like there's this sort of sense of superiority that drives me freaking nuts when it comes to this. All right. So we should also talk about in terms of like giving credit, very quickly. Did you see this thing that happened with Figma over the past week where Figma effectively released this tool where you can design stuff based off of a prompt? And it ended up basically emulating the Apple Weather app when you asked it to build a simple weather app. Have you seen this story?

• 32:12Speaker 01

  Ah, yes. So Figma, again, like a prototyping user interface, user experience design tool, now like many others, has a generative AI component. And if you basically asked it to create me a weather app, It created you a weather app prototype that looks exactly like Apple's weather app. And it's funny now, Apple is kind of the, instead of a small artist or in term or independent artist, it's actually Apple that's getting copied into oblivion by generative AI. But, but the, the interesting part of this was, at first, the Figma CEO came out and basically said

• 32:51Speaker 01

  that, you know, we did not train actively on any other like IP like Apple's weather app. And that, that part was very interesting to me because, but, but also to note, they also now put the, uh, put the feature on pause as they're kind of doing more of a QA on, uh, what are, what the underlying data is and what the different types of outputs are, and if they have other types of problems like this. But what was interesting to me is that question, if he's telling the truth and saying, we did not actually train on Apple's weather app. It's interesting because now Apple's weather app is so prolific and on every phone and everyone has it,

• 33:35Speaker 01

  that now the AI models and just the, the world thinks that this is what a weather app looks like. And then if you ask it to generate a weather app, that's what it'll create. So, so it's interesting to think about in terms of like creative generative AI processes, the more common format is or like, the more popular your tool is at a certain point, that just becomes the reality of what it, what an AI would think it is or it looks like. So I think it raised a bunch of very interesting issues around this.

• 34:06Alex Kantrowitz?

  I mean, I like Dylan and I like Figma, but I don't buy it. I mean, it was such a carbon copy of the Apple weather app that there's no way that this thing did not train on the Apple weather app. It spit out the exact same thing. And now you're starting to get Figma developers being like, oh God, if we're developing in Figma, are we next? Uh, I have a design friend, he sent me a couple of these tweets. Somebody give it to me straight, is Figma going to use our designs for AI? Or are we misinterpreting and overreacting to this? And then someone replies, if you have to ask, da, da, da. I think that this also plays on a theme that we've been talking about over the past couple of months, which is that These fears of IT IP theft are going to go far beyond the news.

• 34:51Alex Kantrowitz?

  Like, information on the internet is the sort of bare bones of what we do online. Then we extend more and more, and we're extending here as well. And now we've seen the designers get involved. We've seen Hollywood get involved with Scarlett Johansson. And it's not just the New York Times that's getting angry and ready to sue, right? And this is sort of a a large, growing problem that just extends beyond news. And we saw the Suno thing last week.

• 35:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, we that was just gonna say, we saw the music last week. And I to me, this one was even more interesting because a as someone who's not a designer, but very familiar and work with plenty of UX and UI designers. Like, what is actual theft? Like, is having a, obviously, having the exact replica of an icon seems like it probably would be bad. But would have a having a specific layout be a problem? Would matching three different colors in a color scheme be a real problem? Like, I think i it it enters a world where it's even more vague and difficult to try to understand what's actually copying and what's actually just being inspired by whatever is out there.

• 36:02Speaker 01

  And I think, again, the Apple weather app is the perfect example of. If that's what everyone looks at and thinks of a weather app is looking like, then obviously AI is gonna think the same thing.

• 36:14Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. And look, despite some of the issues, we've seen just this enormous amount of cash, enormous, pour into the generative AI world. And there was another New York Times story, by the way, I mean, outside of not crediting to our cash, they've done some great work on AI this week. There was another New York Times story by Aaron Griffith, friend of the show. Investors poured $27 billion into AI startups defying a downturn. And funding for AI firms has made up nearly half of the $56 billion in US startup financing from April to June, according to PitchBook. There's this whole meme about whether AI is investable or not. And quite honestly, like,

• 36:54Alex Kantrowitz?

  It seems like VCs are pouring money into AI, a lot of money into AI, and they're doing it whether or not they're going to get returns. Do you think that this is like, this, it feels like we asked the question about bubbles. I don't think either of us think that AI is a bubble, but do you think that this is just like another

• 37:18Alex Kantrowitz?

  place where people could really lose their shirts as the hysteria and the buzz around AI continues to build?

• 37:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think when we've said this, it's not a bubble, but a lot of people are going to lose a lot of money and a lot of companies are going to fail. I think is the, is how I'm looking at this. The amount of money and the speed with which it's going in, I think, is huge. But, and actually, take Suno, for example. I was, I came across, it was one of the A16Z investors. It was a thread from like back in March, but around talking about the AI tourist problem. That what's happening with a lot of these consumer-facing apps is there's this whole infrastructure, again, probably driven by the For You page on Twitter, where, you know, 10 crazy new AI things I tried this week

• 38:12Speaker 01

  and getting to like a million users very quickly and people signing up for your product and trying it and using your compute has actually become a lot easier because there's a ton of people, myself included, trying everything. And then people can go out and raise money on that and they call them the AI tourists. And I put myself in that camp, trying everything, but there's no retention. But I think a lot of people are able to raise money right now that you go mildly viral, go to a bunch of investors who are just salivating over any AI opportunity they can get and, and raise a bunch of money.

• 38:51Alex Kantrowitz?

  How how bad do you think the fallout is going to be from this when they have to return that cash?

• 38:56Speaker 01

  I I don't think it's going to be like systemic failure of the Silicon Valley Bank going down is like the banking system. I think it'll be just a lot of people losing a good chunk of money and a few people making a lot. And one thing I've seen more that this is a different moment because of Lina Khan, because in the past, and that's why you've seen like with inflection, I think there was another one last week where instead of buying out the company, when it's not really going anywhere, you know, Microsoft hiring the inflection team and like leadership or like, I think we're going to see more of that, which is not a good outcome for investors either.

• 39:38Speaker 01

  Because basically, tech giants cannot just buy up every single AI startup right now. So it's gonna change the incentives a little bit more, I think.

• 39:50Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, what about this company, Runway?

• 39:53Speaker 01

  Oh, I also in talks to raise $450 million. I have used them for a while for image generation. So they just released Gen 3 Alpha, which is a text to video generator. And honestly, it's pretty amazing. It's also not amazing in certain ways, but but like, so basically, I was trying a couple of things. And this is like OpenAI Sora, which we've seen demos of, and they've apparently released it to a small group of people. Anyone can go use this, subscribe, buy some credits, and you can generate video. I tried a couple of different ones. The first one was like a man, I've been driving a moped around Taiwan a lot and really enjoying it.

• 40:38Speaker 01

  So it was like man wearing a purple helmet, driving a moped in the streets of Taipei at night with like blurred out lights, and it came out. Really well, except for the motion of the wheels. It looks like the it's just drifting the entire time as opposed to actually driving. It's weird, but you can see, okay, this is this is moving very quickly. But then you start to realize like if you do generic, I did like a tiger walking in the Serengeti desert at dusk, and it's beautiful. It's like genuinely good. So if this is V one, I can only imagine like it it felt a lot more real, the Hollywood's in trouble after seeing this because, I mean, for me, just

• 41:21Speaker 01

  quick prompts, seeing the outputs and seeing what's gonna happen, I think, especially for any kind of B roll or side shots or something like that as opposed to people acting, I think a lot of that is going in this direction.

• 41:35Alex Kantrowitz?

  That's crazy. I mean, it's it's amazing how two years ago, like, the idea of generating an image with text was crazy. And now we are, we are where we are, where it's this stuff is gonna end up being put into action in professional production. So why don't we end this week talking a little bit about Threads, the Twitter competitor from Facebook? So they hit 175 million users. They just hit one year. And this is from the verge a year and a half ago, Threads was but a twinkle in Mark Zuckerberg's eye. Now the rival to Elon Musk's X has reached more than 175 million monthly active users. And basically, it's growing. We hit 100 million users very quickly, I think, within a month

• 42:19Alex Kantrowitz?

  or so. So then it lost, and now it's find a way to found a way to rebuild. The interesting reaction I saw on Threads, really, and on Twitter, which is what was that a lot of people like said, 175 million doesn't feel like that. And in fact, the app has given away a lot of its relevance, because it's not going to suggest political posts from people that you don't follow. It's also, uh, it seems to like not be so interested in news and it's slower. And I guess like in some ways, this is good because Facebook is learning some of the lessons of its past when it comes to spreading political information.

• 43:02Alex Kantrowitz?

  But it's also just like, it seems like it's never really gonna have a chance to have the urgency it needs to actually challenge X without that. And so I'm kind of of two minds of it where I'm just like, good on you Meta for making the right choice, I think, from a safety perspective. But also just like Threads is, seems to have like an expiration date to me.

• 43:27Alex Kantrowitz?

  If it doesn't sort of go to the dark side. And I'm not encouraging it to do that, but it's just what it is. Curious what you think.

• 43:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think Threads to me, especially because the fact that they're saying we don't want to get into political content in the next few months this year, that's gonna be a pretty critical thing. So to try to avoid that at all costs, I think is, is a big miss. But I, I think the main thing for me is still, I just don't know what it, what it's for. Like when I go on it, it's, there's some people I see who very like actively said, I'm leaving Twitter. There's a lot of like posts, two days old, three days old, that are kind of viral. There's a lot of auto-posted things that you could see the person who posted on Twitter and is cross-posting to Threads.

• 44:16Speaker 01

  So it's just, it still feels kind of like people are there for the most part because it's, there's some people there, you're supposed to be on it if you work in social media, but otherwise, I don't know, I, I still, maybe there are thriving Threads communities that I'm completely missing, but it still feels to me that it's more just brute force. Facebook can go from a hundred to a hundred seventy-five million users, which is actually not that impressive when you have two billion people using your products every day and can just hit them with any push notification you want. And they do that with Instagram anyways, so. So I think I'm still not quite, I'm not a Threads boy. Yet or anymore. I think you had your moments there, right?

• 45:01Alex Kantrowitz?

  I had some moments, but I'm also just like, I was just thinking, is there any time I learned something surprising or new from threads? And I can't really recall. Whereas I feel like I learned something surprising and new from Twitter uh every day, despite how awful it can be. And by the way, I just did something that I wasn't expecting to do, but it's kind of interesting. I'm logged out on threads right now. Cause you were asking like, what does threads wanna be? And I'm like, I'm looking at this logged out experience. I was actually trying to get the logged in. But let me tell you what these first few posts are. So there's a post, I think by a dog. And it says by Honey Bear Henry and the post is mommy says I look uh like the Fourth of July.

• 45:43Alex Kantrowitz?

  And it's got like a Fourth of July handkerchief around its neck. The next one is a book recommendation. The other one is happy fourth with a picture of fireworks. The other, the next is a picture of a rock band.

• 45:59Alex Kantrowitz?

  I can't really tell what the next one is. Eventually I get to a picture of um a reveal of the Puma jersey for some soccer team. And then a chicken that's going cluck yeah, America. This, this is, this is, it's incoherent in terms of a vision for what this thing should be, if that's the logged out experience. It's just like, it's not Tumblr, it's not Twitter, it's not Instagram. And I don't know, I mean, maybe that's fine. Like, maybe it is just this kind of extra place that they can put, you know, sort of put some resources to, to it, but it doesn't really

• 46:40Alex Kantrowitz?

  make sense to me why Facebook is doing this without, without news. And I think there's ways to do news responsibly. I don't think you wanna do politics necessarily, but there's, there's stuff with like, the news gives a product a sense of urgency and I just don't see it there.

• 46:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm actually looking right now that Mark Zuckerberg has been, he'll go like over a month without posting on threads, like May 16th and June 18th, then June 25th, so a week, but like before May 16th was April 19th. So it's not like, like this kind of service only works where you're on it a lot. It's not like a scheduled post or not like you're jumping in every now and then where you're, you're thinking out loud. That's the beauty of Twitter is you, you think out loud on that service. And yeah, I think the real time part of it, it's never gonna get, it's just, it's been a couple of years

• 47:35Speaker 01

  now and I don't see how, if it's not encouraging that kind of, that way of creating content or posting, it's, it's, it's never gonna get there.

• 47:46Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. And I heard like the conspiracy theory that I've heard is that this is like Meta's way to train its models on real time information, but that doesn't really compute if there's like, not like any like pressing real time information that's showing up there. So I mean, I continue to use it. I log in like a couple of times a week. I think it's interesting. It's fun to share things there, but it doesn't feel as alive as Twitter does.

• 48:10Speaker 01

  Maybe Zynternet Threads is actually a thriving, vibrant community and, and we should all start to follow whoever the, the key thought leaders in that space are.

• 48:23Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. I mean, Barstool is doing well there. 2.1 million followers. So says something. I don't know what it says, but. All right. We managed to cover Hawk 2, I think in a fairly like reasonable way.

• 48:39Speaker 01

  Nuanced and cool headed way.

• 48:41Alex Kantrowitz?

  Nuanced and cool headed way. And it's actually one of the more fascinating things I think we've dug into here, like talking about the evolution of the internet. So I'm glad we did it.

• 48:49Speaker 01

  I think Z- Z- Zynternet is not going anywhere. And I think, I think July 4th is probably the most zen of holidays there is.

• 48:59Alex Kantrowitz?

  That's true.

• 49:00Speaker 01

  Meat, meat posting, waters for like a

• 49:04Alex Kantrowitz?

  selfie in the tank top.

• 49:05Speaker 01

  Parties. Yeah, tank top beer, like shotgunning a beer, just grilling massive steaks. I think this is happy Z- Independence Day, Alex.

• 49:15Alex Kantrowitz?

  Happy Z- Independence Day. And to everybody out there, if you're a US listener or celebrating US Independence Day, happy Independence Day. And if you're among our many listeners around the world, we're wishing you a happy Friday and a nice weekend. And next week, Matt Wood from AWS, he's the head of AI there. He's going to be on the show. We're going one-on-one, talking about state of AI at Amazon. And then Ron John and I, are we back next week together? Or are you on the road?

• 49:43Speaker 01

  Not next week, next week.

• 49:45Alex Kantrowitz?

  Not next week? The week after.

• 49:46Speaker 01

  I'm raw dogging a flight next week.

• 49:49Alex Kantrowitz?

  Oh, please turn the movies on. Please turn those movies on. So we'll have a guest host that'll come in. All right, everybody, thanks so much for listening. Thank you, Ron John, and we'll see you next time on Big Technology Podcast.

• 50:00Speaker 02

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