Pod Insights Big Technology Podcast How We Use ChatGPT, Meta’s New AI Glasses, Can Jimmy Kimmel Be Canceled? About this episode Ranjan Roy from Margins is back for our weekly discussion of the latest tech news. We cover: 1) OpenAI tells us how people use ChatGPT 2) Practical guidance is the top use of ChatGPT 3) Is generative AI actually a threat to search given the use cases? 4) OpenAI has a very broad definition of 'doing' or agent work 5) The hidden impact of AI 'decision support' in the economy 6) People trust AI bots massively - is that bad? 7) ChatGPT's massive growth 8) Anthropic shares Claude's economic uses 9) Automation is surpassing augmentation for AI in work 10) Will Meta's AI glasses hit? 11) Can Jimmy Kimmel build an audience off-ABC? 12) Will the next Jimmy Kimmel be a youtube/rpodcaster?
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Transcript 0:00 Speaker 00 New data from OpenAI and Anthropic reveals how people are actually using their chatbots. Meta's new AI glasses are here. Are they the road to superintelligence? Plus, can you actually cancel Jimmy Kimmel? We'll talk about it 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 a Gentic AI to work across an entire enterprise? I recently spoke with Genesis Chairman and CEO Tony Bates about why orchestration is emerging as a competitive advantage in customer experience and what companies need to get right in the AI era. Then I sat down with Adam Mitchell, Head of Enterprise Business Solutions at Voya Financial, to go inside a large-scale Agentic CX transformation, including the business decisions,
0:45 Speaker 00 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.
1:19 Speaker 00 Welcome to Big Technology Podcast Friday Edition, where we break down the news in our traditional cool-headed and nuanced format. We have a great show for you today because we have a boatload of new data from OpenAI and Anthropic, looking at all the different uses of chatbots, some data that may settle some debates we've been having on the show for quite some time. We'll also talk about the rollout of Meta's new AI glasses, some live demo trouble, but we'll talk about where the product is going. And we'll also discuss the canceling or the pausing of Jimmy Kimmel's show, and really whether cancellation has the same meaning these days, given the outlets available online to continue the conversation. It's gonna be a great show. Joining us as always on Friday is Ron John Roy of margins. Ron John, great to see you.
2:04 Speaker 01 Good to see you. I can't believe it. OpenAI just lifted your blog post, "Three Ways People Are Using Generative AI." We're gonna get into it, but when I was reading that research, oh man, I was like, "Did GPT-5 just ingest the big technology blog and come up with, 'Here's how we want to structure this'?"
2:27 Speaker 00 I have to be honest, I read that and I was like, that is the three faces of generative AI post just coming out in OpenAI research. So I'm so excited to be able to talk about the data because we finally do have some real data. And let's get right into it. So OpenAI releases this post this week, how people are using ChatGPT. I, of course, was like, well, what's going on with the companionship side of things? And we actually have real data on that as well. But here is, here's directly from the post. It says, ChatGPT consumer usage is largely about getting everyday tasks done. Three quarters of conversations focus on practical guidance, seeking information, and writing, with writing being the most common work task, while coding and self-expression
3:11 Speaker 00 remain niche activities. Practical guidance, seeking information, and writing are the three most common topics and collectively account for nearly 80% of all conversations. Practical guidance is the most common use case and includes activities like tutoring and teaching, how-to advice about a variety of topics, and creative ideation. So Ranjot, I just want to turn this over to you. What do you think about the fact that these are the most common use cases of ChatGPT? And I'll just add on another question, because why not?
3:45 Speaker 00 When I saw this, I said, you know what? Chat, like chat with generative AI and search, have always felt like completely different things to me. And maybe this is some evidence for like this bigger overriding question of is Google toast? Why Google is seeing the success it is and why generative AI might not be the direct threat it was portrayed as for so long?
4:06 Speaker 01 I'm going to push back on that. How do you see practical guidance and seeking information is distinct from traditional search? Like, wouldn't that be the main, or at least a very large component of overall traditional search?
4:22 Speaker 00 Okay, good point. Seeking information definitely is search, right? That is without a doubt, search. But the fact that practical guidance is number one. Like, I think there was a misconception that AI was going to be just like search redone, a refactoring of search. And it's probably led by publishers who are like, where's our traffic going? But the fact that practical guidance is number one, where you can go to, and we're gonna talk about it more, but you can go to ChatGPT and say, "I'm facing this situation, what should I do?" Whether that's a work situation, a health situation, a relationship situation, getting fit, which we're gonna talk about. That, to me, is a brand-new use case. You just have not had that online at all.
5:05 Speaker 01 No, no, no, no. If you think back, there was, I remember in the like 2000s or early 2010s media and startup days, there was entire, there was one HowCast where it was just all short-form video that would just do how-to videos, like how to do basically small elements of practical guidance. So, so there was, this was a core component, especially like very SEO-optimized traffic. Again, every publisher that was trying to like pull in traffic goes around these how-to questions. So, so I think I would still push back.
5:42 Speaker 00 Yeah, that's exactly the point I'm making here, which is that this has been a, the belief that, that AI is the natural inheritor of search has been driven in part by people who work in publishing, which, which is a place that the narratives tend to come out of. Who've said, "We've done this before, and this is search, and this is taking search." The difference is, you had to create all that content on HowCast. This is a technological solution to practical guidance, and that's emergent. That's something that we haven't had previously. It's brand-new. And so, to me, this idea that it's a technology replacement to search comes second to this idea that this is a brand-new technology layer on the practical guidance front. And in fact, I would say,
6:26 Speaker 00 Maybe this is controversial, but I think this does a better job than those HowCast and eHow. And no offense to anybody who's worked on those websites before. They are a creation of SEO. They would not exist without Google and they're not very good. Like, I don't think anyone, you know, going, giving their, you know, coming back to a college, giving the commencement address, somebody super successful, you know, says, hey, I want to just thank the people at eHow, you know, and I figured out everything on eHow. No, it was just like, it could get you maybe two thirds of the way to fixing your sink.
7:01 Speaker 01 When I look back at all the success I have achieved in my life, I would like to thank eHow, HowCast, Ask Jeeves, and all the above. Yeah, I think-
7:12 Speaker 00 Students, students, you may be asking how, but you should be asking eHow.
7:20 Speaker 01 We're dating ourselves for any Gen Z listeners here, but there was a time that these websites were, were large and dominant. So, okay, so one thing I'll start to kind of, if we dig in further, practical, the way they start to distinguish these things, I still found a little difficult or problematic. So again, what is the difference between practical guidance and seeking information? Like, there's going to be a lot of blurry lines in there. Writing, I think, is fairly, fairly consistent, but to me, they had gone another level deeper. So they had, those is one categorization. But then to me, going back to your blog post, they had three
7:59 Speaker 01 patterns within messages, asking, doing, and expressing. About half of messages, 49% are asking. And then expressing, doing is 40%, expressing is 11%. These fit very neatly into our discussions, your blog post, thinking, doing, and companionship. So I think they start, it's kind of amazing that they're starting to see the world in the way that we've been talking about this, thinking, doing, companionship, or asking, doing, and expressing. The only thing for me, I want to start, kind of like, I want to hear your thoughts on, the way they define doing is not how I define it.
8:42 Speaker 01 They define doing as getting help in doing some kind of process, like getting help drafting text or planning or programming. The way I've been discussing this is, to me, doing is actually going out and doing it. I had a complaint with Delta about luggage a few weeks ago, and I had ChatGPT write the email and tell me where to go, but it didn't send the email. So it's almost there, but it's not. To me, that is the real doing. But otherwise, I'm glad they're starting to look through this in the same way we are.
9:14 Speaker 00 Well, that's a great point, and I'm going to take it one step further, right? So these are the tasks that people are coming to generative AI or ChatGPT for. Forty-nine percent is asking. That would be my thought partner category. Eleven percent is expressing, which OpenAI says captures uses that are neither doing, asking nor doing usually involves personal affection or exploration and play. To me, that's companion, obviously. Now, doing should be agent, right? And you're saying that their categorization of doing is actually much broader than you would use for agent, and I would agree. It seems like some of these things, like using the chatbot
9:55 Speaker 00 for drafting text, let's just go with your definition. If it's not calling a tool, it's just like normal LLM behavior. So I think that what they're doing in this study is expanding their agent category to encompass more than it really should, and I wonder what's why they're doing that. I think I have an answer. I think what we're seeing in the numbers here is the vast majority of activity within ChatGPT is really thought partner. It is a thought partner tool, and the agentic stuff, of course, is super early, but they didn't want maybe the numbers, and this is maybe somewhat conspiratorial, but I stand by it. They didn't want the numbers
10:35 Speaker 00 to show how deeply into thought partner they are when they just released a product, GPT-5, not only released, tuned their product to the agent use case. To me, this explains why there's been so much up Brawl and disappointment and disconnect between the people who've been using the previous models and the people using GPT five. OpenAI had a thought partner product and they turned it into an agent product, which is by their definition, a minority of the use uses. And as you look a level deeper, a very small percentage of the uses. And that to me is, I think it's a
11:18 Speaker 00 problem. And that's why I think these companies are gonna have to have clarity over which one they're going for. You cannot really do all three. Maybe you can do it in the same product, but you definitely need a switcher.
11:29 Speaker 01 Yep. Okay. And I like this. I don't think that's even conspiratorial. Actually, I will say, I do wonder, like, because this was presented as a research paper, you know, and as a PDF in that Times New Roman font and like, it just looks like a research paper. You assume there's no marketing hand kind of overseeing it. Whereas if this was produced as a slick PDF, like from a Google, you would just be like, okay, whatever. This isn't real. Like, or it's just marketing. Because and I actually do wonder how that gets like politically divided within an organization like OpenAI, because all of the findings really do help push their business
12:11 Speaker 01 case. Like, there's, again, like, as you said, giving that looser definition of agentic with doing makes it seem like they have very distributed use cases. And they are moving towards this world of agent. But where in reality is we're discussing, they're not. They also have nearly half of messages come from users aged 18 to 25. So guess what? We're capturing the younger demographic. They have demographic gaps are shrinking, that now women are using it as much as men, which I kind of found interesting.
12:46 Speaker 00 That was the lead finding in this in this study.
12:49 Speaker 01 Yeah. And but they were very clear that it was like with using traditionally feminine gendered names. Like, they're like, we don't actually have data on you. Don't worry. But we're using just
12:59 Speaker 00 But we're gonna tell you exactly how people are using our product down to the minute, like tiny little percentage. Okay.
13:04 Speaker 01 Exactly, exactly. And then they have like, they said emotional companionship are rare. They said only 1.9% of messages are about relationships and 0.4% role play.
13:19 Speaker 01 That's the companionship we're talking about, but you know, like
13:23 Speaker 00 It's one one level deeper than companionship.
13:25 Speaker 01 Yeah, the one asking for help, the other getting into the role play. But but but overall, like everything, oh, they even had like geographical uh like lower income countries are starting to use this more. So it's positioning it is this beautiful democratizing force like bridging the wealth gap between nations. So so overall, like the more I was looking at it, I'm like, the greatest form of content marketing you can do is make it look like a research paper. And then suddenly just add so much credibility to it.
13:57 Speaker 00 Yeah, look, I have no doubt that researchers worked on this. But we cannot, it's just one of those things when a company releases research, you have to look at it with a not, I I don't think you you don't believe anything you read. You just have to like read between the lines a little bit and you can you can get some good data. Like I'm sure that part of this does really does reflect the way that that chat GPT is being used, like the idea to me that most of it is this thought partner use case. That makes total sense to me. It it's totally tracks with what I've been thinking about with that about the bot, but you do have to say there are certain narratives that they want out there.
14:37 Speaker 00 And you're right, if you put it out as this research paper, it does do a better job of advancing those narratives than a thou dost protest too much blog post saying only 1.9% of chat GPT messages are in the topics of relationship of relationships and personal reflection. And in fact, this study I initially, you know, found out about this study because I think one of our listeners tagged me on Twitter and said, oh, hey, look, only 1.9% are companions. And I had been sort of beating the drum, saying that companion, you know, is is one of the leading use cases. Maybe I even said it was the number one use case. I might have to revise that after the show. Well, it was an HBR article that seemed to suggest that. And that HBR article was also cited in this OpenAI study. So.
15:23 Speaker 00 I think they give some credence to it, even though they found something completely different. But I would say after reading the articles that have come out about OpenAI and listening to the podcasts about OpenAI and how people are building relationships with ChatGPT and that's unhealthy.
15:38 Speaker 00 I if I let's just say this, if I was a researcher at OpenAI, I would do whatever I could. And maybe this is me getting it completely wrong. I'm I'm open to that. I would do whatever I could to minimize that use case. I would say there's only a small percentage of people that are falling in love with ChatGPT. And by the way, let's just do our building relationships with the with ChatGPT. And let's just do the back of the envelope math here, because we have 700 million users of ChatGPT. And so this would say 1.9% of people have some sort of relationship with them, I think. So that would still leave us with 13.3 million people weekly having a relationship style conversation with ChatGPT. Obviously, it's
16:23 Speaker 00 not the overriding use case, but that's still shit ton of people.
16:27 Speaker 01 Oh, actually.
16:28 Speaker 00 Befriended, the bot.
16:29 Speaker 01 If you look at it, it's 18 billion messages per week. So I just did that's 35 million relationship messages right there per week.
16:40 Speaker 00 Can we can we back of the envelope, figure out how much it's costing OpenAI to serve these online boyfriend and girlfriends?
16:47 Speaker 01 Well, actually.
16:48 Speaker 00 Well, they're gonna burn 100. Go ahead.
16:50 Speaker 01 In the world of it's also funny, because like in the world of GPT-5, where you could have a simple non agentic answer that can keep things going. Instead, it's going to do some like multi dimensional, multi layered thinking that's just burning tokens just to say, that's a great answer. You are so smart.
17:11 Speaker 00 You know, it is interesting, because you do get I really, I mean, maybe I should just do a test. But I really wonder how this agentic, you know, we talked last week about how GPT-5 always asks, like, do you want me to do this for you? And like, right, your friend at the barbecue, where it's like, where you said, hey, are you flirting with with ChatGPT? And it's like, hey, I can be more flirty if you want. Like, I do wonder when you get deep into those role plays, like what ChatGPT is actually suggesting as in terms of the next step?
17:40 Speaker 01 I someone for research, go out. I just can't. I just.
17:47 Speaker 01 That scares me too. Actually, that's where I feel like, yeah, we need that story out there of someone who actually goes down that rabbit hole. Alex, I'm nominating you.
18:00 Speaker 00 I'm not gonna say I'm gonna do it, but I'm also not gonna say I'm not gonna do it. If I don't have a story for next week, I may have to desperately start to try to go into a role play with ChatGPT and see what happens. God help us all. There was also another interesting speaking of stats here. Another interesting stat, they say 4.2% of ChatGPT messages are related to computer programming compared to 33% of work-related Claude conversations. It's interesting how they have that qualifier, work-related Claude conversations. But even still, I think what they're saying with this is, hey, we've really been working on coding,
18:39 Speaker 00 and we have a lot of opportunity here on the coding front, given how intensely, how intense Claude is used for coding and sort of how it's still emerging as a use case for us.
18:51 Speaker 01 Yeah, I agree. That one jumped out at me. And we have been talking about this for months now. And I think both of us have agreed that Claude's essentially pivot towards coding as like a core use case in terms of monetization has actually been a seemingly successful one as they've been just like ripping through revenue growth. But yeah, it felt like as the new Codex product came out, like, this is another one, like, hey, everybody, we have plenty of opportunity here. And Claude's already a little bit saturated. So definitely, again, this one felt like one of those very, very convenient statistics that was put out
19:35 Speaker 01 there. I'll say, though, actually, no, this one, and I wasn't surprised by it either. Because again, I feel everyone I speak with, ChatGPT is not the default for coding assistance and coding help. So this made sense.
19:50 Speaker 00 That's right. Okay, let's talk a little bit about work versus not work. 30% of consumer usage is work-related, and approximately 70% is non-work. That is interesting to me.
20:04 Speaker 01 Yeah, I think, but again, how this stuff gets defined, I think is, uh, is difficult. But, but also I think we've said before that they have to win consumer. And they position themselves as they're going to win consumer and that they are leading in consumer. So I think this also still kind of helps drive that narrative too, that. And, and apparently that it's up from 53 to 70% that is non-work usage. So they're showing that this is growing in importance. Everyday people are using ChatGPT, which I, again, flirting with it while it's telling you how to grill on a Labor Day weekend. Like that's, I'm going to call that non-work usage. Um, so, so overall, I think that one seems clear to me.
20:49 Speaker 00 There's, there's one last part here, which I think is worth talking about, uh, because they, they particularly call out this decision support side of things. And I think it's very interesting. So they say a key way that value is created is through decision support. ChatGPT helps improve judgment and productivity, especially in knowledge intensive jobs. And as people discover these and other benefits, usage deepens with, uh, with user cohorts, increasing their activity over time through improved models and new use case discovery. A couple of things on this. First of all, they are saying that this is a way that chatbot, uh, uh, productivity is actually, uh, you can't see it in GDP numbers because it's not like a clear activity.
21:31 Speaker 00 But they say that this is actually already making a difference, uh, in terms of economic, uh, impact. Uh, the other side of it is the fact that they're highlighting this and practical guidance, um, so prominently in this study just suggests to me that I don't think we have fully grasped the level with which people already in the year 2025, three years, nearly three years after the release of ChatGPT.
22:00 Speaker 00 We trust these things. We do. We trust it for guidance in our personal relationships, in our work world, everything from our health to how to, you know, write an email inviting people to a party. For instance, I just wrote an email inviting people to a party and I just screenshotted it and dropped it in ChatGPT and said, how's my subject line? And it like suggested three different subject lines. I'm not really the, I don't have a lot of experience inviting people to parties, but ChatGPT has a lot of that baked in. And I was like, you know what? Your subject line is better than mine. Copy paste and away it goes. And the RCPs are flowing in. So just the amount of trust people have in these bots is unbelievable already.
22:45 Speaker 01 Is that doing? Is that doing right there? Or is that thinking?
22:50 Speaker 00 Well, you're, the bot's not doing it. I mean, maybe the bot is. I would put that in Thought Partner.
22:54 Speaker 01 Yeah. So that's where, but I'm guessing that would have been, that would have been categorized as doing in the, in the OpenAI context. I also, that is an interesting point around how GDP and traditional economic metrics aren't capturing any of this. Because they're, they're only gonna capture, I guess, improves, improvements in output, but all this, and this happened, I feel like, in the early digital days where there's all this discussion around the time spent posting on Facebook or posting on Twitter or all these kinds of things actually created very little economic value. And it was more, and it was more where, you know, people were just spending
23:36 Speaker 01 time and energy. And I think that's actually going to be an interesting, as people just spend more and more and more time with AI chat, like what that actually means for overall measurement of economic activity, because none of it is going to be captured.
23:52 Speaker 00 Yeah.
23:53 Speaker 01 Other than your, other than your better converting subject lines to get people to the party, that'll be captured certainly.
24:00 Speaker 00 That will be captured, yes, and drinks served. But what do you think about this idea that people trusted already? I mean, for all the, and is it trustworthy? Go ahead.
24:11 Speaker 01 Okay, two separate questions there. I think, do people trust it? Yes, I mean, undoubtedly, everyone, I think that we definitely have crossed the inflection point of all my normie friends using ChatGPT regularly, or using some kind of chatbot, Gemini, Claude, whatever, in day-to-day personal life, and just asking it questions. Is it trustworthy? I think, I don't know, it's still tough, because like hallucination, I still very clearly get hallucinations on factual information if, if the quality of information around the query is not good.
24:52 Speaker 01 So it's certainly not trustworthy around more niche topics, or things where there's kind of like conflicting information out there, because it shouldn't be trustworthy. That's not how an LLM is meant to work. So I think that could be more of a problem going forward, but still, right now, everyone's in the kind of honeymoon phase. What about you?
25:14 Speaker 00 That's right. I, I, I do think it is very interesting. I can't tell you whether it's good or bad that so many people trust it. I don't know yet. I don't think we have enough data. I have found it to be trustworthy to a certain extent. For instance, like, in situations where I've been sick, I've said, give me a, you know, a day-to-day of where my health is going to be on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday of this week. And it's been pretty accurate, and it's been able to sort of help me figure out what to do, how to, how to plan things, you know, when to take it easy, when not to. And that's just one small use case.
25:56 Speaker 00 I've found it to be, obviously, it hallucinates, but it gets stuff right so often, that I found myself trusting it more and more. And it also goes back to this Matthew Prince thing, the CEO of Cloudflare that came on a couple of weeks ago. And he said, people used to click out to the links. Now they trust the bot so much, they don't even care about the footnotes anymore. I think we're getting to that point.
26:17 Speaker 01 Yeah, and I think also, is the web dead? Is the web in secular decline? For any longtime listener will know, this is something we've debated regularly. I think just so much of the web actually became less trustworthy, or just overly SEO optimized, or just unusable, that people are actually just excited that there's something that cleanly gives you an answer that's at least seemingly, or is fairly accurate. So people are just excited about that, but.
26:48 Speaker 00 Yes, but the one tragedy here is that eHow is relied upon less. So I expect us to produce a generation of less capable leaders because of this.
26:58 Speaker 01 Let's bring it back, eHow.com.
27:00 Speaker 00 eHow. Maybe they should merge with ChatGPT. By the way, one last thing. The usage numbers, which they included in this report, with some really like, kind of key data points in terms of how people have used ChatGPT, it is fascinating. So we talked on the show a lot in 2023, 2024, about like, where's the growth of ChatGPT? Is ChatGPT flatlining? And you actually see that getting into mid 2024, it had not reached 200 million users. After people said it, you know, hit 100 million early 2023, which you look at the data and it's not quite clear that it did at least weekly users. But then around
27:41 Speaker 00 mid 2024, you see a spike. So it crosses 200 million users in around July 2024. It goes up to 300 million in around January 2024. This year, it's on track to hit 800 million weekly users by the end of the year, maybe even more, maybe 900 million. That is astonishing growth. And I have never seen this in any product ever before. And to be honest, not even close.
28:13 Speaker 01 No, I agree. And again, you see it, I think like with a lot of technology, when it really is in front of you day to day, in front of not just early adopters, but you know, even the iPhone, I remember I stood in line for the first iPhone and I was made fun of at my work by people who are like, why are you standing in line for a phone? It was a solid like five or six years before you saw it just ubiquitous. And this has become a lot, lot faster where it's just fully immersed in everyone, my parents, pop culture, it's just out there. So I'll, I'll give, and it's a testament to just how revolutionary the actual products are.
28:57 Speaker 00 That's right. Yeah, it's in South Park. So
29:00 Speaker 01 It's in South Park, which was canceled this week.
29:04 Speaker 00 South Park was canceled this?
29:05 Speaker 01 No, no, they removed, they did not air their new episode. And they said that, they said that, that they did not have it done, which is just odd.
29:19 Speaker 00 That never happens. Yes. Okay.
29:21 Speaker 01 I mean, yeah. Anyways.
29:23 Speaker 00 We'll talk, we'll talk about more media weirdness after the break. And if you enjoy data about the chatbots, we have more coming your way as we get into the numbers that Anthropic shared this week. It seems like it's AI usage data week here on Big Technology Podcast Friday Edition, and we'll do more of it right after this. This episode is brought to you by App Point. Everyone's racing to roll out AI right now. Copilots, chatbots, agents doing real work. But here's the part nobody loves talking about. All that AI runs on your data, and most teams have no single way to see it, secure it, and prove it's under control. That's exactly what App Point does. For 25 years,
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31:43 Speaker 00 And we're back here on Big Technology Podcast Friday Edition. All right, so first half, we talked all about this fascinating data from OpenAI. I feel like that could have been an entire show on its own. Really fascinating stuff. I do love it when these companies publish the data. Even if we have to question some of their motives, it's always very interesting to get a picture of where things are going. And we have more data from Anthropic. So Anthropic released its Economic Index Report this week. They say uneven geographic enterprise AI adoption. A couple of interesting stats right off the top. In the US alone, Anthropic says 40% of employers report using AI at work. Up from 20% in 2023, two years ago.
32:26 Speaker 00 Such rapid adoption reflects how useful this technology already is for a wide range of application, its deployability on existing digital infrastructure and its ease of use by typing and speaking without specialized training. Rapid improvement of frontier AI likely reinforces fast adoption along each of these dimensions. Here's a little history lesson they give us. Historically, new technologies took decades to reach widespread adoptions. Adoption electricity took 30 years. The first mass market personal computers reached early adopters in 81, but did not reach the majority of US homes for another 20 years. Even the rapidly adopted internet took around five years to hit adoption rate that AI has reached in just two years.
33:10 Speaker 00 So Rajan, turning it to you. What are we supposed to, what should we make of the rapid adoption of AI? Is it just a nature of the fact that it is so easy to use as Anthropic is suggesting here? And does that mean we're, we're like the, you know, we should be more skeptical because it's been adopted so widespread and we're still trying to sort of find out what the ROI is? Or is it just a bullish sign because there's been such enthusiastic adoption that it's just going to get crazier from here?
33:40 Speaker 01 Yeah, it's the right question because like the moment you're like, this is bigger than electricity. And I think, wasn't it Sundar who said like, it's the biggest thing since fire?
33:49 Speaker 00 I was in the room for that. I was in the room, I was talking on an NBC show, I think Kara Swisher was hosting it. And he said it was bigger, AI would be bigger than electricity and bigger than fire. And everyone's like, so this Sundar guy, he's on drugs. But it turns out that, you know, if you said it now, we'd have to at least take that seriously.
34:08 Speaker 01 Bigger than fire. I think, so yeah, the speed of it, I really was trying to think through like, what would be the corollary? Is it electricity took, because electricity is a very like heavy infrastructure type of innovation. So to actually diffuse it across houses or just people is gonna take longer. I don't know, like, if you think about viral apps, could TikTok? Be somewhat comparable, even in terms of scale and speed. Um, yeah, I, I don't know. It sounds exciting. It sounds big. That to me still though, this like millennia, like looking at the context of like innovations over centuries and millennia.
34:51 Speaker 01 I'm still not there. I'm like, you know what? People are, people are flirting with chat GPT a lot more. But is it that revolutionary just yet? We still have to wait and see.
35:02 Speaker 00 I'll, I'll say this. If I was running, uh, again, these studies are marketing in some way. They're also helpful and informative, but we can't separate the two. If I was running, uh, the publication of one of these at a company, uh, whose product was taking off this way. Would I compare it to electricity and fire? I mean, hell yeah, that my job was marketing. I think I would. Um, if I'm, but I'm looking at it now. Am I going to say it as an impartial observer that it is? No, I'm not. But I do think that the, the, um, fast adoption rate is definitely notable. And I think we'll probably have answers about what this technology will actually do sooner rather than later. Given the investment and given the attention. And we have seen, we so, so Anthropic didn't just give us some of this data about enterprise use.
35:46 Speaker 00 By the way, I think forty three, forty percent of enterprise use, maybe that's on API side of things. Uh, we know that many more people are using this chat GPT within their organizations. But here's like some interesting data on what Claude is being used for. So coding is still number one use case at thirty six percent. But educational tasks have surged from nine point three percent to twelve point four percent. And scientific tasks are now, uh, six point, they're, they went from six point three percent to seven point two percent. This is an interesting thing for you, Ranjan. Users are entrusting Claude with more autonomy. Directive conversations where users delegate complex, uh, delegate complete tasks to Claude have jumped from twenty nine, twenty seven percent to thirty nine percent.
36:31 Speaker 00 We're seeing increased program creation and coding and a reduction in debugging suggesting that users might be able to achieve more of their goals in a single exchange. So Claude being used for education, science, and more complete tasks, go do this Claude and then people trust it.
36:49 Speaker 01 Yeah, actually, and again, as we've discussed, those all very neatly fit into Anthropic's strategic objectives. So as we get into these, it's like, we know Anthropic is pushing Claude into more coding, more kind of like educational scientific use cases. And very conveniently, I will say, I was just looking, they presented this research not in that academic PDF format, but actually as a blog post. So my one, my one call out to Anthropic, just make it a PDF that looks like an academic paper and we'll, we'll trust it more. But, but overall, it's all of this stuff I think is interesting. I think it's, it feels correct. Again, I don't
37:33 Speaker 01 know anyone who's using Claude that much in terms of the thought partner side of it, other than my, my co-host of margins, John, he's been using, he's been, he's like a Claude head for thought partnership through and through. But, but overall, yeah, I don't know anyone else who's, who's using it. So this, this all seems to add up.
37:55 Speaker 00 I unfortunately have some news to report to you here, which is that there is a big group that seems to be using it for thought partnership, and that is the US government. The city that, or a region that had the most Claude adoption per capita is Washington DC. So US government seems like it's being run by Claude.
38:20 Speaker 01 Um.
38:21 Speaker 00 Which frankly, might be an improvement.
38:23 Speaker 01 I don't, I don't know what that says about Claude right now.
38:27 Speaker 00 Claude cancelled Jimmy Kimmel.
38:29 Speaker 01 Yeah, Claude, Claude is testifying, gonna be pulled up in front of Congress and has to answer some questions. Yeah, I wonder though, see, this is where the data gets kind of just questionable, like, the way they define per capita usage, I actually looked, they had a formula around like, total usage relative to overall population and, I mean, if you just have a couple of big federal contracts that are using Claude, and DC is a smaller population density area relative to, like, you know, and most other cities, that would skew that data completely. So, I don't know, that one, that one seems not the most easy to understand.
39:14 Speaker 00 Let's get to one headline that I think was pretty interesting, that sort of got the most attention here, and that is automation tasks are surpassing augmentation for Claude. They, sorry, Anthropic says 77% of business uses involve automation, compared to about 50% of Claude users, and you look at the chart that they put together, and automation was actually a, was actually much less, 41% automation compared to 55% augmentation. I think this is in their V1. Today, automation has, has passed augmentation, 49% automation, 47% augmentation. So this idea that our people trying to augment or automate work,
39:59 Speaker 00 the study seems to suggest that automation is taking priority. However, I will just say that oftentimes you can automate work tasks, and then free somebody else, free someone up to do something else. Is that an augmentation task? No, it's probably in the data seen as automation, but it's actually, it's actually the, the same thing as an augmentation.
40:23 Speaker 00 If you get
40:23 Speaker 01 Yeah.
40:25 Speaker 01 No, no, no, I agree. Like, again, what does, what is the definition of automation here? Because in reality, I'm assuming it's mostly coding because like Claude has some connectors where that allow you to do stuff with other systems. I've tried them. They're not great right now, so I cannot imagine that they at any kind of scaled usage, like people are building these like complex agentic workflows using it. So, so I, I'm curious how they define that directive. I think overall, as, as listeners can feel like when all these numbers just so neatly fit into the existing strategic narrative of these companies, I have a hard time just,
41:09 Speaker 01 you know, taking it at full face value.
41:12 Speaker 00 Yeah, then, by the way, that's what we're here for. Like, we want to provide nuance in these conversations. We want to read it. We want to attack it with some perspective as impartial outsiders that you wouldn't get necessarily from someone who's just trying to push the company line. So I think overall, just to wrap this up, we both say this is interesting data, I believe, and it is just a data point, I would say, and not the be all end all.
41:39 Speaker 01 And you also get incredible recommendations like put your findings into an academic style PDF paper and it will increase the credibility.
41:48 Speaker 00 I mean, the marketing agency of Roy and Cantor is we're just doing work.
41:51 Speaker 01 That's one of the core offerings right there. Make your research look more credible.
41:55 Speaker 00 Put it in a PDF.
41:56 Speaker 01 Yep, put it in a PDF.
41:58 Speaker 00 Listen, these are non-obvious things. Okay, we're running out of time. We have two more things to talk about. So briefly, Meta has the $799 glasses. We talked about it last week. I don't think we have to go into it too much detail this week, but we now know the, the, the truth here. Very interesting dichotomy during this Meta event. Reviewers gushing over the glasses, Meta on stage unable to get them to work. Now, sometimes that's because the wifi in an event space gets jammed, but it was very interesting to see this happening. To me, a big question here is that there's going to be a display on these cameras.
42:36 Speaker 00 Let's see, German says that over time Meta might allow people to offload some functionality to their eyewear that would normally be on their phone. So could this be a replacement for the phone? The display basically lets you have a viewfinder. You see what your photos are going to look like before you snap them. There's also live captions, live captions features that displays spoken words in real time, including translation, similar to closed captions on TV. That's cool. You can message, you can talk on WhatsApp. There's going to be a music app powered by Spotify. Instagram will initially only support direct messages, but Meta plans to add reels viewing
43:18 Speaker 00 later this year because that's apparently what you have to do on your glasses is sit back and watch a reel. I'm kind of sounding like a hater. I'm interested to use this technology. We both like the Ray-Ban Metas. I just, to me, the idea of putting a screen in front of my eyes in a world that I'm already sucked in by computing too much is not very appealing.
43:43 Speaker 01 Okay, so this is where I am incredibly excited about this. I talked about it last week, but even from, and we'll get into the failed demo, but overall, like, this is exactly what I was hoping for. So for reference, I have the Meta Ray-Bans taking photos, asking very simple questions to Meta AI. Otherwise, it doesn't get them. Walking around New York, I love it. I also actually have Snap Spectacles, not like the AR Spectacles. I'd been part of the developer program and had been testing them. So having an augmented reality screen, they're like big and bulky and they're definitely a developer
44:23 Speaker 01 product as opposed to anything kind of consumer. Already I saw the potential and even like walking around, there's different games you can play with it. You can have different information feeds. So it's still very clunky, the Snap version, but still you can see where the the promise is. So to me, this is gonna happen. This is the direction. I think the screen. Again, if you're watching reels while crossing the street, that's not good. If you have like a light bit of information to in the 20 degree field of you in the far right of your lens that shows you a text message, so you don't pull out your phone or stare at it as you're walking, which everyone in New York City does, I think that's great.
45:06 Speaker 01 So I think like that slightly augmented layer of computing, though if it's done well, this could be massive.
45:17 Speaker 00 I remain skeptical, but I'm willing to try them and see what happens. I just again, like, I want to get offline more, honestly.
45:27 Speaker 01 No, but come on, this is, but there is the reality and there's the kind of like the hope. And, and to me, and maybe it's New York City more than other cities, but actually I was just, I mean, in Paris and like, same people are just, they have their phones out as they're walking around. And, and I think anything, and I actually loved that, and I am not the biggest fan of Meta or its leadership for many years, but like, I loved Andrew Bosworth talking about, this is about keeping your phone in your pocket. That's what, that's exactly how I've seen this whole interface of computing for a long time. And they are, they're winning. They're winning right now and they're, they're moving in the right direction as well.
46:13 Speaker 00 Is that the same thing about the Apple Watch? And I'm sure you've been with people who you're having a conversation with, and their wrist buzzes and they look at it and it's some dumb notification and it ruins the train of conversation there. So.
46:27 Speaker 01 Yeah.
46:27 Speaker 00 I will reserve judgment here. Am I looking forward to using them? Hell, yes. Am I nervous also? Yes, also.
46:33 Speaker 01 And the social normalcy of like, if you're in a conversation with someone and you see their eyeballs kind of like moving to the right and not looking at you, are they, are they just like scrolling reels right there? That's a, it'll add some interesting dynamics to human interaction.
46:53 Speaker 00 I mean, you remember all the parodies of Google Glass. It's like I'm on a date and I'm like looking up things to say. Now especially, could you imagine you're like on a date like this? There will be a parody of this. Someone's on a date and they have Meta AI turned on and it's teaching them how to be like. Smooth talker.
47:10 Speaker 01 Hey, you know what? If it helps those who cannot talk smoothly, is that a bad thing, Alex?
47:16 Speaker 00 Yes. Be yourself. Blow that date. That was, she wasn't right for you anyway.
47:24 Speaker 01 You become dependent on it. Yep.
47:26 Speaker 00 That's right.
47:26 Speaker 01 Just date ChatGPT. She'll always be there for you.
47:30 Speaker 00 Could you imagine a relationship where someone's like, super smooth in like, outdoor environments, but like, the second you go for a swim, they're just like a total dud. Can't wear their glasses.
47:42 Speaker 01 On the beach.
47:42 Speaker 00 This is gonna be a movie, I'm telling you.
47:45 Speaker 01 Yep. And we'll make it on VO.
47:48 Speaker 00 Yep. All right. So, uh, they, uh, they did talk about the, why the demo failed. Apparently, Zuck said, hey, Meta, start live AI. It activated everybody's AI in the room and effectively DDoS the servers. All of the servers were all, all the traffic was also routed to the company's servers, uh, in Iceland, apparently. So, that's why it broke. All right, I'm not gonna kill them on, on not being able to demo live.
48:13 Speaker 01 I'm so happy. We talked about this last week, how there's been no live demos. Apple destroyed what is a live demo. And I loved, honestly, like, not trying to give them too much credit here, but I was like, I, like, a slightly wonky demo is awesome. Is like, that's what the world wants right now. It's been so long. I actually think it's gonna give a lot more credibility among developers that this is real, and it's wonky, and it didn't work on stage right now, but they're at least showing what is real, rather than Apple. Everyone has lost all faith in, in terms of like, what's real and what's not.
48:53 Speaker 00 True. All right, we got five minutes left. I wanna touch on the Jimmy Kimmel thing. I wish we had much more time, uh, for this segment. Basically, what happened this morning was you and I were texting and asking each other whether we should weigh in on Kimmel.
49:07 Speaker 00 Not to speak for both of us, I think we both believe that it's ridiculous that the government pushed Kimmel off air, even if it's temporary. If you're gonna take yourself seriously, if you're gonna be taken seriously, you have to be willing to, you know, to be confident enough to take ridicule. Goes for the left and the right. It's just my perspective, not speaking for Anja on here. And when you start to go after comedians, even if you don't think they're funny, which I know the government, US government, doesn't think Jimmy Kimmel's very funny, you look weak. And to me, I think that that is, that is what's happening here. It's, you've seen, obviously, a lot of people speaking out from every political angle, basically saying this is ridiculous. So I don't think we have much to add on that front.
49:51 Speaker 00 I think what is interesting here is the question of can you be canceled in the traditional way in 2025? Because, let's say you were to leave a network, like Colbert is going to and maybe Kimmel will after this, you still have the opportunity to form an independent media agency. And you could look at a list of, a long line of people who've done this. Shane Gillis, after he was canceled by SNL before joining the cast, but also Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, even Bill Maher, after he was canceled, although he ended up back on HBO. So maybe Bill isn't like the perfect example, but you could end up basically going independent,
50:33 Speaker 00 not being dependent on any, any company, and you could do better that way. So, you know, obviously, like, without getting too much into the details of like the, the whole thing before, I'm just kind of curious, like, what you think this actually means for Kimmel, and whether this is as impactful as it was previously.
50:52 Speaker 01 Taking the second question first, is this as impactful as it would have been in the past? No, I don't think it is at all. In fact, I mean, that playbook of, "They canceled me, subscribe to my Substack," is something that, like, so many people have perfected in terms of monetizing so well. And in reality, like, from a distribution standpoint, late night TV is such a weird format, that the more, like, I hadn't spent a lot of time in a lot, like, reminding myself how Next Star and Sinclair and the whole affiliate model works with these networks. But again, These, no one is watching this stuff live anymore. So the value comes out in the clips afterwards.
51:37 Speaker 01 There's still value in the platform to an extent, but in reality Jimmy Kimmel is the brand. Stephen Colbert is the brand. Like the late night show to, or the Tonight Show, like these things are no longer the brand anymore. So to me, like you can get canceled and if, especially if you make that a central part of your, they're coming for me in the mainstream media. Even Karen Antia, I'm not sure how to pronounce it, from the Washington Post. Yeah, like again, like she had an entire Substack post about like, they canceled me, they're trying to silence me, subscribe to my Substack now. So like, it's become such an almost like frustrating playbook, but a successful one
52:22 Speaker 01 that if Kimmel wanted to, he could go all in blue sky, subscribe to my Substack and like be just as influential. I'd be curious though, if someone like him wants to play that game. I don't think he does, but I don't know. What about you?
52:39 Speaker 00 I think he could do it. Obviously it's like worked, Conan O'Brien is a great example of a comedian who wasn't canceled but left, and I think has just as much influence, if not more with his podcast now than, and obviously much more control than he did previously. This is again, us just like, you know, there have been some people who've been like, well, he had bad ratings anyway and he wasn't profitable. I don't think that was the scenario. But I think the overriding story of like, if you're somebody in his position, what are you facing now? And how impactful is this? That, that is for us, a pertinent question. And there was this great line on CNN, Jeff Jarvis, God bless him, was there. And he's told the panel, the only good news I see, and I hate to say this to my friends at CNN, is that mass media are dying.
53:25 Speaker 00 And it is sort of this thing where like if you're an entertainer or in a position like that, it just today, it makes much more sense to own your audience. And maybe this idea that you would have a comedian anchoring a network's evening coverage is just gonna go away.
53:41 Speaker 01 Yeah, I, I think, and Jeff has been saying that since 2020.
53:46 Speaker 00 So he's probably not, I mean, he's obviously, I don't think he's wrong. Doesn't seem like the trend is counterfactual to his argument.
53:53 Speaker 01 I'll give him, he got it right. But in, in truth, though, he was going viral because he was on CNN. Like, I think this is where there's still, there's power in platform to have those kind of secondary, I agree, like if only 129,000 people are viewing live between ages of 18 to 45, Jimmy Kimmel, yeah, but the influence he has is that actually doesn't denigrate it at all. It means that we all see clips on Instagram or TikTok and YouTube all day long. So, but, but in terms of the business model, advertisers are paying to be shown alongside that live viewing part of it for the actual TV show, which is dead. I mean, it's completely
54:38 Speaker 01 dead. So, so I do think we, it's a good reminder, we need to rethink that overall business model. I think none of that has anything to do with why he was suspended. And it is terrifying, and it's gonna get uglier and darker, I think, before it gets better. But, but overall, I think, uh, I'm not, I'm not pouring one out for the Sinclair medias of the world.
55:02 Speaker 00 Right. Okay. I know you have to go one last thought, and then I'll end this is, uh, you know, the next generation of Jimmy Kimmels are not gonna look like this generation. Like, the next comedian is not gonna have this aspiration to go host the Tonight Show or The Late Show on a television network, they are the Jimmy Kimmel Show. They are going to be just, it shows how quickly we've changed. They're gonna be digital native. They are going to have a YouTube channel. They're gonna have a podcast. They're gonna be the owners of their content and not be subject to this stuff. So.
55:35 Speaker 00 I think it's unfortunate what happened, but I also think that it's looking forward, the government's power to do this type of stuff is going to be much, much more limited because they don't have the ability to like go to a YouTube and say yank Jimmy Kimmel.
55:46 Speaker 01 Yeah. And just like both of us who own our own audiences and channels and content. Yeah. Yeah. But just cancel us so we can go on tour saying, we got canceled. Subscribe.
55:59 Speaker 00 All right. Get us in the Discord. Join the Discord. Do I become a paid subscriber? Join the Discord. Revolt, overthrow Ranjan and I, and we will get working on the next iteration of eHow. So, thank you all for listening. Thank you, Ranjan. Always great to talk to you, Ranjan. Thank you again.
56:14 Speaker 01 See you next week.
56:15 Speaker 00 All right, everybody. Next week, I believe we're going to have Yonan Kostika, the co-founder of Wiz, talking about AI and cybersecurity. So we will see you next time on Big Technology Podcast.
56:26 Speaker 02 Now, more than ever, we need someone on our side. But Rob Whitman? Whitman's votes drove up costs, cut Medicaid, and risked 350,000 Virginians' healthcare to pay for tax breaks for himself and his donors. He's not on our side. Shannon Taylor will fight corruption, cut taxes, and bring down costs. This November, vote for Shannon Taylor. She's for us. Paid for by HMP, the HouseMajorityPac.com, not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee.
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