Pod Insights Big Technology Podcast Meta's Big Llama 3 Release, Google's New Culture, MKBHD vs. Humane About this episode Alex Heath from The Verge is back for our weekly discussion of the latest tech news. We cover 1) Taylor Swift's new album 2) Meta's new Llama 3 release 3) Does conversational AI work in a social media products? 4) Will the value of generative AI be realized in foundational models or products? 5) Zuck's new icon status 6) Bearded Zuck 7) The risks of open sourcing massive AI models 8) Sundar Pichai writes a stern letter to Google employees 9) Google fires 28 employees involved in office takeover protest 10) Is a new Google culture taking hold? 11) Should product reviewers be kinder when products suck.
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Transcript 10,500 words · 6 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Alex Kantrowitz? Meta's introduced its new Big Lama 3 AI model. Google fired 28 protesting employees for taking over its offices. And do reviewers like MKBHD have a duty to not kill companies whose products suck? All that and more coming up right after this. This episode is brought to you by Genesis. What does it actually take to put a Gentic AI to work across an entire enterprise? I recently spoke with Genesis chairman and CEO Tony Bates about why orchestration is emerging as a competitive advantage in customer experience and what companies need to get right in the AI era. Then I sat down with Adam Mitchell, head of enterprise business solutions at Voya Financial, to go inside a large scale agentic CX transformation, including the business decisions,
0:45 Alex Kantrowitz? 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 Alex Kantrowitz? 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 guest for you today. Alex Heath is fresh off a conversation with Mark Zuckerberg, talking about the Lama news. He's the deputy editor of The Verge and he's the author of the command line newsletter. And he's here with us today to break down everything that's happened this week. Alex, welcome to the show.
1:41 Speaker 01 Hey, thanks for having me, Alex. Always good to have a double Alex pod.
1:44 Alex Kantrowitz? Two Alexes. This should be an epic week. First of all, like we're continuing our cycle of every Friday or every week, having a big celestial event happen. We had three weeks ago, an earthquake, last week an eclipse. This week, Taylor Swift's new album is out, The Tortured Poets Department. So we're keeping up this streak. Have you, have you gotten a chance to listen to it today?
2:07 Speaker 01 You know, I actually started playing it like an hour ago. And I don't know, man. I really feel like I shouldn't weigh in here unless you unless you have something like overwhelmingly positive to say about Taylor Swift. I've realized it's best to just not put opinions on the internet.
2:23 Alex Kantrowitz? So I'm not going to be afraid with my thought here, and I'll tell you this. I hit play. I was eager to see what she had. It's obviously been a very hyped album. And I realized that I am Taylor Swifted out between the exposure at the NFL and the fact that she's become this mega, even bigger than mega celebrity. I am, I think I'm good for the time being on new Taylor Swift music. And I'm not ashamed to admit it. It doesn't mean she's not great at what she does. But I've had my share of Taylor Swift. I'm ready for something new.
2:53 Speaker 01 Well, RIP your mentions, Alex.
2:56 Alex Kantrowitz? All right. Well, we'll, we'll take your, your silence here as, as telling, but we won't put you on the spot. Something that you will be able to comment on is this new meta llama three model. Obviously, it's really when you talk about like llama one, llama two, llama three. It's a large language model, but it's really more than one model. They've released two models this week, two smaller models, and they're working on a massive one that's set to come out this summer. And of course, you know, we have GPT four and Claude. These are not open source models, but metas are. And, you know, it's a very big strategic moment for them in terms of putting these out. So would love to hear your reaction to what this, what meta is doing here and where it puts them in the conversation in, in the broader AI world.
3:40 Speaker 01 Yeah. I mean, I'd also be curious to hear what you think. I think they have been considered a leader in open source AI. Especially with llama two last year. But now with llama three and the assistance and putting that everywhere and WhatsApp, Instagram. If you start using the search box and Facebook and Instagram, you're going to see meta AI, at least in the US and a bunch of other countries. So that's a big bet. That's a lot of real estate. And I think, um, you know, I talked to Zuckerberg this week about it, and I think he wants to use kind of their massive distribution to. Kill chat GPT in the cradle if he can, so to speak. I mean, I think they, he sees this area of,
4:23 Speaker 01 you know, AI chat, chatbots, agents as something that Meta has to be in. And I don't know, man, it's not, it's not super obvious to me that that is a thing that makes sense inside a social media app. I think the jury is still out on if people want to be using like a chat GPT like experience next to their friend chats and WhatsApp.
4:49 Alex Kantrowitz? Right.
4:50 Speaker 01 So I think they've got to prove that. This is now, they're in the like, I don't know, this week was the like firing gun of the race and now they have to prove that they can execute and that people actually want this. And so I think the pressure is on.
5:05 Alex Kantrowitz? Well, let's talk about that right from the start. And I definitely want to talk a little bit about these models and their capabilities. But I think the productization is really the key here. So your point about whether this should live within a social media company, well, it's a messaging company, I think, first and foremost. Right? Meta had this pivot to privacy. Basically, the company figured out that people don't really want to share as much on news feeds. They want to share privately within messaging groups. And so they've, you know, you think about what Facebook is today. And the big blue app is much less important, I would argue, than the messaging apps, Messenger and WhatsApp. And to some extent, Instagram is, is a messaging app with a media sort of front end. And so if you're thinking about where one of these bots is going to live,
5:48 Alex Kantrowitz? naturally, wouldn't it be in a messaging app where you would effectively, you're messaging with your friends, you can call it in, you know, to conversations with your friends when you're like trying to find something to do or trying to answer a question. And then also it is a conversational interface. So why not have that live within a messaging app?
6:05 Speaker 01 Yeah, I guess just the mental model that I have for these chatbots is that there are things that you go to separately, right? Like the chat GPT app. And I think of them more as like utilities right now than I do like another friend almost that would live next to like where my mental model is when I go into WhatsApp is like to talk to people or groups of people. And so adding in like a chat GPT type experience to that feels a little strange. I know like in the Verge newsroom, there was a lot of heated opinion about. Whether this was a good idea and people had a lot of strong opinions that they didn't want this in their WhatsApp. So they have to prove that people want it. And you know, what Zuckerberg
6:49 Speaker 01 told me was they see, you know, the feedback loop of this. So basically getting this out to more people, having more people engage with it and then learning from that and how they can improve from that is being one of their key differentiators over time versus like an anthropic or a chat GPT, which just has less surface area and less potential users to reach by default of just not having a network of three billion plus daily users that Meta has. So it makes sense why they're doing it from like a, you know, if you really believe that these AI agents are the future and that's how we're going to be interacting with computing, you want to get it out there. Meta has a mixed track record on this stuff, right? And, you know, I think, but I think Zuckerberg
7:34 Speaker 01 sees this as like you've got, you had stories, you know, which was like a format that Snap invented and then they grafted on to Meta's apps. And then the same thing with Reels, which was, you know, TikTok, basically, which just works now and has done really well for them. And I think he sees the assistant as the same thing for these AI chatbots. And I mean, he's very clear, like he wants this to be the most used AI assistant in the world. And they have a shot just by default of the distribution. It kind of, it shows how distribution is still king. And even if you have cool tech and you start the race like OpenAI did, you know, it may just come down to distribution at the end of the day.
8:16 Alex Kantrowitz? It is really important, like the type of personalities that these things take on in different settings, right? So in Meta, they might be more social. Within chat GPT, it might be more informational. Claude, you might want to like talk with your documents there. Like there's different versions of this. And it may be that, you know, because of that distribution, they can sort of steer what this becomes. And this is sort of what you talked about, how distribution is so important, right? We have a commenteer coming in. People don't come back to ChatGPT and it's true. I mean, ChatGPT, the usage from the data that I see has really leveled off. It like hit that hundred million user benchmark pretty quickly. And then hasn't really blown past that.
9:00 Alex Kantrowitz? In fact, it seems to have shrunk. And so even if Meta isn't the perfect place for this, it still seems like it has a chance to live out that vision that Zuckerberg wants to see. Because, again, because of that distribution, right? Like, let's say ChatGPT is at 200 million users right now, right? Nothing compared to the billions of people that now have access to Meta AI.
9:22 Speaker 01 Yeah, I mean, that's the bet. We'll see, right? I think it's been a running joke inside Meta, you know, for the last six months or so. Cause they first debuted this assistant in September of last year, right? And it was only in the US, but it's kind of a joke inside Meta that no one uses it. And not even like Meta employees use it. And it was also kind of hard to find though. Like you had to kind of search it out, right? I was actually shocked in the Verge newsroom. How many people didn't even know that this assistant already existed in their WhatsApp and Messenger? And that's why Meta is now putting it, I mean, literally inside the Facebook feed. So if you're scrolling and there's a video, it may like recommend a prompt based on what's in the video.
10:07 Speaker 01 Like, do you want to learn guitar like this?
10:11 Speaker 01 And same thing with the search. I mean, the IG search box is probably one of the most, you know, traffic surfaces of that app. And the fact that the assistant is going to be right there in a lot of Meta's biggest markets is a big bet. And it's, they would normally test this for a really long time. A B tested in different countries with different cohorts. And they're just turning it on for everyone, which means it's a, it's a top down huge bet. And. Yeah, I don't know. They they they want to play to win here and they have a really great research group. It's definitely, I wouldn't say it's considered to be as elite as OpenAI's, but they're definitely in the top, you know, three or four research groups in the world.
10:55 Speaker 01 You've got Google, OpenAI, them, Anthropic. So they've got a lot of the right ingredients and they've got a lot of GPUs. So I'm really interested to see with Llama 3, this 400 billion parameter model that they're training. I know you talked to Ahmad, their head of GenAI on the pod this week. And that's going to be a big deal if they open source that. There's not been a model that large and that complex that's been open sourced. And I'm curious to see like, from a bigger than meta perspective picture, what pressure that puts on OpenAI and others to either open source or not.
11:39 Alex Kantrowitz? So what, Alex, what is your, I mean, you've brought up like a lot of the skepticism here in terms of whether this will work. What is your sense on whether it will work or not?
11:47 Speaker 01 Like, I don't know.
11:49 Alex Kantrowitz? I know you're a reporter and you're going to beg off this question, but just like handicap it a little bit.
11:54 Speaker 01 Like the assistant or Llama 3?
11:57 Alex Kantrowitz? Well, let's go, let's go both.
11:59 Speaker 01 I mean, Llama 3 is going to be, is a big deal. I mean, it's just, it's, it's already, I think it's been, they said it'd been downloaded like over 100 million times. It's, it's been used in a lot of apps already. It's a huge part of the developer ecosystem for AI already. So the third, you know, Llama 3 with, especially the 400 billion one when that comes out, that's a, it's a big deal for the industry. In terms of the consumer applications of this as an assistant in Meta's properties.
12:33 Speaker 01 I don't know. They have a good shop. It has to be a good product and I'm looking forward to trying the assistant more now that it's been upgraded with Lama 3. I think there was a sense that Lama 2 was, it was barely like ChatGPT 3.5 level performance. So these bots are really only as good as the models that power them. And so now that there's a model that is more approaching GPT 4. And when the 400 billion one comes out, maybe even exceeds it on some areas, that will make the assistant more compelling.
13:10 Speaker 01 You know, they've also got Google in there now, which Google's providing real time search results, which I think they're the only chatbot besides Google's own Gemini that has that. So they've got Bing and Google. I'm sure they'll build some other hook-ins. They've got to keep building it out and making it, I think it's pretty bare bones right now. But they've got to make it more personalized as well as something I really want. Like I've heard that they will probably let you eventually be able to, to generate images based on your likeness on like Instagram, for example.
13:41 Alex Kantrowitz? Oh, that's definitely coming. Yeah.
13:42 Speaker 01 Yeah. And like that, that's cool. And that's unique to what they do. So they need to have more kind of unique wedges that complement the fact that your internet presence is already on their apps and they have a lot, that's a lot of valuable data that they can use to personalize the assistant to you. And like if I'm, you know, searching on Instagram for, you know, ideas for like a Japan trip that I'm taking next month. I would like the assistant to know that and to know what I'm already looking for. And like if I ask it a question, be like, well, you looked at this spot in Kyoto. This is another one that looks, you know, very similar, stuff like that. So I think it's like, we're in
14:22 Speaker 01 the very, very beginning of this stuff, especially for Meta. And they, they have to move really quickly because OpenAI is moving really quickly. And if I had talked to Zuckerberg about this, if OpenAI puts out GPT 5 later this year, does that leapfrog them again? And reset everything, you know? So it's a fast moving space. That's why it's so fun to cover.
14:45 Alex Kantrowitz? And what did Zuckerberg say with that, to that question?
14:49 Speaker 01 The thing, I mean, he can't know, right? I mean, no one really knows what GPT-5 is going to hold, but he made the point, which is fair, that they put out Llama 2 after GPT-4 had already come out. And now 3 is coming out before GPT-5, and they're about to train version Llama 4, and they're already roadmapping Llama 5. They're moving very fast.
15:11 Alex Kantrowitz? Yeah, with this model, they said that they had, they're using 10 times the amount of data and 100 times the amount of compute that they use to do 2. And that's what Ahmed El-Dallah told me on Big Tech War Stories, which is the show I do through bigtechnology.com, like the newsletter, separate to this one. It was a very interesting conversation where we talked about the making of these models. And of course, like, again, like, we've talked about it a couple of times in this conversation, there's like the two smaller models that are out now, and then this bigger 400 billion parameter model that's supposed to come out this summer, which is like four or five times the size of what they have now. But, and I want to talk about that because there's questions about whether they're going to open source it. But I think this conversation also gets to the value of where, gets to where value's
15:55 Alex Kantrowitz? going to be created with these models, right? Because you have, of course, the actual development of the model themselves, and that's what Meta and OpenAI and Anthropic and Google are competing on. And then you have the way that it gets built into products. And there's been so much focus on the actual models. But I guess like, one of my thoughts here is that the model race is going to matter less and less as these things converge, because the real money is going to be made in terms of how people turn this into products. And it's almost like Meta has this week even pushed that home even more, because its Llama 3 model is good enough, and it's going to be, you know, it's going to be free to everyone
16:37 Alex Kantrowitz? to use it through open source. And it's good enough that like, you can, you can get it, and it's not like there's going to be riches if you build something incrementally better than it, because people will just go with it. So. That seems to me like we've always asked like where's the economic benefit going to come from this AI revolution and more and more it seems like it's going to be with semiconductors like Nvidia and then the way that you build products on top of it. So like whether Lama three is as good as GPT four or not seems almost like beside the question. Like the real point is the one we started earlier, which was, you know, is this going to actually deliver value in a product for Meta? And I think everybody who's building with AI is including Microsoft is asking, is AI going to deliver value in our products? And that's the big question right now. What do you think about that?
17:23 Speaker 01 I think that is exactly right. I mean, I cover this stuff and I don't get a ton of value out of these chatbots. You know, the hallucination problem is a big one for me and being able to trust what it tells me. Like if I'm using it for research for a story and I want to like compare a bunch of financials or something that are actually, it would be actually kind of hard to find all this and SEC documents, et cetera. And I asked the model to do it in a very specific way and it gives me an answer, but it's like, I can't trust it. And therefore I why, why, why am I using this to begin with? Because like then I'll have to go find all of it anyway, which I was trying to avoid by using the model.
18:06 Speaker 01 So the more it can be grounded, the more things like search are integrated and you can, it can learn from you. I think the more valuable this stuff will become. I mean, clearly people want to use this stuff. I mean, I don't think Meta would be putting this across all their products like this if this was some flash in the pan interface. It's just, it's just early, man. I know I said that already, but I just feel like the industry is moving so fast, even though consumer interest in actually using these tools as valuable
18:44 Speaker 01 parts of everyday life is relatively early. And I think, I think Zuckerberg knows that. And like he knows, he hopes at least that the meta AI will be the first time that millions of people are introduced to conversational generative AI like this, because even with chat GPT hitting that 100 million user mark as quick as they did. Um, I think that was monthly or something. It wasn't daily. Um, there's a lot of people, a lot of millions of meta users that have never used a chatbot, right?
19:21 Alex Kantrowitz? Right.
19:21 Speaker 01 And it's kind, it reminds me of stories, right? Like we both covered that era with Snap and the competition there. And they really kneecapped Snap and uh, hurt its growth by taking this kind of magic thing that Snap had and introducing it to a lot of people where it's like, at that point, it's like, why do I need to go download another app? If I have a really good chatbot in my WhatsApp, why would I download the chat GPT app?
19:43 Alex Kantrowitz? Exactly. And last year I wrote this story that said Mark Zuckerberg is coming for Sam Altman and OpenAI.
19:48 Speaker 01 Yeah.
19:48 Alex Kantrowitz? And it's like Zuckerberg, first of all, he's very good at seeing a product that's taking off and has mass user appeal. And baking that into Facebook. And I also think there's an element of like, he wants to be the alpha dog in the tech world. And it almost like, it's so interesting because there's been all these different attempts for Zuckerberg to shape his image. Whether that was like the tour that he did around America or, you know, the different speeches that he gave defending free speech, all that stuff. But it seems to finally be working for him. And I think one of the signs that I've seen is that there's been this image floating around social media. This past week, uh, that's sort of a Photoshop of his actual announcement video.
20:33 Alex Kantrowitz? Where he like gave the llama three update, um, clean, cleanly shaven, but with a chain and a T-shirt. And someone photoshopped this beard onto him and it's been going wild. And there's all these uh, great memes of it. Like somebody wrote, I think, um, they posted the picture and they, they did quote, you're the only girl I'm talking to Zuckerberg and the beard. And it is interesting. It sort of goes to the, um, the image of Zuckerberg, which is kind of an important part of this, uh, this whole thing. He's almost become, and I'm curious what your take is on this, this like kind of tech icon in a, in a strange way.
21:12 Alex Kantrowitz? Where he's being worshipped in Silicon Valley as someone I think who's taken a beating, kept on shipping and has this kind of, don't give a, you know, fuck attitude in terms of like.
21:26 Alex Kantrowitz? What he's gonna do and that's sort of like the new Zuckerberg and and it seems to be working. What's your perspective on that?
21:32 Speaker 01 Yeah, I mean, I think it's certainly working. I think his comms team is thrilled.
21:38 Speaker 01 Yeah, it's I don't know really what to attribute to. I mean, you said he's like an icon. I don't know if icon has positive or negative connotations. I think it can have both, but like I think he's always been an icon. I think he's always been like.
21:51 Alex Kantrowitz? But there's a different level to it now.
21:53 Speaker 01 Well, now he people like him.
21:55 Alex Kantrowitz? Of him going through the timeline right now.
21:57 Speaker 01 People in tech like him now, which is different and he's seen as like a innovator, which is what he desperately wants and needs for recruiting and for all these reasons. And also just personal, you know, gratification and ego, right? We all want to be loved.
22:12 Speaker 01 Yeah, man, I don't know. Like he he's in his like, what is it like chat era? I don't know. He's he's he's really just letting his hair down, literally. And it's working from a perspective of like, he seems to be more out there.
22:31 Speaker 01 And willing to engage in a way that he felt really robotic and really closed off for a very long time.
22:40 Alex Kantrowitz? And we're we're we're both members of the press. I wonder what you think about this idea that this might be part of his ability to like have he took a real beating from the press over the past few years. Like there was a moment where you could say anything negative you wanted about Zuckerberg and no one would come after you. And sort of some of it became a little excessive. So he took this beating from the press. You know, he's continued to remain relevant relevant through Facebook. He made these difficult year of efficiency decisions within Facebook and then like, you know, almost to solidify his reputation as a fighter, right? Started doing UFC stuff or whatever his his MMA. Do you think that's part of it?
23:19 Speaker 01 That just that that's all connected the MMA. Yeah, yeah, for sure. I mean, I think the MMA literally was like it was the pandemic and he found a hobby a little bit, but.
23:31 Speaker 01 Yeah, I mean, I think he, you know, there was something he said, I interviewed him around their connect event last year in the fall. And there was something he said at the end about, I just want to be like building awesome stuff again. Like I think he'd felt really pulled away and distracted by the everything from Cambridge Analytica on through like 20, really into the pandemic. That time period was all about politics, scandals, government. He was spending a lot of time in policy world and not like, he is an engineer and a product guy at the end of the day. And I think he feels like he's finally able to like focus on that because the reputation of the company is constantly
24:16 Speaker 01 under fire like it used to be. They're always like one scandal away from that happening, right? Like they're, I know they're, they're terrified of a Gemini diversity type scandal with the assistant, for example, like if that were to happen, that's a whole nother, you know. The Metaverse stuff was rough in terms of kind of getting out ahead of their skis on messaging on that. And then everybody kind of realizing there's not a lot there yet. But now that he's moved on to AI and that's what everyone cares about, you know, they're able to position themselves as like a key. And it's, it's true. They are a key leader in the space.
24:53 Speaker 01 Yeah, I, I don't know. I, I, I just think he's like becoming more comfortable.
24:58 Alex Kantrowitz? Right. Oh, definitely appears that way. Yeah. Let me tell you where I think the potential misstep here is.
25:05 Alex Kantrowitz? Their commitment to open sourcing these models. Now, the argument that they're giving is that if this technology is going to be super powerful, better to give it in everybody's hands versus allow one sort of unchecked actor to have it. And, you know, that sounds good in, when you say it as a line, but then when you think about, think about it a little bit deeper like this, the fact that this technology, which is so powerful, can really be used by anyone if you open sources, open source it. And you have really little recourse if someone goes against your rules, like that is, that seems like a potential vulnerability. And when I was speaking with Ahmed Al Della about the, I'm sorry, the Meta generative AI head about it,
25:49 Alex Kantrowitz? I said, well, are you going to open source this 400 billion parameter, right? This massive model that's going on that they're going to build and release in summer? They're training it right now. It wasn't a definitive yes. And that, I think that even shows this sort of discomfort that Meta might have with what open sourcing all these models might have. Now, I'm pro open source. I think it's obviously good. It'd be silly to be anti open source. But it also goes to the point where like where you're, when you're spending these hundreds of millions of dollars, maybe billions of dollars to train these models and they can do crazy things. How open do you want to make that? And I think there are potential downsides, like potential things that can explode
26:31 Alex Kantrowitz? in a negative way if this stuff is so freely released.
26:35 Speaker 01 I talked to Mark about that and I do think they're going to open source the big model. They have to, they have to go through safety evaluation once it's done training. So they just can't say that until, in case they're, I mean, he basically said barring any like really unforeseen anomaly in the output of the model, it'll be open source. He wants to open source it. They, they just can't, they can't definitively say it until they've evaluated it, which I think is like the responsible way to approach this. I think it would actually be even scarier if they were saying, we're going to open source any tech we make, no matter, even if we don't know like what the model and state is going to be. But he did say like image generation, for example, they made some big leaps in image generation
27:19 Speaker 01 with the new assistant in Lama 3. And he was saying, you know, different modalities of these models, when you get out of text, so video output or text output, we may not open source those. And he is, he specifically called out, you know, that it's an election year and they were concerned about the image generation being kind of just out there and freely available for developers to use in potentially, you know, more nefarious ways. So they may open source part of these models, but not the multimodality, which I think is interesting. But yeah, he's not like. He wants to be out there as the open source leader, but he doesn't want to be dogmatic about it, which I think is actually a nuanced position that, um, I don't know.
28:03 Speaker 01 I'd rather him be thinking about it that way than being like dogmatic about it and going to open source no matter what.
28:10 Alex Kantrowitz? Yep. And it's been interesting, like the financial impact on the company's stock jumped a bunch. Yesterday, when they released the model and today down three and a half percent. So, um, we'll see. I think just to recap, looks like this model definitely puts them in conversation. Uh, as, as one of the providers of the best models out there. I mean, we'll see what happens when GPT five comes out. You're right. There might be this race. They get the distribution in the product. It's good for recruiting. And, um, and again, it just kind of shows that like it's got to be productized. If it's productized well, it's valuable. If it's not productized well, you're not, you're not left with much.
28:50 Speaker 01 Yeah. I mean, I think you nailed it. I, it remains to be seen if they will, if they'll make it a good product. That's kind of what they have to do now. And if they don't, this is a massive overreach in terms of what they thought they were going to do.
29:01 Alex Kantrowitz? Is there like reality lab spending going from VR to AI?
29:05 Speaker 01 I don't think it's, I don't think it's that simple. Um, um, we actually, I talked about when he bought all the GPUs he did. So there, I think maybe the first or second largest customer for Nvidia, I think they're maybe tied with Microsoft.
29:20 Alex Kantrowitz? Six hundred fifty thousand GPU equivalents by the end of this year. So.
29:23 Speaker 01 He bought all of those like at the very end of, I think, 2022. So before GPT four even came out. And this was when Meta's stock was at like $90, had bottomed out. And he was placing this massive multi-billion dollar GPU order. And he said, it was actually for reels, um, for doing recommendation videos for reels. They were crunched on that and they needed more compute. And he was like, but I just doubled the order because I didn't want to be in this position again, where there was a big new thing that we needed to build for. We didn't have the compute we needed for it.
29:54 Alex Kantrowitz? That turned out to be pretty smart.
29:56 Speaker 01 Turned out to be pretty smart, something that really only like accompanied that scale with like founder control, founder control could do. I can imagine a Google that getting shot down by like the CFO. But he made the call, they did it. And yeah, I now they have all this compute. There's that they're using for Lama three and four and five. And it was precious to to to kind of get that compute because now it's very hard to get H one hundreds. And so, yeah, I don't know. They they're definitely well resourced. They just, they need to be seen as the leading place for the best talent in the industry to come.
30:37 Speaker 01 And I think that's part of why you see him so out there doing all these interviews with me and others is, I mean, he was open about this with me. You know, that the best people want to work on the biggest problems with the most impact, right? And so he wants Meta to be that place.
30:50 Alex Kantrowitz? Yep. And so you mentioned the Gemini thing, and obviously, Google has been working behind the scenes to try to clean that up, clean up the structure, right? They promised structural changes and those structural changes came this week. And there was a number of things that happened. First of all, Sundar Pichai had this like pretty remarkable memo that he sent out to Google, and they published it, which means they want the world to see it. It's called Building for our AI Future. And one of the sort of least noted things that I think is really important is they're moving this responsible AI team and research to Google DeepMind. And Sundar says it's to be closer to where the models are built and scaled.
31:30 Alex Kantrowitz? Now, I don't know this for sure, but if I was to take a guess, I think this group had a lot to do with some of like the safety things that were placed into Gemini after the after it was built within Google DeepMind, at least that's what I've heard. And sort of led to this, you know, embarrassing moment for Google where this thing was just like getting everything historically wrong in terms of its image generation. So now like that group is going to have a boss in Demis Hassabis, the head of Google DeepMind, and won't be able to have such a big imprint. Obviously, we'll do some checks on the product, but won't be able to like guide the product before it ships. So I thought that was pretty interesting from Sundar. And then there was another thing that he put.
32:11 Alex Kantrowitz? It seems like he kind of wrote this in the last few days, like as he was like putting this together. But he had these four components, the shifts in AI were one, they also merged like Chrome and and hardware and Android together. But he ends this note with this statement called Mission First, and I've never seen this from Sundar, and I think it's pretty important. I'm just going to read it. He says, "One final note, all the changes referenced above will help us work with greater focus and clarity towards our mission. However, we also need to be more focused in how we work, collaborate, discuss, and even disagree. We have a culture of vibrant, open discussion that enables us to create amazing products and turn great ideas into action. That's important to
32:55 Alex Kantrowitz? preserve, but ultimately, we are a workplace and our policies and expectations are clear. This is a business and not a place to act in a way that disrupts coworkers or makes them feel unsafe to attempt to use the company as a personal platform, or to fight over disruptive issues or debate politics. This is too important moment as a company for us to be distracted." That's obviously kind of him putting his foot down in terms of all the like the internal political debate that's happened within Google. I'm curious what you think, A, about these changes, the structural changes, and B, this kind of like new tone that Sundar seems to be taking.
33:31 Speaker 01 I don't know, man. I don't know if I agree that it's a new tone. It's fairly, it's fairly normal for him, which is like, I don't know, um, milquetoast, I guess. Like, it's like, it's, it's kind of, it feels a little, I know he probably wrote it, but it feels a little written by committee. Um, I know Googlers feel this way, Google employees, um, when they get memos from him.
33:57 Speaker 01 I mean, we're skating around why he wrote that, which is that they fired 28 employees.
34:03 Alex Kantrowitz? I was maybe not skating around, setting up.
34:04 Speaker 01 Well, I just, that's, I mean,
34:06 Alex Kantrowitz? Let's talk about it, though.
34:07 Speaker 01 That didn't come out of nowhere, right? And like, I thought the more remarkable memo was the one that came out the day before from Google's head of security, um, announcing to the whole company that they fired 28 people, which to my knowledge for a sit-in protest over Google Cloud's Israel contract, um, I've never seen anything like that. I don't know if you have in covering tech for as long as we have. I've never, I've never seen. A tech company fired that many people at once, especially in connection with a protest over something like this. Definitely was meant to send a message. And the way the memo was worded was very stern and had this Yeah.
34:48 Speaker 01 warning saying, for those of you basically who are thinking of maybe doing something similar, like this is going to be your fate as well. And there were nine of them arrested to be physically dragged out of the offices they were sitting in. You know, a couple of days before. So, yeah, I mean, Sundar is flicking at that in that memo, which is really about a reorg of of parts of the company. But I don't know, man, Google just feels so, I mean, I know you've been covering this as well. They it feels like so precarious right now, and so
35:23 Speaker 01 the culture is just very very tense. Right. A lot of dissenting in the ranks, a lot of frustrations with management at how the layoffs, the rolling layoffs have been handled. The Gemini stuff. The general just kind of slowness around adapting to to new technology, the fact that Google invented the transformer, the T and ChatGPT, and that they kind of missed this wave and are now playing catch up, even though they have arguably the best research group in the world.
35:58 Speaker 01 It's it's tough. Sundar is in a really tough place and
36:03 Speaker 01 I think he feels like he's got to get his arms around the rank and file, and I think that's part of what that memo was saying. But
36:14 Speaker 01 the employees definitely feel more emboldened than ever. I mean, Google's also, I mean, it's always been a pretty I don't know, like bottoms up culture, especially when Larry and Sergey were there. And, you know, there's been many protests over the years, you know, they got Google to stop working with the Pentagon years ago. But now it's you've got the this.
36:39 Speaker 01 This pot of all this stuff happening and people already mad about the layoffs and things just feel really heightened. And I don't know, what's your take on it?
36:50 Alex Kantrowitz? I mean, I'm gonna make the argument, I'm gonna push back here and make the argument that this is a new culture for Google. And I think that you can read Sundar's lines as a pretty powerful exclamation of where he wants this company to go. Now, from the Larry and Sergey days, Google's always been this place for free expression, bring your whole self to work, sort of setting the tone for that in Silicon Valley. And that includes political stuff. I mean, you remember in the leaked video that we have from after the Trump election, the Larry Sergey especially, I think was up there talking about how devastated he was that Trump was elected. And that was sending a signal to the employee base that Google was a place for, you know, effectively to do exactly what Sundar is saying that
37:31 Alex Kantrowitz? you can't do right now, saying that you can't use the company as a personal platform, right? That's exactly what they were doing. Sergey was doing that after the election, and here we are. And now the employees have done it. And I think that for maybe the past, I don't know, seven years, Google has had a tremendous amount of political advocacy happen within the company and trying to use the company for political advocacy. And maybe even to the extent that some people within that Gemini group built their own political views into the product and sort of that backfired in a way. And I think this is a moment where Sundar has said, you know, this has kind of gone too far. And that's
38:14 Alex Kantrowitz? why both him and Chris Rackow, who's head of security, have to emphasize that it's a place of business. And in the past, where they might have tolerated employees, sort of taking over offices and making political statements about Google's projects, they're not doing that anymore. I mean, that's a shift. And you're right to reference this memo from Chris Rackow, the head of security. Here's the paragraph where he really tells people enough is enough. He goes, "We are a place of business and every Googler is expected to read our policies and apply them to how they conduct themselves and communicate in our workplace. The overwhelming majority of our employees do the right thing. If you're one of the few who are tempted to think we're going to overlook conduct that violates our policies, think again."
38:58 Alex Kantrowitz? The company takes this extremely seriously and we will continue to apply our longstanding policies to take action against disruptive behavior up to and including termination. I mean, basically what happened is they called the cops on the people that were occupying these offices, offices, including the CEO of Google Cloud, including, yeah, Google Cloud CEO is Thomas Kurian's office, and they got them arrested and then they fired them. And they might have even gone a little too far, like there's now some talk about people who were outside the building as part of this protest, but not inside the offices, might have also been canned. But this definitely seems like a shift from the Google we've known under Sundar, which would tolerate this stuff and just doesn't seem like it's going to tolerate it anymore. So that's my perspective on it.
39:41 Speaker 01 I agree with that. I guess my point was more just that tonally, yeah, Sundar is not becoming, like on the spectrum of Zuckerberg to, I don't know, pick your most docile CEO imaginable. I don't think Sundar is getting closer to Zuckerberg. He's definitely putting his foot down, as you said, in the way of just saying, you know, we're not going to allow this stuff. But I don't know, man, I think, I think he hasn't gotten his hands around the company and the cultural backlash there that is so strong. And could maybe mean more Frank and more take charge. I don't know. This line was buried underneath a long thing about a reorg, you know, it's
40:26 Alex Kantrowitz? It's a good point.
40:27 Speaker 01 So, yeah, I don't know. Sundar, I'm really curious to see what happens with Google in the next, you know, 12 months, because they have so much advantage, strategic advantage that they've built up over the years. And it's really like theirs for the losing, all of this. So.
40:45 Alex Kantrowitz? Yeah, I don't think they're out of the woods yet at all.
40:47 Speaker 01 No.
40:48 Alex Kantrowitz? But I do think that this is, my perspective is that this is a good thing for the company. And by the way, I think also for the employees, like lots of employees don't want to be distracted by this stuff. And the ones that want to enact politics through the company are going to realize that it's actually not the most effective way to do things. And that the ballot box, just speaking about this, this week with some folks who asked me about like how political stories are going to play out through these companies. It's actually the ballot box and mainstream political organizing that actually ends up being the most impactful, you know, not, not trying to do stuff like this within companies.
41:19 Speaker 01 Yeah, I agree with that. I mean, I think there's a place for workers being able to protest things that they disagree with at the company. But at the end of the day, like, your ultimate protest is quitting, is taking your effort and your time to another company. And not thinking that like, you're actually going to be able to change the high-level strategic decisions of a multi-trillion-dollar conglomerate. It's just not going to happen. I know that they got the Pentagon project canceled. That was a different era. That was the era where Sergey was crying about Trump in front of the whole company. And now we're past that. I think you're totally right to point that out. And this is also just a bigger cultural shift in corporate America that I think is happening.
42:00 Speaker 01 But ultimately, I don't know. Yeah, that's how I feel. I feel like if I, if, if I really disagree with something my employer is doing, I can push behind the scenes for change, but ultimately, my old, what I can do is, is leave.
42:13 Alex Kantrowitz? Yeah, and it seems like these employees were surprised they got fired. And that, to me, is also surprising because it's like, your job is to, you know, do, do your work for the company, not to sort of take over your executives' offices. And it's also, by the way, it goes to the same thing with this NPR editor, Uri Berliner, who, you know, was suspended for writing this memo about how NPR is too woke and then eventually quit when he didn't like what the CEO said about him. Like, what was your expectation there exactly? Like, you're gonna go to another publication and you're gonna write about how your publication is too woke and expect to stay employed and like, good standing there? Like, that's also crazy.
42:52 Speaker 01 Media is insane right now, man. I don't, that's, God, I don't know if I can say anything that won't get me in trouble.
42:59 Speaker 01 Yeah, I think there's a lot of, it'd be good for everyone to focus on what their jobs are. I agree with you on that.
43:06 Alex Kantrowitz? Yeah.
43:06 Speaker 01 And like, but it's, it's good to push for change. It's good to push for things you can't, like, you want to stand up for. I'm not saying like muzzle yourself, but like, find the right avenue for it, I guess. I guess there's a lot of misplaced energy. I'm not saying the energy itself is bad. It just seems misplaced.
43:23 Alex Kantrowitz? No, the energy itself is democracy. Like, that's like, being part, part of the political process is important. But I guess my, my main point is trying to, you know, pull a paycheck from a place that hired you to do one thing, and instead, you know, doing political advocacy is never going to end well for you. And if that's, if that's the case, like, maybe that's okay. Like, maybe you can actually go full-time and dedicate yourself to the cause. So. Anyway, let's talk again about how media is crazy and what media should and shouldn't do when we discuss this big debate over Marcus Brownlee, aka MKBHD's negative review
44:02 Alex Kantrowitz? of both the main pin and Fisker and the backlash that he's gotten for effectively what people say is trying to kill a company. That's coming up right after this.
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46:16 Alex Kantrowitz? And we're back here on Big Technology Podcast with Alex Heath. He's the deputy editor of The Verge and he's the author of Command Line. We've talked in the first half a little bit about how Facebook and Google have both been, you know, trying to develop AI and the cultural challenges they've had. And now on our front door is another sort of controversy, if you could call it that, surrounding Marcus Brownlee, who is a YouTuber, a reviewer, who has produced two pretty negative reviews in the past year. One about this Fisker car, which has effectively kneecapped Fisker. It was that bad. And then he said that this Yumene pin, which is this AI device that we talked about last week,
46:59 Alex Kantrowitz? that this device was the worst product he'd ever reviewed yet. And there was a debate about whether it was appropriate for someone with such a large audience. He has millions of, I think 12 million followers on YouTube. To, to, whether it was appropriate for him to write such a negative review. There was this ex AWS engineer tweeted this tweet that's been dunked on ruthlessly. "I find it distasteful, almost unethical, to say this when you have 18 million subscribers. Hard to explain why, but with great reach comes great responsibility. Potentially killing someone else's nascent project reeks of carelessness. First, do no harm." So this large debate about whether, you know, Marques Brownlee should be, should be, you know,
47:44 Alex Kantrowitz? producing these incredibly negative reviews about products that have, let's be honest, have not been good. And it's also interesting because it's like some of this criticism about that's gone to the media. Oh, they're too negative, they're out to kill, is now like going to YouTubers. And where does it end? Are you allowed to criticize at all these days? What's been your perspective watching this play out?
48:06 Speaker 01 I just laugh, man. This is so ridiculous. Like,
48:08 Alex Kantrowitz? Yeah.
48:11 Speaker 01 I do think this whole media cycle around this is because just some, a couple tech bros got really mad online and had some viral posts. I don't think most people, if you were to seriously ask them, do you think reviewers should be positive about products even when they don't feel that they are positive products? Like, I don't think most people would be like, yes, that makes sense. Like, no, it's actually like, it's Marquez's job to honestly review these products. It's why he has such a huge platform. It's why we at The Verge, people trust our reviews. It's because we are honest about our opinions. You know, our David Pierce for us also trashed the humane pen, gave it a four out of 10.
48:51 Alex Kantrowitz? I enjoyed watching that.
48:52 Speaker 01 He gave it a four out of 10. And arguably, I think he wishes he gave it a three out of 10. So, yeah, I, reviews don't kill products. Bad products kill products. And that's always been the case. It will always be the case.
49:07 Speaker 01 And I just thought that post that you read by the former Amazon guy was hilarious. It shows a complete lack of understanding of what journalism actually is, why people seek it out, why people watch Marquez's reviews. I think he addressed this in a follow-up video, which I thought was very good.
49:27 Speaker 01 But, yeah, the humane, humane, it's a bad product. I mean, they'll figure it out, or they won't, and they'll, they'll go under. That's like, that's, this happened so many times. Like, also, it's not like, it shouldn't matter, but humane has brought a lot of hubris onto this, like, from them. You know, they debuted themselves through a TED Talk. They talked very grandiosely about replacing the smartphone. You know, if you're going to set expectations as high as they have, don't be surprised if the product doesn't cut it and you get torn down.
50:06 Speaker 01 That's like, just how it is, you know? And that's not personal. It's just, this is a $700, $800 hyped gadget that
50:16 Speaker 01 reviewers have an obligation to be honest about. It helps people make purchasing decisions, helps the industry move forward, make better products.
50:26 Speaker 01 And so, yeah, if you're mad that MKBHD didn't like the humane pen, I mean, I- I don't know what to tell you.
50:33 Alex Kantrowitz? Well, okay, but for the sake of argument, let me throw this out there, right? He, his, his headline was the worst product I've ever reviewed, or something like that.
50:42 Speaker 01 That's his opinion.
50:43 Alex Kantrowitz? He has, he has this platform of 18 million people. Don't you think you could just? Do you think that, I mean, there's a way to write it as saying it's negative? Or, and there's a way to write it that, you know, may be a kill shot for a company. I'm just throwing this out there, like, let's debate this, because this is effectively the idea behind this AWS. AWS engineers post.
51:04 Speaker 01 It is an illogical, it's an illogical argument to think that a review is going to kill a company. Because the review is reviewing the product, the product is what is killing a company if it's bad. So if the product was good, he would have said it was good because he's a good reviewer. And it would be fine, like blaming it him for potentially killing a product in the crib. Is ridiculous, because if he was lying, everyone would know it, because other reviewers would be saying that the humane pen is great. You will notice like, there are no good reviews of the humane pen. Like, find me one. I dare you. So.
51:39 Alex Kantrowitz? I can't find.
51:41 Speaker 01 So knowing that to be true.
51:46 Speaker 01 He can't kill humane. Only humane can kill humane. Or a competitor who makes a better product. So journalists don't take like the Hippocratic Oath, like this like first do no harm thing.
51:59 Alex Kantrowitz? Was really ridiculous.
52:01 Speaker 01 I miss that in Jay's school, like we, that's not what we're here to do. We're not doctors and we're not Spider-Man either. So yes, with great, great power comes great responsibility. But your responsibility is to be honest and fair to the companies you cover and to your audience. And MK saying that this is the worst product I've ever reviewed is honest.
52:25 Alex Kantrowitz? Right.
52:25 Speaker 01 And fair. He's not saying also like the people humane are horrible, right? He's talking about the product.
52:34 Alex Kantrowitz? Do you think he's a journalist?
52:37 Speaker 01 I mean, I don't know.
52:39 Alex Kantrowitz? The line is a little bit.
52:40 Speaker 01 Yeah, the line is blurring, man. I mean, I would think you would call yourself a journalist. You don't work for a traditional.
52:45 Alex Kantrowitz? Oh, I definitely am for sure.
52:47 Speaker 01 Yeah, you don't. You don't work for a newsroom. You don't work for a what a like a traditional media brand.
52:52 Alex Kantrowitz? Yeah, no, I'm an independent journalist.
52:54 Speaker 01 You're independent.
52:55 Alex Kantrowitz? Yeah.
52:55 Speaker 01 He is independent as well. I think the line gets blurry when money is involved. So when you're reading ads for companies you cover, if you're investing in companies you cover, I think what journalism is versus like commentary is impartiality.
53:13 Alex Kantrowitz? Right.
53:13 Speaker 01 And so if you're able to keep impartiality and, you know, he said that in his videos, like, my first and only responsibility is to the viewer.
53:22 Alex Kantrowitz? Yep.
53:23 Speaker 01 And I think that's right. And I think that's why he has such a large audience.
53:25 Alex Kantrowitz? Yeah.
53:26 Speaker 01 Because people trust him.
53:27 Alex Kantrowitz? If anything, this makes him more credible in terms of the stuff.
53:29 Speaker 01 Yeah. And I know like people think he's deferential to Tesla or something because he likes the Cybertruck or whatever. I don't know. I know other people who like the Cybertruck. I know plenty of people who hate it too. But as long as he's being honest and disclosing conflicts. And that's why like all this like direct to audience stuff with VCs, the all in guys, people like that, like, saying people can be citizen journalists, like that you can't do that, like, like really for it to be journalism, it has to be not, I think there had, you have to remove that financial piece of it. You can have opinion, but if you're swayed behind the scenes in ways that influence coverage,
54:12 Speaker 01 then you're just like a commentator or a pundit at best. So as long as like his reviews are sound and he's not, you know, there's not a condition from an advertiser that he has to say a certain, and I don't think he would do that, then yeah, I think he's a journalist.
54:27 Alex Kantrowitz? Yeah. And we have.
54:28 Speaker 01 I mean, he's interviewing CEOs. He's interviewing CEOs of huge companies and I don't know. It's, it's tough when.
54:40 Speaker 01 I don't know. There's a lot of conflicts. It's a messy thing, but I don't, I don't think it's fair to call him not a journalist, I guess.
54:47 Alex Kantrowitz? Right. We have one comment here that sums it all up, which is, the horse was already dead.
54:54 Speaker 01 Yeah, that's what I'm saying. Like, reviews don't kill products. Bad products kill products.
54:58 Alex Kantrowitz? And who knows? Maybe they'll turn it around, or maybe they will fold.
55:01 Speaker 01 Maybe they will.
55:02 Alex Kantrowitz? That's what makes this fun. All right, Alex, do you want to let people know where to find command line?
55:08 Speaker 01 Oh, yes. Thanks so much. Yeah, I send it once a week. I think anyone who listens to the show will enjoy it. It's just theverge.com/commandline. All one word is where you can find it and sign up. Part of the interview with Zuck is in there this week. And yeah, otherwise, on the verge, Threads, X, all that stuff. But yeah, I really appreciate you having me, Alex. This was fun.
55:29 Alex Kantrowitz? Awesome stuff. Thanks so much for coming on. Thanks for the great stories this week. It was fun to read them and especially to speak with you about them. And we hope you come back soon, Alex.
55:37 Speaker 01 Yeah, no, appreciate it.
55:38 Alex Kantrowitz? All right, everybody. Thank you so much for listening. We will be back on Wednesday with a new show with M.G. Siegler, talking about Apple's AI play. So that'll be a fun one. And of course, we'll be back here next Friday, breaking down the week news, the week's news. Until next time, we will see you then on Big Technology Podcast.
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Previous Kara Swisher Rates Tech Leaders — With Kara Swisher Next Apple's AI Play — With M.G. Siegler Page updated October 12, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
