A Trip to TikTok + ChatGPT’s Origin Story + Kevin Systrom’s Comeback

TikTok is opening up a “Transparency and Accountability Center” to try to win over skeptics. Is the company’s strategy working? Then, the origin story of OpenAI’s ChatGPT and how the company kicked off an A. I. arms race. Plus: The co-founder of Instagram, Kevin Systrom, hopes to make a “TikTok for text.”

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:36Casey Newton?

  Kevin, this week I went on a reporting trip to Los Angeles. I was there to meet with some people from TikTok, and I brought you some trinkets.

• 0:43Kevin Roose?

  Oh, what'd you bring me?

• 0:45Casey Newton?

  Well, we have the branded TikTok jotters, which are some ballpoint pens.

• 0:51Kevin Roose?

  Those are cool.

• 0:52Casey Newton?

  Yep, there is some refillable nourishing hand sanitizer with a TikTok logo on it. We have the classic For You notepad, of course, a riff on the TikTok For You page. And then here is some information about how many trust and safety professionals the TikTok corporation has hired.

• 1:10Kevin Roose?

  It's a real goody bag.

• 1:11Casey Newton?

  Yeah, and finally, there's the Wi-Fi password for TikTok if you need it. Anyway, based on this, would you say that TikTok no longer poses a threat to our national security?

• 1:21Kevin Roose?

  Yes, based on the notebook, hand sanitizer, pens, you know, honestly, pretty good password for the Wi-Fi. I'm not going to read it out, but you know, I wouldn't have guessed this. And this crumpled sheet of paper, I believe that my concerns have been sufficiently alleviated, and I no longer believe that TikTok poses a threat to the security of the United States.

• 1:41Casey Newton?

  Well, you see, that's why you invite the media down. It's because that's the kind of shift in perception you can get.

• 1:48Kevin Roose?

  Well, mission accomplished. Let's move on to the next segment. I have no more concerns about TikTok.

• 2:00Kevin Roose?

  I'm Kevin Roos. I'm a tech columnist at The New York Times.

• 2:03Casey Newton?

  And I'm Casey Newton from Platformer.

• 2:04Kevin Roose?

  This week, Casey takes a field trip to TikTok. I report on some behind-the-scenes developments at OpenAI and ChatGPT. And Kevin Systrom, the co-founder of Instagram, tells us about his new AI-powered news app.

• 2:37Kevin Roose?

  Okay, let's talk about this trip. So you went down to LA to do what at TikTok?

• 2:43Casey Newton?

  So a couple of years back, TikTok announced that they were gonna open up this building that they were calling the Transparency Center. And this was around the time that the Trump administration was trying to force ByteDance, which owns TikTok, to sell it off to some conglomerate led by Oracle and Walmart. And TikTok said, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Before we go that far, we want to be more open with you than any social network has ever been with anyone. And we're gonna build a room where journalists and lawmakers and regulators can come in and you can basically stare the algorithm dead in the eye and see what it's made of. And so I was very excited about this.

• 3:28Casey Newton?

  I was ready to go down, and then there was a global pandemic. Instead, we took a virtual tour, and I'm just gonna say, it was not that great. It's like, very hard-

• 3:37Kevin Roose?

  It was our conference room.

• 3:39Casey Newton?

  Yeah. It's very hard to take a virtual tour of a algorithmic transparency center, is what I learned. But a couple of years went by, and conditions on the ground changed. And a few weeks back, I got an invitation to go to TikTok's office in Culver City.

• 3:55Kevin Roose?

  Wow. So you show up, so set the scene a little bit.

• 3:58Casey Newton?

  Yeah.

• 3:59Kevin Roose?

  What's it like? I've never been.

• 4:01Casey Newton?

  It looks like what you would expect a TikTok office to look like. There's sort of, you know, giant LED screens showing TikTok's, you know, sort of life-size representations of the logo, conference rooms named after viral moments on the app, right? If you've been to like Facebook or Twitter, like, this is kind of how they all look.

• 4:21Kevin Roose?

  Totally, yeah. Which is always weird. The conference room name thing has always weirded me out. Like, you know, you go to a tech company and like, usually the conference rooms are like-

• 4:32Casey Newton?

  It's like Chewbacca Mom.

• 4:33Kevin Roose?

  Right, I remember, yeah, like, named after big moments on the platform. Or like Ice Bucket Challenge, which I always think is like, like, you know you're eventually gonna have to lay someone off in there, right? Like, you know someone is getting canned in the Chewbacca Mom room.

• 4:49Casey Newton?

  It's like, that's right. The results of our investigation into your embezzlement case are in, and we need to talk to you over in the Ice Bucket Challenge.

• 5:01Kevin Roose?

  Right. Meet us in Grumpy Cat for a discussion of your performance evaluation.

• 5:07Casey Newton?

  Yeah, we've got some bad news for you over in the Tide Pod Challenge Zone.

• 5:11Kevin Roose?

  So anyway.

• 5:12Casey Newton?

  Bring your lawyer.

• 5:13Kevin Roose?

  It's got conference rooms with funny names. What is the actual Transparency Center? Describe it.

• 5:18Casey Newton?

  Yeah, so we were sort of in two rooms. One was a just sort of a big conference room where we heard some speeches from some TikTok folks, which I can talk about. And then after that moment, we crossed the street and went to the Transparency Center.

• 5:33Kevin Roose?

  Oh, it's a different building.

• 5:34Casey Newton?

  It was in a different building.

• 5:35Kevin Roose?

  Was it transparent? Did it have like glass walls?

• 5:37Casey Newton?

  Yes, you could look in on it from the street. No, you couldn't. I would actually say it was heavily secured. So we go in there and we were sort of led on a presentation. And it's called a Transparency Center, but the way that I would think about it is a little bit more like a children's museum about TikTok, you know? Where you sort of have a docent who is a very sort of friendly, bright, articulate host. And she brought us through a series of exhibits that were interactive. And there were sort of a series of these sort of large, like smartphone-like screens where she could swipe up and swipe down, almost as if she was swiping through TikTok itself.

• 6:18Kevin Roose?

  Okay.

• 6:18Casey Newton?

  And then we're led to the real heart of the exhibits. One of them is essentially like a guided tutorial where you could, you know? It was like, God, it sounds so boring. And this part kind of was. It was like, you know, how does TikTok keep people safe? And you tap a button and then it would, you know, sort of show you some visual media and try to answer that question. And then you could go back and they would say, well, you know, how do you ensure that this doesn't happen? And, you know, so it basically kind of a fancy Q and A zone.

• 6:50Kevin Roose?

  Right, like the Terms of Service in museum form.

• 6:53Casey Newton?

  Exactly. The more interesting of the exhibits was a room where you could pretend to be a TikTok content moderator. And you know I was in heaven doing this, right? I love the subject of content moderation. I write a lot about content moderation, but I have not really been in a position to do any moderating of content. And what TikTok has set up is kind of a facsimile of their content moderation system, where you could choose any of the bad things. So you could choose hate speech, or violent extremism, or nudity, or bullying. And they would then show you a handful of videos. And next to those videos, they would show you sort of relevant policies from their own community standards, like about bullying, or hate speech, or extremism. And then you would decide, does this violate the content or not? And then you would either say like, yes, it does.

• 7:38Casey Newton?

  And if so, which policy does it violate? Because that's something that content moderators have to do. They can't just say, good or bad. They have to say, no, you broke this rule, right? And then, you know, you would sort of get the result. And it would say, well, you know, were you right, or were you wrong? And I was right a lot of the time.

• 7:51Kevin Roose?

  Hey, not to brag.

• 7:55Casey Newton?

  But I was also wrong, too, in ways that surprised me. You know, and I'll just tell this story quickly, because I think that, you know, we have so much, like, heartburn over content moderation in this country. And people get so mad about having their posts removed. But we also get so mad about posts that are left up, that we think should be removed. And I think everyone would benefit from like, spending an hour in a chair, just trying to decide whether posts belonged on TikTok, or Facebook, or Twitter, or whatever. There was this one where I'd been reading these policies about bullying and harassment. And there was this TikTok that was taken from inside, you know, like a refrigerator case at a bodega, where they have like, the cold drinks, you know, type of thing? So somebody was sort of behind that, and was pointing a squirt gun. And it was a bright green squirt gun.

• 8:40Casey Newton?

  It was clearly a squirt gun. And some kid was gonna like, reach in to like, get a can of Coke or something. And the squirt gun goes off, and just blasts the kid in the face. And the video ends with him sort of recoiling, you know, and falling backwards. And I'm like, this seems like pretty clear, like harassment of someone. Like, you know, maybe the kid was in on it, but like, I can't tell from the video. And it said it just kind of looks like somebody being mean to, like, innocent people shopping in a bodega.

• 9:05Kevin Roose?

  So you clicked the, this violates the rules, take it down button?

• 9:09Casey Newton?

  Yeah. And they were like, no, that actually doesn't violate our rules.

• 9:11Kevin Roose?

  Fascinating.

• 9:11Casey Newton?

  Yeah. So look, if you want to go squirt a kid with a squirt gun, anywhere in the world, put it on TikTok, go viral, make money.

• 9:16Kevin Roose?

  Well, I know what I'm doing tonight.

• 9:17Casey Newton?

  Yeah, there's your weekend plan.

• 9:18Kevin Roose?

  Okay. So you, so they see this simulator, this like, you know, flight simulator, but for content moderation. What else?

• 9:25Casey Newton?

  So those were kind of the big two exhibits. And then on the way out, they said, now there is this third exhibit, but we're not going to take you to it. And it's actually in this room over here. And so she sort of pointed to this, you know, area where we were not allowed to go. And she said, in this room, you would pass through some metal detectors. You would sign a non-disclosure agreement. And then you would sit down and you would see the TikTok source code. And it's like a room where the source code can be inspected.

• 9:54Kevin Roose?

  Wow, like the Ark of the Covenant vibes.

• 9:56Casey Newton?

  Yeah. And, you know, one of the big challenges that TikTok has is that no one trusts anything it says on a handful of subjects, right? One of the things that people don't trust it on is could the Chinese government interfere with ByteDance? And sort of insert code into TikTok either to surveil Americans? Or maybe promote pro-China content, right? And could they put that into the source code itself? And so there is a room where people like regulators, academics, or whoever else TikTok allows can go in and look at that code. You know, I don't write code, so I wouldn't be able to read it. But there is such a room.

• 10:36Kevin Roose?

  So, okay, you didn't get to go in the secret code room. But it does exist. And other people have gone in there and can go in there, right? Who do understand how to evaluate code and could go look for evidence of, you know, Chinese interference.

• 10:50Casey Newton?

  Yeah, that's right. Now, of course, this gets tricky in a hurry because, okay, so you look at the code and it looks fine. Well, then you walk out the door. Then what happens to the source code, right? And so, you know, TikTok has a lot of these challenges, but they are starting to think through like, okay, how could we try to organize ourselves in such a way that we address those concerns more permanently?

• 11:08Kevin Roose?

  Right. So let's just back up for a second and talk about why you were at TikTok in the first place. So as we've talked about on the show, TikTok is under a lot of scrutiny from regulators and politicians. It's being banned in certain state governments. And actually, federal government employees now are no longer allowed to have it on their phones, their work phones. And part of the reason for all the suspicion, as we've discussed, is that it's owned by ByteDance, which is a Chinese company. And Chinese companies. You know, can be influenced by the Chinese government.

• 11:38Casey Newton?

  Yeah, and I mean, influence is probably not strong enough a word, right? Like, if the Chinese government tells a Chinese company to do something, like, the company either does it, or they're shut down, right? There's sort of not a lot of room for negotiating there.

• 11:49Kevin Roose?

  And so TikTok has been on this kind of furious quest to prove to American regulators, mostly, but also journalists, that it is independent, that it is not being steered by ByteDance in ways that would make it a threat to US interests.

• 12:04Casey Newton?

  That's right. And to the extent that Americans' data is being stored in China, or that Chinese employees would have access to that data, TikTok is trying to say, we are going to undertake a huge effort to ensure that that doesn't happen. And of course, the whole goal for this is that ByteDance can continue to own TikTok and minimize the risk that someone else is either going to shut it down completely or force them to sell it.

• 12:28Kevin Roose?

  Right. And I think it's very interesting that the way that they've decided to be transparent is with this sort of, you know, children's museum, as you described it, but also this, you know, allowing people to go and inspect the source code or a version of the source code at a moment in time. And I think this is an area where I've changed my mind in the last few years. I used to think that sort of transparency would solve a lot of problems with social media, that if they just sort of opened up the algorithms and made them viewable, so you could see why are certain posts ranked higher than others, that that would actually go a long way to increasing trust in these social networks. And I still think that's true in some cases, right? I think transparency is usually a good thing.

• 13:12Kevin Roose?

  But on this algorithmic transparency bit, it just seems like that's not, like, it's only a partial solution, right? Because only one of the worries that people have about TikTok is that ByteDance or the Chinese government could be inserting malicious code into its codebase, right? A lot of the other fears are about sort of content moderation decisions, frankly, like, you know, which posts are allowed to stay up and go viral, and which posts are kind of taken down or demoted so that no one sees them. And that kind of thing typically wouldn't be in the source code, right? It's not like there's a line of code that says, you know, take down all videos of Tiananmen Square, or something like that.

• 13:50Casey Newton?

  That's right. You know, the first exhibit, one of the things that it did, one of the questions that it would answer for you is, why am I seeing the videos that I see in my feed? How are these videos chosen for me? And so the program explains that to you. And as part of the explanation, they show you the code snippets. And the sort of written explanation will say something like, well, you know, we take a set of videos, and then we run it through our machine learning systems, and a score is generated. And then we sort of reduce that to a smaller set of videos, and we run that through like some more loops, right? And on one hand, I think they have explained with a high degree of accuracy and a pretty good degree of depth, how TikTok works, right? So they've like, they are being transparent about that. And yet, at the end of the day,

• 14:35Casey Newton?

  can I really say with any specificity why I saw a video? It's like, no, it's like, some math happened in a computer, and now I'm seeing this. And I think that's the the truest explanation for why you're seeing what's in your feed. And I don't think that's a very satisfying explanation for a lot of people.

• 14:48Kevin Roose?

  Hmm. And it makes me think of this idea that Elon Musk had when he took over Twitter, that he was gonna sort of open the code base and look at the code and find this sort of, you know, smoking gun evidence that Twitter had been suppressing certain kinds of posts. And instead, what you found is like, kind of a normal algorithm, where like, certain posts are promoted, not based on like their ideology, but like, how likely it is to keep you on the app. Like, that's what I think I've learned by talking with engineers who build these algorithms, is it's like, it's very rare that the controversial thing is like hardcoded into the app itself. The app itself is usually just trying to get you to stay on the app.

• 15:29Casey Newton?

  Yeah, but businesses make business decisions. And we don't often talk about that. We're talking about content moderation decisions, right? These people are all trying to make money.

• 15:37Kevin Roose?

  Totally. Yeah. So what else did you see? What did they say? What did the TikTok executives talk about? And I'm curious, just what else happened?

• 15:45Casey Newton?

  Yeah, so the, I think the kind of centerpiece of the day, aside from the visit to the children's museum, was a set of talks from some TikTok executives, where they tried to give us the lay of the land, and talk in some detail about Project Texas. Project Texas is TikTok's effort to move all Americans' data to the United States to put it in what they call a secure enclave, which will be managed by Oracle.

• 16:14Kevin Roose?

  Right. Oracle sort of being the US babysitter of TikTok in this case.

• 16:18Casey Newton?

  That's right. They're setting up a subsidiary called US Data Security. And that's going to be in charge of making sure that everything TikTok stays in the United States. They're saying that they have already spent $1.5 billion on this and that it will be a sort of massive ongoing expense for them. But that at the end of it, there will be like an independent board of directors who will be able to check in at any time and say, hey, did any, you know, did anything untoward happen with data?

• 16:50Kevin Roose?

  Was, so that was what they wanted to talk about was the Project Texas and their very expensive sounding efforts to, you know, appease regulators and politicians in the US. Were there any things that they notably didn't talk about or didn't want to talk about?

• 17:04Casey Newton?

  Well, I wanted them to get into this stuff on the record a little bit. You know, they wanted to do that particular portion of the day on background, which is, you know, is a term in journalism, which is basically like, you can report what we said, but we don't want you to attribute it to specific people. And I imagine that's because these are very sensitive negotiations that, you know, when they are going to talk to the Biden administration, it's going to be some extremely high ranking official and not, you know, the sort of more, you know, I guess, mid-level managers that we were talking to in some cases. So I get it, like, it's sensitive. But at the same time, you know, you bring reporters down to the Transparency Center to talk about your transparency efforts and you're like, well, you know, but don't attribute any of this information and, you know,

• 17:47Casey Newton?

  we don't want you to record this part. It does get a little frustrating.

• 17:51Kevin Roose?

  Right. My Transparency Center t-shirt is raising questions that have already been answered by my Transparency Center t-shirt.

• 17:59Kevin Roose?

  I feel the same way about like US Data Security as the subsidiary name. Like, it's a little tryhard.

• 18:07Kevin Roose?

  So after this visit to TikTok and its transparency center, are you feeling any different about TikTok and sort of its prospects to avoid punishing regulation or an outright ban in the US? Are you feeling more comfortable about TikTok?

• 18:23Casey Newton?

  I mean, on one hand, I am glad I got to go down there. I did learn a lot about how the recommendation algorithm works, about the way that they moderate content. And also, I do think it's good to just meet the executives who are working on this stuff. And you sit down with them, and they're mostly American citizens, and they come across like any other employee of any tech company I've ever written about. They're trying to do their job, they have their challenges, they hope that it's going to work out, they're not sure. And there's a certain amount of comfort there. But at the same time, there are the other issues that we have talked about on this show. We had Emily Baker White come in, and she said that, yeah, ByteDance employees tried to figure out who her sources were by using her IP information.

• 19:06Casey Newton?

  ByteDance was not particularly forthcoming about Project Texas until Emily wrote about it. And on top of all of that, the fact remains that at the end of the day, if China wants something from ByteDance, it's almost certainly going to get it. And that's always been the trap that TikTok is in. So I don't know, man. I don't want to sound like I'm weaseling out of answering your question, but I do find the case of TikTok really hard, because I think there probably are good reasons to take really, really strict action against it. And I'm not sure that just being extra transparent about everything is going to answer our concerns. What's your take on all of this? Do you think a more transparent TikTok is one that should stick around? Or do you think we need to scrutinize it more?

• 19:49Kevin Roose?

  I would say yes. I believe both those things. It seems like as much as they might want to portray themselves as being independent, when it really matters, when there's something that the Chinese government wants, whether it's user data or to make a certain kind of video go more viral or less viral, the question is what? Capacity does TikTok in the US have to push back on that? And so far, I have not heard them talk about that in a convincing way.

• 20:16Casey Newton?

  Yeah.

• 20:17Kevin Roose?

  I would like to see them, in addition to doing all this transparency work, I would like to see them meaningfully and honestly reckon with some of what's out there about how they operate and how ByteDance operates with TikTok sort of kind of at arms length, but not. I just haven't really seen them address that stuff.

• 20:35Casey Newton?

  When they get asked about it, they usually say, you know, we've never been asked to do anything by the Chinese government, and we would say no if we were asked. That's what they say. And, OK, but to your point, it's like, you can't really tell the Chinese government no. And that is the specific thing that I feel like that they've never really reckoned with. You know, at the same time, the reason that I struggle to say ban them is because I feel like I know with a fair degree of confidence what will happen if TikTok gets banned, which is that YouTube and Facebook will just benefit tremendously. And that you'll see all the people making TikToks right now will just be making shorts and reels. And it's like, meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

• 21:11Kevin Roose?

  Right.

• 21:11Casey Newton?

  You know, and 99% of our lives will be exactly the same. It's just that like one more competitive force has been taken out of this already pretty anti-competitive market.

• 21:22Kevin Roose?

  Right. And as far as what they could do to kind of restore trust in the US, at least for me, if they came out and were just radically honest and said, "Look, sometimes ByteDance does stuff that we don't approve of and we don't know about, and it makes us really uncomfortable and it's kind of awkward. But they're our owners, and so we just have to deal with that. And here's some things that we're doing to mitigate that. And here's some of the fights that we have internally." Like, I actually think this is a scenario where radical honesty and not this kind of like glossy corporate transparency stuff could go a long way, at least with me.

• 21:55Casey Newton?

  And the absence of it makes you feel like there is something that they are afraid to say.

• 21:59Kevin Roose?

  Yes.

• 21:59Casey Newton?

  And that is actually, I think, at the root of my discomfort here, is that sense that there is an underlying fear at that company that is always being talked around. And it's why like I can't sign off fully in my brain on some of the stuff.

• 22:13Kevin Roose?

  Totally. Well, I'm glad you got to go. That sounds very exciting. And thank you again for the gifts.

• 22:17Casey Newton?

  Yeah. Did you do any reporting this week?

• 22:21Kevin Roose?

  Are you my boss? Yes, I did some reporting this week. Oh, excited. I want to tell you about it right after the break.

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• 24:33Casey Newton?

  All right, Kevin, you have finally done some reporting.

• 24:39Kevin Roose?

  I don't like this attitude. Listen, okay, it takes, it takes a long time to make a delicious meal, right?

• 24:45Casey Newton?

  It's true.

• 24:45Kevin Roose?

  If you're just whipping out, you know, microwave Trader Joe's, you know, frozen meals, it's gonna be quick. But if you want to prepare a filet mignon, it's gonna take you some time.

• 24:54Casey Newton?

  So this week, you delivered a true prefix menu of journalism.

• 25:02Casey Newton?

  And it was about one of our favorite subjects, AI.

• 25:04Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, so I've been looking into OpenAI, the company that made ChatGPT and DALL-E 2 and a lot of these other AI products that we've talked about on the show. And I talked to some people who know what's going on inside the company, including current and former employees, and really just tried to lay out the origin story of this product, ChatGPT, that has now like kind of taken over the world in this incredible way. I mean, you know, it's scaring Google, it's, you know, Microsoft is investing, you know, $10 billion into OpenAI.

• 25:39Casey Newton?

  And it felt like it came out of nowhere when it landed, too, right? So I think it's a really good question is like, where did this thing come from?

• 25:45Kevin Roose?

  Totally. So I've been looking into this for a couple of weeks, and I found what I would say like are three big takeaways from my reporting. The first is that ChatGPT is just way more popular than I thought. It's got more than 30 million registered users.

• 26:01Casey Newton?

  Wow.

• 26:02Kevin Roose?

  More than 5 million people use it every day.

• 26:05Casey Newton?

  Wow.

• 26:05Kevin Roose?

  And for a product that is only really two months old, that is a phenomenal number of people. So just by contrast, like Instagram, in its first year, got 10 million users. And that was seen as like one of the fastest growing things of all time. So getting 30 million users within two months, I just don't know that I've ever seen a software product grow that fast.

• 26:28Casey Newton?

  Put that in context, that's actually bigger than the Hard Fork Podcast.

• 26:32Kevin Roose?

  It's slightly bigger than the Hard Fork Podcast. Another really interesting thing I found out is that this was a total accident. So OpenAI, its plan for most of last year, the thing that it was working on was GPT-4, this new language model that they were developing. They were very excited about it. And so the plan that they had been going on was that they were going to release GPT-4, or whatever it's going to end up being called, early in 2023, along with a series of chatbots that were sort of like more narrow, they were more aimed at like business users, and that that was going to be how a lot of people interacted with GPT-4 was through these sort of limited chatbots.

• 27:15Casey Newton?

  Sort of like very tentative experiments.

• 27:17Kevin Roose?

  Totally, totally. But in November, this announcement goes out to employees and it basically says, okay, change of plans. We're going to release a chatbot now before GPT-4 comes out, in part because we don't want another AI company to beat us to the punch and release a chatbot before GPT-4, but also because we think releasing a chatbot now will kind of let us gather some feedback and ultimately make GPT-4 better. So they sort of decide to dust off this old chatbot that had been sitting on the shelf and update it and then launch it to the public for free as something called Chat with GPT-3.5, which I think we can all agree.

• 27:58Casey Newton?

  Well, I didn't think there could be a worse name than ChatGPT, but we found it.

• 28:02Kevin Roose?

  So they announced that they're going to do this and they give it a two-week deadline.

• 28:06Casey Newton?

  Wow, what is this, Elon Musk's Twitter? It's extremely hardcore vibes.

• 28:11Kevin Roose?

  I don't know if they actually literally slept on the floor of the office, but it was a sprint. And internally at OpenAI, there were some people who were just kind of confused by this. They said, like, you know, we've been working on GPT-4. It's getting to a place where we feel like it's almost ready. Why are we scrambling to release a chatbot based on our last language model, which has been out for two years and which really isn't the state of the art anymore? But OpenAI's leaders really wanted to put something out there. So they make this announcement and then 13 days later, ChatGPT comes out.

• 28:50Casey Newton?

  So one of the reasons this is interesting is that now it is February and none of these other chatbots have emerged. So what happened? Did OpenAI just misread the market? And what do we know about these other language models?

• 29:04Kevin Roose?

  So we know that other companies are working on similar projects. There's a company called Anthropic, which has its own chatbot in the works called Claude. It's been rumored that DeepMind, which is a Google AI subsidiary, is close to coming out with a chatbot too. But none of these chatbots have come out publicly yet, which makes it seem like this fear that these OpenAI executives had may have been overblown.

• 29:30Casey Newton?

  You know, I remember that the original premise of OpenAI was that they were not going to move that fast. They wanted to make their work, quote, "open" and "safe." That's not the sort of thing that you think about being built in 13 days. So how did they sort of reconcile those ideas?

• 29:49Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, so OpenAI is sort of a strange beast, right? It was started in 2015 as a nonprofit. It was started by this kind of all-star group of tech people, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Sam Altman, Reid Hoffman. It had all of these sort of initial sponsors who chipped in the money to get this thing off the ground. And the whole point was that it was not going to be driven by these sort of narrow commercial interests, right? They pitched it as kind of like the anti-Google or the anti-Facebook, where those companies were developing AI to suit their business needs, whereas OpenAI was going to be sort of half research lab and half kind of humanitarian AI organization that was going to make sure

• 30:34Kevin Roose?

  that its AI was safe and responsible and sort of steer this whole area of technological progress in a better direction.

• 30:42Casey Newton?

  So what changed?

• 30:43Kevin Roose?

  Well, it's a long story. Basically, in 2019, they decide, you know, we need to raise all this money because it's very expensive to build and train these giant AI models. So they started a for-profit subsidiary. So basically, it's sort of a confusing structure, but right now, there's OpenAI. AI, the for-profit subsidiary, and then there's the sort of nonprofit umbrella organization that still has a board that kind of oversees the whole thing. But they started behaving in some ways a lot more like the companies that they were competing against. They started trying to, you know, commercialize their research, trying to figure out how to make money from it. They struck a deal with Microsoft that

• 31:23Kevin Roose?

  gave Microsoft some exclusive rights to GPT-3. And this was all controversial within the AI research community, where people said, wait a minute, weren't you guys supposed to be like not behaving like a startup that was just trying to raise a bunch of money and sell things and push things out into the world, maybe before they're ready? And so, you know, if you talk to OpenAI, they'll say, well, we still have like some of the best safety research going on in the world. We're still taking our time doing things deliberately. We're not just being reckless and putting things out before they're ready. But I think there are also people inside the company who are uncomfortable with how fast things like ChatGPT are coming into existence and maybe worried that the company is cutting some corners in an attempt to get to the market.

• 32:06Kevin Roose?

  So that's the second thing, that ChatGPT was not expected to be nearly as big as it is, and that it's kind of been an accidental hit. The third thing is that ChatGPT's success within OpenAI has created all of these interesting problems for them. They did not expect this to be as big as it was.

• 32:25Casey Newton?

  Oh, come on. That's that's silly. Of course, this was going to be popular.

• 32:28Kevin Roose?

  No, it's not. Because, look, Meta had released a chatbot last August called Blenderbot that you've probably never heard of, because no one used it.

• 32:35Casey Newton?

  Well, I've heard of it, but I cover Facebook. But what I will say is I didn't use Blenderbot. In my memory, though, it's like, did Blenderbot even do half the stuff that ChatGPT does?

• 32:44Kevin Roose?

  Well, no, in part because Meta nerfed it to prevent it from being misused, because right after it was released, people did get it to say crazy things like that the election was stolen and some anti-Semitic stuff. And this kind of thing had happened before, right? That was the whole deal with Microsoft's Taybot a few years ago. So Blender Bot from Meta comes out. It doesn't really make a splash. The reception is very lukewarm. And so there are people inside OpenAI who think like, OK, we're slapping like a new interface on this two-year-old model. It's already been out there. People have already, you know, seen this kind of thing before. It's not going to be that impressive. So they were totally caught by surprise when it became a total cultural phenomenon.

• 33:27Casey Newton?

  This feels like a sick case of tech people like living in a bubble and not understanding how cool their own lives are. You know what I mean? And of course, I'm guilty of this too all the time. But like, when you have access to a tool that can do as many things as ChatGPT does and feel somehow like bored or unimpressed by it, like, it's like funny to me.

• 33:44Kevin Roose?

  Totally. Well, and it speaks to just the way that the employees of these companies, I think, get desensitized to the power of the things that look. Because inside OpenAI, this is the second-best model, right? It's built on this two-year-old model, GPT-3, and they already have internally access to tools that are better than this. So for them, this was like kind of an afterthought. And they didn't realize that it would totally upend the technology industry, be used by millions of people, like wreak havoc in high schools across the country. They just did not see this coming.

• 34:17Casey Newton?

  Yeah.

• 34:17Kevin Roose?

  And so they've been kind of scrambling to address some of these issues and patch some of the flaws. So for example, this week, they put out an AI detection tool that they're sort of aiming at teachers and other, you know, people who might want to be able to detect if a given text is written by AI or not. It's not super clear that it's all that effective, but they have been putting this out there. They've been talking with educators and trying to kind of like, you know, sort of cool temperatures around this. So they're playing catch-up, but it's fair to say, I think that this has been a chaotic couple of months inside OpenAI.

• 34:52Casey Newton?

  Yeah, it's like a classic moment of catastrophic success. What I wonder is, how much has that changed the trajectory of the company? Like, now that their second-best afterthought product has galvanized so much attention, how much has that changed what they want to do with the company?

• 35:07Kevin Roose?

  Well, it's in some ways, it's made their lives easier because they now have this $10 billion investment from Microsoft. So I think in some ways, it's been very good for them. But in other ways now, there's a lot of targets on their back, right? Going first in such a competitive and controversial area as sort of large language models and advanced AI has drawbacks as well. And you hear that not just from people at Google and other AI companies, which are who are clearly sort of jealous of the success and attention that ChatGPT is getting. But you hear that from from, you know, less obviously biased sources too. They just say like, with something like this, like you have to really be careful because

• 35:49Kevin Roose?

  if you're rushing this out and you're not paying enough attention to the possibility that it could become used by millions of people overnight, you're not going to build in some of the guardrails that maybe you need.

• 35:59Casey Newton?

  Right. And that was, of course, the lesson from the 2010s and the social media boom was that if you go really fast and you just try to grow at all costs, inevitably you'll make some mistakes. But my sense is that the people at OpenAI know that, right? I guess the question is just if the people making those points are being listened to.

• 36:15Kevin Roose?

  Totally. And this not only has sort of changed OpenAI's trajectory, but it's set off this total arms race, right? Where now you have Google declaring code red and trying to, you know, fast track a lot of its AI products. You have Baidu, the Chinese tech giant, which is reportedly coming out with its own AI chatbot. And then you still have, you know, DeepMind and Anthropic and all these other companies that are gearing up to release their own. Now they're racing too. So this decision that OpenAI made to kind of rush this chatbot out, as much as it may have seemed like an afterthought at the time, really did set off kind of a race in AI that I think is is dangerous.

• 36:57Kevin Roose?

  And I think OpenAI believes that it's dangerous too, because in their charter, you know, from many years ago, they specifically say that as as we approach AGI, this artificial general intelligence, the sort of intelligence that's equal to that of a human, they specifically say that we're not going to feed into this race dynamic that if Someone else, if another tech company or research lab gets closer to AGI than we are, we will stop what we're doing and help them. So it really is a case of, I don't want to say like mission drift, but almost like, like they started off as a nonprofit. They started this for-profit subsidiary several years later. And there's kind of these competing impulses that are still inside the company,

• 37:40Kevin Roose?

  where a portion of the company thinks like, whoa, whoa, whoa, why are we doing what we said we wouldn't do? And racing to get this stuff out into the public's hands. And then there's this other force that's like, well, now we're a big tech company and we're competing with big tech companies. And if we don't make this stuff, someone else will, and they'll get the credit and the funding. And maybe their values won't be in line with ours.

• 38:02Casey Newton?

  What you have me wondering, though, is wasn't all of this inevitable? Wasn't someone always going to go first? And assuming it was good, wasn't that always going to cause an arms race?

• 38:12Kevin Roose?

  I think there's an element of that, sure. I think that it's plausible that if OpenAI had not released ChatGPT as quickly as they did, that someone else would have come along and, you know, released something that had fewer guardrails or was more easily abused. And that's certainly what they would tell you at OpenAI, is that they did years of safety work on the base model, GPT-3, that was used to make ChatGPT. So it's not as if they had no safeguards in place. They had lots of them. It's just that they weren't expecting this many users. So I think that it was always inevitable. But I also think it's very important in the early stages

• 38:53Kevin Roose?

  of this sort of next phase of AI to set norms in the industry, that before you release something like ChatGPT, you do months or years of testing on it in a very limited setting, where it's not going to be used by every high schooler in the country overnight. You sort of allow society to kind of slowly adapt and put in place some of the structures that allow this to not be so disruptive. You don't just flip a switch overnight.

• 39:24Casey Newton?

  Yeah. So what's the next turn of the screw here? They've got all of this technology cooking. There was some reporting this week that Microsoft is about to announce a bunch of new integrations, which would sort of bring OpenAI's tech even further into the mainstream. They seem like they're in the lead now, but what do you think is next?

• 39:46Kevin Roose?

  Well, they're still working on GPT-4, right? Which is their their next generation language model. That's still slated to come out from what I hear later this year. And they are using a lot of the feedback that they're getting on ChatGPT to make GPT-4 better. So I expect that there will be another big launch in the next few months, that there will be sort of this, I don't know whether it's going to be, what we don't know yet is sort of what GPT-4 is going to look like, whether there's going to be sort of an easy to use chatbot interface like there is with ChatGPT. But that is still sort of the company's big project this year.

• 40:29Kevin Roose?

  And in some ways, I think it's going to have an easier time. I think if GPT-4 had come out of nowhere, the way that ChatGPT came out of nowhere, we would be seeing an even bigger sort of societal response to it. And it's something that I'm really going to be looking at when GPT-4 does come out, especially this question of bias. So I'm sure you've seen, but in the last few weeks, there's been this kind of conservative backlash to ChatGPT. There was an article in the National Review called ChatGPT Goes Woke that was all about how-

• 41:01Casey Newton?

  Oh, my God, no, I didn't. That that sounds like an article ChatGPT would write if you said, write a conservative article about ChatGPT.

• 41:08Kevin Roose?

  Right, so very predictable, but also interesting in the sense that people are, you know, trying to sort of figure out, does this chatbot have ideology? Does it, has it been programmed in a way that makes it favorable to one side or the other? And so they've been testing it and saying, you know, write an admiring poem about Donald Trump, and it'll say, you know, we can't do that. And then it'll say, write a, write an admiring poem about Joe Biden, and it'll do it. And so there are people who are saying, okay-

• 41:33Casey Newton?

  Look, let's not question the wisdom of the AI here, right? This is state of the art technology. If it can't write an admiring poem about Donald Trump, maybe it can't be done.

• 41:41Kevin Roose?

  Right, it's becoming a new frontier in kind of the content moderation, free speech wars. And I think that that's something that I'll be watching very closely this year, and I think for probably several years to come, is just the emerging battle over centralization and control and censorship in these models. I think this is going to be just as controversial as some of the conversations around social media were in the last decade.

• 42:08Casey Newton?

  Yeah.

• 42:09Kevin Roose?

  So get ready. We're gonna have hearings.

• 42:13Casey Newton?

  Love a, love a hearing. Very good story, Kevin, and I know we already talked about one of my stories this week, but I wrote another one, too. Damn it. And we'll talk about that after the break.

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• 44:28Casey Newton?

  All right, Kevin. So this week, we've talked about TikTok and we've talked about AI. But now I want to talk about something that brings both of those things together. And that thing is called Artifact.

• 44:39Kevin Roose?

  What is Artifact?

• 44:40Casey Newton?

  So Artifact is this new app that the co-founders of Instagram are working on. And I think it's interesting, in part because it is charting a path for what I think a lot of apps are going to do in a world where these large language models are now available.

• 44:55Kevin Roose?

  So the co-founders of Instagram, famously, they sell their app to Facebook for something like $1 billion.

• 45:02Casey Newton?

  $715 million because Facebook's stock went down after the closing of the deal. It's a sensitive subject with them.

• 45:07Kevin Roose?

  Wait, I gotta find the sad trombone.

• 45:09Casey Newton?

  Yeah, there you go.

• 45:13Kevin Roose?

  Only $715 million. So they sell this app. It famously takes off, becomes a huge cultural phenomenon, kind of leads Facebook to a new era of growth. They leave the company.

• 45:27Casey Newton?

  That's right.

• 45:27Kevin Roose?

  And so how did we get to Artifact?

• 45:29Casey Newton?

  So on Friday, I get an email from Kevin Systrom.

• 45:32Kevin Roose?

  One of the co-founders of Instagram.

• 45:34Casey Newton?

  Yeah. And in a lot of ways, it felt like an email that I'd been waiting to get for five years, since he and his co-founder, Mike Krieger, quit Facebook. We haven't heard much from them since then, although they did work on a really cool website called RT Live, which sort of helped track the spread of the pandemic. It was just sort of a free website that anyone could visit. But aside from that, they hadn't tried any new business, and I sort of always assumed they would. And Kevin emailed me and said, hey, we're actually ready to talk about what we're doing. And he's actually here right now to talk to us about it. Hey, Kevin.

• 46:03Speaker 06

  Guys, how are you?

• 46:04Casey Newton?

  Good. How are you?

• 46:05Speaker 06

  Good. I'm super excited to talk.

• 46:06Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, great name, by the way.

• 46:08Speaker 06

  I know, right?

• 46:11Kevin Roose?

  So, welcome to Hard For. Tell us what Artifact is.

• 46:14Speaker 06

  Yeah, so Artifact is a hyper-personalized newsfeed driven by the latest in machine learning. It's like TikTok for text. There's a lot of text out there on the web, most of it news, blogs, articles. And we take all of that, we understand it, using machine learning. And then we say, hey, user, you signed up for Artifact. What are you into? And then we start matchmaking. And we present you a feed of stuff. And at first, you're just like, okay, it's a newsreader. But if you use it for, I don't know, a week or two, or depending on how heavily you use it, it becomes really different. And that's because it starts to understand what you like and you don't like. So I've now been using it for well over a year.

• 46:57Speaker 06

  And it knows I'm into Japanese modern architecture. And if a really cool example of Japanese modern architecture pops up, it'll serve that to me. It also knows things that I don't tell it. Like, obviously, I'm into Instagram.

• 47:11Kevin Roose?

  Yeah.

• 47:12Speaker 06

  I'm into all the drama around Instagram and where it's headed. And I don't think I would ever say that on a survey.

• 47:18Kevin Roose?

  Right.

• 47:18Speaker 06

  But it clearly knows I'm into that. So it serves it to me. So I get to follow along with the history of Instagram as it gets built. And so that's what Artifact is. It's a newsfeed for you. And over time, it morphs from kind of just a newsreader into like, you know, presidents back in the day used to have these things called valets. And valets.

• 47:38Kevin Roose?

  Casey still has a valet.

• 47:40Speaker 06

  You do? Okay, fancy.

• 47:42Casey Newton?

  I'm hiring for one, okay? The job posting is up.

• 47:45Speaker 06

  But they read everything for you. They find the most interesting stuff in the morning, and then it's on your desk.

• 47:50Kevin Roose?

  Hmm.

• 47:50Speaker 06

  There was an executive at Facebook who had this. I won't name names. I actually thought it was smart.

• 47:56Kevin Roose?

  Can I ask some questions just about the app itself? Because I have not played around with it yet, although I'm on the waitlist. So as soon as you feel like.

• 48:02Speaker 06

  Wait, wait, wait, Casey, you didn't hook him up with an invite?

• 48:05Casey Newton?

  Uh, you know what? I'm inviting him right now, but Kevin asked your question.

• 48:07Kevin Roose?

  Casey never thinks of me in these moments. You know, he's very selfish.

• 48:10Casey Newton?

  We compete with each other. It's not in my interest always for him to have access to what I have access to.

• 48:15Kevin Roose?

  Right, we're frenemies. So this is not generative AI, right? These articles that you're showing users, they're not being written by AI. They're just being sort of ranked by AI, is that correct?

• 48:26Speaker 06

  That's right.

• 48:26Kevin Roose?

  So they're coming from publishers, they're coming from the New York Times, the Washington Post, the BBC, wherever. The app that you're talking about, it just sort of sorts them into a feed based on personalized guesses about your interests.

• 48:40Speaker 06

  Yeah, we do not generate text right now, though I will say I'm very excited about generative text in the future for us. Less about replacing writing and less about replacing authors or publishers. Way more about synthesizing events and being able to point you to the right sources on the events. If like a large event happens, Artifact launches, it's like, okay. These are the people covering the tech side of it. These are the people covering the competition side of it. Here's what they think and it allows you to quick slice an event much more quickly. So to answer your question directly, Kevin, no, we're not doing generative text yet, although of course that's that's an option.

• 49:18Casey Newton?

  I'm interested in the social stuff. So right now, if you start using Artifact, you'll see that core news feed and you can start to teach it about your interests. But there is a beta group of users, which I'm in this group, that sees a couple more things. There is a sort of more social feed and then there is a direct message inbox. And, you know, I'm somebody who has sort of been aching for a renaissance of social apps. I want to see new ideas in this space. And so this to me is one of the most interesting and exciting things about Artifact is what you can do socially. When you have people interacting around, you know, the news stories that are most of interest to them.

• 49:56Speaker 06

  Yeah, first I'll apologize and say this is like one of these bad habits I think we learned at Instagram slash Facebook, which is these feature gates. Where like some people have features, some people don't, and you're doing testing and all this stuff. But what I'll say is our intention is to get it out to everyone as soon as it's ready and we're ready. But I want to point out that like when we launched Instagram, it was a filter app first for everyone. Like, most people didn't even know that there was a network behind it. It was a filter app. My intention was always for it to be a social app and I was like kind of bummed when everyone talked about it as a filter app. But what I realized in there is that the best networks are first a utility. And then they like kind of piggyback on that utility and they become a network.

• 50:40Speaker 06

  I think Facebook's actually a great example of this. It may not be so clear, but it was clearly just a directory at the beginning. It was about like finding people, communicating with them, right? And then it became the social network that it became. Once they added the news feed and all this other stuff. So Instagram and Facebook are actually not that different in their evolution. So we decided probably a couple of months ago, when we talked about launch, that we were just going to focus on the utility part of it first and be really good at that. Because like, starting a social network from scratch, I think, is the wrong order. You see a lot of people launching things today that are social networks first and then utility is questionable. And it's because the utility in a social network only makes sense when you're at scale, when you have a lot of people, and it's very hard to bootstrap that.

• 51:24Speaker 06

  I'm very excited about Artifact being a place where you can discuss what you discover. So I don't want to be an app that is discussion first and discovery through only discussion, because I think that that causes filter bubbles. Like, one of the things TikTok does really well, I think, is you can be a nobody, post an awesome video, and go viral. That's not possible on Twitter, really. That's not possible on Instagram, or it wasn't really. And in this place, like, I want a great post from an epidemiologist on Substack who nobody knows to become the de facto thing that everyone reads if it's great.

• 52:05Speaker 06

  And then I want people to be able to discuss it and post about it and say what they think about it, debate and argue or whatever, but that comes second. So it's this way to connect around things that inspire you. But maybe backing up for a second, I think the best companies often do one slice of what existing companies do really well. When Instagram launched, everyone was like, but I do photos on Twitter, I do photos on Facebook, why would I use Instagram? And it's like, actually, if you just focus on one job in particular, you can optimize for that job and create like a really wonderful experience around it. Yes, you can get news on Facebook, yes, you can get news on Twitter, and yes, do I think the discussion on Twitter around news is way better than on Artifact right now? Yes, of course.

• 52:49Speaker 06

  But like, it doesn't have to be that way forever. You can create a space for these things to blossom, but you have to do it in order and sequence matters.

• 52:56Kevin Roose?

  I think there's this feeling in the media business, at least among the folks that I talk to, that the media has been burned by people in Silicon Valley who come along and they have some new idea about how to revolutionize the news industry and they make all these promises and they say, well, we'll share profits with you or we'll pay you for exclusive things with your content or we'll send a bunch of traffic to your website. And then it just always kind of ends up feeling like a bad deal or things go sour. I think there's been a lot of failed attempts to unite the media industry, which is producing all of the news, and the technology industry, which wants to distribute it to consumers. So have you found that in talking with publishers about including their stories on Artifact?

• 53:41Kevin Roose?

  Have you found that there's some missing trust there? And how do you plan on working with publishers in a way that's productive?

• 53:50Speaker 06

  I think unlike a lot of these companies that serve news as a side dish, we only have our relationship with publishers. If we take advantage of that, if we screw them, if we lose trust, we're gone. I mean, gone, right? We have to have a great relationship with them. It's not to say there won't be challenges. And I'm sure if we're successful, there are all sorts of questions about money. And right now, we're a product that's trying, what would happen, as a thought experiment, what would happen if you were a publisher first? What would happen if you had to have a great relationship in order to succeed? I'm not

• 54:33Speaker 06

  saying that's all the reason of why these relationships have turned sour before, but I think it's a big part. The other part of this, I think, is working with publishers so far has been really fun. And it's because, I won't name names, there's one large publisher, very well-known, trusted, and I got to know CEO of this place early on. And I got an email yesterday, which was like, I just want to thank you because when I tap into our stories, it shows our login, it doesn't remove all of our ads. I literally don't understand why you guys are the first people to just have done that. Why was it so hard for everyone else? Meanwhile, it was funny, I don't know, Casey, if you saw this post this morning in social that was like...

• 55:17Speaker 06

  Finally, you know, someone who agrees, it was about the group we're posting about ads. And it's like, Artifact will never be successful if it doesn't strip out all the ads. I just like, maybe I'm a contrarian here, but I'm like, well, but these people have to like, win somehow, like you, and by the way, Facebook's full of ads, so is Instagram. Like, no one's saying those things won't be successful if ads are, if we just got rid of the ads on these platforms, they'd be so much more successful. No, it's this fine balance. What you don't want is pop up over pop up over fixed footer over. And there are publishers who have done that, but maybe we can work with them to produce a better experience where you continue to make money, you continue to find subscribers. But Kevin, I don't want to be that person who over promises the world and under delivers.

• 56:02Speaker 06

  I just want to say, hey, we're working on something cool. If you want to work with us, let's do it. And, um, and I get why you wouldn't trust a lot of us. I get it. Um, so all you can do is take me on my, on my word here that we want to do great stuff together and let's go.

• 56:18Kevin Roose?

  Great. Yeah, I'm, I'm excited to try it. I, Casey's did send me an invite code, um, so I'm going to sign up, although I mistakenly sent it to a different phone. I typed in my phone number wrong, so someone out there has a, has an Artifact beta link. Uh, I hope you enjoy the app.

• 56:34Speaker 06

  You can do it again, it's okay. It's not a one-time use, it'll be fine.

• 56:37Kevin Roose?

  Okay. Whew, thank God. Um, well, I'm getting you additional users, uh, who may be random people. But, um, I do want to ask one Instagram question. I know we're here to talk about Artifact, but I have a question about Instagram that I've been, uh, dying to ask you, which is, what do you think of the app now? I mean, when I log into Instagram, it is almost unrecognizable from the app that I remember, even from a few years ago, you've got reels, you've got shopping, it's, you know, showing you stuff from people you don't follow. It's hard to find your friends sometimes. I assume you still use Instagram, this app that you, that you've built. What do you think of what it's become?

• 57:13Speaker 06

  I use Instagram every day. The thing I will say is this, these things are not. Static, they have to change with the times, they have to evolve, they have to move. And that doesn't mean all the moves or the evolutions are good. But like, you gotta go with the waves of evolution because you never know where it'll navigate. Now, what I'll say is, that's a really non-answer to your question because you're like, well, of course, right? But what do you actually think? Like, are there things about it that make you sad? Sure, like, I don't want it to become this overcomplicated mess of, you know, features and... But it's funny, because when I worked there and we added features, people said the same exact thing.

• 57:53Speaker 06

  And some of those things worked and some of those things didn't, like Instagram direct or messaging stuff worked really well, stories really well. IGTV not so well, but I don't know, had it been slightly different, maybe it would have been a TikTok before TikTok, right?

• 58:07Kevin Roose?

  Right.

• 58:07Speaker 06

  So I look at it kind of like, I assume with kids, like how they are at three and how they are at seven and how they are at thirteen, just like changes dramatically. And sometimes you wish they were just that three-year-old and... But you kind of just gotta take it all together. And, you know, I think that Adam's doing like his best with what he has.

• 58:25Kevin Roose?

  Adam is very, uh, who runs Instagram now.

• 58:28Speaker 06

  Yeah, I... But man, like, I, this stuff's hard. So, uh, without being in the chair, it's really easy to be like an up-chair quarterback and say, oh, I would have thought these things differently. Um, the one thing I know is that I'm happy to be playing in a world where I'm not like, I... Can I tell this quick story?

• 58:44Kevin Roose?

  Yeah.

• 58:44Speaker 06

  I had this meeting once with like one of our executives who ran a vertical for us and we were having this like very serious conversation about Snapchat and she goes, um, I just need to know, like, what's our hot dog moment? And I was like, excuse you? And this person was like, what's our hot dog moment? We need our hot dog moment. And I literally thought at that moment, like, how long can I last in this job?

• 59:12Kevin Roose?

  Wait, and just, so I vaguely remember there was a Snapchat hot dog filter, right?

• 59:17Speaker 06

  Yeah, and you could have your hot, it was like this AR thing where you could have a hot-

• 59:20Kevin Roose?

  Dancing hot dog.

• 59:21Speaker 06

  Dancing hot dog, right?

• 59:22Kevin Roose?

  Yeah.

• 59:23Speaker 06

  Um, and I just remember thinking like, is that the level of discourse and thought like, we have to worry about whether or not we have a dancing hot dog in our app and...

• 59:35Speaker 06

  It's okay. Like, I guess that was the right question to ask is everyone was talking about it. And but I thought to myself, I was like, OK, not to be elitist, maybe hot dogs are interesting. But there was a moment where I thought to myself, um, like, I don't know if I can laugh. Like, I don't know if I can do this forever. Like, I the fights I want to fight are different. And it's not to say there won't be similar questions about hot dogs in the future of artifact. I don't know. But I I wanted to work on a different product. And I'm thankful that I have some time to like, what I believe is focus on an area that, if done well, can like, create meaningful value for people because they're learning and about the world. Not just about like, can we get an extra minute or two because you're watching a hot dog dance or, you know?

• 1:00:21Casey Newton?

  Right. In artifact, the hot dog will, yeah, no, in artifact, the hot dog will explain the news to you and sort of get you caught up on areas of of significant interest.

• 1:00:30Speaker 06

  What an awesome Easter egg that would be like, our little Clippy is a dancing hot dog. It's like, it looks like you're trying to learn about something. Um, listen, there are, that's a hard. Social media is just a really hard business.

• 1:00:44Kevin Roose?

  But news is very easy. So I'm, it's, I'm not accusing you of being a glutton for punishment. But I will say, um, you know, it's, it's an area that I think a lot of executives in tech sort of are very excited about and then sort of regret having ever dipped their toes into because it is such a thorny and complicated world.

• 1:01:05Casey Newton?

  But we also want people to like, try hard problems, right?

• 1:01:08Kevin Roose?

  Totally, totally.

• 1:01:08Speaker 06

  But can I clarify something really important here? Which is, um, I'm interested in news, but that is not why I started this company. Why I started this company was because I believe that machine learning can serve consumers better than anything that exists today. And it just so happens that if you're gonna apply that thesis to the world, text, we can understand really well. Um, there's a lot of it on the web. There's a lot of it being produced very quickly. And people have an appetite for it. My ambition is not to remain a news company forever. It's actually to figure out how to take what we are building and apply it to all sorts of areas.

• 1:01:51Speaker 06

  Um, so like I get when a VC emails and it's like, wait, so just want to be clear. Like, are we talking the news app or no? Like, that just happens to be where we're starting. And I think it's the right, like, there's this book called Crossing the Chasm. They talk about beachheads and, um, Jeff Moore, I want to say, wrote it, right? Um, where do you start? What's your beachhead? And I think news to me is such an interesting place to start because it's like all the concentric circles. They intersect in the right ways. But I agree. Um, we may talk in a year and, and, and I'll be one of those tech execs who says, man, what did I get into? But it's okay. I think sometimes people talk about startups or companies as like, okay, you do one.

• 1:02:34Speaker 06

  And if your next one's not successful, okay, you're off to the elephant graveyard of San Lalo Road. And you're going to go invest and like, you know, there are a lot of these people like try it once and say, oh, it's too hard. Um, I, I think it's more like making movies where like you make a great hit. Day one is like Star Wars or whatever. And that like you might make a couple of duds, but like, hopefully if you just keep making movies, you can make great stuff. And I just fundamentally believe machine learning is going to underpin all of this stuff. And maybe it's not news. I think news is a great place to start. Um, but we're going to keep making movies. And then you can like pull up this quote when I joined something on San Lalo Road and you're going to be like, what happened?

• 1:03:18Casey Newton?

  Um, and I'm sure there'll be a great article about it that gets served to someone via machine learning.

• 1:03:23Speaker 06

  Sure.

• 1:03:23Casey Newton?

  If it happens.

• 1:03:24Speaker 06

  Exactly.

• 1:03:25Casey Newton?

  Um, but in the meantime, you can go to artifact.news. Uh, the app is available for Android and iOS and you are letting people in off the waitlist. It seems like a pretty good clip. Is that right?

• 1:03:35Speaker 06

  Trying my best, trying my best.

• 1:03:36Casey Newton?

  Very cool. Kevin, thanks so much for coming on Hard Work. Yeah, thanks for stopping by.

• 1:03:39Speaker 06

  Thank you.

• 1:04:11Speaker 05

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• 1:05:55Kevin Roose?

  Hard Fork is produced by Davis Land with help from a dancing hot dog. We're edited by Paula Schuman. This episode was fact-checked by Caitlin Love. Today's show was engineered by Alyssa Moxley. Original music by Dan Powell, Alicia Baty-Tup, Marion Lozano, and Sophia Landman. Special thanks to Hannah Ingber, Nell Galogly, Kate LaPresty, and Jeffrey Miranda. As always, you can email us at [email protected]. That's all for this week. See you next time.

• 1:06:24Casey Newton?

  You know, as written, sexually, that's all of this week.

• 1:06:27Kevin Roose?

  That's all of this week. See you next Utime.

• 1:06:31Casey Newton?

  What if we had actually captured all of the week in those three segments? I mean, maybe we did.

• 1:06:36Kevin Roose?

  There's nothing else of importance happening.

• 1:06:38Casey Newton?

  Yeah, like, turn off your podcast app now. Go outside, touch grass.

• 1:06:40Kevin Roose?

  Who needs AI-powered news apps after all? You've got a hard fork bringing you all the news that matters.

• 1:07:31Speaker 04

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