Cocomelon For Adults

Last week, OpenAI released an app that quickly shot to the #1 spot in Apple's App Store. Sora is like TikTok, except all the videos are AI generated. Is this ... what we're doing now? What's the business case for a fake AI video platform? Check out Casey Newton's newsletter (Platformer https://www.platformer.news/) and podcast (Hard Fork https://open.spotify.com/show/44fllCS2FTFr2x2kjP9xeT) Support Search Engine! https://searchengine.supercast.com/

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

• 0:00PJ Vogt?

  Hello, Search Engine listeners. Before we start the show this week, some news. We're doing something new, and I need your help. So basically, I need you, our listeners, to submit questions that you think I would be unqualified to answer. So like, stumpers. Don't ask me how to make a podcast, or how we find stories for Search Engine, or where to get a sandwich in Brooklyn, Federoff's. Ask me stuff that I probably could not answer. What's the meaning of life? How do batteries actually work, technologically speaking? How do you raise your child, who I've never met? Everybody wants to look smart online, but in an act of daring and bravery, I'm going to completely and valiantly whiff for an hour and reveal the shallow limits of my own intellect. Send your questions, if you have them, to [email protected].

• 0:45PJ Vogt?

  This is going to be a live event online for our incognito mode listeners. We're going to do it on October 17. As always, you can sign up for incognito mode at searchengine.show, but everybody can send questions. All right, the show after these ads.

• 1:29PJ Vogt?

  Last week, OpenAI launched a very strange new app called Sora. Sora is actually Sora 2. There was a Sora before this that fewer people used and which lived inside the paid version of ChatGPT. But Sora 2 lives inside a standalone iPhone app called Sora. The short version is that it's an app that lets you make very realistic AI videos using your own face. Plug in a prompt, and a little bit later, it'll spit out a very realistic-looking video clip. There's a little uncanny valley effect where you can tell, particularly if it's a video of someone you know, that it's been AI-generated, but it's pretty close to being indiscernible from real. I think even someone relatively practiced

• 2:14PJ Vogt?

  at spotting fake videos on the internet should expect, going forward, to be fooled pretty often.

• 2:22PJ Vogt?

  Sora launched with some safeguards. Nobody can make a video of you without your permission. But if you want to, you can choose to give the app permission for you to use your own face in videos, for your friends to use your face, or if you're nuts, for strangers to use your face. I got on and I did the thing you do with these AI toys, where I started making videos for myself of myself. A very, very fat PJ shook hands with a very, very skinny PJ. Whoa, you're me, just thinner.

• 2:51Speaker 01

  And you're me, plus a few pounds. Good to finally meet.

• 2:53PJ Vogt?

  Likewise. Manosphere bro podcaster PJ talked about his nutritional supplements from behind his no-neck, huge muscled bod.

• 3:00Speaker 02

  What I'm running right now, 5 grams creatine monohydrate every day, fish oil, vitamin D, and a little ashwagandha. That's my baseline.

• 3:06PJ Vogt?

  I would tell you more, but there's this rule of AI, which is that the things we make are like our dreams, very interesting to us, very boring to everybody else. Anyway, there was a moment this week where I felt a little nausea about the future of the internet. AI slop content made by bots that floods the places where humans are trying to talk to each other has been rising across social platforms. And convincingly fake video seems like it'll make the internet worse, not better, at least for me. So I wanted to understand why this is happening. I wanted to both know how we got here, how a company claiming to want to create machine intelligence is detouring into the slop business, but also where we might be going.

• 3:50PJ Vogt?

  And that's why I'd called Casey. Casey Newton, welcome back to the TeraTop.

• 3:54Speaker 03

  Hi PJ, nice to be here.

• 3:56PJ Vogt?

  So can you just explain in a way my dad would understand, like, how do you explain what Sora 2 is?

• 4:02Speaker 03

  Sora 2 is a text-to-video generator. If you compare it to something like ChatGPT, that's text-to-text, right? There's a box and I type, "Hey, do my high school English homework for me," and I click enter and it does it perfectly. Sora lets you say, "Hey, make a video of me doing my high school English homework using my face," and then it does that instead. And it has audio as well, so it might include a little bit of dialogue in what it produces.

• 4:31PJ Vogt?

  And the way that it gets the audio is that when it captures your face, when you sort of let it capture your face, you just speak a couple of numbers and from that, it is able to kind of create a facsimile of your voice.

• 4:42Speaker 03

  Yes, although, as I'm sure you've noticed, it's a pretty bad facsimile. You're saying at most four or five words to this thing when you're getting started, which at this point is still not enough data for it to be really good.

• 4:55PJ Vogt?

  So we're talking Thursday, October 2. How long have you been messing with it?

• 5:00Speaker 03

  So I was able to get access to Sora earlier this week on the day that it launched, and I have been making videos with it every day since.

• 5:10PJ Vogt?

  So can you show me one of your stupid videos?

• 5:12Speaker 03

  So I thought it'd be fun to like imagine myself trapped in a video game and unable to get out of it. And so I wanted to see if it would put me in the original Mortal Kombat arcade game. That, of course, is also like copyrighted material. So I also kind of wanted to test like, what are the boundaries as far as copyright? And I found that Sora was quite happy to put me into Mortal Kombat.

• 5:34PJ Vogt?

  Okay, wait, we're watching now. Oh, it is a really good recreation. It's like you're fighting Raiden.

• 5:40Speaker 03

  Oh, my God, someone's throwing lightning at me. This isn't fun anymore. Please don't finish me.

• 5:44PJ Vogt?

  It really looks like you've been put into Mortal Kombat. Like, I'm sure that if I compare this to an actual Mortal Kombat screen, there's plenty of details they got wrong. But relative to my memory of a Mortal Kombat screen, they did a good job.

• 5:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, I'm definitely more impressed with what they got right here than what they got wrong. Like, you might also notice that both Raiden and me have a health bar, as you would normally see in a fighting game, and my health bar does just say Casey on it. So like, the amount of details that it was able to conjure over the, let's say, two to three minutes it took to generate this video did impress me.

• 6:15PJ Vogt?

  So those are the sort of videos that Sora can quickly output from a prompt. I wanted Casey to also describe the Sora app itself. The Sora app is different from the existing ChatGPT app. It's a whole separate thing to download. And once you install it, it's hard not to notice that it looks a lot like a clone of an existing, very popular platform.

• 6:36Speaker 03

  So the actual app looks like TikTok, full stop. In their livestream announcing this, OpenAI employees said, "We've designed this to look familiar," which is a nice way of saying we have copied something. So when you open Sora... You see a feed of videos that are all about 10 seconds long. You swipe up to move to the next video. You can double tap something to like it. You can add a comment. You can share it. And the one sort of interesting thing about Sora is you can also remix it. So if I see something that is funny, for example, I saw somebody took a popular meme character and put it into the world of the video game Death Stranding.

• 7:20Speaker 03

  And some people hit the remix button and they said, well, put him in this video game instead, or instead of this meme character, actually make him Jesus. And you do that just by typing out a few words in text and Sora will then generate a video, which then appears next to the original video. So if you see a video on Sora you really like, you can kind of swipe to your left and videos appear at the right and show you all the remixes that people have made.

• 7:46PJ Vogt?

  So, okay, so that's the tool that's you playing with for a couple of days. Like, talk to me about just how Sora 2 was announced to the internet.

• 7:55Speaker 03

  It was announced via a live stream, which is how OpenAI likes to announce things. They'll get members of the team who worked on it. They'll go live on YouTube and they'll kind of walk through, here is the research that we've done, here is the new tool, and then they demonstrate the tool.

• 8:14Speaker 04

  Welcome back to reality. I'm Bill, I'm the head of Sora. I'm Rohan, I lead the Sora product team. I'm Thomas, I lead Sora engineering. Back in February 2024, we introduced Sora 1. We really view that internally.

• 8:26Speaker 03

  The OpenAI live streams tend to be somewhat casual, I would say. No one is in a suit. Everyone is in their sort of San Francisco, slightly preppy hoodie forward uniforms.

• 8:43Speaker 05

  When you see the feed, you're going to see all the fun we'll be having on the Sora team. Some memes have been emerging as we play with the product. There's one about ketchup, I drink ketchup for some reason.

• 8:54Speaker 03

  And everyone is in their 30s, it seems. And they just kind of casually talk through the research they've done, the thing that they made, and it's very much presented as, well, we made something we think it's kind of cool, we hope you like it.

• 9:09Speaker 04

  We're training a lot of models that we think the world can have a great deal of fun with and can bring a lot of joy. So we're really excited to see what you'll ultimately create on this app. We'll see you guys on Sora.

• 9:19Speaker 03

  They tend not to hype things up too much. Sometimes they will say like, you know, we think this is a big leap forward in this way or that way. But these aren't sort of iPhone announcements where the CEO is on stage like constantly telling you how amazing something is.

• 9:35PJ Vogt?

  The way I, as a sort of like, when I pay attention to it kind of tech journalist, I had not seen the announcement, but what they successfully did that caught my attention was that later in the day where they announced it, they were just posting lots of stuff on Twitter. And there was one OpenAI employee named Gabriel Peters who was posting all these sort of funny and goofy videos he'd made of Sam Altman. And Sam Altman had said it so that he could use his face as much as he wanted to, which is such a weird sentence to find myself saying. But the thing that caught me was there was one point where Gabriel Peters has this post and he's like, I have the most liked video in Sora 2 right now. I will be enjoying this short moment while it lasts.

• 10:16PJ Vogt?

  And it was fake security cam footage of Sam Altman stealing GPUs at Target.

• 10:23Speaker 02

  Please, I really need this for Sora inference. This video is too good.

• 10:27PJ Vogt?

  And then being caught and like cuffed by a security guard. And I think he was trying to say, look at the funny thing I made. And I, and I saw a lot of journalists having the same reaction. It was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. This seems like not good technology.

• 10:42Speaker 03

  Yeah. Making realistic videos of people committing crimes that they did not commit can lead to negative outcomes.

• 10:50PJ Vogt?

  What a neutral way to say that. What did you think when you saw that?

• 11:00Speaker 03

  One, I was struck by the fact that Sam had let anyone remix his likeness into anything. He would later post on X that seeing himself so much in this Sora feed was less strange than he expected it to be. But I was thinking a lot about, wow, we have another billionaire who has made himself the main character of a social app. Why does this keep happening to us?

• 11:27PJ Vogt?

  Why do you think it keeps happening to us?

• 11:29Speaker 03

  I think at the end of the day, everyone is the same. They want the most followers and the most likes and the most reposts. That's what I honestly think.

• 11:36PJ Vogt?

  And that people will compete for attention, even if it's negative attention. And the people not willing to do that don't end up in the public sphere in 2025.

• 11:43Speaker 03

  Yes, we live in a world where attention is perceived to be power.

• 11:48PJ Vogt?

  Right. I mean, I saw Sam Altman's face in all sorts of, I saw it in a toilet. I'm a CEO in a porcelain spa. Skibbidu, skibbidah. Yes, yes, yes. That's me, running AI from the bathroom. Can't stop, head above water, flush that tune, everybody bouncing. I saw Sam Altman dressed like a teacup committing acts of musical theater.

• 12:04Speaker 02

  Silver towers breathing snow, fans revolving measured time, keeping circuits still alive.

• 12:10PJ Vogt?

  I saw Sam Altman playing with Teletubbies.

• 12:14PJ Vogt?

  I am gonna touch the purple one. Like, I saw so many Sam Altmans this week. It was weird. It was like he was putting himself into everybody's dreams. It was a very strange thing, because even like the way Elon Musk dominates X.com, it's not the same as just seeing someone in video clip after video clip after video clip after video clip.

• 12:33Speaker 03

  There is a nightmare on Elm Street quality to it, where you're flipping through the Sora feed of dreams, and Sam Altman walks into every dream.

• 12:40PJ Vogt?

  Yes.

• 12:44PJ Vogt?

  Watching one of the most famous tech CEOs appear in realistic video after realistic video of himself in various fake situations, I had that feeling you get when you watch the future become the present. It's happened so fast that it feels almost cringey or millennial, are those different words? To wring my hands about all these deep fakes, they're here. They're gonna keep getting better. And while OpenAI has put safeguards on Sora, users will want AI video generation with fewer safeguards, and companies will compete to give it to them. We all live here. I don't have to tell you how it works. What I did find remarkable was how fast we've arrived at this moment, how we went from, oh, the robots can draw pictures sometimes, to I don't trust political video anymore.

• 13:30PJ Vogt?

  I asked Casey about it.

• 13:34PJ Vogt?

  Can you just kind of help me remember what the steps along the road that have gotten us here? Like, where do we start and how do we get here?

• 13:44PJ Vogt?

  Where did we start?

• 13:45Speaker 03

  We started with a crazy and dangerous dream to build a machine god.

• 13:55Speaker 03

  That most of the people involved said to each other, this would be a bad idea.

• 13:59PJ Vogt?

  The whole time.

• 14:00Speaker 03

  One by one, they said to each other, while this is a very bad idea, I do think I can do it in a slightly less bad way than you are going to. And so I'm going to raise $500 billion and I'm going to do it my way. That was kind of the start of it.

• 14:17PJ Vogt?

  Yes. And then from there, the first image thing I remember was Dolly. But was that actually the first popular one? I remember like, there was a moment where Dolly had first launched and people were making these incredibly primitive. It was like looking at a three year old's drawings, but three olds, a computer. Like, it wasn't that they were good, but the novelty of it was exciting. And the watching a computer try to make images was exciting.

• 14:41Speaker 03

  I did find it exciting. I even thought the images were cool. I mean, at least it was cool that I could say like, make me a picture of a bulldog on the moon. And like 30 seconds later, I'd be looking at like a really cute bulldog.

• 14:52PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 14:53Speaker 03

  So yeah, Dolly was a moment where all of a sudden the idea that you could conjure not just text, but also an image out of thin air became real.

• 15:02PJ Vogt?

  So Dolly's 2022, the other thing I remember, when does video start? Was it like 2024? Do we start to get video?

• 15:09Speaker 03

  Yeah. So Sora gets introduced in December of 2024. So last year and gets added into paid subscriptions for ChatGPT. At that time, it did not have audio. So you could make a very short video clip, but it would not have sound. And so while OpenAI was very interested in exploring what potential applications of this could be, they start working with like Hollywood filmmakers. It can't really make what you and I think of as video, which is video with sound.

• 15:43PJ Vogt?

  Right. And at the same time that they're doing this, it's like OpenAI, this sort of. Pattern for this is OpenAI will release something, they're often ahead. They'll release something that works pretty good and feels like a sketch of what might happen next. And they'll have rules in place to prevent abuse. And then usually there are competitors, like prominent companies, less prominent companies, who will build similar things with fewer guardrails. So like my memory, and correct me if I'm wrong, but 2024, one of the big ones people used was called Stable Diffusion. And Stable Diffusion was like, you could do a very similar thing, but you were much less likely to run into the chatbot on the other side telling you that it couldn't generate an image you wanted.

• 16:26Speaker 03

  Yes, Stable Diffusion made models that were small enough that you could download them onto a laptop and just sort of use them without essentially any guardrails other than whatever might have been baked into the original model.

• 16:38PJ Vogt?

  And what I recall also from that time is like, it's where you see, there's this like, I kind of want to bring it up, the Will Smith video where he's eating spaghetti.

• 16:47Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 16:52Speaker 03

  Oh, that's hot. That is hot.

• 16:56PJ Vogt?

  Uncle Phil, come try this.

• 16:59PJ Vogt?

  Fresh pasta of Bel Air. Do you want to describe it, Casey?

• 17:02Speaker 03

  So this is Will Smith's face eating spaghetti with his bare hands. His chin is kind of bobbing all around, almost like detaching from his face. It's incredibly grotesque. They are playing the Fresh Prince of Bel Air theme song, though, which brings up warm and nostalgic feelings in me.

• 17:28PJ Vogt?

  This infamous video, originally from 2023, before rewatching it with Casey, I've forgotten how aesthetically disturbing it really is. A version of Will Smith, whose facial proportions I would describe as wrong and dripping, shoves a mop-like mass of spaghetti near the general vicinity of his grotesque melting mouth. It was so bad, it went viral. But as new AI video models have appeared, oftentimes people will showcase the new, better version of AI with new Will Smith eating AI spaghetti. It's one of the informal benchmarks for how the technology has moved forward. You can watch these spaghetti videos get realer. Underneath that progress, though, I wonder what's been happening technologically.

• 18:11PJ Vogt?

  Casey says probably some of this is from the models being fed more training data, more video to learn from, and they're using more horsepower, more GPUs, more energy consumption. But beyond that, it's a little opaque what's driving the rapid progress here.

• 18:26Speaker 03

  You know, I tried to get a really good answer that would be accessible to a broad audience on like, why is Sora 2 better than Sora 1? And the answer proved to be just dauntingly technical. Like, one thing that's better about Sora 2 is that it can generate videos faster than Sora 1. And so I know PJ, that you're a smart guy. You're wondering like, well, how can it do that?

• 18:55PJ Vogt?

  Yeah, how can it do that?

• 18:56Speaker 03

  The answer to that question involves step-reduced solvers, rectified flow variance, and kernel-level optimizations. So hopefully that answers your question.

• 19:10PJ Vogt?

  But it's funny, because there's been other kinds of technological advancements where there's been jargony explanations for it that I've read you parse. This feels more jargony and less parseable.

• 19:22Speaker 03

  And I think the reason is because it's relatively easy for me to understand how a single image gets made. You've probably watched this happen. It uses this process called gradient diffusion, where what it's essentially trying to do is find the median in all of its training data. So if you say something like, "Make me a picture of a bulldog on the moon", the model works and it's like, "We're going to show you the thing that looks the most like a bulldog, and we're going to show you the thing that looks the most like a moon, and we're going to show you the thing that looks the most like the two of them together." And you can just sort of watch that like gradually come into focus. Now you think about a video, you have to do that across hundreds of frames over 10 seconds. You have to synchronize that with audio.

• 20:07Speaker 03

  And so there are just a lot more processes that are running in order to make that happen, and they have simply overwhelmed my pathetic human brain in this moment.

• 20:20PJ Vogt?

  Do you get this into the people building it completely understand it?

• 20:24Speaker 03

  What I've learned from my time covering the AI industry, PJ, is that no one who works there completely understands any of it. So, no, I don't think that they totally understand it. I mean, when you talk to people who work on the models themselves, they talk about them like they are growing orchids, right? Where it's sort of like, well, these ones look really good. This one has a problem. We're gonna see if we give it a little more light if maybe the flowers grow a little better, but we're not exactly sure why it turned out that way.

• 20:54PJ Vogt?

  Sora 2, the Sora app, was released to a limited set of users on September 30th. By October 3rd, it would be the most popular app in Apple's store. Setting aside obvious, necessary conversations about copyright or fairness, what was immediately so clear is just that a lot of people really enjoy Sora. It's a novelty. The way that Sora was set up at launch, users could generate videos using realistic images of many copyrighted characters and public figures. Copyright owners' work was fair game by default unless they'd explicitly opted out. That meant I saw a Pikachu from Pokemon grilled in thalade.

• 21:33Speaker 06

  Pikachu on the grill here. It's already got a beautiful char and it smells like somebody plugged in a chicken. Let's give it a flip. I'm gonna carve it into some thick steaks.

• 21:39PJ Vogt?

  I saw a lot of Stephen Hawking's on a lot of half pipes. And I watched last weekend in real life as a group of teenagers and 20-somethings played with the tool and just got totally sucked into it for hours, amusing each other mainly by trying to see how inappropriate they could be. Watching, I thought, okay, a tech company has created one more tasty brand of junk food, a new reason to look at our phones a little longer. It was what I expect from this internet, although not what we've typically seen so far from OpenAI. The company talks about superintelligence, about trying to improve the lot of humanity. And now, they built a tool that let people use Martin Luther King Jr.'s likeness to make more Epstein jokes.

• 22:27PJ Vogt?

  To me, this seemed like a pivot. But was it? What were OpenAI's motives here?

• 22:36PJ Vogt?

  After the ads, some answers.

• 23:22PJ Vogt?

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• 24:35PJ Vogt?

  Welcome back to the show.

• 24:40PJ Vogt?

  So our question, what are OpenAI's motives here? We, of course, reached out to OpenAI directly to ask them what they think they're up to with Sora. A spokesperson said in part, quote, "On the road to general purpose simulation and AI systems that can function in the physical world, we think people can have a lot of fun with the models we're building along the way." "In keeping with OpenAI's mission, it is important that humanity benefits from these models as they are developed. We think Sora is going to bring a lot of joy, creativity, and connection to the world." So that's the company line. But this is the "we're here to help humanity" company unveiling junk food, an AI slop social media feed that is glugging unseemly amounts of electricity? I wanted to ask Casey about this, since as far as I could tell, none of this had been

• 25:25PJ Vogt?

  a part of OpenAI's lofty mission at its start.

• 25:29Speaker 03

  When OpenAI gets formed, the idea is to create artificial general intelligence that benefits all humanity. It's famously set up as a nonprofit. It seems like the last thing that they would want to make is a social app that just sort of sucks away your time. And on Wednesday, October 1st, there's a person on X who posts, "Sam Altman, two weeks ago, we need $7 trillion and 10 gigawatts to cure cancer. Sam Altman, today, we are launching AI slop videos marketed as personalized ads."

• 26:01Speaker 03

  And he's got a point there, right? And Altman actually responds and says, "I get the vibe here, but we do mostly need the capital for build AI," I assume he meant for building AI, "that can do science. And for sure, we are focused on AGI with almost all of our research effort. It is also nice to show people cool new tech slash products along the way, make them smile, and hopefully make some money, given all that compute need." So that was really interesting to me because it was an acknowledgement of the fact that this is a money-making enterprise, and in part, it is a money-making enterprise that is going to be designed to subsidize the absolutely enormous cost of running OpenAI.

• 26:43PJ Vogt?

  So talk to me about that. Like, the idea is you make one more stupid app to make people look at their stupid phones. And if you can do that, and it causes people to sign up for the more premium version of ChatGPT, that money is just sort of like revenue that OpenAI somewhat desperately needs?

• 27:00Speaker 03

  Yes. The idea is find ways to generate revenue now that help to offset some of your losses across the rest of your business. And here's where we can talk about one of the most interesting and under-discussed phenomenon that we've seen at one of these companies recently, which is what I think of as the Facebook-ification of OpenAI.

• 27:21PJ Vogt?

  Meaning what?

• 27:22Speaker 03

  So when OpenAI gets started, it really is mostly a research lab. You have some startup people in there, like Sam Altman, who used to run Bicombinator, was just sort of like deeply enmeshed in the Silicon Valley startup ecosystem. But it's a lot of sort of big brains who are trying to figure out how do you build large language models that can do everything ChatGPT does today. Over time, though, OpenAI, in addition to being this brainy research lab, also becomes one of the hottest startups in Silicon Valley, maybe the hottest one. And they start to attract a lot of talent from other big companies, including Meta. Recently, OpenAI hired a woman named Fiji Simo to be what they call their CEO of Applications. So in charge of running the various apps that the company

• 28:05Speaker 03

  has, which now include ChatGPT and Sora, Fiji Simo came from Instacart, where she was the CEO, but previously she had spent almost her entire career at what was then called Facebook. And she worked on systems that helped people spend a lot of time looking at feeds and buying ads based on what they were seeing in those feeds. And when you look across OpenAI, according to some research that we talked about on my podcast recently, we think there are about 700 people at OpenAI who used to work at Facebook. So that's not to say that all of them were Facebook true believers and they want to make ChatGPT look exactly like Facebook. But a lot of the DNA of this company is now people who

• 28:48Speaker 03

  worked on social feeds that were monetized by advertising. And as we saw with the launch of Sora, there is part of the company that is now moving full speed ahead in that direction.

• 28:57PJ Vogt?

  And for you, like, I think one of the interesting things about trying to understand technology in 2025 is that most of the prominent tech reporters in our cohort generation, or at least maybe those are the ones I pay attention to, they're people who watched the rise of and were disappointed by the social media internet. And one of the questions has been the AI tech companies, like, how much are they like what came before and how much are they not? Like, how do you see OpenAI as at least representing itself as having a distinct mission? And like, what does it mean for it to become Facebookified?

• 29:30Speaker 03

  Yeah. So in terms of OpenAI's mission, over the past few months, as there's been more concern that ChatGPT can lead to delusions or even psychosis in the people who are using it, OpenAI puts up a blog post in which they try to assert their mission. And what they say is, we want to help you get stuff done, and then we want you to stop using ChatGPT. We do not want to trap you in some endless engagement loop where you're refreshing a feed 100 times a day. ChatGPT is to help you get stuff done and to improve your life. And

• 30:10PJ Vogt?

  I just want to say that's very, very different from, that's almost like when I think about why I have positive feelings towards this company. I mean, I've never felt the need to put screen time limits on my ChatGPT use because it's something that I look stuff up on and then I put my phone down.

• 30:24Speaker 03

  Right. And I have felt the same way. And then the week before Sora comes out, they put out something called Pulse. What is Pulse?

• 30:32PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 30:32Speaker 03

  Pulse is a feed of stories personalized to you. Some of those are news stories. So if you're like me, read a lot of news, it'll be like, hey, here's what's going on with the TikTok sale. But then it'll also say, hey, you were looking up some stuff about meditation. Here's a quick meditation you can do in between your meetings today. And, you know, we know you got a dinner coming up this weekend. Like, here's a side dish that you could make. And on one hand, this is like, good and helpful stuff. I basically like the idea of it. But is it also a feed I can come back to and check every day? Will they send me a push notification if I let them, letting me know that my Pulse is ready? Is this an obvious spot where they could integrate advertising in the near future? Of course.

• 31:12PJ Vogt?

  I see. And so the question, one of the questions you have watching this right now is

• 31:19PJ Vogt?

  OpenAI says, and let's just like give them the benefit of the doubt. OpenAI believes that they have a mission and the mission is in a real way to improve humanity. And like, obviously, there's lots of potential downsides, which we can talk about. There's energy consumption and climate risk and job loss. But they have this optimistic vision and the optimistic vision requires tons of money. And so one of the ways that they are trying to suck money into that mission is to be a little bit more like Facebook. And one of the questions you have to have is like, how much do you trust them to be a little bit like Facebook? Versus in two years, ChatGPT is a super optimized product that gets you to stare at your phone

• 32:03PJ Vogt?

  using all the tools, the existing social platforms used to get you to stare at your phone, most of which leave you feeling worse off when you're done.

• 32:09Speaker 03

  Right. So unfortunately, I do think the trend is that the OpenAI products are starting to look more like social media apps in that they are asking for more of your time. They are becoming more explicitly commercial products. One of the other changes that they've announced the week that we're talking is that there is now a commerce integration into ChatGPT. And so you can start buying products directly from the ChatGPT feed. Over time, all of this adds up to something that could very credibly serve not just as a replacement for Google, which is where a lot of the attention has focused so far, but possibly for the meta family of products as well. So on one hand, there is still kind of the big crazy AI story of, oh, gosh,

• 32:54Speaker 03

  what happens if the machine god does get built and none of us have jobs anymore? But there's this other, much more normal and traditional Silicon Valley story, which is hot new startup comes along and starts to eat the lunch of the incumbents. And a lot of what we've seen OpenAI do over the past few months has been much more in that direction.

• 33:17PJ Vogt?

  Remember, according to Sam Altman's tweet about all this, his belief is that if OpenAI is going to deliver on its promises to humanity tomorrow, it needs capital today. That's why they've begun to nibble at the lunches of these existing social media companies. OpenAI needs more capital, seemingly always, because the resources that these AI companies are fighting for are very expensive, particularly compute power, which comes from enormous data centers, which need oceans of electricity to run. This is the subject, actually, of a couple of stories we're working on that'll be out in the next months. But that said, for the purposes of this story, all you need to remember is that OpenAI is currently spending enormous amounts of money to try to stay ahead of its rivals.

• 34:01PJ Vogt?

  Because nobody competing in AI seems particularly interested in second place.

• 34:06Speaker 03

  There is a belief within AI world that this is maybe a winner-take-all race. And if not a winner-take-all race, then probably a winner-take-most race. That has been the case with many of the big internet categories, right? There's more than one search engine, but Google took most of the market share, unfortunately for your show.

• 34:31PJ Vogt?

  Thanks. We keep trying to hire. We keep trying to head on from Google.

• 34:35Speaker 03

  There's more than one social network, but for a long time, Facebook had taken most of that market. So the question is, is AI sort of the same thing? Where one company creates the AI that is used by 80-plus percentage of the population? And if that is the case, you want to be that company. And right now, the race is still unsettled. OpenAI has done a great job so far of cementing itself as the leader in that category, but there are a lot of challengers nipping at its heels. And the big incumbents have started to wake up to the fact that, oh, wow, these guys actually could eat my lunch. You know, Mark Zuckerberg is browsing that Sora feed, and he's going to go put the fear of God into his employees, because this is something that he thinks about constantly, right?

• 35:18Speaker 03

  It's like, what is the thing that is finally going to dethrone me? So you're just starting to see all of these very competitive, very ego-driven executives taking a look at the future and thinking, it had better be my name that gets written in the history books as the person who builds the machine god, and we are going to spend as much money as fast as we can to get there.

• 35:38PJ Vogt?

  And so for this narrow thing this week, like Sora 2 launched as basically AI TikTok. Do you think it will work? Like, asking people to make predictions is kind of unfair, particularly about something measurable, like the success of an app. Like, I understand what I'm doing is unkind. But like, do you think that OpenAI will make the money it needs to offer this thing? Do you think people will use it the way it seems to want people to?

• 36:01Speaker 03

  I'll tell you the prediction that I have that I am confident about and that I think I might differ from my Peters on. I think this feature that they're calling cameos, which is the ability to take your friends likenesses and your own likeness and put it into whatever situation you can dream up that the content guidelines will allow. I think that's here to stay. I think people are really gonna like that. I think it's the sort of thing that enlivenes any group chat, which is where most discussion now takes place. And I think you can make a lot of like fun and funny stuff that will like drive memes and engagement online. Can OpenAI take that basic creative tool and build an entire social network around it? That's a much bigger challenge and it is impossible to judge

• 36:43Speaker 03

  on the first week whether a social network has any staying power. By default, every social network dies. There have only been a handful that have managed to last a decade. And the ones that have done that successfully have essentially found some kind of influential community that had a reason to be there and liked being there. And they just like kind of stuck around and they drew more and more people to them over time. And the creative tools evolve and maybe the people who are creating things there find ways they can make money, right? Like, these are some of the ways that these networks can take off. And it just remains to be seen whether Sora is going to be one of those things. But we have reporting that OpenAI has thought for a long time, not just

• 37:25Speaker 03

  about creating a TikTok clone, but also maybe wanting to go after X, wanting to replace the Twitter of old with something.

• 37:33PJ Vogt?

  Would that, I don't understand. What would that? A Twitter where nobody's real?

• 37:39Speaker 03

  Well, I think the idea was like, there should be a place where you can share and discuss your creations in OpenAI. So, you know, at the time, we were thinking, maybe it's the images that you're creating. Maybe, you know, you want to share some of the conversations that you're having with ChatGPT. I realize none of this sounds like fun or interesting to browse, but like, these were some of the discussions that people were having. Now along comes Sora. And it's like, oh, well, like, maybe that's actually the core of it. It's like, people are sharing these videos, but it would not surprise me at all if this thing starts to gather momentum and OpenAI says, you know what? You can actually share text posts in the feed now as well, if you like, right? You could use the Sora feed as the basis to create something larger. So if they feel like they're having some success, they may go for it.

• 38:24PJ Vogt?

  It's funny, you know, I've been a bystander to a fight between an adult and a teenager about social platforms. And like, there's been an attempt to hold the line against a teenager getting on Instagram. And what's been hard is that for the teenager, they're like, this is where my friends are. Like, plans are being made here, homework assignments are being shared here, not by the teacher, but like, it's communication that they legitimately have a need to have. And as an adult, you're like, the platform doesn't care about your relationship with your friends. The platform is holding that relationship hostage so that the platform can have a relationship with you.

• 39:02Speaker 03

  Yes, correct.

• 39:03PJ Vogt?

  And the fear isn't what your friends are gonna say to you on the platform. The fear is that once you get on the platform, what your relationship with it's gonna be? And there's something very confusing to me about right now, where if OpenAI wants you to have a relationship with its platform, but its platform isn't even kind of about other people? Like, it wants you to share your funny Sora videos so that you see the funny Sora videos, and then more people get online and talk to their chatbots. It's very weird trying to imagine what an AI-mediated social platform is gonna look like. And I do kind of have faith in their ability to draw people into it.

• 39:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, I basically do too. You know, one of the dimensions of this conversation that we haven't discussed yet is that I think a lot of folks who are around our age have a powerful disdain for what they would call AI slop. And they're in disbelief that companies keep creating tools to make and share it. And I'm sympathetic to that view. It's weird for me to go on Facebook and see Shrimp Jesus and obviously Fake Woman, who says that she just turned 101 today and made a birthday cake, but there's no one here to celebrate, and it has like 800,000 likes and comments from people wishing her happy birthday.

• 40:22Speaker 03

  It's weird to me that that's like so much of our reality, and it's easy to get from there to, this is all gonna burn itself out. Like, this is obviously stupid. But I do think that this is one of the lessons of the internet over the past year. Is that you can say on one hand, I don't like AI slop. It makes me uncomfortable. I can't imagine spending much time looking at it. And then on the other hand, digging into it a bit and finding out this stuff is crazy popular. You know, you read the comments of these things and people seem to have an awareness that like their brains are being cooked as they're watching it. Like they're just sort of being hypnotized into a stupor by the series of images. We haven't talked yet about Meta's Vibes app, which Meta had rushed out the week before Sora launched.

• 41:07Speaker 03

  And is a kind of just worse version of it. Your friends and family aren't in it. It's just sort of random AI generated video. And as I'm flipping through this thing, I'm thinking this is Coco Melon for adults. This is just raw.

• 41:22PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 41:22Speaker 03

  Visual stimulation designed to keep me hypnotically scrolling as long as I can. And on one hand, that might not seem very different than TikTok today. But on the other hand, it's like, well, at least that person made a TikTok. Like at least that girl is dancing, you know? And now it's like, I'm going to get into my bed, but my bed is made out of cookies and I'm going to fold the cookies over me. And there's no real point to it, but God, it looks weird and I kind of want to share it with my friend. And like, this is the sort of cuckoo town direction that everything's going in.

• 41:55PJ Vogt?

  Are we just going to end up looking at colors and shapes?

• 41:58Speaker 03

  We're so close. We're so close to colors and shapes.

• 42:04PJ Vogt?

  Underneath all this conversation, maybe it's just some anxiety that I think everybody who covers tech has right now. The invention of social media was so expensive for society that tech journalists like Casey Newton are now trained to spend way more time anticipating when new technology shows up. What it might break instead of what problems it could solve. There's this hope that if we can see the danger ahead of time, maybe we can somehow be useful. Is that true at all? I don't know. I remember trying to impress a grade school history teacher quoting that line about how we have to know history so we're not doomed to repeat it. He asked me, when has knowing history ever stopped anybody from repeating it? Me, I continue to use our decaying internet.

• 42:49PJ Vogt?

  I continue to play with these new AI tools and I try to stay curious. Which means for me, I try to ask myself a lot these days. What do I think this technology is doing to me right now? And do I like it? And so what do you think? Just like as a person who needs to, like not having high screen time is not really an option for you with your work. Like you need to look at and make sense of an internet that is becoming both less sensical and less human driven. How do you prepare for the next season?

• 43:20Speaker 03

  So to try to inject a little optimism here.

• 43:23PJ Vogt?

  Yes, please.

• 43:25Speaker 03

  I do think that there are these avenues where you see people really hungry for a human connection. I think podcasts are a big part of that. Like I, I look at these AI generated podcasts that people are now making. And I may have some blinders on here because it would be in my interest for this to be true. But I just think, I don't know. In the next two or three years at least, I can't imagine wanting to listen to an AI podcast weigh in on events in the same way that I want to listen to all of the podcasts that I listen to investigate all of the subjects of their interest. I think podcasts give us a connection to real people who we like, thinking through

• 44:10Speaker 03

  difficult problems over long periods of time. And I think that's one reason why podcasts are so popular. Right? I also think that you see this in the rise of newsletters and other kind of niche publications. Right? There really has been a boom in blogging that I sort of thought we wouldn't see again. I thought it was like kind of one and done. But now I feel like almost everybody I know has a Substack that they send out once or twice a year. And I think it's because people want those authentic connections. They want to be able to tell you what they actually care about and how they're thinking about things.

• 44:49Speaker 03

  So I don't think it's as if everyone is giving up on human connection and deep thinking at the same time. I do think there are more and more powerful distractions being injected into the bloodstream of the information economy, and they are kind of sniping people one by one, and it is worse.

• 45:13PJ Vogt?

  I think it's genuinely scary, but I think you're right that it's worth remembering that as some parts of the internet get more senseless, people express a strong demand for sense-making, and that, like, sense-making is still happening. The solution to all of this is clearly podcasts.

• 45:27Speaker 03

  The solution is podcasts. I bet you listeners weren't prepared for that point, but we got that.

• 45:34PJ Vogt?

  Casey, thank you for being part of the solution here.

• 45:36Speaker 03

  My pleasure.

• 45:44PJ Vogt?

  Casey Newton. You can find him on his podcast, Hard Fork, and at his newsletter, Platformer. I recommend both.

• 46:41PJ Vogt?

  Search Engine is a presentation of Odyssey. It was created by me, PJ Vogt, and Trithi Pinamaneni. Garrett Graham is our senior producer. This episode was fact-checked by Mary Mathis. Theme, original composition, and mixing by Armin Bezarian. Our executive producer is Leah Reese Dennis. And thanks to the rest of the team at Odyssey. Rob Morandi, Craig Cox, Eric Donnelly, Colin Gaynor, Maura Curran, Josephina Francis, Kirk Courtney, and Hillary Schaff. Our agent is Orin Rosenbaum at UTA. If you'd like to support our show and get ad-free episodes, zero reruns, and even extra interviews, please consider signing up for incognito mode. You can join incognito mode at searchengine.show. Follow and listen to Search Engine wherever you get your podcasts.

• 47:25PJ Vogt?

  Thank you for listening. We'll see you next week.