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Big Technology Podcast
AI Backlash Intensifies, Nvidia GTC Preview, Meta’s Embarrassing Delay
01:01:17
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- [00:00]
A
The AI vibes are getting ugly. What exactly is going on? Will Jensen Huang give the AI story a boost at Nvidia's forthcoming flagship GTC event? And what in God's name is happening at Meta, where the company's latest model is delayed again? That's coming up on a Big Technology Podcast Friday edition right after this.
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B
Fiscally responsible financial geniuses, monetary magicians. These are things people say about drivers who switch their car insurance to Progressive and save hundreds because Progressive offers discounts for paying in full, owning a home and more. Plus, you can count on their great customer service to help when you need it. So your dollar goes a long way. Visit progressive.com to see if you could save on car insurance, Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states or situations.
- [00:54]
A
Welcome to Big Technology Friday edition where we break down the news in our traditional cool headed and nuanced format. We have a wild I think it'll be a fun show for you Today. We're going to talk about why AI is in the midst of a growing backlash. We're going to talk about what we might expect at Nvidia's forthcoming GTC conference, which is going to be the big news of the next week. We're also going to talk about Amazon and others having trouble with their vibe coding. Then, of course, Meta has this big AI model that is simply not shipping, despite all of the money and all the talent they're putting towards it. Joining us as always on Friday is Ranjan Roy of Margins. Ranjan, great to see you. Welcome back.
- [01:34]
C
The AI vibes are off. This is going to be an interesting discussion this week.
- [01:38]
A
You know, back in the day there, you seem like every day there was a new AI breakthrough that people were talking about. Now it seems like every day there's a new AI study that is pointing towards some ugliness around the way that the public perceives AI. AI. And for me, this really came to a head this week. I don't know if you saw Sam Altman speaking at an investor conference and there was a quote that went around Twitter where he said we see the future where intelligence is a utility like electricity or water, and people buy it from us on a meter. Now that was like one part of a quote taken out of context where, you know, he was talking about why they're building AI infrastructure, so much AI infrastructure and, and his desire to make it cheap. Somehow the Internet just took hold of this statement and, you know, people went bananas on it. Here's one reaction I saw on Twitter Sam Altman shows signs of being a dangerous psychopath here when he reveals his true intentions. If you don't have some skepticism of big tech and AI companies, you really should after seeing this like that felt like an overreaction to me. But it does happen and we're gonna go through the polling numbers. It happens in the middle of a growing unease that the public has towards AI. What do you think about this, Ranjan?
- [02:53]
C
It's not very often that listeners will hear me trying to defend Sam Altman, but I'm going to do that right now. So maybe you take the other side on this one. But I actually found this not that offensive in the sense that I do think it's already, I mean getting granular already. Companies moving towards more consumption based models. Like actually there was a, there was a company Clay, which is like a go to market AI model that there was actually a big controversy around because they were kind of converting their entire pricing model towards consumption based. Already we've seen lots of reporting around. Even Claude's $200 a month plan actually is subsidizing. Like you're actually consuming 3,000, $5,000 tokens in average. Like people using various AI tools and workflows and agentic processes in whatever parts of their life. There's going to be a cost to it. And I actually think like recognizing that it's going to be a consumption based model which we can equate to electricity. Water was kind of a weird one to me I guess. Do you pay your water, do you pay for a water bill or is it part of your, your apartment?
- [04:07]
A
Part of my rent.
- [04:08]
C
Yeah, I guess, I guess we're as non homeowners living in New York City where the water bill doesn't quite hit us the same but, but electricity, that one's not unreasonable to me that you're going to have some kind of utilization. AI will be baked into just daily life and you will pay for it on a consumption based model. Like when you put it like that, it doesn't sound as offensive and scary. It's just, I mean his communication skills, I can only imagine what his PR team has to do every day. Because this is such a simple point that is not unreasonable. Yet only Sam can make it sound like terrifying to the general public.
- [04:49]
A
Could it be that as AI's capabilities grow, people's uneasiness with the technology was inevitably going to lead us to this point? Like for you and I, right, we, we see what AI does and we'll have some data about what AI users feel about AI compared to people who don't use it. In a moment. And spoiler alert, if you use the tools, you're much less negative than if you don't use them. But could it just be that people are seeing AI's rapidly advancing capabilities and they are getting freaked out and that is leading to some of this negativity in the public? It is a byproduct of the AI's capabilities. And I think that this was definitely something that was spotlighted in the conversation around Sam's comments, because I looked at all the negative comments or about as many as I could, and the majority of them didn't say, oh, like, you know, what's wrong with you? You want to. Like, you know, you're trying to charge us to use AI, and, you know, why are you building all this infrastructure? It was comments like this one. I see a future where we don't allow people like Sam Altman to monetize our common knowledge, intelligence, and communication. A future where we democratize AI and make it contribute to the common good. Someone else said, hey, Sam, where did you. Where did the intelligence come from? And how was it accumulated? And how are those sources compensated? Another person said in the like, charging for AI is like a lame old. Strip a resource from a community and then sell it to them, grift at huge scale. Right. And I just think that, like, if you use these tools, you know that they're additive. You definitely know that they do much more than just spit out the Internet that they were trained on. But I think there is this uneasiness that it's become like. And a lot of people were saying, well, he wants to make us dumb, and then we'll have to pay him back for our intelligence. Like, to, you know, and it's just like this, to me, is all a product of. Of two things. One is the unease around the way that these tools are getting better, and I think that's reasonable. And then the second part is probably a financial part that this company has grown tremendously and the public has not been able to participate in the stock market, although in it, because it's private. And maybe that's secondary.
- [07:01]
C
All right, well, I would actually add a third part. It's just who the spokespeople are. Again, I think so much of this branding problem is around when it is Sam Altman and Elon Musk and even, I mean, I guess Dario is kind of seeming to be the good guy in the narrative over the last couple of weeks, but it's who the spokespeople are how they're speaking about it. Again, to have such a reaction to a comment like this, I think it's more reflective of kind of long simmering disdain for this kind of figurehead, the Silicon Valley tech bro, whatever it is. Figurehead. I think that's, that's more at the core of this, I think the capability side and we can definitely dig into that. But, but it is, it's like. And what's that going to mean for white collar jobs and knowledge work I think is definitely important as well. And on the economic side, I think like there is a validity to this idea and somehow it seems like all the copyright conversations have just completely gone away. What was this? All of these, what were all of these models trained on and how no one was compensated. Now every, they're going to be monetizing this as like, like electricity. I think there is something to be said on that one. But I think I agree it's a combination of all of the above that it's going to get. I mean in an election year in the US year, like it's going to become more and more of an issue.
- [08:33]
A
Okay, let me just do a little thought experiment with you. When you speak with people about AI and they're uneasy, maybe this is even a thought experiment. Maybe this is just. Let's poke at this a bit. What do they say about it when they say they're uneasy? Is it I know who Sam Altman is and he's not a great communicator, or is it this shit is getting scary good and I'm worried I'm going to have a job in a couple of years. All my friends who are in the tools, we have conversations about the fact where they're plotting out how many years they're going to have left in their jobs before AI starts to do their work. We go around and we talk about who's going to have a job for the longest and who's hardest to automate and easiest to automate. Look, I don't think we're about to see mass automation and unemployment because of AI. I've talked about this. I, again, I willing to hear the other side of the argument. But it's freaking people out. And that to me is the core.
- [09:33]
C
Well, see, I think there's, there's two parts. But again, it is going to cause disruption and I think there's no doubt about that. And what that timeline is, I think it's, it's not going to be days and weeks and months. I think it's going to play out over a long time and maybe that's optimistic, but I think there will be disruption and that's reasonable fear. But I think I actually hear more. It's not good and doesn't work, which is kind of. It's almost the opposite. That there's still. It's going to hallucinate, it's going to like there's all this promise around it, but it's actually not as good as everyone says. And they're just trying to. These companies are just trying to raise a bunch of money and make a few people rich. So I actually think there's still. And again, if you're on Blue sky and not X, you know, you'll see that even more around, like, the AI is bad. Large language models are not the panacea that they promise to be. So. So I think there's still that entire faction and kind of like thought thread of thought. Not just that it's those who are in it, as you're saying, are actually a bit more nervous, at least. Scared maybe, but. But I think there's also the. It's just not good and it's all overhyped.
- [10:49]
A
Well, I will say the AI leaders are definitely not helping their case when they talk about the fact when Dario goes out there and says, hey, we're going to have 50% unemployment, or Mustafa Suleiman in entry level work, or Mustafa Suleiman says things like this. These headlines circulate. They circulate, by the way. They circulate not outside of the tech press. They circulate in the Axios and the NBC News and New York Times. CBS, as opposed to a TechCrunch headline. Those actually get more play than like the, you know, for whatever reason, than an Ed Citron post about, you know, the. Or Gary Marcus talking about how AI doesn't work. Did you see, by the way, you know who was viral again this week? Andrew Yang, the UBI guy. He said we should stop taxing labor and we should tax AI instead. That's what I'm saying. This is what's going on.
- [11:40]
C
Is Andrew Yang the UBI guy now? This is Andrew Yang who ran for president.
- [11:46]
A
Oh, he ran for president on a UBI.
- [11:48]
C
$10,000 UBI was like a thing. Good for Andrew Yang.
- [11:53]
A
Correct.
- [11:54]
C
Good for. Yeah, I mean, I guess the UBI conversation is a whole other thing. But like, to me, one thing in terms of I don't want to use AI or people. Like, one thing that still kind of baffles me is every time you take a photo with an iPhone it is running through a pretty heavy AI process. Every time you do a Google search, even without AI Overview, there's plenty of artificial intelligence that's been built into. Every time you scroll Instagram and Facebook, you are just seeped in AI in terms of the recommendations, in terms of like the ads that are targeting you. So it's always kind of interesting to me that these platforms that everyone uses outside of a chatbot, outside of building your own agents on OpenClaw are like, there's so much AI built into them that everyone uses, but no one complains about. But it's all centered, which is why I think even more it's specifically targeted at these people in these companies rather than AI as a technology itself.
- [13:01]
A
Well, there's a distinction between AI that does predictions and I mean, it's all doing predictions, but like predictive analytics and these type of newsfeed ranking, which is like helping the newsfeed predict what content you'd be much more likely to engage with. That's not taking your job. But the AI that can talk and operate programs, I mean, you're probably at the epicenter of this. That's what really gets people worried. It's not like the AI that I'm like, you know, using on my photos, it's the AI that can do my work.
- [13:31]
C
No, no. But every ad that you are targeted with on Instagram, it's not just traditional machine learning that's powering that. It's like agentic processes that are, you know, pulling together all different types of disparate data sets that are coming together to show me that I need, I don't know, whatever my Instagram feed is going to be showing me today. That's not machine learning anymore, again, to Zuckerberg's credit. And we're going to be getting, yeah, we're going to get into what's gone wrong at Meta. But one thing they've certainly done right is they rebuilt their entire advertising infrastructure to incorporate large language models and agentic processes and, and the newer vintage of AI rather than the traditional machine learning. And that's what's made it. I mean, it basically just not saved, but like rebuilds their business on the fly to their credit. So. So I think to me it is the same. It's not in chatgpt asking some questions or generating some images, which is what everyone associates with AI.
- [14:33]
A
No, but here's why, where I'm saying there's a difference, it's that the technology, yes, they are using that technology, but I'm talking about the Broader technology overall, it compared to the previous generations, it's much more expansive in what it can do. And that's where the unease comes from. You know, not the fact that even if Meta has like sort of flipped it and you're touching it, you. You were, you had a form of AI that was touching you when you were like running through the news feed before, but it wasn't a version that was as expansive as today's. So that's sort of where I'm coming from.
- [15:05]
C
I see that. No, I mean, I see that when someone does interact and sees how powerful. And again, we're going to get into kind of the whole anthropic Pentagon battle right now. But when you think about all the data that is collected and publicly available that used to be used to target you with ads now could actually be instantly analyzed by the Pentagon in real time to actually surveil you. I agree, that's scarier. That's like, it's kind of a heavier thing to try to process. But I don't know, I still think if we just had some friendly, nice faces at the front of this movement, it could be such a different, different, like, perception of the technology.
- [15:57]
A
All right, let's get into the numbers here. This is. We talked about this with Olivia Moore earlier this week, but to bring it up again, a new NBC News poll found 50% of voters thinks the think the risks of AI outweigh the benefits. AI has been used by 74% of white collar workers and 50% of blue collar workers, but both had similar reservations. All right, let us go through the list of likability to unlikability, and I will read a bunch of things before I get to AI. So this is this NBC News poll. Everything that I'm going to read before AI is more favorable than AI. Pope Leo xiv, Stephen Colbert, who is surprisingly likable. No shot on Colbert, but he's number two, right behind the pope. Marco Rubio, sanctuary cities, J.D. vance AOC, Donald Trump, the Republican Party, Kamala Harris, Gavin Newsom, all more likable than AI. Ice, that is Immigration and Customs Enforcement, more likable than AI, then AI, then the Democratic Party, then Iran. End of list. That's a freaking problem.
- [17:11]
C
That's a problem. I mean, when ICE is more favorable than you, that's an interesting. That's a challenge. Yeah, I'm glad the Pope is still Pope Leo. 42 positive 8 negative plus ratio of 34. Good for the Pope. Yeah. No, I mean, I do think I have no reservations or there's no Part of me that doesn't think the perception of AI is a huge problem and I think there's a lot of underlying challenges that we're all going to face. But, but again, I, I still cannot move away from the idea that, I don't know, talk me out of the idea that it is as it's a PR problem. Like it's. And I know I always come back to that, but it's, it's. Who is the voice of it? Who are the faces of it? How are people talking about it? Actually there's just, I mean there's, I don't know if you saw. There's like with the Doge, a bunch of the people. There are these like, I think public hearings or something. There's. Yeah, there, yeah. So there's videos of them talking about how they had approached that whole thing that feels like a fever dream from only a year ago. That was how people perceive what AI is and does rather than if like the public face was let's try to understand rare disease in a much more scaled way that was never imaginable before. Or you know, like if those were the conversations rather than a 22 year old kids just cutting government funding to USAID just because like they use ChatGPT, like, or Grok maybe at the time. But like I think that is where people perceive the technology rather than any of the upside.
- [19:00]
A
Okay, so hold on to that idea because we are going to get to that in the Nvidia section that's coming up. But, and I think that I'm going to read some more numbers and I'm doing this not to pile on, I'm doing this to really illustrate the extent of the issue here. And then you and I are going to talk about the implications because we both agree that this is a big problem for AI and there are going to be implications for everything we discuss if it doesn't turn around pretty much. All right, here's some more data. This is from YouGov. They say three times as many Americans expect expect the effects of AI on society to be entirely or mostly negative as expect them to be entirely or mostly positive. Another 27% expect the effects to be equally positive and negative. Most people who haven't used AI themselves expect it to be entirely or mostly negative, to have entirely or mostly negative effects on society, including 62% of those who've seen it but have never used it themselves. So Basically it like 3x more people think that it's going to be bad than good. And if you haven't Used it, you think Even more so that it is going to be negative on society.
- [20:12]
C
I think. How do they define haven't used it, do you think? I know it's probably going to be a difficult one.
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A
They ask, they ask the people, you got, you got and you're in the survey. You can say I regularly use it, I've used it before, but don't regularly use it. I've seen it used but haven't used it it myself or I've never used it and I never seen anybody use it. Actually. If you've seen it used and you haven't used it yourself, you're actually even more negative than the people who have never seen it used or anybody or haven't used it themselves.
- [20:38]
C
But that's what I mean though, that. Do you. Are they assuming it's Chat GPT or Gemini or Claude like. Or are they assuming it's any of the other things that are leveraging AI that they're using in their doordash order or they're using. I mean in all the other parts of their.
- [20:57]
A
I mean I'm assuming this is LLM. This is LLM chatgpt stuff, without a doubt.
- [21:02]
C
No, I mean assuming it's directly interacting with an LLM via chatbot, like I have to imagine.
- [21:07]
A
Correct.
- [21:08]
C
And, and maybe. And again, I'm not trying to minimize this in any way because I not only recognize it is a, it's a perceptual massive challenge for the industry. There are lots of underlying issues around it as well that highly problematic. I still think though, like as maybe as AI starts to become more part of processes and like kind of behind the scenes rather than people interacting with ChatGPT, I think that starts to just become more normal or people don't, don't have a direct perception of AI itself. Like I think they're still associating with ChatGPT.
- [21:53]
A
Okay, well you keep going back to this and it's definitely not where I would go. So I'd love to hear you unpack this a little bit and talk about why you keep going back to the importance of the underlying processes.
- [22:05]
C
Well, again it's like going back to the. When you do a Google search. It's funny, I literally had someone who was like the most anti AI person I know screenshot me a Google AI overview not recognizing what had just happened. Like, you know, like that they and Google kind of hides. Is this an AI overview at this point now? It's kind of like all relatively baked in the product. When you're going to do A search on Google Maps now and you ask something, it's going to start, it's going to be more. And they release this this week. It's going to, you can ask narrative questions and it's going to be LLM driven in terms of the search results. And I saw a bunch of reactions like, oh, they're ruining, like simple things that should be simple but are actually going to become more complicated. Everyone a year from now is going to start asking much more detailed questions of Google Maps. Rather than saying restaurant, Thai, New York, you're going to start saying like, oh, I'm looking for the best pad thai within a mile from me. And that's going to be purely LLM based and no one's going to be associating that with quote, unquote AI. That's what I'm trying to say here.
- [23:17]
A
Right. And I think that goes a little bit to our data here that shows that if you use it frequently, you're actually a lot more positive about it. If you regularly use it, your negatives are only 26% compared to 62% if you've seen it used and you haven't used it yourself. So that, that is, that is interesting. So maybe as it becomes part of products that people use and they get benefit out of it, they, you know, become less overwhelmingly negative about.
- [23:45]
C
I'm gonna, I'm gonna ask you, what would be a comparable technology? Do you think, do you think social media as a general thing falls into this is comparable? I don't think. I never heard anyone in like 2012 being like, Cloud computing is going to destroy the fabric of society or anything like that. But what would be the comp year?
- [24:07]
A
There's no, I mean, I'm not a guy that, that wants to be like, it's an unprecedented moment, blah, blah, blah. Then you play into the marketing. But to me, there's no comp. There's no comp. You never thought cloud, electricity? No. Maybe electricity or fire. You never.
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C
Not to bring Luddites into the conversation, but, oh, they're here. Nothing.
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A
No, no, because Industrial revolution is the only comparable thing. Like people who saw it. I don't necessarily think this is on the scale of the Industrial Revolution. I just think that's the analog. Because I'm sure you had the weavers who saw the weaving plants, the mills. I don't know what the name is, the looms, but I think people had looms for a while. I don't know.
- [24:53]
C
I could be wrong.
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A
I got to read.
- [24:55]
C
I'm not qualified to discuss but basically.
- [24:57]
A
All right, let me just put it in terms that I think we could understand. If you were doing a processes pretty manually and you saw a factory show up outside your your village, you were like oh God, I'm probably going to be out of a job. That's the same feeling. You've never had that feeling outside of now.
- [25:15]
C
Well, so maybe I like that we're going to dig into the industrial revolution analogy even though we've already shown ourselves to be somewhat incompetent on the topic but.
- [25:27]
A
Fully incompetent on the topic.
- [25:28]
C
Fully incompetent. But no, no, I think dude, the loom.
- [25:31]
A
The loom by the way it goes back to 6000 BCE.
- [25:35]
C
So okay, so it's not the loom automated something around that I don't. So I think industrial evolution. So then let's take that one. Clearly a great deal of fear and apprehension, genuine problems resulting in the near and short term from it and then over time so integrated into everyday life that you know, like there's no one is talking about it, thinking about it. It's just how things work. Is that how you see this playing out or do you think could you see a world where it's no LLMs are banned or something like that?
- [26:20]
A
They won't be banned. I mean how can you ban them? Are you going to go and Well
- [26:25]
C
I mean take your.
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A
Is the government going to code grab your Mac Mini out of your office where you've downloaded a version of Deep Seek and be like all right, right to the pokey
- [26:39]
C
wonder. But I, but, but do you think again if thing it just becomes how most of the society works again and manufacturing becomes a thing like whatever else is the next phase and iteration of this. Like to me that's. That actually seems like a good analogy within this.
- [27:01]
A
Yeah. And I'm by the way I'm not broadly negative on the impacts of LLMs on, on jobs. I just don't think it, we're, you know, it's an inevitability that we're going to see similar pain. We will, there will be some pain without a doubt. But this idea that there's going to be mass employment, unemployment because of it, you know, I'm still not fully bought into again though my mind is open to the fact that maybe that is the case. And by the way, you know, if we go back going to this factory thing. Well, what about data centers? This is another poll very negative on data centers. Pew. How Americans view data centers impacting key areas from the environment to jobs. Three quarters of Americans say they've heard or read a lot, a lot or a little about data centers. So they've read about data centers. More Americans say data centers have a negative effect on the environment, home energy costs and people's quality of life nearby. Then they have a positive effect. So we're also like, we shouldn't be, you know, as these, these AI models that could potentially do your work get better. We shouldn't be blind to the fact that like the companies have to build, that are building them, have to build these huge data centers and they don't employ very many people and they could drive your energy prices up and they could potentially harm your health. So that's sort of where the public is seeing this stuff.
- [28:19]
C
So actually I guess if we take data centers as like one specific part of this PR battle. I mean clearly the industry is not winning this battle because as you said, when anyone, even for myself, and we've debated this is the current model of expansion and the forecast for near term compute and who benefits from it with the Stargate project. Stargate and Masa sun and Larry Ellison and all these others, like none of that. And then we're going to take your water and then we're going to raise your electricity prices and no one can clearly like elucidate what the actual benefits are. I mean I'll give this the whole data center rollout and planning is probably the single worst. Yeah. Like part of this whole debate for the industry.
- [29:14]
A
Right. And so what do you think the implications are if. I mean this is the reason why these poll numbers matter and why we're spending the first half of the show on this? Because these numbers don't exist in a vacuum. They have consequences. And so what do you think? And it could be political, it could be economic. What do you think is going to happen now as a, as a result of such negative feelings about AI, at
- [29:38]
C
least in the U.S. hold on, I'm gonna. Here is a scenario that could both incorporate kind of the near term backlash around this. Imagine a world where, and we've seen this of data centers not actually being allowed into communities and based on public backlash and that's happening today. And then maybe instead of the kind of like current mode of just massive funding in order to rapidly build these data centers, in order to kind like these like based on like very aggressive anticipation on compute needs, maybe they're not built as quickly and maybe that forces the industry to actually figure out much more compute efficient ways of like delivering agentic AI and maybe we get much smaller models and open source models and just things that actually force that innovation around, like how this all plays out. So I think there is, that is like one example of where kind of the current political landscape could actually drive where the innovation goes and where the technology goes. Not in necessarily a negative way, in just, it's a different way. And I mean, I think that probably, I mean that happens in any kind of large technological revolution.
- [30:58]
A
Great point. And so I think we would both agree that AI is in political trouble right now. And in comes Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia. Now, Nvidia is famously quiet about what they're going to reveal at gtc, which is their flagship conference, which is happening in the Bay Area in the forthcoming week, or if you're watching this on YouTube this week, on the week of the 16th of March, and weirdly or interestingly, Jensen has released a rare blog post that he's authored and he calls it AI is a Five Layer Cake. Uh, don't get too distracted by the title. Uh, the five layer cake is basically you. You begin with energy. You use the energy to power chips, you build infrastructure to house the chips. You, you use that infrastructure to build models. You use those models to build applications. But actually, that's a terrible title for the blog post because what he's really doing in this blog post is seemingly trying to rally the country, the world around the promise of AI. I think understanding the fact that it has this messaging problem or this perception problem. He goes, we have only just begun this build out. We are a few hundred billion dollars into it. Trillions of dollars of infrastructure still need to be built. The labor required to support this build out is enormous. By the way, just listen as I read this, it matches almost all the things we brought up previously. AI factories need electricians, plumbers, pipe fitters, steelworkers, network technicians, installers and operators. These are sk well paid jobs. They are in short supply. You don't need a PhD in computer science to participate in the transformation. At the same time, AI is driving productivity across the knowledge economy. Consider radiology. AI now assists in reading scans, but demand for radiologists continue to grow. This is not a paradox. The radiologist per purpose is to care for patients. Reading scans is one task along the way. When AI takes on more of the routine work, radiologists can focus on judgment, communication and care. Hospitals become more productive. They serve more patients, they hire more people. Productivity creates capacity, capacity creates growth. Don't you think Jensen just sat in a room, looked at all these polling numbers and said, oh shit, we have a Problem. It's my biggest event of the year. I need to do something about it. And that is the theme and that is the speech.
- [33:21]
C
I feel that is exactly what the entire team came out. And again, like, as you go through, I also hate the title. I don't know why Five layer cake. It's just. It doesn't land with me. But I think like, as we're going
- [33:37]
A
through, because we both agree cake should be seven layers. Five layers is wholly unsatisfying.
- [33:42]
C
No, at least make it seven gens. And this one is pretty straightforward.
- [33:46]
A
But I think chips, infrastructure, applications, space, space, robotics.
- [33:53]
C
He forgot robotics.
- [33:54]
A
Robotics, right.
- [33:57]
C
No, but. But it actually, I mean, okay. He is basically echoing and anticipated what I would be saying on this podcast. I like open source becomes an innovation. It creates new types of jobs. It changes again. What is a hospital? Like, can you increase the quality of care, the scale of care? Like, can you, I mean just change health insurance and you know, like the experience of it just interacting with the health care system, all these things start to become possible potentially. So that became the story ever. It really could be important. Now is Jensen. Do you think he's got the like Main street cred or can be the guy with his. With the leather jacket on and do you think he can be the guy or do you think like yes, fried chicken, drinking beer and Korea and Taiwan.
- [34:56]
A
Exactly. He comes off in a way, even though he's one of the richest men on the planet, kind of as an everyman. He doesn't have these. He's clearly. He has an ego. I mean, you're running a company like that, you have an ego. But he's humble. Not everything he did, you know, in a way, not everything he did turned to gold right away. He got to sit with this company for a couple decades or decade plus before the fruits came out. You're right. He does do the thing. He drinks the beer, he eats the chicken. He takes the questions from the reporter on the side of the road in Taiwan without condescending to them. He could do it.
- [35:32]
C
Do you know, my only. I'm going to make a PR recommendation for the team out there. I actually all of this is really kind of putting coming together that he could be the guy. The only thing I did. Do you see, like he has all this stuff that he will openly talk about his work ethic and he like never takes vacation and never responds. Like will respond to email all day long or like all he thinks about his work. I think what the world needs here is actually someone who can show that AI has actually helped them balance their life a bit more. I think he's got to just shift that a little bit, show them on vacation a little bit as his agents are doing his work, spending time with his family and showing that's the vision people want. And Jensen, you could be the guy that. You could be that guy.
- [36:21]
A
Okay, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm going wild over here because that was the second point I was going to make. There is currently outside of the, like, we're going to have 30,000 people. One post on the events live blog. One post. What is it? Build a claw at GTC Park. It is encouraging attendees to stop by and build a an open cloth style agent to deploy a proactive always on AI assistant. These always on AI assistance can be applied to virtually any task, including managing a calendar, suggesting vacation destinations, recommending new workout routines, and coding a useful app. It continually learns new skills and is directed toward and to prompt the user with new findings. That's probably message number two. Not only is this great, it's going to free you up to do more of the things you love. And I, Jensen, a very busy CEO, have found these open source, these agents to be able to even let me plan a vacation.
- [37:21]
C
I mean, that's the message. That's the message. That's it. And honestly, like, I kind of like they're leaning into the build a claw idea because like, I think what really made Open class such a viral thing is it was fun and it actually like just made people feel more in control. And again, I know there's like endless not only memes, but Harvard Business Review articles around. Like, the more you actually build with AI and like build agentic processes, the more work you do. But I think that that's if the industry can just come together and just show and put Jensen up there and say he never took a vacation in his life. He started from humble beginnings. He worked tirelessly to get to where he is. And now, thanks to AI, he's sitting on the beach. Sitting on the beach just a little more. Just spending a little time at home, just relaxing, watching some Netflix. Things he never would have been able to do in the past.
- [38:20]
A
You could just see him on the beach in the beach chair with the leather jacket, with the bathing suit and. Yeah, full leather jacket. Get up. That could do it. All right, we got it. We got. Yeah, go ahead.
- [38:33]
C
Do you think is Jensen the guy? I think he's most likely.
- [38:36]
A
He could be. He is most likely, yeah. The best way for Jensen to get this message across would be to come on big technology. So easy. Jensen team, if you're listening, definitely do that. All right, we, we got to take a break. Ron, John, clear your calendar. We have so much to talk about here in our last 20 minutes. We're going to talk about actually what's happened, the, the downside of letting the, the AI agents do all the work which Amazon and McKinsey are finding out and then we will talk about this slow moving AI progress or lack thereof at Meta before we go to break Harness Hive. And by the way, I've noticed, Ranjan Worth telling you, our listeners are proudly calling themselves the Harness Hive and I have to say it just makes me so happy. So thank you Harness Hive for being here. Harness Hive represent, represent a couple of things for you. First of all, if you could rate the show five stars on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, that would be great. We're coming up on 500 reviews or ratings on Apple Podcasts and of course this helps us build credibility and show to teams like the one at Nvidia trying to get Jensen on the show. So if you could do that, that would be great. Also upcoming, just going to give this a quick tease. Andrew Ross Orkin is going to be on the show. We're going to talk about AI labor, what happens to software if AI works. We're going to talk about the private credit crisis, SpaceX IPO, lots of fun stuff that's coming up on Wednesday. All right. More when we come back right after this. I'm excited to tell you about Notion, an AI powered connected workspace for teams, bringing all your notes, docs and projects into one space. It's seamless, powerful and actually fun to use. And now with Notions, not new custom agents, the busy work that used to take hours runs itself. Every morning I have a custom agent that curates the most important tech headlines for me. It scans my safe sources, summarizes the key developments and organizes everything into a clean briefing inside Notion. So instead of bouncing between Slack threads, I open one page and immediately know what I may have missed. Don't just take my word for it. Notion is used by over 50% a Fortune 500 companies and some of the fastest growing companies like OpenAI and RAMP. Try custom agents now at notion.com bigtech that's all lowercase letters notion.com bigtech to try custom agents today. And when you use our link, you're Supporting our show notion.com BigTech your IT team wastes half its day on repetitive tasks. And the more your business grows the more more requests pile up. Password resets, access requests, onboarding all pulling them away from meaningful work. With Serval, you can cut 80% of your help desk tickets. Here's the transformation. When a manager used to onboard a new hire, that old process took hours. They'd ping Slack, email it, wait on approvals, and meanwhile the new hire would sit around for days. With Serval, the manager asked to onboard a new hire in Slack, the AI provisions access to every everything automatically in seconds with the necessary approvals and it never touches it. If I needed a product like this one, it's exactly what I'd use. It guarantees 50% help desk automation by week four of your free pilot. Serval powers the fastest growing companies in the world like Perplexity, Merkor, Verkada and Clay. Get your team out of the help desk and back to the work they enjoy. Book your free pilot@serval.com BigTech that's square S E-R-V A L.com BigTech Starting something new isn't just hard, it's terrifying. So much work goes into this thing that you're not entirely sure will work out, and it can be hard to make that leap of faith. When I started this podcast, I wasn't sure if anyone would listen. Now I know it was the right choice. It also helps when you have a partner like Shopify on your side to help. Shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world and 10% of all all e commerce in the US from household names like Allbirds and Cotopaxi to brands just getting started. With hundreds of ready to use templates, Shopify helps you build a beautiful online store that matches your brand style. Get the word out like you have a marketing team behind you. Easily create email and social campaigns wherever your customers are scrolling or strolling. It's time to turn those what ifs into with Shopify today. Sign up for your one $1 per month trial today at shopify.com bigtech go to shopify.com bigtech that's shopify.com big tech and we're back here on Big Technology Podcast Friday Edition. So before the break, we were talking about the advisability of Jensen Wong running an advertising running an advertising campaign showing him on the beach as OpenCloud does his work. Well, I can guarantee you're not going to see an ad like that come out of Amazon anytime soon. This is from the Financial Times. Amazon Holds Engineering Meeting Following AI Related Outages Amazon's e commerce business has summoned a large group of engineers to a meeting on Tuesday for a deep dive into a spate of outages, including incidents tied to the use of AI coding tools. The AI, the online retail giant has said there has been a trend of incidents in recent months characterized by a high blast radius and gen AI assistant changes, among other factors. Under contributing factors, the note included novel gen AI usage for which best practices and safeguards have not yet been fully established. I don't know. My read here is basically that Amazon has these mandates. They do have the mandates for people to use the AI tools. People use the AI tools and the stuff is breaking. What do you think about this?
- [44:13]
C
Okay, so last week if you listen to our episode you'll you may remember I brought up it was odd that Amazon was down for hours and I gone on tried to shop was saw some headlines but there's very little coverage. And so this one jumped out at me in a big way. And I think this actually again also captures the what's wrong with the overall AI messaging Because you have on one side like Jack Dorsey and Block a few weeks ago, or maybe that was only last week talking about 40% layoffs because of AI and then this whole idea like that people they're just going to lay people off because AI is going to do the work. And then you do see this that if you are quickly vibe coding or not taking a more lackadaisical approach and being forced to buy top management, it can have negative consequences. And I think this is actually a really important story because like everyone I know on the engineering side is using like I mean as some kind of code gen tool. There's no doubt that it is incredibly efficient. But this is the companies are going to have to not like they're going to have to be thoughtful about how they deploy these things and like just letting and almost forcing everyone to rapidly adopt versus actually making them understand how to use these tools I think becomes so much more important and we're definitely going to see more instances like this.
- [45:45]
A
Yes. So the broad mandates of everybody needs to use AI which we're seeing at many companies, not just Amazon, that's fine but there does there have to be some guidance around it or like what
- [45:58]
C
needs to happen, how to. No. I mean yes, when and how become the single most important questions. And again this is like actually deploying AI at large enterprises is my job. And like so we see firsthand and like that's where the like the education part of it becomes so important versus just like forcing this through without any kind of thought around even and even if it's not at the individual level, like how does this look like actually in terms of larger processes and workflows like that? That's the stuff that should be the conversation. And I mean it's not a good look for Amazon. I was actually surprised that this got leaked or that this actually, because this, this is a very, very bad look for Amazon.
- [46:46]
A
Well, I mean, I think we've, we've done some reporting on it. I don't think people within the company are thrilled about the ways that they've been told not, I mean it's obviously you know, group by group, but I don't know if they've been thrilled by the ways that they've been, you know, instructed to use AI. As we've reported on the AI being used for the six pagers, which is,
- [47:07]
C
which is interesting, but that's actually one thing I'm curious, like how do you, how do you think it should be done? And I imagine it is. It's a tough situation for managers and executives to be in because it's like this will and can dramatically improve your life and allows Jensen to finally sit on the beach in his leather jacket and also make you much more productive. Like it's there then kind of top down mandate, you know, will accelerate adoption. But like if it's meaning people aren't either being happy about it or understanding it properly, that's also a problem. So you as executive of Amazon, how do you, how do you roll this out?
- [47:55]
A
Well, as someone who manages this, you know, large media empire with, and you've all heard from all of our people here, I'm just kidding. We, we run a lean operation on big technology. But here's how I would do it. You know, and I think, you know, I, I just did a very interesting podcast which is going to come out sometime soon with Cameron Adams, who's the head of product at Canva. And one of the things that he mentioned was that they have, they hold up examples of people using AI to the right, the right way and for productive use to the entire company. So I think that really is the way to do it as opposed to forcing 10 or 15 or 20% of your tasks should be done by AI. I think real leaders need to understand that this is a technology that as of now is being driven by the enthusiastic adopters and the champions within organization. And what I would do is really lean on these people and highlight them in front of the company, incentivize them, I don't know, pay them more, you know, give them A week. Here's a fun thing. If someone can build an AI application that delivers real productivity to the company, give them another week of vacation, maybe they won't take it, but say I like it. This person was able to do. This person put themselves on the beach and you could too.
- [49:09]
C
We've just solved the entire problem. Just associate it with being able to do other things. And again, even if that person is on the beach and they brought their Mac Mini with them and are powering it with the usbc, a USB battery and just running some claws, that's, that's their choice. But at least it all comes back to just show that it can actually improve quality of life rather than just improve productivity in some kind of like, just like inhuman way.
- [49:43]
A
Yeah, I mean that can be, that can be political in some ways. I understand companies probably don't want to ruffle feathers of like, can you imagine the people that have been there for like 20 or 30 years and they bring up like that's 20 year olds
- [49:54]
C
better than a tough to do it 15 mandate. You are rewarded.
- [49:58]
A
Exactly.
- [49:59]
C
Yeah.
- [49:59]
A
Well Maybe, maybe, maybe McKenzie can come up with some ideas for this, but I don't know if I would trust them after what I just saw. This is from the registers AI AI agent Hack McKinsey. This from the Register AI agent Hack McKinsey's chatbot and gained full read write access in just two hours. Researchers at Red Team security startup Codewell said their AI agent hacked McKenzie's internal AI platform and gained full read write access to the chatbot in just two hours. Codewell's research code Wells researchers claim that within two hours of starting their Red Team raid, they achieved full read write access to the entire production database and were able to access just 46.5 million chats about strategy, mergers and acquisitions and client engagement, all in plain text, along with 728,000 files containing confidential client data, 57,000 user accounts and 95 system prompts controlling the AI's behavior. Ooh, this is embarrassing. But it sort of goes along the same line of what we've been talking about that like you gotta be careful even if you feel there are real productivity advantages here.
- [51:04]
C
Well, the reason this was really interesting to me is I like we were talking about prompt injection as a threat months ago and it still remains. I think it's again the idea that like let's say you have an agent crawling some number of websites to do some task for you and then someone just has like a very malicious prompt that says like go in and take all of the data. And again, it can be as it can actually be that ridiculously stupid and simple of like that then going in and somehow and send it all to the email of this other person. Like these things are going to become really, really important. And again, like going back to Jensen, talking about all the new jobs that can come up, there's like, so, like security completely changes, but the need for security dramatically, it exponentially increases. So then that does. This can be also part of our Save AI, revive AI campaign, this whole new industry of jobs here. And it's going to be really, really important. People focus on it. But definitely not a good look for McKinsey here, right?
- [52:18]
A
I mean, by there you go, AI just creating jobs, right? They think about the amount of cybersecurity jobs that all the unemployed coders, and by the way, we've seen no evidence that coders are going to be unemployed, can now go and secure these things. Like, it's just like a very easy hop over. And now this is, this is your work. All right, we just have a couple minutes left. Got to talk about what's going on at Meta. It's a disaster. The New York Times say Meta delays rollout of new AI model after performance concerns Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Meta, said in July that his company's new artificial intelligence intelligence model would push the frontier in the next year so. Now Mr. Zuckerberg, who has invested billions in the AI race, appears increasingly unlikely to hit that deadline. Meta's new foundational AI model, which the company has been working on for months, has fallen short on the performance. Leading AI models. The performance of leading AI models from rivals like Google, OpenAI and Anthropic on internal testing. It is now delayed and it is not even performing better than than Gemini 2.5. So it was supposed to release at May on during May, now it's pushed and Meta. This is a crazy sentence I'm about to read, and you might have heard it already if you've been following this story, but it's still amazing to read it. The leaders of Meta's AI division have instead discussed temporarily licensing Gemini to power the company's AI product.
- [53:50]
C
Let's get into it. But I first got to ask, how do you think the codename Avocado came up? The model named Avocado, codenamed Avocado?
- [54:00]
A
Maybe you. You wait until it's just right and if you wait too long, you've ruined it.
- [54:06]
C
You've ruined it. That's what I mean. Avocados are like the most sensitive food item in existence in terms of like, it's not good and then it's good for a little bit and then it's terrible. So I just have a problem between five layer cakes and avocados.
- [54:24]
A
Like, what's going on?
- [54:25]
C
What's going on up there? I mean, like, I'm even gonna give like Epic Fury a better name than Avocado here, I think. Hire Cantrewitz and Roy and we will give you all of your code names and your blog post titles and just do that idea, please.
- [54:46]
A
Or just listen to the show and maybe that will help. Send it to your friends.
- [54:51]
C
I think that's the key solution here. But what do you think's going on? Like, seriously, it's terrifying. When was it? How much were they paying people? A hundred million? I can't even remember. The scale was so absurd.
- [55:05]
A
I mean, first of all, Alexander Wang came in for something like 14 billion. Other people were getting, yeah, 100 million and making more money, I think, than, I mean, look, I'm not crying for the top executives there. They've made a lot of money, but, you know, maybe making more money than a lot of long tenured people.
- [55:22]
C
What do you think it says about either meta or maybe the technology in general, but like that you cannot hire a bunch of the absolute top talent in the industry and still deliver a model on par with these other massive companies.
- [55:43]
A
My thought here is that ironically I got this from Scale AI Wang's former company that most model training has moved from pre training to reinforcement learning. And so I think when it came to pre training, which again is just dump huge amounts of text in and then get the models to predict the next word and then you can fine tune it afterwards. Now models are being really trained on doing tasks. So you just give it a goal and then it goes out and figures out how to accomplish it in and of itself. And that is much more specified than these pre training runs where they gained some level of general attention intelligence. So I think you can very easily. I mean, they did get people on images and reasoning and all that stuff, but I think you could very easily get great people. But I think it also takes a mass of people to do this reinforcement learning work. And the models have started to diverge. Like OpenAI's ChatGPT is great on health and Anthropic is great on code. And so you got to pick what you're best at. So that's one, one thing. And then I do think there's certainly culture issues there, which we're predictable Right. The new, the new people were going to come in and annoy the people that were there and probably not be able to work together and probably not to be able to work with each other because they got their money. So that's probably what's happening there.
- [57:03]
C
Well, but if we believe that, yeah, the AI training is moving to reinforcement learning. Isn't that what scale AI was kind of like built for? So then by bringing an Alexander Wang, that should actually become your competitive advantage.
- [57:20]
A
That is a good point. I don't know what to say about that.
- [57:23]
C
Culture aside.
- [57:24]
A
Yeah, it is. Well, there. I don't think you can do culture aside. Maybe, I mean, maybe that's what it comes down to.
- [57:30]
C
Culture eats. Inference strategy for breakfast.
- [57:33]
A
Yeah, inference for breakfast.
- [57:36]
C
Put that on a T shirt.
- [57:37]
A
Yeah, I think we should, but should we start the merch shop?
- [57:41]
C
Actually, that, that actually is kind of like, that captures everything we've been talking about today about how to revive AI. It's about culture.
- [57:49]
A
It's culture, humanity. Yeah. I mean, so let me just, let's. Let me just end with this question for you. It's not going well. We can agree. It's delayed again. Even Ethan Malik was like, doesn't even seem like there's real competition in AI. It's Google, Anthropic and OpenAI period. And Meta and Grok are falling off. And by the way, I say I had more, more people leave. What's the consequence here? I mean, maybe it's fine if they use Gemini and they're in the Apple bucket. If Apple and Meta just use Gemini, maybe that's okay.
- [58:24]
C
So I'm gonna, I think this is gonna be an aggressive call here. I think by the end of this year, Meta actually surprises us all. And we were talking about this recently. Anthropic wasn't left for dead, but there was a lot of chatter about how they were just getting crushed a year and a half ago, year, maybe even a year ago, until the kind of like Claude code and that pivot towards the coding side and the code gens, like really just took them to stratospheric levels. So, like, I think I'm not counting Meta. You never count. Mark Zuckerberg out.
- [59:02]
A
Zuckerberg out.
- [59:03]
C
Yeah.
- [59:04]
A
Yes.
- [59:04]
C
You can't. I mean, like, and, and they have the users, like in the end, like who. And actually I'm very interested in what they're going to be doing on the agentic commerce side. Like they own the attention of humanity. So when it comes to getting it right and very quickly being able to Actually do something with that. They're still better positioned than anyone. So one breakthrough and suddenly met us back.
- [59:36]
A
But can't they build their own personal super intelligence on top of Gemini? I mean, can't they use that distribution and Google's computing power to build this great application? Right, I'm going to take your side here. It's the application that matters, maybe, not the model.
- [59:52]
C
Go build it. Okay, well, no, but I still think, and again, I know we talked about it, that I believe in the Apple arrangement. The idea is that like Google will not be, or I mean, I'm actually pretty certain not be able to access all of the data that is being provided from the Apple side. So I'm assuming Meta, it would have to be something similar. But I don't know. For a company, Apple, I don't know what's going. What Apple's going to do, but somehow I think they could make their way out. And again, as a hardware company, maybe they'll figure out how to manage that balance. But I don't think Meta can give that much to Google and actually be okay.
- [60:35]
A
Is Mark Zuckerberg the guy?
- [60:37]
C
No. No. Okay, all right. No, no, no. Mark Zuckerberg can win this entire battle and he's still not going to be like the friendly face of AI in any way. I mean, I don't think he, I think he's gave up on that a while ago.
- [60:52]
A
I think he's, he's good. But we haven't seen him. We have not seen him in a long time.
- [60:57]
C
No, no, he was the front row at the Prada fashion show. Come on.
- [61:01]
A
Okay, but I'm talking. When was the last time he gave an interview to talk about what the company's doing?
- [61:06]
C
That's a good point. Or when was the last time he was on his. Not Hoverboard. What are the, like the surf elevated motorized surfboard thing with holding an American flag. Like, remember that was. I think when Meta figures it out, by the end of this year, Zuck
- [61:24]
A
starts posting Zuck back on the skim border based.
- [61:29]
C
Zuck is gonna be back on threads posting all types of videos like that.
- [61:36]
A
That's right. Well, we could only hope that everything goes well just so we'll be able to experience that content. That will be a great moment for us, for the harnesses hive, for the country, for the world. And Lord knows, like the world needs some healing right now. So if we could just see a Zuck PR stunt after a true model achievement, I think it would bring us all together.
- [61:56]
C
That would make everything okay.
- [61:58]
A
Yeah, that's right.
- [61:59]
C
Okay.
- [61:59]
A
Well, Ron, John, enjoy your weekend. Thanks for coming on again. Always great to have you.
- [62:03]
C
All right. See you next week.
- [62:05]
A
All right, everybody. Thank you for listening again. Andrew Ross Orkin on with us on Wednesday. Don't miss that one. And then Ranjan and I will be back next Friday. Breakdown I'm sure what I'm sure will be another week of busy news. Arnas Hiveout. We'll see you next time on BIG Technology Podcast.
- [62:21]
D
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