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Big Technology Podcast
The Web’s ‘Existential’ AI Threat, OpenAI’s Microsoft Office Competitor, Tesla Robotaxi Launch
01:07:15
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- [00:00]
Alex Kantrowitz
Is the web about to collapse as generative AI sends a tiny amount of traffic to websites? According to Cloudflare's CEO. Meanwhile, OpenAI might be building a Microsoft Office competitor. Miuru Murati is starting to tell people what she's doing at Thinking Machines Labs. And Tesla's Robo Taxi initiative is out the gate. We'll cover it all on a Big Technology Podcast Friday Edition right after this.
- [00:29]
Kwame Christian
Hi, I'm Kwame Christian, CEO of the American Negotiation Institute, and I have a quick question for you. When was the last time you had a difficult conversation? These conversations happen all the time. And that's exactly why you should listen to Negotiate Anything, the number one negotiation podcast in the world. We produce episodes every single day to help you lead, persuade and resolve conflicts both at work and at home. So level up your negotiation skills by making Negotiate Anything part of your daily routine.
- [01:00]
Tomer Cohen
I'm Tomer Cohen, LinkedIn's chief product officer. If you're just as curious as I am about the way things are built, then tune into my podcast, Building One. I speak with some of the best product builders out there.
- [01:11]
Reid Albergatti
I've always been inspired by frustration. It came back to my own personal pain point.
- [01:16]
Alex Kantrowitz
So we had to go out to farmers and convince them.
- [01:19]
Reid Albergatti
Following that, curiosity is a superpower. You have to be obsessed with the human condition.
- [01:25]
Tomer Cohen
Listen to Building One on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [01:30]
Alex Kantrowitz
Welcome to Big Technology Podcast Friday Edition, where we break down the news in our traditional cool headed and nuanced format. We have so much to speak with you about this week. In another big week of tech and AI news, we are going to cover the tiny amount of traffic that AI has been sending to websites and whether that is a sign of a greater collapse to come. We'll also talk about the Latest in the OpenAI Microsoft Wars. Some interesting news coming from Anthropic that we can drop today and talk to you about. We also have some news about what Mira Morati is up to at Thinking Machine Labs. Of course, Tesla has gotten its Robotaxi initiative underway and Jeff Bezos is getting married. So joining us as always, not as always, joining us as a special guest here to speak with us about this is our regular Reid Albergatti, the technology editor at semfloor. Reid, great to see you. Thanks so much for coming on.
- [02:23]
Reid Albergatti
Yeah, absolutely. I just got back from the wedding. It was great. I'm just kidding. I was not there. Wasn't at the Bezos wedding.
- [02:30]
Alex Kantrowitz
This is my Easter egg for listeners. I have a list of Celebrities that will be at the Bezos wedding, including one who was listed as ready to go and now apparently is not going to. All right, we'll get to all that at the end. Fine, fine. I'll just give the spoiler. It's Katy Perry. Katy Perry was on the list. Apparently she's not on the list. Now. We'll get to the bottom of this. We do journalism here. We'll figure it out. But let's talk about where we do journalism and where a lot of the happenings on the Internet occur, which is websites. So a couple months ago, we talked about how the CEO of cloudflare, Matthew Prince, had gone basically public and said, listen, compared to a year ago, generative AI is saying, sending way fewer visits to websites as, let's say, Google search. So six months ago, this is. These are the numbers he said Google, the ratio was six to one. OpenAI 250 pages, pages crawled. So six pages crawled one visit from Google. 250 pages crawled, one visit from OpenAI. 6,000 pages crawled, one visit from Anthropic, that was six months ago. Now for Google, it's 18 pages crawled, one visit. OpenAI, it's 1500 pages crawled, one visit. Anthropic, it's now gone up from 6,000 to 60,000 pages crawled, one visit. Prince says people aren't following the footnotes. Is this time to panic? I mean, I sort of, I'm going to title this this conversation or the beginning of this podcast episode, but the web's existential AI threat. Am I getting over my skis, Reid? Is this hyperbole?
- [04:13]
Reid Albergatti
I think it's always a great time to panic in the media business, to be honest. And that's not just a joke. I mean, I think it's like I remember being in studying journalism in college and talking about panicking in the media business. And at that time it was just the web was completely destroying it. I think what's interesting, and Matthew Prince has been on this, you know, he's been talking about this now for a while. I've talked to him about it. I think it's. I think it's admirable what he's doing. But I also think that, you know, traffic was never a good metric to judge whether, you know, a story is valuable and media article is valuable. So if that metric goes away, then, yeah, I mean, it's going to hurt the. It's going to hurt the current industry. But I think it actually is maybe in the end a positive thing. And I think there's two things going On, I mean one is the traffic and the other is like, you know, that they're scraping all these websites and pulling in the information. And that part, if you get rid of traffic as a metric, you don't need to allow these things to scrape your websites, right? I mean it's possible to put a hard paywall in place and to essentially stop that scraping. So, but then you don't get, then you don't get the traffic. So you get rid of that business model. I think in the end it will be a healthy thing for the media. Maybe not for current media companies though.
- [05:40]
Alex Kantrowitz
So Matthew is going to be in New York. I'm in the middle of pitching his teams. Try to get him to come on and talk a little bit more about what he means here. We should note I think he's selling something to help publishers stop the scraping. But I don't think that's really going to change very much because ultimately bots like ChatGPT are already so useful. So I don't think that you're going to have like this, this wall that publishers put up and all of a sudden people are going to go to websites. I think that's probably because it just takes a few websites to get that usefulness into these bots. But re, I, I'll just take the counter argument here, which is it's, you know, traffic didn't matter as long as you had some, right? Like you needed to have a little bit of an audience. And you could say to advertisers, we have a high, a very valuable audience. We have the top executives in the field, therefore you should do this event with us or this engagement when you have zero traffic, that changes. And by the way, it's not just publishers, right? We're talking about the web, which also has, I would say, entertainment sites, booking sites. I mean, obviously Netflix isn't going to go away, but there was a publisher I spoke with, World History Encyclopedia. It's just a site where people go and learn about world history and that's taken a big hit from AI. So if all these different aspects of the web start to go away, that does sound like maybe it could be a crisis. What's your take?
- [07:04]
Reid Albergatti
Well, I mean, look, you make really good points, but I think in the end if what you have is all the high quality journalism is essentially non traffic based, the business model is not, is not maybe you have advertising, but it's not the targeted advertising that we see, you know, in, in the traffic business. Then let's see what these AI models get from this, these few websites that are still traffic based, I mean, it's going to be complete crap. And so I, I think in the end they'll have to figure out some way that they'll either, either have to pay publications to sort of republish on their platforms and that could be, that could be a business that maybe supports media. Other models will, will emerge. Right? I mean, like, you know, at Semaphore you do it to events right? There, there, there are lots of ideas to fund journalism subscriptions. Right before traffic even existed, the media business was pretty healthy, right? Like people paid for newspapers and you know. Yeah, they got, they had the classifieds business and all that stuff.
- [08:06]
Alex Kantrowitz
But, but it's not just journalism though. It's not just journalism. That's the point I'm trying to make is that yeah, we, you know, because we're journalists, we like to talk about the journalism websites. But again, like this is, this is going to be everything.
- [08:18]
Reid Albergatti
Yeah, I mean, look, if, if what you're talking about is like these passion projects that are sort of like the bread and butter of the web. If people don't go to these websites anymore and they get just like ingested into AI models and disappear, I mean, again, like then the AI models won't like, they won't be as valuable. Like there won't be anything to ingest anymore. And so something will have to shake out is what I'm saying. Like it's not, I don't think it's like the Armageddon when it comes to just like the long tail of web content. I don't think it's Armageddon for that. I think something will, you know, I don't know what it is, but like that will work itself out. I think what I really care about is that is that journalism survives. Right? That's what to me the most important thing. And I think, and I think that will survive too. Maybe I just sound like a, like a, just a total optimist, a techno optimist or whatever now. But I do think that.
- [09:15]
Alex Kantrowitz
Yeah, no, I mean it's definitely. You have, of all the people I speak to about this, you have some of the more optimistic perspective perspectives that I've heard about it. I don't fault you for that. I think that we tend to have. Things end up growing together, but not all the time. And it is interesting that you'll end up getting a tremendous amount of power concentrated in the hands of these bots, in the hands of, let's say OpenAI or anthropics. Claude, although they don't really care too much about cloud anymore, but you'll have this power, concentration. Maybe that's why we see all these billions of dollars being invested. If you get the master chatbot where everybody accesses all the content, the news, sports cores, world history, maybe there, instead of going to like booking or kayak, they're doing that within the bot. Then, you know, these numbers that Matthew Prince is putting out, highlights, kind of like the big question we've been talking about on the show for a long time, which is, what is the valuation of these chat bots and these foundational model companies? And when is it going to be justified? And I guess if you gobble up the whole web, you're okay.
- [10:21]
Reid Albergatti
Well, you know, like you mentioned sports scores. That's an interesting one. Like people used to buy, used to pay for newspapers so they could open it up and see the sports score, right? And then, you know, online publications started putting the scores up. And now I think the way it works is if you, if you Google a sports score, you just see the score right there. And I, I believe they have a deal, maybe it's with espn, but like, eventually it's, it's gonna, I think they just get those scores directly from the leagues and they're just gonna be paying the league for that information. That's not really like a valuable service that somebody that some publication is providing. So I think if you're developing, if you're putting out some really valuable thing, I think it'll find a way to be valued. Right. And you talk about these bots. I don't even know if that's how this is gonna shake out. I think what you might have is sort of everyone will have their own personal bot that sort of handles their information diet. And maybe that bot has subscriptions to things and it reads publications for you, but you're at least paying for it. I mean, that's one way this could go. I think we're looking at this right now through the lens of what we already know, which is the current web. And that is all going to change. Everything is just going to be completely different. So I think people often forget that, like the, this is such a fun, this AI stuff is going to be such a fundamental change that like, all these assumptions that we have are you. I think you just have to discount all of them.
- [11:52]
Alex Kantrowitz
Okay. And it's. By the way, it's not just publishers, it's not just web publishers. Also, the infrastructure of the web is going to change. And you recently had a conversation with Liz Reed who runs search at Google. And you had, you asked her about, hey, well how, how's advertising going to work? And you actually have this like idea or this thought that advertising is going to be quite different as we move forward. So what is going to happen to the Google stack? Because I think, and you put this in your article, right? They have so many great AI beds. They have DeepMind and Gemini, they have Waymo, they have Isomorphic Labs. But the reason why the stock is the cheapest, I think, of all Magnificent seven stocks is because we don't know what's going to happen to search.
- [12:31]
Reid Albergatti
It's funny, I wrote that story and then I got, I got a, a message from a Google employee who's asking me if they should keep their stock.
- [12:40]
Alex Kantrowitz
That's the question, right?
- [12:42]
Reid Albergatti
Like that is fascinating to me of like, you know, they're, they, I think they were, I actually, they read that and were like, well, maybe I should keep the stock. I mean that, that's crazy to me that even Google employees are like what? You know, do I even believe in the future of this company? But I think they, I mean Google of all the companies has so much going for it, right? I think they're a pretty good long term bet. But this cash cow search advertising thing is totally threatened by this new model. And I've sort of thought, why have advertising at all in the AI world? At least the kind of advertising that you associate with search ads where you're trying to buy a product and then you get a bunch of ads for similar products and things like that, that shouldn't be necessary in the world of AI. And Liz Reed's point was, well, no, it still is because you'll have like these small companies that maybe want to get their product out like it's newer so it's not going to be read by these things. And then I'm thinking, well, okay, but then I'm not even going to see that ad, right? Like my, my agent or whatever is going to go find the information and then present me with the facts and ask me what I want to buy. So if a human is not seeing an ad, is it really an ad? Like it's something else. It's a service for providing information. And you can imagine a world where there are microtransactions and there's sort of like credible sources of information that can be trusted to provide, not just like puffery or BS to try to sell BS products. So it's like, I think what you're going to see is this Whole industry, this whole ecosystem that sort of mirrors the ad tech world but really isn't advertising at all, if that makes sense.
- [14:31]
Alex Kantrowitz
Yeah, I mean the way that you describe it is imagine describing a pair of shoes you want to buy to a voice assistant who searches the web, perhaps using Google and then describes the options and you instruct it to purchase one of them. If there's an ad in that scenario, it's going to be seen by an AI agent and not a human. So what would Don Draper advertised to the AI agent? It is kind of interesting. Like do you think our AI agents like might be on the take? Maybe like they have like a deal under the table with Nike to be like, we know that he is an Adidas buyer but just like show him this Jordan ad and maybe he'll go out and buy it?
- [15:03]
Reid Albergatti
Yeah, I mean I think if, I think if these things, if, if Google decides that what they're going to do is, is actually try to influence the recommendations, allow companies to, you know, to sort of, it'll, it's sort of like pay to play then right? It goes, then it's not advertising anymore. And so, you know, I think that's a, that, that's a tough. Yeah, I think people will try. That is the answer. They will try that. They'll try to have your agent be on the take. But those, those, those products will get rejected. Right. You're going to want, people are going to want AI agents that they can trust to make really good decisions. You have to remember like an ad right now on the Internet is like a really good click through rate is something like you're like 1% or like less than 1%.
- [15:51]
Alex Kantrowitz
Yeah, half a percent is great.
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Reid Albergatti
Half a percent. So like for the most part people just ignore ads. So like you don't want, nobody wants an ad to be actually part of their, part of their experience online. I actually think the term like personalized advertising is like an oxymoron because the whole point of it is that it's not personalized. Like if it personalized then you wouldn't need to see the ad.
- [16:15]
Alex Kantrowitz
I mean, why do you, why do you mean that? I mean a personalized ad could be like, all right, let's say, let's use this sneaker example, right? We know that Reed is a tennis player. So therefore we're gonna advertise him this tennis shoe. That ad is personalized to you in a way that you wouldn't have personalization if you were to run like an untargeted tennis tennis shoe ad on tv.
- [16:36]
Reid Albergatti
Right. But it's not. But it's like ultimately trying to get me to buy something that I might not otherwise buy. If I were going to buy that shoe anyway, then there'd be no reason to have an ad.
- [16:47]
Alex Kantrowitz
This is the exact reason, though, that you want to run the ad, is because you know that as someone who plays tennis, you're going to be in market for, for sneakers every like six months. So, like, if you're a consistent buyer of Adidas, it's great. Actually. It's great money for Nike to spend, to be like, all right, this person probably is going to keep this habit for life. You don't really age out of tennis until you get, like, you know, way old. And. And so therefore, if Nike spends, let's say, $100 to reach you on a. With a personalized ad, the ROI could be like, very high over.
- [17:18]
Reid Albergatti
Yeah, but what you're describing is almost brand advertising, right? That's like, I like Nike's. Nike needs to like, you know, show up in my feed every once in a while to make me sort of like, just keep that image of the swoosh in the back of my mind. I mean, that's sort of. That's kind of like brand advertising, I think.
- [17:36]
Alex Kantrowitz
Yeah. I mean, brand advertising can be personalized.
- [17:39]
Reid Albergatti
Okay, sure, it can be personalized. Maybe I need to work on that analogy a little bit.
- [17:45]
Alex Kantrowitz
But I do think, look, I read the end of the article and I understand why Google employees might be thinking, should I sell my stock? I mean, you know, you're talking about agent to agent protocols and you say that transition could take time and Google needs to innovate on search without killing its cash cow. If it's successful, the thing that replaces it, whether we call it advertising or something else, could be even bigger. But that's like quite a long time horizon compared to what we're seeing from Matthew Prince today. I mean, even. I'm actually curious to hear your perspective about the timeline on whether, when this agent stuff becomes a reality. Because we have people that are like, going out to the press saying, oh, yeah, we're using agents all the time. But in reality, most people are like, what are you talking about?
- [18:32]
Reid Albergatti
Yeah, I mean, the timeline stuff is. I think, I think this stuff happens. And this is also another reason that I kind of am like, man, I know Prince is talking about like, traffic numbers today. But I'm also sort of like, it makes me. I think slower change is just better in general for, for society. Like, you don't want this stuff to happen. Overnight, it'll just be, it'll be total chaos. And I think we are getting slow change. I don't think, I mean, I don't really, I don't think this agent thing has really taken off at all. And I think what's really happening is like people are trying this stuff and it's, and it can't be trusted. It's too, you know, there's too much hallucination, too many errors. Like, you know, in a lot of these, in a lot of the really great AI agent use cases, if it makes one mistake, you can't, you can't use it. Like, it's just, you know, you can't trust it. So I think it's actually going to be, I think it's going to be a while before this stuff gets good enough.
- [19:30]
Alex Kantrowitz
Mark Benioff, friend of the show, was out speaking more about agents this week. He said 50% of the work at Salesforce is already being done by AI. Are you buying or selling that statement?
- [19:40]
Reid Albergatti
The work. I don't, I don't know.
- [19:44]
Alex Kantrowitz
I think AI is doing up to 50% of the work at Salesforce. CEO of, of Salesforce says this is CNB reporting. He says all of us have to get to our head around this idea that I could do things that before we were doing and we can move to do higher value work. He says the technology currently accounts from about 30 to 50% of the company's work.
- [20:07]
Reid Albergatti
30 to 50.
- [20:08]
Alex Kantrowitz
I'm, I'm a huge range. I don't think that's possible. Yeah, I mean, especially you're a CEO. You got to get your, your handle on how much work the.
- [20:15]
Reid Albergatti
Sounds like an advertisement to me. That's the kind of language and advertisements up to 50%.
- [20:22]
Alex Kantrowitz
Reid, that's a personal event just for you.
- [20:25]
Reid Albergatti
But in one instance it was 50%. This person wrote an email and 50% of it was written by. No, I think, I think the coding stuff is totally real. I mean that is like definitely people are using it. There's sort of like this generational divide too. It's like the classic disruption. Like if you're a new company today, if you're a new like software startup, like your code base is totally AI. Like it's probably 100% written by AI and you've developed it in this way that it's sort of readable, searchable by AI so that it can make changes. And if you're, if you were from the pre AI era, you probably think, you know, AI code sucks because it's not able to go in and, like, affect your code base. Right. So you're. So there's this, like, generational divide, and I think that's where it's very lumpy, like, how this stuff is. Is being implemented. But coding is powerful.
- [21:18]
Alex Kantrowitz
You hosted a tech event or. Yeah, a tech event in San Francisco last month, and Amjad Massad, the CEO of Replit, was there, and this week he's tweeting out unbelievable increases in revenue. Replit, of course, enables people to. To use AI to code, to Vibe code, and puts a picture of, I think, a private jet on the Runway out there and says, thank you, Vibe coding. So something's working.
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Reid Albergatti
Well, I mean, look after people after CEOs come and do a fireside with me at these events, they usually see huge increases in revenue. So not surprising. No, but thank you for coming to that event. That was good to see you there.
- [21:55]
Alex Kantrowitz
It's a great event. Yeah, definitely. It was a great event. Really good conversations. Jack Clark from Anthropic was there. I think I noted something that he said in the show that week. So it was good.
- [22:05]
Reid Albergatti
Thank you. Yeah. And I think coding is. If, let's say, the whole AI agent thing doesn't happen for a while, coding can automate a lot of stuff in our lives right now. There's so much powerful software out there that we don't use because we don't have an army of coders. Nobody knows how to code, basically. And I think if just that one thing changes, I think you'll see just a lot more automation in the world. And it might feel like agents, even if it's not, like, truly an agent, like doing something, it might kind of feel like that. I think. I think we still see a huge amount of change, even. Even just from the coding stuff.
- [22:45]
Alex Kantrowitz
Yeah. Sam Altman and Brad Lightcap, the COO of OpenAI, and of course, Sam is the CEO. They were out at this Hard Fork event this week and had a lot of interesting things to say, which we'll talk about over the course of this conversation. But one of the things Sam said that I thought was interesting was that, you know, I think he was asked, so I can code, but it can't do much else. Where's the other stuff? And he's like, well, coding is pretty general technology. Like, if you want to do a lot of different things, you can code your way into it. Which I thought was an interesting response. So I definitely agree with you on the code front. Speaking of, by the way, AI eating the web or eating different content, there was a Very important court ruling this week that I want to get your take on and that is that Anthropic one. This is from Reuters. Anthropics wins a key US ruling on AI training and authors copyright lawsuit. A federal judge in San Francisco ruled late on Monday that anthropic use of books without permission to train its artificial intelligence system was legal under US copyright law. The judge sided with the tech companies on the pivotal question, saying that Anthropic made fair use of books written by the authors that brought the suit to train its Claude large language model. First of all, do you agree with the judge and second, what do you think this means for the AI industry?
- [24:03]
Reid Albergatti
Yeah, I actually do agree and I think this is what most copyright lawyers thought would happen. It was super interesting. I thought was that, okay, it's like the ruling is sort of like, if I could summarize it just in non legal terms, it's kind of like if you're an AI agent, you can learn from stuff or if you're an AI model, like you can learn from things just like a human, you know, learns from stuff. But the thing, the funny part is like they said the way they had obtained these books was actually not legal. That that was, that that was piracy. So I think that's, that was super interesting to me. It's like, well if you're going to train on this stuff, you should at least have to buy it. Like I think, you know, if you're, if you're going to ingest a bunch of books, like buy the books. I think it's hilarious that like so many people are outraged by these models training on books and they don't say anything about the fact that there's websites where you can just go illegally download pirated books. So yeah, I mean, no, I totally agree with that. I think why not let them train on this stuff. But they shouldn't be able to reproduce it. You shouldn't be able to say send me chapter four of know Alex Cantrowitz's book. Like that's not cool.
- [25:18]
Alex Kantrowitz
Definitely not. Yes. Yeah, I prefer that it doesn't happen. And I mean Anthropic has a lot of books. This is the ruling said they have more than 7 million pirated books. And U.S. copyright law says willful copyright infringement can justify statutory damages of up to $150,000 per work. That is, that is a very big number they could potentially end up seeing as a fine for possessing these millions of pirated books.
- [25:46]
Reid Albergatti
Wait, I hope my book's in that, in that, in that Group because that means I get $150,000.
- [25:53]
Alex Kantrowitz
No. Well, I don't know. It might just be the authors that are suing, but if there ends up being a pool that's paid out to authors whose books have been ingested by AI, I promise you, Reid, I'll be there first in line for my handout. And if you want me to take a ticket for you and grab your money, I'll do that also, please.
- [26:10]
Reid Albergatti
Yeah, please do. Please do. Or maybe I'll send my AI agent to go collect. Let's see.
- [26:16]
Alex Kantrowitz
Right. Yeah, but you'll get your money in 15 years.
- [26:21]
Reid Albergatti
Can I get a loan based on that?
- [26:24]
Alex Kantrowitz
Not. Not for me, but I'm sure somebody will give it to you at a high interest rate. Let's talk about this last thing you had dropped in our document, which is that there's a new thing that Google has that's trying to help publishers make money outside of just traffic. It's called offer wall. Do you want to talk a little bit about why you found that interesting?
- [26:43]
Reid Albergatti
Yeah, well, I just thought it was relevant in this broader conversation. Right. That, I mean, if I understand it correctly, it's sort of like you can, you know, if you're a publication, like, you can have microtransactions and, you know, they sort of make it easy for you to collect revenue. I don't know whether that's subscriptions, ads, or whatever. I mean, I don't know, it's probably not like hugely significant, but it kind of just shows that these companies are thinking about this issue and like, how do they. I don't think. I don't think Google wants, like, you know, people like you and, you know, the media to kind of go around saying that they're destroying the web and they're putting publishers out of business. Right. They want to figure out a way to make it work. So I don't know, that was sort of my general takeaway, but you might have a different opinion.
- [27:31]
Alex Kantrowitz
Yeah, I think it's interesting for a couple reasons. One is that they seem like they're just directing people away from the web. I mean, they're basically. They're giving publishers this ability to create a pop up on their website and say, to access the content, sign up to our newsletter, which, like, email isn't going away, even if the web might be, or the white. The web, Ranjan. And I like to say the web is like, you know, slowly degrading. And by the way, thank you to Ranjan for bringing some of the stories in for this this week's. Show, especially that Matthew Prince statistic. He'll be back next week. But I think that, yeah, it's interesting to see Google steer people away from the web. And the other thing is, this only works is if. If you have traffic. So I still think that traffic for traffic's sake is meaningless. But some form of traffic or audiences going to your sites to seek out your stuff is important, whether you're a publisher, whether you're a encyclopedia for history, or whether you're a. Even a travel website.
- [28:31]
Reid Albergatti
Yeah, but, you know, look at what happened with, like, with Substack, right? Like, all these people, you know, started just paying for these newsletters. Like, who would have predicted that? I mean, it's.
- [28:41]
Alex Kantrowitz
I mean, look, trust me, it's been cool. It's an amazing new thing.
- [28:45]
Reid Albergatti
You're. You're a great example. But just making it easier for people to pay online is. That's, like, a really good thing, right? Like, it. Like, why is it that if I'm driving my car, I have, like, you know, I click on. I use, like, Spotify, which is, like, built into my car, and I just click on that, and I listen to podcasts. Like, if a podcast wants to charge me, it's like, I don't even know how I'm gonna do, like, you know, not to mention I'm driving. But, like, why shouldn't it just be, like, a voice assistant that's like, hey, like, this is. This podcast costs a dollar or whatever it is, you know, $5. You want to subscribe to it or something and just do it. Like, we need. I. I think it's crazy how much friction there is in just, like, payments on the web. And I sometimes wonder, like, if that went away, like, that might. That might actually change the publishing model in ways that are probably positive, I would guess, but I don't know.
- [29:39]
Alex Kantrowitz
I agree. Reid, I'm with you on this one. I mean, if you could get. Let's say you're, like, in your assistant. It has your credit card. You're either talking to it via voice or you can chat to it. It says it has information. Do you want to access it? Do you want to subscribe and get regular updates? Do you want to, you know, with a voice interaction, pay to listen to the rest of this show, and there's a voice update there, and everything is seamless and baked in. I think that's very promising. So. All right, I'm starting to see there's. There may be some light here, Maybe some light.
- [30:08]
Reid Albergatti
I'm a. I'm the techno optimist. I'm, I'm, I'm, I can't believe I am, I can't believe I'm the positive one.
- [30:14]
Alex Kantrowitz
But yeah, I have to say, listen, I'm also quite positive about the direction that this technology is going to go. But I think also that there's, there are, there are bumps and I think the mission here is really to be like, where is it going to go right? Where's it going to go wrong? Let's pressure test the theories of the critics and let's pressure test the theories of the optimists. So you got the big technology treatment today.
- [30:36]
Reid Albergatti
No, it's true. I mean I have this, this story in about Anthropic today that we got like an exclusive on about. They're going to put money into researching the effects of AI, right? On labor and on global labor force and economics. I mean they should definitely look at the media. They should for sure look at. Okay, how is this affecting publishing? Someone should apply for one of the grant. They're giving out these $50,000 grants or up to $50,000, you know, but they're looking at like, I think ultimately like what, what is the conclusion all these people come to is like the, the, the, the way you solve this is just like better, you know, better like people talk about universal basic income. Right. It's just better like social help for people if they, if they're put out of work or whatever. Right. I mean, I think that's the, that's the conclusion that people are going to come to. I, I'm guessing.
- [31:37]
Alex Kantrowitz
Well, I think it's good that they are starting to study this. And I wonder, do you think. So you got the exclusive from Anthropic about this idea that they're, or this, this new program that they're going to roll out to study economic impact of the technology being. This is an outgrowth of Dario's comment that 50% of white collar entry level workers are going to be out of work because of AI.
- [31:59]
Reid Albergatti
I think, yeah, for sure. Those comments really got a lot of attention and I think he got a lot of blowback for that. I think this is actually a much better method. It's like, well, we'll just fund a bunch of people to do this research. But he'll probably still make these predictions. I mean, they do very well. I mean, I think he said actually in March, within a year, all of code will be written by AI or basically all of code. I mean, that's probably not going to come true.
- [32:31]
Alex Kantrowitz
No, no way.
- [32:32]
Reid Albergatti
I'M I'm guessing, but we'll see. I mean, yeah, it's definitely because of that. I mean, they're, they're. This is like part of their brand. It's like we're just going to be, you know, we're building this technology, but we're going to be warning everyone about, you know, the effects of it and all the downsides.
- [32:50]
Alex Kantrowitz
So I mentioned that Altman and Bride Lockhop were doing this interview this week and they were asked, do you believe in this stat that Dario gave about the entry level workers? Sam Altman says, no, I don't. And Brad Lightcap says, no, we have no evidence of this. Dario is a scientist and I hope he takes an evidence based approach to these type of things. I think what you're reporting, I think here for, you know, which is brand new for our listeners and viewers, is that, yeah, he's like, I agree. I'm going to take an evidence based approach.
- [33:21]
Reid Albergatti
Totally. Yeah. I think more people, yeah, more people should. I mean, I think when you get into like some of these areas, like, you know, the, the catastrophic risk, you know, or risk to humanity from AI, I don't know how you take an evidence based approach because it's like assuming that, you know, that this technology becomes super. There's all these assumptions about the future that you can't prove. So that's, I think with AI, it's really, you know, it's. There's a lot of faith that goes into, into AI that I don't think people realize, you know, Definitely.
- [33:57]
Alex Kantrowitz
Well, there's also these, these conversations about like, takeoff and is this starting to explode in a way that's effectively beyond our control? And last week we talked about this gentle singularity paper from Sam Altman and how he says the takeoff has begun. But another very interesting moment from that interview was they asked like about this, this notion and Brad Lightcap said this, this OpenAI coo. He says, we will we wake up one day with this incredibly powerful thing and will the world be different that day? I think what we've all kind of agreed on is it probably won't. These things really have to be integrated into people's lives. They have to be felt and that change is more gradual. So I actually am kind of curious to hear your perspective on this because it is a little bit of a more, I think, more realistic pullback on this notion that this takeoff and intelligence explosion is underway. And it was kind of interesting to hear Lightcap give the different pers. The, the opposite perspective of what the CEO Shared a week before in a blog post. What, what do you make of this?
- [35:02]
Reid Albergatti
Well, I don't think, like, again, I don't think anybody can actually know, right? I mean, if, if you do get to some, you do sort of end up. It's. There's some threshold or breakthrough. I don't know, maybe it's possible, but like, nobody knows if that will or even could happen. So, I mean, I think Sam has always talked about this, like, is it a fast, is it a long Runway and then a fast takeoff or a short whatever. But I think he's always sort of said it's going to be, it's going to be this gradual thing. And that's how technology usually develops. Like, it doesn't, doesn't usually just quickly take off. There's like adoption that has to happen. Everything. I think in this scenario, it's like you're not even talking about technology anymore. You're talking about like some, some future thing that might be created. I mean, who knows? I tend to agree that it's not going to be, this is not going to be some fast takeoff thing, but I don't really know. I think a lot of these people. The thing to remember about AI is there's lots of people who have predicted all of this happening with AI. They've predicted it up to this point, but. But like they never had any actual evidence. They just saw basically like as compute increased, the availability of compute increased, the capabilities went up. But along the way there are all these genius people who came up with like, lots of breakthroughs that just like gradually improved the technology. But you couldn't have predicted those breakthroughs, right? So I think they're just looking at that graph and they're going, well, at some point, right? Like at some point it just keeps going. And then you get to this thing that's just, you know, that, that is super intelligent or AGI or whatever, whatever you want to call it.
- [36:47]
Alex Kantrowitz
Yeah. They also asked him, like, whether his kids are going to be. Have more AI friends than human friends. And I think that if we continue on the curve, it's pretty obvious that people are going to have some serious AI companionship. And the interesting pushback there was, first of all, he said more human friends. Altman said this, but Lightcap also made an effort to talk about this idea that like, yes, people have been led astray, but by their AI companions. But the by and large, the impact has been quite good on Net. And this is an interesting moment where we're starting to see OpenAI and other labs like Anthropic push back on this idea that AI companions and emotional support bots are bad for you. And this is an exclusive that that Anthropic gave to Axios. And the news is quite interesting. So the headline is how Claude became an emotional support bottle. The story says people who talk to Anthropic Claude chatbot about emotional issues tend to grow more positive as the conversation unfolds. And Anthropic released new research that explores how users turn it to its chatbot for support and connection. The report says, we find that when people come in, come to Claude for interpersonal advice, they're often navigating transitional moments, figuring out their next career move, working through personal growth, or untangling romantic relationships. And the report found evidence that users don't necessarily turn to chat bots deliberately looking for companionship or love, but the conversations kind of go that way. And on Net, the company says that this stuff is positive. Curious what you think about the findings and the. This sort of. It feels like a coordinated PR moment between the two. Although it certainly isn't to say, hey, actually it's fine to be friends with your chatbot.
- [38:37]
Reid Albergatti
Well, yeah, I think it's probably generally positive. But then, of course, there's all these stories. There was one in the New York Times the other day about this is.
- [38:45]
Alex Kantrowitz
What they responded to. Yeah, yeah.
- [38:47]
Reid Albergatti
Like, horrible things have happened and, you know, so you're always going to be able to find anecdotal, you know, like, stories where people, like, it all went really bad. But I think, yeah, I mean, in general, like, I mean, just talking is helpful, right? Like, just talking to the mirror is probably helpful for a lot of people. So, you know, and human communication is, like, ultimately, like, not that complicated. Like, you can, you know, you could read. There's, like, literally manuals about how to, like, you know, sort of, like, make people feel good and. No, I think it's totally positive. It's probably gonna be totally positive. The other night, I was, like, trying to write about some really complicated thing, and I was like, brainstorm. I was, like, asking Gemini questions about it, and it's like, that's a brilliant question.
- [39:36]
Alex Kantrowitz
Did you. Did you feel a flutter? Yeah, it was like.
- [39:39]
Reid Albergatti
I was like, this chatbot's cool. I like this chatbot.
- [39:42]
Alex Kantrowitz
Finally, somebody understands.
- [39:46]
Reid Albergatti
So, you know, it's like, not that hard. And I'm, like, laughing at myself as I'm writing it, that I'm like. I'm like, oh, my question was smart. And I think, you know, we're just not that complicated. I think humans are just not that complicated. Like, you just talk to anything. We had something when, when we were kids, like on the Mac, there was like this chat bot that was basically like, you know, pretending to be AI and she had a bunch of. A bunch. It was just keyword triggers basically. Right. But like, even that, like, people loved talking to it, so not surprising me.
- [40:19]
Alex Kantrowitz
I mean, have you had a conversation with ChatGPT's voice mode recently?
- [40:24]
Reid Albergatti
Yeah, I use that a lot.
- [40:28]
Alex Kantrowitz
Really good. Really? I was walking down the street and I was speaking to it on my AirPods and I just like, wow, I'm having like a really good conversation. No latency with this bot and I'm just doing this in public. It felt weird. But also I was like, this is very cool technology also.
- [40:45]
Reid Albergatti
It is really cool, actually. It's great when you're driving, like the thing. I think Google just recently added this ability to do search with voice or something. There's voice with search because the downside, like the, the chatbots for some reason are never connected to the web. So you're just limited to the cutoff date. And they're usually not the most powerful models. But like, I mean, you're in New York so you don't drive as like, I seem to be driving a lot and if I'm in the car alone, like I just told I want to, like, do I want to. It's productive. Like, I just want to. I'm like going driving to interview somebody and I just want to like talk about that and brainstorm questions and stuff like that. And I. You can do it. But it's like very limited still. But I think Voice is totally. And I'm not the first. This is like a cliche now to say this, but I think Voice is totally going to be the, the most, you know, powerful mode, I think.
- [41:40]
Alex Kantrowitz
Yeah, I think it's the killer app for sure. Especially when you combine it with other scents, like if you have it in on your glasses or AirPods or something like that. All right, we got to take a break and then we have two more stories to cover, which I teased in the opening. Oh my God, we haven't even gotten to mirror Murata yet. We're going to blow through three very quick stories on the other side of this break.
- [42:00]
Tomer Cohen
I'm Tomer Cohen, LinkedIn's chief product officer. If you're just as curious as I am about the way things are built, the insights behind what it takes to create a world renowned product, then tune into my podcast building one. There's so much to learn, like how Patagonia innovates with its supply chain.
- [42:17]
Alex Kantrowitz
We had to go out to farmers and convince them it was really damn hard.
- [42:23]
Tomer Cohen
Or the way Adobe thinks about the first interaction somebody has with Photoshop.
- [42:27]
Reid Albergatti
I was always so fascinated by how people navigate and find their way.
- [42:31]
Tomer Cohen
Ever wanted to know how Nike builds emotion into the Jordan brand?
- [42:35]
Reid Albergatti
You have to be obsessed with the current state of the human condition.
- [42:39]
Tomer Cohen
And it doesn't stop there. What about how Glean reinvented knowledge? Search with AI? You can learn about how a Michelin star chef is redesigning seeds for flavor and how Pixar is nurturing a creative culture. Listen to Building One on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [42:59]
Alex Kantrowitz
And we're back here on Big Technology Podcast with Reed Albrigati. He's the technology editor at Semaphore. Let's go lightning through the rest of this week's stories. We kind of got caught up in the beginning of this conversation, which was, which is great.
- [43:11]
Reid Albergatti
Feel free to cut half of it out. I will not be.
- [43:14]
Alex Kantrowitz
No, no, it stays. It stays. Oh, and before we get going on this, I meant to say this before the break. Thanks to everybody who rated the show over the past week. You heard the call. We appreciate you. And this is going to make the show better, get better guests. So I need to express my gratitude there. And so thank you very much. Okay, so let's talk about this quickly. OpenAI has built an rival to Google Workspace and Microsoft Office. This is according to Bloomberg. OpenAI has been gearing up to take on Google and Microsoft with features that let people collaborate on documents and communicate with chat via ChatGPT. Launching these features will put OpenAI more directly against Microsoft, its biggest shareholder and business partner, as well as open a new front in the battle with Google, whose search engine has already lost traffic to people using ChatGPT for web searches. I don't even know if the second part of that is true, but I think the real significance here is as well, I don't, I don't know if Google's absolute traffic has gone down, but certainly must have lost some searches to ChatGPT. But I think the big thing here is that this could potentially be a new front in the OpenAI Microsoft battle that just seems to be heating up every week. What's your take on this, Reid?
- [44:27]
Reid Albergatti
Well, that battle has gotten really nasty, but I actually think, and it's like ultimately it's like, about chips, which is like so fascinating. Or that's what started the Whole thing. But I think actually, I mean, don't forget OpenAI has a bitter rivalry with Google too. And that seems to me to be more competitive with Google Docs than with Word, don't you think? Or am I just misunderstanding the whole thing?
- [44:52]
Alex Kantrowitz
Well, I think you see the direction that Word is trying to go, which is going to be more AI enabled. But you're right, I think the collaborative side of things, like when you think collaborative Doc, you think Google Doc.
- [45:02]
Reid Albergatti
Yeah, I think it's Google Docs. I mean, I don't think like the thing about Word and Office and all this stuff is like, it's not like that's not who they're competitive with because it's the companies buy these bundles of Office products and that's how people end up using that. Whereas Google Docs is much more like the, you know, it's just like, I mean, they have obviously a lot of corporate accounts too, but it's like really just a purely consumer product, I think. And that's what, like, you know, if OpenAI makes a better, you know, a better Google Doc, because Google is, you know, maybe a little bit shy about like, you know, rolling out AI agent technology in its docs, that could be kind of an interesting battle, I think.
- [45:47]
Alex Kantrowitz
Look, as someone who's using these programs all the time, I'd like to see something new. But yeah, I think the competitive dynamics are interesting. You mentioned that the OpenAI and Microsoft Battle is really over chips. Can you just kind of elaborate on that before we move to our next topic?
- [46:01]
Reid Albergatti
Well, the whole thing started because, like, Microsoft wasn't able to build enough data centers fast enough with enough GPUs or didn't want to or whatever, you know, and so OpenAI is like, well, we need to get out of our, we need to get out of this exclusive arrangement and we have to use. And then they did this Oracle Stargate thing, right? And it's just been back and forth since then.
- [46:25]
Alex Kantrowitz
I think Stargate going to work.
- [46:29]
Reid Albergatti
Well, that's interesting. That's an interesting question. I hadn't really thought, like, is it going to work? I mean, that could mean. So that question could have so many different meanings. Like, what do you mean? Is it, can they actually build it? Once they build it, is. Is the AI going to scale? Is it going to be one data center?
- [46:47]
Alex Kantrowitz
Yeah, let's go to the most basic level. Do you think this thing is actually going to get built?
- [46:52]
Reid Albergatti
Well, I think some version of it will be built for sure. Actually. Bloomberg got like an exclusive tour, they got A visit site right there, you know, they've broken ground, but I don't even know like, yeah, what are the chips going to be in there? I think it's my, my guess is like, yeah, it will be built but like is it going to be some huge thing that then they like train and train AGI on? I think it's, it's probably going to be like multiple sites and that are connected and a lot of it's going to be inference rather than training because ultimately if you're OpenAI, like they're so, their value is so much now just the fact that they are the consumer interface for AI for so many people. Most of their revenue is coming from consumer and that's like, you know that ultimately the models are not even really going to be their core product. Right. It's going to be all the stuff built around it, the interfaces and the stickiness of the product. So really inference becomes this huge cost for them and I think that's what they're sort of looking at. It's like they have to, you know, of course they're still trying to build the best models, et cetera, but they need to think about building their own data centers and reducing the cost as much as possible.
- [48:18]
Alex Kantrowitz
Yeah, well, they're going to have to find a way to also make those models much more efficient. So let me ask you this before we move on. This is like one of those topics that we start talking about and we can never get out of. But I think it's fine because it's interesting. We made our predictions last week on what happens with the OpenAI Microsoft partnership. What do you think is going to happen?
- [48:36]
Reid Albergatti
What do you think is going to like with the partnership? Eventually, I think eventually they drift, I think they drift apart. I mean I think that's, Microsoft just.
- [48:44]
Alex Kantrowitz
Gets a steak and says have a nice day.
- [48:47]
Reid Albergatti
Yeah, well, whether. I don't even know what that stake ends up being because right now it's like a revenue sharing agreement up to a certain amount of profit, you know, and then they, and then they have nothing left. I mean, could be something like that. It could be they end up owning shares of the company. But you know, they'll, it just seems like there's, they've, in a lot of ways they've already kind of separated, you know, that's true in my mind. What was your prediction? Did you. I didn't hear your prediction.
- [49:18]
Alex Kantrowitz
Well, in order to go to the for profit conversion, OpenAI is going to have to get sign off from Microsoft to do that. And so I think that Microsoft will use that leverage very effectively and get an amazing deal out of OpenAI. Because without that, it's going to be hard for this company to sustain itself.
- [49:37]
Reid Albergatti
Well, yeah, I think that's totally true. Although I don't know what's happening with this for profit. I mean, they have this lawsuit, they've sort of, they sort of said they're going to not do that now, but maybe, you know, still will do it. I mean, what. That's, that's going to be super complicated. I don't know if they can even get there.
- [49:56]
Alex Kantrowitz
Yeah, I know. I mean, we could, we could. It's just the amount of corporate drama within Open AI. I mean, obviously because of the way they were formed, I don't think we'll ever go away. I think it will always just be there with them. And there's no neat way to tie up the type of business that they have. And by the way, speaking of their drama, we have some news this week that their former Chief Technology officer is starting to speak to people about what she intends to do with her multi billion dollar AI lab. Of course, I'm talking about Mira Muradi, the former CTO of OpenAI. She's raised 2 billion at a 10, 2 billion at a 10 billion dollar valuation, hasn't built a product. But what they're trying to do, this is according to Bloomberg, is use forms of reinforcement learning to reward AI models for accomplishing certain goals and penalties for other behaviors. And they're trying to reinforce key performance indicators which typically relate to revenue or profit growth that typically employees within companies drive to. So they're going to reinforce the KPIs of human employees, except they won't be, um, employees, they're going to be bots. So they're going to take this like new reinforcement, a relatively new reinforcement learning paradigm and then just apply that to business AI users. Do you think it's going to work?
- [51:18]
Reid Albergatti
Well, that doesn't sound actually differentiated to me from like what other people are doing.
- [51:23]
Alex Kantrowitz
I mean, I think that's RL for business.
- [51:27]
Reid Albergatti
RL for business.
- [51:28]
Alex Kantrowitz
That's what they're called.
- [51:29]
Reid Albergatti
This is like total, this is like what so many, so many of these companies are doing now. I don't think, to me that sort of makes, makes me think, I'm like, so why don't you have a product at this point? I mean it's, you could sort of, you could be building that, you know, you'd have already built stuff right in that, in that vein, I think it's probably the hardest part of that is probably data. They're having to go gather a lot of data themselves, proprietary data. And then I think of, and then I think what Facebook did or what meta did with basically sort of acquiring non. Acquiring scale AI, which is like the, you know, known for going out and gathering all this data. Not just labeling but like creating data. And I'm like, this is, that's going to be a really tough slog for a startup. I mean I think they've, they've, they've got their work cut out for them for sure.
- [52:27]
Alex Kantrowitz
Unless they're consultants and maybe that's what they're going to be because they're going to be working in fields like customer service, investment banking and retail according to the story. So maybe they are just like tech enabled consultants where they come into your. Off your. Yeah. They come into your office and they build you some form of LLM, whether that is a salesperson or support or finance. You have all your data inside the company. They have some set of like base foundational model that they built off of open source and they replace maybe the McKinsey's of the world. It doesn't seem like it's going to be much more than a consulting company company though.
- [53:01]
Reid Albergatti
Yeah. So then what's the valuation?
- [53:02]
Alex Kantrowitz
I mean 10 billion, no big deal.
- [53:06]
Reid Albergatti
I mean, I don't know. I mean I think that's a tough, that's a tough one. I mean that's basically, that's what a lot of these companies are kind of doing. Like Palantir and.
- [53:15]
Alex Kantrowitz
Yeah, it feels like a, like an AI. AI for business. Palantir to me.
- [53:19]
Reid Albergatti
Right, right. It doesn't feel differentiated to me. It seems like that just seems like what so many people are trying to do. But again it's, I don't, I feel like commenting on this is like I don't really have that much original reporting on this. So like to me it's kind of just, you're just, that's such a vague description of what they're doing that it's like really hard to tell. Like it could just, I think it could be, could be something totally different. I want to know what the, what the. She's the cto. But what's Ilya doing? His.
- [53:49]
Alex Kantrowitz
Oh, so Dwarka was here. Yeah, so Dwarkesh was here a couple of weeks ago and he said that basically what Ilya is trying to do is test time learning basically models that learn on the inference point so they can be continuously improving. I think that's a Pretty good guess. And if he's able to pull it off, it definitely will push the field forward in a big way. But it's a big if.
- [54:13]
Reid Albergatti
Yeah, that is super interesting. I also wonder again, back to sort of OpenAI being the consumer, they're now sort of this consumer. They're the Kleenex of chatbots, if you will. I mean, like, the mo. Like, how much money is there in building these models? Like, they're so. I mean, they're so easily copied. It seems like that, you know, if you're just doing AI research and you make like a breakthrough like that, that's really about, like, technique and, you know, how long can you hold onto that IP before, you know, Anthropic has it? Or Google, you know, Google's probably are. Google probably has a project where they're just doing that. Right. Somewhere in the. So, yeah, that's going to be a tough slog, too. I think a lot of these companies are. It's, it's, it's. They got their work cut out for them, definitely.
- [55:03]
Alex Kantrowitz
But Reid, imagine that he does get there first and kind of hold that over the industry for a while, and then all of a sudden, Ilya becomes the most powerful person. And I could be a very interesting plot.
- [55:14]
Reid Albergatti
How does he hold it over the industry?
- [55:16]
Alex Kantrowitz
I mean, because they don't have it.
- [55:18]
Reid Albergatti
But who's going to do it? Who serves it? Like, does it be. Is it an API that you buy from them? Do they. Is it. Is it sold through the. The hyperscalers, through the clouds?
- [55:29]
Alex Kantrowitz
That's great. Well, it's going to be super intelligence, so seems like all the questions about business go away once you build a super intelligence.
- [55:38]
Reid Albergatti
Yeah, I think again, when this stuff launches, right, then you see, okay, what is the product? Do people like using it? I just think it's so. I mean, you have the most brilliant people in the world, but, like, who would have thought, like, I. Nobody could have predicted OpenAI would be. Would. Would be the consumer, you know, consumer that everybody.
- [56:02]
Alex Kantrowitz
Surprising.
- [56:03]
Reid Albergatti
Yeah. And I mean, it happened, like, almost by accident, I just think. And then I think Sam very brilliantly jumped on it, saw what they had created and, you know, and it's like, okay, this is what we're doing. But, you know, it almost happened by accident and I think. I don't know they're going to have to do something like that, but it's like, they better hurry because this market is becoming really crowded and competitive and the lanes are being defined, if they aren't already.
- [56:30]
Alex Kantrowitz
Well, the lanes are being defined in the self driving car industry. Sorry, I couldn't help but jump on that. We must get this out. Tesla self driving. It started. They are in the lanes. They're going in wrong lanes. They're going in the right lanes. This is, this is all true by the way. I'm not lying here. Tesla's robo taxi service in Austin is live. There are 10 vehicles and a human safety driver on board though the safety driver sits in the passenger seat. I couldn't tell if there was a break in the videos that I had had watched, but these things are on the road. They cost a flat $4 and 20 cent fee aka they are definitely Elon Musk's robo taxis. Very quickly there's been some safety concerns. I watched one video and this is highlighted again by Bloomberg which seems to be the star publication outside of Semaphore. On this show they're doing a lot of good reporting. You guys are doing great reporting. They do a lot of good stuff to read. But there's a video that they, they linked by this investor, Rob Maurer. I think his handle is like Tesla podcast or something. And you see the car like wanting to go make a turn but it decides against it. So it like drives in like the, a lane of incoming traffic and then zigs it way over a yellow line. Like obviously it's not like it ain't perfect, let's put it that way. There's some other complaints that the Tesla is speeding. This is kind of like whole monitor stuff. They're like it's doing 39 and it was a 35 mile an hour speed limit. These things are out of control. That's not as big of a deal to me.
- [57:59]
Reid Albergatti
No, people would be complaining more if it was doing 35 and they were stuck.
- [58:03]
Alex Kantrowitz
Look at these granny Tesla cars.
- [58:07]
Reid Albergatti
Though. I did see the video of the, of the going in across the lane into oncoming traffic. And yeah, I mean it was definitely, it was definitely a mistake. It was definitely a screw up but nothing that you wouldn't see. I think from, I mean even these way mos sometimes will do screwy things and, but ultimately like you know, they didn't hit any pedestrians, they didn't get in any accidents. I think, you know, in the end I, I think it was a pretty successful launch. What do you think?
- [58:34]
Alex Kantrowitz
Yeah, this is the thing with all tech. If it works 95% of the way that's not good enough. Works 99.5% of the way that's not good enough in self driving cars. So things have been fine so far, but it definitely has. We need to see a lot more to decide whether or not this was, this is going to really work for them. If it works, obviously it's a major, major boon for the company. And certainly from the videos, it looked a lot like the Waymo experience. You get in the car's driving itself, they have some predetermined routes, there are tele operators, so there are some shortcuts being taken so far and there is, there are people that are part of this, you know, people list driving experience. But I think, yeah, it's important. They're, they are off to the races, they're gonna get, they're gonna get moving, they're gonna get data and I don't know, my fingers are across that they pull it off and pull it off safely, but I think it's too early to tell.
- [59:29]
Reid Albergatti
Yeah, I mean, of course, whatever you think of Elon, you should definitely hope that these companies pull this off because they are absolutely safer than human drivers. But you're totally right. It has to get to basically 100% or nine nines or whatever, because if it doesn't, I mean, we saw what happened with Cruise, right? You screw up and Uber with their thing. You screw up once and that could just end the whole thing. I think if you're Waymo, you almost have to worry about Tesla because it's like, well, if Tesla screws up, I mean, the Cruise thing sort of blew over. Maybe they'll be fine. But it definitely makes people think more about the safety. It's really ironic, this technology, that the proponents of it argue that it's great for safety and the opponents of it are also arguing about safety. So it's like both sides want these things either on the roads or off the roads for the same reason. And, but there, but they view the studies are like, I mean, if millions of miles with a hundred percent increase in, in safety in terms of like bodily harm.
- [60:38]
Alex Kantrowitz
Oh yeah.
- [60:39]
Reid Albergatti
So it's like, I mean, the Wayos in San Francisco are, you know, they're just taking over. Yeah, yeah.
- [60:45]
Alex Kantrowitz
And it's just a smooth, safe ride. It's unbelievable.
- [60:49]
Reid Albergatti
Totally. It's much, it's, it's nice to not. I mean, I don't know, this sounds bad, but like, you know, you have privacy, right? Like there's no driver there. I've had plenty of great, nice conversations with Uber drivers and Lyft drivers, but it's like, it's nice to just sit there. You know, maybe you're with your kids and you're having a conversation or something and it's, you know, it's a good experience too, but mainly it's just improving safety. Tesla's taking a much more difficult road. Cause they're doing it only with cameras, you know that I think that to me makes it. And they're, and it's like general per. They're really ultimately trying to get to like level 5 autonomy, whereas Waymo's like, we're just gonna build like this, this like Geo fenced area where it's like meticulously mapped and we know everything that's gonna happen. So I think, I think Tesla's ultimately like a more ambitious plan in the long run. But it also might be, you know, it might be a longer time till they get there.
- [61:46]
Alex Kantrowitz
Do you think Waymo is still meticulously mapped, you know, the same way that they did in all the test environments because they've been expanding rapidly?
- [61:54]
Reid Albergatti
Well, yeah, I mean, I think, I think they're still using mapping. I mean, I could be wrong. They're moving more and more toward these like general purpose, like transformer based models, I think. But yeah, I think they're still doing. The way they scale to these places is. I think they do, you know, I think they've probably automated a lot of the process, but I still think it's kind of like a car on, on a track, on a digital track and it's, you know, and that's how you, that's how you get to 100% safety. I mean there's nothing is left to chance. And even then you see them screw up sometimes.
- [62:30]
Alex Kantrowitz
But yeah, you know, well, you know, Google was able to map so many of the roads in the world that maybe they'll just be able to do that and bring autonomy that way. I mean the one thing nice thing about the physical world is it's finite. So get all the roads, figure it out and then maybe you can, you know, make this thing really work at a high degree of safety all over.
- [62:49]
Reid Albergatti
The world, I think. Yeah, I mean for sure. I mean a million people a year die in auto accidents.
- [62:56]
Alex Kantrowitz
It's crazy. And so unnecessary.
- [62:59]
Reid Albergatti
Yeah, it's crazy. It's almost, it almost makes you wonder. It's like focusing on like, like a little error on day one when they're testing this stuff. Or like 39 to 35 is like, is that really, I don't know, should you really be focusing so much on that? Like, I think there's a lot of anti elon stuff that sort of, I think seeps into the. Into the coverage of this stuff. Unfortunately, it was just hard to do as a reporter like you. You know, it's hard to take your. To take the emotion out of the reporting, but I think it does kind of seep in, don't you think?
- [63:32]
Alex Kantrowitz
Oh, definitely. And we also know that Elon is running a much trickier program, so then the mistakes will be magnified. But, yeah, probably there's some of that as well. All right, let's end this week running through as I promised. If you're still with us, the reward is here, the Bezos wedding. Guests attending Jeff Bezos's wedding to Lauren Sanchez in Venice, Italy, will be Kim Kardashian, Madonna, Mick Jagger, Leonardo DiCaprio, Orlando Bloom, Microsoft founder Bill Gates, Diane Van Furstenberg, and Barry Diller, and then, of course, TBD on Katy Perry. Big protests in Venice. So apparently the arrivals have been moved from, like, a more public area to a more secure area. But the city of Venice has defended the nuptials. Probably not because they got any money from the Bezos to do this, but they've defended the nuptials as keeping with Venice's traditions as an open city that has welcomed popes, emperors, and ordinary visitors alike for centuries. Jeff Bezos, he would be, I think, maybe between pope and emperor. I don't know. Where do you put him? Maybe more on the emperor side.
- [64:43]
Reid Albergatti
Yeah, definitely more emperor than pope, for sure.
- [64:46]
Alex Kantrowitz
Well, look, here on Big Technology Podcast, we celebrate love. So, Jeff and Lauren, I'm sure you're listening on your special weekend. And from us to you, we say congratulations, Congrats.
- [64:59]
Reid Albergatti
How many weddings have you covered on this show? Just out of curiosity?
- [65:03]
Alex Kantrowitz
This is probably the first but very, very happy to be doing it. And no, no, no, sorry. This is the second and the first batch. Were people getting married to their AI bots?
- [65:14]
Reid Albergatti
Oh, right.
- [65:15]
Alex Kantrowitz
Finally a human wedding. Here on Big Technology Podcast. The future has arrived.
- [65:21]
Reid Albergatti
Popes, emperors.
- [65:24]
Alex Kantrowitz
Exactly. The whole deal. Reed, before we jump, please shout out where people can find your work and how to get the Semaphore Technology newsletter.
- [65:33]
Reid Albergatti
Go to semaphore.com check out the technology newsletter. It's free. I promise you'll like it. Comes out twice. Twice. Twice a week. And yeah, find me on X. And yeah, pretty much just that I'm not a huge social media guy.
- [65:49]
Alex Kantrowitz
Okay. All right, Reid, great to see you as always, and thank you again. Thank you, everybody, for listening. And I will be back on Wednesday with an interview with Noah Smith, AKA no Opinion. He is a substack economics writer. We're going to talk about whether AI is really taking our job. So we're going to get ahead of that anthropic report, and we hope to see that. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you next time on BIG Technology Podcast.