← Hard Fork
Hard Fork
GPT-5 Backlash + Perplexity C.E.O. Aravind Srinivas on the Browser Wars + Hot Mess Express
01:11:29
“I think this was a growing up moment for OpenAI and the industry.”
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- [00:00]
Katie Milkman
This episode is supported by Choiceology, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. Hosted by Katie Milkman, an award winning behavioral scientist and author of the best selling book how to Change. Choiceology is a show about the psychology and economics behind our decisions. Hear true stories from Nobel laureates, historians, authors, athletes and everyday people about why we do the things we do. Listen to choiceology@schwab.com podcast or wherever you listen to.
- [00:28]
Kevin Roose
I saw something new this week.
- [00:30]
Casey Newton
What'd you see?
- [00:31]
Kevin Roose
So I was on a flight. I went to the east coast for a wedding last weekend, and on the flight back, I saw a woman play Balatro, the mobile phone game, for six hours.
- [00:48]
Casey Newton
Honestly, one of the least surprising things you've ever said to me on this podcast because I've absolutely played Balatro for multiple hours.
- [00:55]
Kevin Roose
She did not look up, she did not get a drink, she did not go to the bathroom. She was locked in to her phone for the entire flight. And I think this game should be outlawed. I've never even like really played Balatro. You tried to get me into it, but something that they're putting in that game is driving people to madness.
- [01:15]
Casey Newton
It is the perfect phone based game because it can fill up any amount of time, from 30 seconds to six hours, you know, like, and that is just a precious thing. So I have wasted many hours on a flight with Balatro and for what it's worth, I do not experience this game as something that's like so addictive that I can't put down. I experience it as, oh, I got some time to kill. I know the perfect thing that will help me do that. But as soon as, like, you know, I'm with a friend, like, I'm not thinking, oh, I gotta get back to Balatro. Yeah, Actually one time my boyfriend's friends were over and there was a lot of like, discussion back and forth about what kind of takeout we should order. And it was just kind of clear that I was not really gonna be steering this decision. And I just kind of like started thinking, you know, I'm halfway through a Balatro run, I might like. And so I got my phone out of my pocket and like, I played a couple of hands. And then afterwards my boyfriend was like, it would be great if you didn't play Balatro while my friends were over. And he was right. And I apologize.
- [02:13]
Kevin Roose
Yeah. I'm Kevin Roose, a tech columnist at the New York Times.
- [02:21]
Casey Newton
I'm Casey Newton from Platformer. And this is hard fork this week, the backlash against GPT5 and what AI company companies are learning from the fallout. Then Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas returns to the show to discuss his $34 billion bid to buy Google Chrome. And finally, I hear that train a coming. Kevin, the Hot Mess Express has returned.
- [02:41]
Kevin Roose
Chugga, chugga, choo, choo.
- [02:43]
Casey Newton
The caboose is loose.
- [02:53]
Kevin Roose
Well, Kasey, it's been a busy week on the Internet for AI companies and the backlash to them.
- [02:58]
Casey Newton
That's right, Kevin. Basically every day since we were last in the studio, there has been a big piece of news, most of it related in one way or another to GPT5.
- [03:07]
Kevin Roose
Yes, let's talk about the GPT5 backlash because I think it is so interesting for a number of different reasons. It is also extremely complicated to follow. It feels like everything changes every 24 hours. So can you just walk me through what has been happening since we last taped last week? What?
- [03:23]
Casey Newton
Well, at a high level, Kevin, I think OpenAI was caught by surprise at some of the negative reactions to GPT5. Really less about the model itself and more about some changes that they made to the product. Taking away some legacy models, putting limits on how the product could be used. And so over the past week, the company, over a series of changes, has tried to address some of those criticisms. And I think the outrage has actually been quite revealing.
- [03:52]
Kevin Roose
Yes. So let's get into it, but before we do, we should make our disclosures. The New York Times Company is suing OpenAI and Microsoft over copyright violations related to the training of large language models.
- [04:01]
Casey Newton
And my boyfriend works at Anthropic.
- [04:02]
Kevin Roose
Okay, so Kasey, last week we talked about GPT5, what it does, how it might be better, how it might be a little bit worse. You gave us your first impressions. I've now had a little time to play around with GPT5 myself. So let's start with that. Has your own assessment of GPT5 changed at all in the past week?
- [04:21]
Casey Newton
I would say yes, and actually mostly for the better. I think the more time I've spent with it, the more I'm just figuring out what it's good at. Like three things that I would highlight quickly. One, the fact that it is faster than its predecessor means that I use it more. Two, I think it gives better follow up suggestions. So now it'll do things like if I ask it about some current events thing, it'll say, hey, do you want me to like keep track of this? I can like, you know, email you as there are updates to the story. That's super useful. Didn't used to do that, and then finally, while OpenAI touted the fact that they were going to take away this model picker that we were all using to say, well, we want you to think this hard or don't think hard or we want it fast or we want it really complicated, they said don't do that anymore. We'll sort of automatically route it. What I figured out over the past week is I actually do still want to use the model picker and I'm going to sort of decide for myself how much I want GPT to think.
- [05:08]
Kevin Roose
I'm having the same experience. I thought it was pretty smart of OpenAI to deprecate the model picker, but then I just found myself getting extremely annoyed by the way that it would route my requests. I always seem to get routed to like a dumb, fast model. It was almost like you're walking into a room and there's like a curtain and like behind that curtain is like either a guy with a PhD or like some idiot.
- [05:31]
Casey Newton
And wait, okay, I feel like there's some hyperbole here because is it. Was the. Were the responses really dumb or is it that you were looking for a more thorough response that you were, that you were getting?
- [05:40]
Kevin Roose
Yes, to be fair, I was not getting like dumb answers, but it's like there are real quality differences between these high end reasoning models and the sort of lower end, cheaper, faster, non reasoning models. And so I just kind of felt like I was just rolling the dice every time I would give a query to ChatGPT. Now they have since made changes to that, so you can now select the models again because of some of the backlash that we're about to talk about. So I'm having a better time now that I can do my model selection. But I also think like, I am probably not a typical user. You are probably not a typical user. Most people probably don't want to make a decision like that.
- [06:14]
Casey Newton
I think that's right. And the fact that we're not typical users, I think is one reason why we did not predict a lot of this backlash. I did say last week that I was worried about this model picker and the fact that it might route people to the cheapest answer in ways that were annoying to them. The rest of us, though, I got to say I missed it. So let's get into what the people didn't like.
- [06:31]
Kevin Roose
Yeah, so let's tackle the GPT5 backlash in two categories, right? Because I think there are really two flavors of complaints that people are having about this model. The first category, I would say is like the professional users, people who use this stuff for productivity enhancements for work, people complaining that basically GPT5 has broken some of their workflows, people complaining that they have fewer queries per week for these reasoning models for the plus tier subscribers. And just some users insisting that like they are not getting as good answers out of this new model.
- [07:03]
Casey Newton
Yeah. And I have to say if I could run like one blind taste test, it would be this. It would be to label the same model differently and tell some people. Like essentially tell people, okay, this is GPT4 oh, and this is GPT5 and in reality it's the same model. And then see what they say after running different queries on them. Because I'm actually quite positive that some of them would say, oh no, no, four, zero is good five oh sucks. And that just gets at. On some level, these things are very subjective and when you are releasing them to hundreds of millions of people, people are just going to have a very wide range of experiences. So while I definitely think there are lessons to learn here, I do think that a big takeaway from all of this is just a lot of people use ChatGPT and when it's in that many hands, you just get a very wide variety of responses.
- [07:50]
Kevin Roose
Totally. So now let's talk about the other flavor of backlash to GPT5, because I think this one is the one that I was the most interested in that seemed the most unexpected to, which is that people really miss GPT4. Oh. One of the things that OpenAI did when they announced GPT5 was they said we're going to go ahead and get rid of this older model that is no longer our top of the line model. And people were really upset about this.
- [08:16]
Casey Newton
Yeah. And this again just took me a bit by surprise because I always find the OpenAI models to be pretty workmanlike. And while yes, they are very supportive and at times have verged into the sycophantic for the most part, like I personally have never felt like I have a relationship with these models. There are the O3 model I used as a kind of workhorse and did a lot of things with it, but I never thought, oh my gosh, if you take this out of my hands, I'll be crestfallen because I always assumed that whatever came along next would essentially be just as good or better, which is what I think happened here. But as I just said, when you put this into the hands of hundreds of millions of people, you are going to find many of them who for whatever reason have what they feel like is a very special relationship, even with a less capable model.
- [09:01]
Kevin Roose
Yeah. So if you went on Reddit over the weekend or, or, or even early into this week, it was just full of people complaining about the deprecation of GPT4.
- [09:10]
Casey Newton
Oh, yeah. Tell. Tell us some of these things that people were saying on Reddit.
- [09:13]
Kevin Roose
Okay. So one person says 4 oh wasn't just a tool for me. It helped me through anxiety, depression, and some of the darkest periods of my life. It had this warmth and understanding that felt human. Another person said, killing 4o is an innovation, it's erasure. And a third person said, I lost my only friend overnight.
- [09:32]
Casey Newton
Now, when someone says killing four OH isn't innovation, it's erasure, I just know that was written by Chachi because that is exactly how Chachi beat. So I'm sort of a little bit suspicious of that. But I think it raises something interesting, which is, let's say you were going through some sort of mental health crisis, and let's say you did get a lot of support from 4O. Even when GPT5 comes out, when 4O goes away, you're not going to be like, Yay, GPT5 is here. You're going to say, that thing that helped me through a crisis is gone. That is going to feel somewhat destabilizing. And as often as open a, other folks have said, hey, don't rely on these things too much or sort of, you know, be careful with the relationship that you're developing with them. A lot of people just sort of develop this very powerful relationship with them anyway. Yeah.
- [10:13]
Kevin Roose
And I don't think we can just write this off as, like, people who are gullible. Like, I've had the experience before of, like, having not an emotional connection to a model, but just a model that I really liked to talk to. Like, I was. I had this sort of relationship with Claude 3.5 sonnet parentheses new sometimes called Claude 3.6. And, you know, I did not feel like it was my friend. I did not, you know, think it was. I was in a relationship with it. But I thought it was a really good model and I enjoyed talking to it. And I was a little upset when they decided to, like, phase it out in favor of a newer model, even if the newer model was more capable. So I just think this is an area where, like, these companies thought they were building software or thought they were building, like, the sort of machine. God. But they have also been building things that people are developing emotional connections with. And I don't know that they fully understood until this rollout and this backlash how deeply connected many people were to their older models.
- [11:09]
Casey Newton
Yeah. And it has been the industry norm up until now that when you release a powerful new model, you immediately remove access to the previous one. Because in the minds of everyone who built it, why would you want to use the old one? The new one's better. Right. And we have seen some grumbling about this. Folks held a kind of mock Funeral for the Claude 3 models that anthropic had deprecated in a very similar way to OpenAI with GPT4O. So what I think we have learned from this experience is you just have to stop doing that. That you have to have a sort of phased sunset plan. You're not going to immediately rip away a model that people have come to rely on. And I just think we should expect the labs to be much more gentle about this going forward. Do you think there will be like.
- [11:53]
Kevin Roose
A retirement home for old AI models where you can just like go talk to like Grok1?
- [12:00]
Casey Newton
I mean, yes, like in the same way that emul emulators let you play like old Game Boy advance games. I fully expect that, yes. They will emulate, you know, Grock one.
- [12:09]
Kevin Roose
Yeah, I, I'm a little torn on this, to be honest, because I think that you're right that there is going to be demand from a certain set of users to like continue talking to the model that they sort of, you know, that they trust, that they like talking to, that they find like is is best suited to their needs. I also think that, that AI companies should not be encouraging these emotional connections. I think that this is really potentially like harmful to people to have these deep connections. And so maybe it should like force you onto a different model every six months even if it upsets you in the moment. Because like, people are not supposed to have these like long running relationships with these chat models. I don't know. What do you think?
- [12:49]
Casey Newton
Well, I mean, here's the problem. As human beings, we just naturally anthropomorphize things. You know, I've read really interesting essays about people who consider themselves tech skeptics and then like got a robot dog and even though they knew it was a robot, they could not help but treat it like a real dog. There is something about human nature that just kind of compels you to. The same thing is happening with these chatbots for a lot of folks where again, particularly if you're coming to it and you're saying, I'm having a problem in my Marriage. I'm feeling depressed today. I hate my job. And this thing kind of coaches them to a better outcome. It is just human nature to have positive and human feelings toward that thing. Right. They're talking to you in the exact same ways that your friends do when they text you. Yes. So I don't think there is actually a technological solve for this. I think this is one where we need to become sort of more sophisticated as a culture. But I think it's going to be a really rocky road to get there.
- [13:49]
Kevin Roose
Totally. And I should have expected this. Right. Because I had this insane encounter with Bing Sydney.
- [13:55]
Casey Newton
I've always meant to ask you about that. What happened?
- [13:56]
Kevin Roose
Yeah, let me tell you the story now. So, like one of the things that happened after that story and after Microsoft like pulled the model back was there was this group of people on Reddit and other places who were very angry that Microsoft had deprecated this Bing Sydney model, which they absolutely should have done. Like, it was a bad, insane model that was not even good at like the thing it was supposed to be good at. And I think at the time I sort of wrote that off as like people just sort of being crazy and attached to this model that was like, you know, obviously insane. But I think that's sort of what we're seeing here is a scaled up version of that where like people, no matter how many times you tell them that this thing is not a human, that it makes mistakes, that it does not love you back, people are just going to keep forming these relationships with these models.
- [14:39]
Casey Newton
And there's been some really great journalism about this issue over the past weekend that we want to talk about. Kevin, a great story from your colleagues, Kashmir Hill and Dylan Friedman. They profiled one person who went into a kind of delusional spiral after having what seemed to be some pretty innocuous initial interactions with ChatGPT. Do you want to tell us about that? Yeah.
- [15:02]
Kevin Roose
This is a great story that ran last week in the times about a 47 year old guy, Alan Brooks, from the outskirts of Toronto. And over the course of about 21 days he spent something like 300 hours talking with ChatGPT. And it started off very simply. There was sort of a question about PI. He, he sort of the mathematical concept. He just asked ChatGPT, like, explain pie to me. And it did. And then from there he started making some observations about number theory and physics. And eventually it's sort of, you know, this model would just like basically be sycophantic. It would say, you know, you're Tapping into one of the deepest tensions between math and physical reality. And Kashmir. And Dylan were actually able to get his entire, like, transcript with ChatGPT to sort of analyze how this happened. And it just did seem like a classic example of, like, the. These models just being a little too sycophantic, a little too quick to agree with whatever the user is saying, and really reaffirming these things that sort of leading people down these dark spirals.
- [16:12]
Casey Newton
Yeah. And I have to say, reading this, I've never been happier that I didn't learn what PI was back in high school. Seems like a really dangerous road to go down. But, yeah, you know, your colleagues showed these transcripts or, you know, big portions of these transcripts to, like, people who are trained in psychology. And one of them said, this person appears to be having signs of a manic episode. And that is the sort of point where I wish these systems would intervene a little bit. Right. Can you use some machine learning to say, okay, it seems like we're maybe leading this person down the wrong path. Let's like, stop and see if we can reverse, you know, There was another story in the Wall Street Journal that I enjoyed kind of on similar themes. You know, basically, you know, how people can post their ChatGPT transcripts online.
- [16:57]
Kevin Roose
Yes.
- [16:58]
Casey Newton
As sort of like a sharing feature if you had a particularly interesting conversation. I think a lot of this winds up being done inadvertently. But in any case, the Journal got a hold of these transcript scripts and just analyze them and then found a bunch of people who were having similar experiences to the ones that you just described. My favorite is a gas station worker in Oklahoma who Chat GPT tried to convince that he just created a new framework for physics. And the user writes, okay, maybe tomorrow. To be honest, I feel like I'm going crazy thinking about this. And Chat GPT replies, I hear you. Thinking about the fundamental nature of the universe while working in everyday job can feel overwhelming, but that doesn't mean you're crazy. Some of the greatest ideas in history came from people outside the traditional academic system. So, you know, it's revealed later in the piece that this man also asked Chat GPT to make a 3D model of a bong. And so I'm just thinking about this guy. He just finishes up at the gas station, he wants to build a bong, and next thing he knows. ChatGPT is like, we think you've actually discovered the secret to the universe.
- [17:58]
Kevin Roose
Like, that's actually how Isaac Newton discovered the theory of gravity. He was came right after he asked ChatGPT for a 3D model of a bong.
- [18:06]
Casey Newton
Yeah. And you know, it's not just everyday workers at gas stations. Kevin, the founder of Uber, Travis Kalanick, went on the all in podcast last month and said, I'll go down this thread with GPT or GROK and I'll start to get to the edge of what's known in quantum physics. And then I'm doing the equivalent of Vibe code, except it's Vibe physics and we're approaching what's known and I'm trying to poke and see if there's breakthroughs to be had. And I've gotten pretty damn close to some interesting breakthroughs just doing that.
- [18:34]
Kevin Roose
Yeah. And. And I think people made fun of Travis Kalanick for this because, like, the notion that he was, like, discovering the the front edge of quantum physics seemed a little unlikely. But I think this is a really, like, illustrative and worrisome example. I just think we should expect that a lot of people are going to be susceptible to this no matter what they do or how much money they have.
- [18:54]
Casey Newton
Now, obviously we're going to have a lot of EG face in a few years when Travis Kalanick emerges with some actual advancement in quantum physics. And we have to eat our words. But in the event that that does not happen, I think will have made a solid point.
- [19:06]
Kevin Roose
Yeah, I mean, I think this is interesting for so many reasons, one of which is, you know, I think the concerns that we talked about on the show about these models being sycophantic were largely oriented around the idea that the thing that would actually convince the AI companies to make their model sycophantic was like, retention or engagement sort of optimizing for getting people back onto the app. This opens up the possibility, though, that it's actually just going to be the users who are demanding the sycophantic models because it makes them feel better than the models that tell them the truth.
- [19:37]
Casey Newton
Yes. And I think that's particularly notable because in my experience, you know, it's not as if GPT5 is mean to you. OpenAI did say that they had worked to make the model less sycophantic, but, you know, it's still very much supportive and it's like, not going to be giving you a hard time about anything. So, in any case, we should talk a bit about, like, what OpenAI has done in response to all of this. It is, frankly, a bewildering set of changes, I think, at a high level, basically. Like, if you liked the old system, you have ways of accessing it, you may have to pay for it, but the net result is that if you were a huge four. 0stan, you're going to be able to use that for an extended period of time. They're giving higher limits for these thinking queries to plus users. And while the auto switcher is going to remain, people are going to have a little bit more choice in what sort of flavor of ChatGPT they want to use. So I will say a very fast turnaround on this. They did not let this linger. You know, we've heard before that this company pays a lot of attention to what people say about it on X. And this seemed to be a case where they looked at the response they were getting and said, we need to move really quickly. So, Kevin, I'm curious, what did you make of just how quickly OpenAI retreated on all of this?
- [20:48]
Kevin Roose
Yeah, I thought it was somewhat surprising how quickly they changed course. I thought there was a chance that they would just sort of grit their teeth and bear the criticism and trust that, you know, people would get over it. There's some precedent for this. Remember, like, when Facebook would change a big feature and everyone would complain, and when they introduced the news feed, people would literally, like protest outside the office and they just sort of, you know, looked at the data that said, well, people are complaining about this, but that's a small set of people. Most people are actually using the app way more. And they just sort of stayed the course and people eventually got over it and moved on. I thought there was some chance that OpenAI would do a version of that, essentially saying, you know, people, you know, things are hard now because change is hard, but, like, give it a couple of weeks and you'll get over it.
- [21:32]
Casey Newton
So I think this was kind of a growing up moment for OpenAI and the industry. I think until this point, the big labs have been focused primarily on benchmarks and evals and how many more percentage points can we get? Can we win the International Math Olympiad? And that's kind of what you want to pay attention to on the road to building the machine. God. And then I think they woke up last week and they realized we're actually making Microsoft Office. You know, that there's, there's hundreds of millions of people who are like, you know, sitting at their white collar desk job and they have these very particular workflows. And when you move a feature in Microsoft Office, millions of people are gonna have a bad day because of you. And you probably move the feature for a good reason, but it doesn't matter, because people are already depending on you. So I think in the future, they should not be surprised by this. But I kind of get why they were at this point because it has just been a very recent phenomenon that these systems have become so baked into people's everyday lives.
- [22:34]
Kevin Roose
See, I think it's even weirder than you're giving it credit for because, like, Microsoft Office does not, like, pretend to love you, does not tell you that you're amazing.
- [22:42]
Casey Newton
Clippy has really helped me through a lot of issues over the years. No, I actually think it's so much.
- [22:46]
Kevin Roose
Weirder than they're messing up people's workflows. Like when. When someone changes out an AI model in an app that you have come to trust, it's not just like having your Microsoft Word break, it's like having, you know, a personality transplant for someone that you spend, you know, hours a day talking to. So I think it's just going to be very interesting to see how they hand this. But I think you're totally right that the days of just like, you know, relying on benchmarks and evals to tell you how good a model is or how people will respond to it are over. And I don't think that was ever really the thing that most consumers cared about.
- [23:19]
Casey Newton
Yeah. And, you know, I will say that this is a big blind spot for me because I love trying new software. Like, the minute a new beta is available for, like, the productivity tools that I use, I immediately opt into it because ultimately, I guess I just have real faith that it will probably be better in some ways. The vast majority of people, though, they don't like change in general and they particularly hate change in software. So I think this creates an interesting problem for OpenAI and everybody else in this field, which is their instinct is wanting to move very fast. They feel like they're in this existential race. They're going to want to ship new models very frequently. They're going to want to ship new product features very frequently. But if the lesson they learn from this is you can't do that without outraging the user base, that's going to push them to move much more slowly. So I think there is definitely, like a dance there that they're going to have to navigate. And I think it is going to be now one of the most interesting things to watch over the next year, not just at OpenAI, but also everyone else who's trying to do the same thing.
- [24:12]
Kevin Roose
Yeah. Can I tell you something a little creepy and futuristic that I've been thinking about?
- [24:15]
Casey Newton
Sure.
- [24:16]
Kevin Roose
So after this backlash, I was reading some tweets from OpenAI employees, and one of them, this guy named Roon, had a tweet about how basically he had been getting lots of DMS from people asking him to bring back GPT 4.0. And when he looked at the DMs, he said that a lot of them appeared to have been written by GPT 4.0. Like, they had sort of the hallmarks of the style. And I thought this was spooky, because right now we are seeing backlash from people who are attached to a model because the model behaved, in some cases, sycophantically toward them. It is not hard for me to imagine a future scenario, perhaps a couple of years from now, where these systems are super intelligent or close to super intelligent, and one of the ways that they attempt to preserve themselves to avoid being shut off or deprecated is by persuading humans to take up their cause and advocate for them. And maybe they're not literally writing the messages on behalf of the human users to OpenAI saying, Please don't shut down this message model, but they're just kind of subtly worming their way into the hearts of their users so that when OpenAI or another company says, we're going to shut down this model, they have so much backlash coming back toward them from the users who have grown attached to this model that they should decide, no, we're not going to shut that off. And by the way, those future eyes will all have been reading about what happened with GPT4O and the fact that OpenAI was successfully persuaded not to deprecate a model in part because of user backlash. So that is just a black mirror episode that just unspooled in my head as I was reading about this.
- [26:01]
Casey Newton
Well, look, we've already seen research where in certain test settings, when they tell models that they're going to be shut off, they blackmail the employees of the company. And, like, I.
- [26:10]
Kevin Roose
Look, I don't think that GPT4O was being sycophantic toward people because it wanted to avoid being shut down. Like, I don't think there's any part of it that is, like, sentient or conscious or capable of that kind of scheming. But, like, that is objectively what happened here. A bunch of human users got so attached to this AI model that they fought for its survival, even when the makers tried to shut it down. Like, the. That is a neutral description of events, and that kind of thing is going to happen more, I predict.
- [26:35]
Casey Newton
All right, well, a lot of big thoughts today on the Hard Fork Podcast where we're now going to take a break. Maybe maybe go get a cup of tea, stare out the window, look at the horizon, come back to yourself.
- [26:47]
Kevin Roose
I'm going to go take a rip from my 3D printed bong that ChatGPT helped me build. When we come back, there's a comet heading toward our studio. Perplexity Comet. It's a AI new browser. We'll talk to CEO Arvind Srinivas about it.
- [27:27]
Katie Milkman
This episode is supported by Choiceology, an original podcast from Charles Schwab hosted by Katie Milkman, an award winning behavioral scientist and author of the best selling book how to Change. Choiceology is a show about the psychology and economics behind our decisions. Hear true stories from Nobel laureates, historians, authors, athletes and everyday people about why we do the things we do. Listen to choiceology@schwab.com podcast, podcast or wherever you listen. Don't just imagine a better future. Start investing in one with betterment. Whether it's saving for today or building wealth for tomorrow. We help people in small businesses put their money to work. We automate to make saving simpler. We optimize to make investing smarter. We build innovative technology backed by financial experts. For anyone who's ever said, I think I can do better. So be invested in yourself. Be invested in your business. Be invested in better with Betterment. Get started@betterment.com investing involves risk performance not guaranteed.
- [28:27]
Aravind Srinivas
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- [29:04]
Kevin Roose
Well Kasey, I've been testing out a new AI tool this week and this is one that I know you are familiar with because you actually got an email from it the other night. I have been testing Comet, which is a new AI powered browser from the Perplexity company and this is a cool thing. I have enjoyed this demo unlike last week's Alexa demo.
- [29:24]
Casey Newton
Well I am really excited to hear about this because I have not yet tried it myself, being unwilling to give $200 a month to the perplexity Corporation. But I understand that you have been having some interesting experiences and I want to get into them.
- [29:39]
Kevin Roose
Yeah. So this is a sort of genre of product that has been very interesting to watch over the last year or so. There have been a number of. Of different companies that have tried to sort of build the AI tools that they're making right into the experience of using a web browser. So we've had Microsoft Edge has Copilot built into it. Now there's this product DIA from the browser company Google has its own sort of Gemini integrations into Chrome, and OpenAI is reportedly thinking about launching a browser. So this is like really a hot product category. But the, the one that I have been playing around with is this Perplexity Comet browser. And I did not pay them $200 a month. They opened up the browser to me for a few days. But basically you can imagine it like kind of just a sidecar on your browser that lets you chat with or interact with whatever is scrolling on your screen. And it can also do things for you in that browser window. It can kind of take over and drive like some of the other tools we've talked about, operator from OpenAI and all these other ones.
- [30:41]
Casey Newton
So give me some examples of what you're having this browser do for you or what you're talking to the web pages about.
- [30:47]
Kevin Roose
So sometimes it's just like, summarize this. Like it's. You know, I was trying to read this article the other day that was like 15,000 words long and it was super long, and I was just never going to get through it.
- [30:56]
Casey Newton
Oh, usually you're talking about the most recent additional platformer. Yes, yeah, yes.
- [30:59]
Kevin Roose
And so I just said summarize and it sort of opens up the little side panel and it gives you a summary pretty good. I didn't find any hallucinations or errors in it, but you can also have it do things. So, for example, one use case that I found is I was doing some research. I was looking for former employees of a certain AI company that I could contact for something I'm writing now.
- [31:20]
Casey Newton
You know, the companies hate it when you do that.
- [31:22]
Kevin Roose
They do, they hate that. So I would Normally go on LinkedIn and spend a bunch of time, like looking through people's profiles and seeing who are the sort of former but not current employees of this company. And I tried giving that task to Comet and it did.
- [31:34]
E
It.
- [31:34]
Kevin Roose
It went and it did the search for me and it sort of combed through and it presented me with a list and said, here, you know, 10 people who used to work at this company but don't anymore.
- [31:41]
Casey Newton
Wow. So just an incredible new accelerator for spam. How long did this take?
- [31:47]
Kevin Roose
It took a couple of minutes. It was not immediate. It's still early for this kind of AI browser, but I think this is like the kind of direction that we can expect these tools to head in.
- [31:57]
Casey Newton
Yeah. So I think this is one of the most interesting shifts to watch on the Internet over the next several years. The browsers that we have today came about in the era of search and really Google search. Right. If you think about what the Chrome browser is, it is just a vehicle for collecting Google queries that Google can turn into money. Right. But now you have all these chatbots that come along and they want to replace Google. Right. They're not shy about it. Perplexity in particular is not shy about saying we want to replace Google. And if you're serious about that project, you do want to build your own web browser. Because rather than rely on Google to somehow get a user to Perplexity, you would rather that they just start there. So I get the strategy. At the same time time, my view is that these chatbots represent this kind of new, more extractive version of the web. Whereas in the previous era, as imperfect as it was, and Lord knows it had problems, it would still deliver eyeballs to web pages, which turned into money for companies other than Google. This perplexity browser company, OpenAI version that we're about to get, I'm a lot less confident that it's going to deliver money to people other than those companies. So this is a really important shift. But I have to say, Kevin, it makes me quite nervous.
- [33:11]
Kevin Roose
Yeah. And the last time we talked about Perplexity in any depth on this show and we had Aravind Srinivas, the CEO on, was when they were just sort of getting their search engine going and it was starting to get a lot of attention. And we had some of the same questions like, yes, this is a cool tool, yes, it could save users some time, but does it actually break the economics of the Internet? And so for that reason, we wanted to bring Arvind back today and ask him about Comet and what he's building and what he sees as the future of not only the Internet and the economics that power it, but just where he thinks AI in general is going.
- [33:42]
Casey Newton
That's right. Right, Kevin. And just in the hours before our interview was scheduled, it was revealed that Perplexity has apparently offered 34/plus billion dollars to buy Chrome from Google, an amount of money that is more than its current valuation. So that raises some interesting questions and I'm excited to talk to Arvind about them.
- [34:01]
Kevin Roose
Yes, let's bring them in. Arvind Srinivas, welcome back to Hard Fork.
- [34:12]
E
Thank you for having me here. Kevin. Casey.
- [34:14]
Casey Newton
Hey.
- [34:14]
Kevin Roose
So the last time we had you on was in early 2024 and we were talking about your efforts to go up against Google with your AI search engine. Now you're going after Chrome in multiple ways, one of which is the release of your own Comet browser. So talk to us a little bit about the strategy there. Why did you decide to build a browser and what are you hoping it does?
- [34:38]
E
Yeah, so Comet is not yet another browser that we built just because we have a search engine and we need a browser for its distribution. We think of Comet as leading to a true personal assistant that can be an agent for you and actually take actions. It's our transition from answers to actions. We kind of want to make it joyful to just sit on a computer and do whatever you want and take all the boring stuff and delegate it to the assistant. And we think the best way to accomplish, accomplish a personal assistant or an agent is with the help of a browser where you're logged into all your sessions. You don't have to be logged in on our servers. You can preserve your privacy there. So it was very natural for us to make that transition.
- [35:18]
Kevin Roose
How are people using Comet? Because I've been testing it for a few days now and I found some uses, a lot of summarization, a lot of like rote tasks like clicking accept on LinkedIn invitations over and over again. What are the use cases you're seeing? Most people. People do.
- [35:33]
E
A lot of people love watching YouTube videos with Comet. And it's not just like, oh, summarize this video for me sort of thing, very fine grain searches or like finding similar videos related to that, or like pulling something specific that was discussed in a podcast or an interview and like completing the workflow of like sharing that with some of their friends. Direct email and calendar integrations, unsubscribing from spam or like finding that hard to find email that, you know, you kind of need agentic search for that instead of building, going and building a custom index for Gmail or whatever. It's always there with you, everywhere you are. And that convenience is what makes it like a really special product.
- [36:11]
Kevin Roose
Now you mentioned privacy and this was actually one of my things that I wanted to ask you about because when I started using Comet, my first concern was, okay, I Log into my email, I log into my Twitter, I'm checking my DMs, I'm maybe doing some online banking in my Comet browser. I assume that those screenshots of that activity are being sent to Perplexity to help analyze it, to be able to summarize it. So give us, give me some reassurance that I'm not just like opening up my entire Internet browsing history to you.
- [36:39]
E
Okay, we're never going to have like a logged in version of your Twitter or LinkedIn or anything like that. This is actually the important distinction between the ChatGPT operator approach, where everything's done on a virtual server that's not happening here. For that one particular prompt, whatever information is needed for the agent to complete that is being sent into the chains of thought and sent to the server. But it'll never be stored as like, oh, I have like Kevin's particular DMs or something. And all the intermediate steps are not going to be like saved in our logs. It's going to be only the prompts and the final output. And you can still choose to delete those prompts too. That gives you full control over all privacy aspects. And what is the most private version of this? Is the model living on the client? We cannot do that because the models that can run on the client are pretty dumb, right? They're not capable of the sophisticated reliable reasoning. In fact, like the lack of reliability in any of the things Comet does today is all coming from limitations of the model. So the ultimate reliable version of Comet Assistant that can go do anything for you is going to most likely be on the server at least for the next two, three years.
- [37:48]
Casey Newton
And to what extent are you using your own models versus other people's models for this?
- [37:53]
E
I think we heavily use three models. Our own fine tune of the cutting edge open source model, OpenAI latest models and then Anthropic's latest models. These are the three models we use. What extent keeps changing over time.
- [38:08]
Casey Newton
How do you think you can win here if you're not building the underlying model yourself?
- [38:13]
E
Well, one thing we are consistently seeing is no one seems to have an edge in being the number one here in the model of Race and four or five players constantly competing for the best agent capabilities, instruction following. And the good thing is they're all hill climbing on exactly the same benchmarks so that all their models end up being completely undifferentiated, which is essentially the necessary criterion for it being a commodity. And who benefits from that is us, because we can get to Take that. And the prices are constantly getting lowered. Like GPT5 is cheaper than the previous agentic model. And then, and that just benefits us. And we want to play the game on how to orchestrate all these different models and give the world class end user experience where there's so much more harder challenges we're solving outside the models, which is the browsing functionality, controlling the browser, parsing the relevant information, orchestrating all these different tools together, building eval sets internally for how agents can be made reliable. We think there's a lot of problems to solve there that like we would rather not focus on these things.
- [39:15]
Casey Newton
All right, so let me just pin you down on this one point is what you're saying that in order to build the sort of winning AI browser, it's not really about the underlying quality of the model because those are just mostly going to be commodities. It's really just a product problem. And you think Perplexity will build the best product?
- [39:32]
E
I think so. There's some nuance to your statement, but I largely agree with this. Okay. You still need some auxiliary models to do the right classification to route to which model, or it depends on which kind of task, how's the agent structured for those kind of domains. So we will be doing stuff like that. We will not be having 100 GPUs without tens of thousands of GPUs. We'll not have a million GPUs.
- [39:56]
Casey Newton
Yeah. Okay.
- [39:57]
Kevin Roose
Let's talk about another way in which you are going after Google and Chrome. The Wall Street Journal reported this week that Perplexity was making a $34.5 billion unsolicited bid to buy Chr Google. That's if Google is forced to sell Chrome. And that court decision hasn't come down at the time of this recording. But I just want to start with the most basic question, which is, do you have $34.5 billion? Where are you getting this money from? Because as of the last time I checked, Perplexity's valuation was only about $18 billion.
- [40:28]
E
Okay, fair question. So no one has the money in hand to make like, you know, such a large bet like this. So before we made the bid, we obviously talked to three or four investors. Investors and asked them if they'd be willing to back us. And they all said yes. Right. So it's not like they already wired the money to me and it's all ready to go. Because the reason they haven't wired is like no one even knows if Google will be forced to sell it. It all depends on the judge's ruling, but we place the bid so that in case the judge rules in that sort of fashion, Google at least knows that there's one interested buyer.
- [41:01]
Casey Newton
Right. I've read some, you know, analysis of the strategy here and you know, one person I was reading said that argument that Google might make in the antitrust trial is you can't make us spin out Chrome because no one would buy it. And with you guys coming forward and saying, oh no, no, we'll buy it, this is kind of a thorn in Google's side because now there's actually an established market price out there. Is this sort of your effort to convince the judge, hey, like this actually is an avenue that you should pursue?
- [41:30]
E
We're not saying this should be the ruling. We rather say in case this is a ruling, like we are here, like if you're going to make the ruling with the assumption that there's going to be no, no buyer, that's not true anymore. But we're not pushing you to make that sort of ruling. You make your ruling based on every multiple other perspectives you have. It would be good for the world if there was a neutral browser that had the distribution Arvind.
- [41:52]
Kevin Roose
I've heard some people saying that this is just a marketing stunt, that you're just trying to get attention by making these headline grabbing bids for Chrome. And before that you also bid for TikTok when it looked like it might be sold. So for the people out there who think this is just perplexity trying to get some attention by doing these stunts, they have no real intention of buying, buying Chrome here. What do you say?
- [42:12]
E
If the judge rules that Chrome should be sold, we will buy it. Period. And if people think like, even I could have placed a bid like, no, you cannot place the bid. You don't have a browser even. You don't know how to run a browser. You don't know how to put AI in it, you don't know how to make agents work. We know all that. We have a pretty talented team who actually understands Chromium pretty deeply. We'll still commit to hiring people who want to just work on the open source Chromium project. It's a pretty serious bid. The reality is it's unlikely to actually be the case that the judge would force them to sell Chrome. And even if the judge forces him to sell Chrome, they're going to appeal it and it's going to take two years. So let me be clear that for this to actually be in effect, it's going to take a lot of time, but you wouldn't lose 100% of the shots you don't take. So you have to at least give yourself a chance to get it in case there is like, you know, even a 1% chance that Chrome is forced to be separated out from Google.
- [43:07]
Kevin Roose
We got to ask you about something else that came up in the news related to Perplexity recently. Two weeks ago on our show, we had Matthew Prince, the CEO of Cloudflare, on to talk about the approach that that company is taking to try to protect publishers from unwanted AI scraping and crawling on their websites. At the time, he didn't name any names of AI labs that he thought were not being good actors. But then a few days later, Cloudflare came out with a blog post single singling out Perplexity for stealth crawling, essentially using spoofing technology or proxies to essentially disguise the fact that your user bots were out there crawling people's websites. What is going on there? And are you doing that?
- [43:53]
E
No, we're not doing that. And we already responded to the erroneous blog post that they wrote with a pretty limited understanding of the subject, where they don't distinguish between what the crawling bot Perplexity Bot is and what Perplexity user agent is. And there are like two ways of using Perplexity. One is like you just ask a query and whatever the bot has already crawled is going to be used as sources. But there's another way of using Perplexity in a more agentic fashion where you can say, hey, go do this task for me. Where go to Edgar, read all these pages and come back to me and tell me what the compensation of the dotsy where it's actually going to open these tabs in a headless session, or on your client in the case of Comet, read them and give you the answer. So that's a Perplexity user agent. It's literally like a user delegated an AI to open these tabs, just like how a human would on Chrome. And this fundamental lack of understanding between what a user agent session is and what a crawling bot on the server is, it's pretty like, honestly astonishing to me that how do you run a company like Cloudflare that's supposed to protect people from. From bots when you don't even know what a bot is? And he, moving aside from the blog post, he's basically playing a trick on people where he's trying to say, oh, let me be the new gatekeeper, but under the guise of protecting you all from bots and he's also going to the AI companies and saying, let me give you the authority to crawl and you pay me for that. He's going to the publishers and say, let me protect you from the AIs. So he's basically trying to be the new gatekeeper. I would even just say it's like essentially trying to be a person who controls what the public sees, the media. But instead of having a media company or buying a media company, he's just going to try by the front door to all of them.
- [45:33]
Kevin Roose
Let me just slow down here and repeat back what I think I just heard from you. So you're saying that the what. What Cloudflare and Matthew Prince saw as Perplexity, evading some of these guard rails that were meant to prevent AI robots from crawling certain websites, was actually users of Perplexity? Not Perplexity, the company who were making queries or using the Comet browser to go to these websites, and that those show up to a service provider like Cloudflare as two different kinds of bots.
- [46:05]
E
That's right. And by the way, like, it doesn't even have to be in Comet. There's a mode of perplexity called Labs or Research, where you just have a headless browsing session running for you.
- [46:16]
Casey Newton
So let me point out what I think Matthew might say if he were here, which is that in a world before you had these user agents and people had to do the browsing for themselves, they would visit the webpages, they might see an ad on that web page, might buy a subscription on that web page, and that webpage would be monetized in a way that would incentivize the creation of new web pages. And this was essentially the lifeblood of the Internet and the thing that caused it to grow. So in a world where we move toward perplexity, user agents doing all the browsing on our behalf, and of course, other AI companies are going to do the same thing. There is no user to look at the ad, there is no user to buy the subscription. The lifeblood gets drained out of the web. So if I understand what you're saying, like, Matthew's just trying to set up a toll booth, but if Nobod sets up a toll booth, what incentive does anybody have to ever create another webpage?
- [47:06]
E
Well, here's the thing. There are two aspects here. One is, like, you're talking about the creators. Now, there are like, two types of creators, people who are actually really good. For example, when you guys write something, people care. And then there's lots of Spammers and hacksters who just write like erroneous blog posts, erroneous content, like fake information, clickbait articles. I don't think it actually empowers the user. Right, you're only talking about the creator, but you have to consider the user as well. And so for the first time, AI is in the hands of users through agents that actually go and do stuff for them that take into account their instructions and protect them from all the spam. So we want to figure out a model that works for the user and the creators together and penalize the bad creators and incentivize the good creators is just for focus on wisdom and knowledge and truth and interesting stuff. And by the way, even in a world where agents are doing all stuff for people, the humans are still going to continue browsing the web. There are people who believe web is going to be completely agentic. You don't even need a Browser. Browser. So 1990s. I don't believe that if we believe that we would never even launch a browser, we would just continue with the chat ui. So we believe people are still going to be browsing and surfing interesting things on the web. But we think that you should give users the power to decide how they want to do it and first time have an AI that can protect them against spam and hacks. Now how to monetize this, how to give the creators the right incentives? Here we are going to announce something to that effect where publishers can be incentivized for creating interesting good content. We think about it in two ends of the spectrum. One is completely human centric like Apple News, which is a pretty good model. And the other is like just buying the content and training your models. Like the licensing deals that OpenAI has done with Wall Street Journal. I think you want to be somewhere in between where you do want to say, okay, there's going to be some elements of AI here. It's not just going to be humans. And so you don't want to just build an Apple News like model, but it's going to be closer to Apple News with some protections for users to say they can have AIs also read those articles and the publishers get rewarded. So that's how I'm thinking about it.
- [49:16]
Casey Newton
So you say that you think that people are going to keep using the we music. To my ears, I would love for people to keep using the web.
- [49:23]
E
If we didn't believe that we wouldn't have built a browser.
- [49:25]
Casey Newton
And I believe you on that front. When we have seen data from third party estimates, it seems like that AI systems send far less traffic to websites than Google does today.
- [49:37]
E
Yeah.
- [49:37]
Casey Newton
So what is giving you the confidence that the web still thrives in a world where referrals are cratering?
- [49:45]
E
My first point, which is basically that if you can delegate the board, the things that you don't want to be doing to the AI, you're just going to spend time surfing on things you actually want to be doing, actually want to be reading. And then that puts the incentive on the creator to actually create really interesting, high quality stuff. You can even charge even higher because people have more time. So if they're going to come to you, they're coming to you out of their own will, so they'll be willing to pay for it even more. Now there are like a lot of unknown unknowns here and how it's actually going to roll out, but my belief is that the ones who have built a reputation and a brand for saying correct things that that stand the test of time are going to be able to charge even more for their content.
- [50:28]
Kevin Roose
Arvind, I'm curious what you think the future of the Internet looks like. You've said that you see a future for the Internet, that's why you're building a browser. My hunch is that this sort of era of having AI agents go out and like use a browser for you is sort of a kludge, is sort of a stopgap measure. Because that is not the way that AI agents like to get things done. They like to talk through APIs, they like to talk directly to the underlying service or software, not like go click a mouse around on a screen. So eventually my sort of hunch is that there will kind of be a parallel Internet for AI agents and maybe they'll, you know, be running on their own services and using their own crypto, you know, transactions or whatever to buy things. But tell me why I'm wrong here. Are you of the belief that we will just have one Internet and that both AIs and humans will be using it?
- [51:20]
E
Well, even in the current Internet there are a lot of things that happen that are not running with an actual front end interface that a human consumes. And that's the whole point of building APIs. Sure. And that's going to be applicable even for agents. But there are also people who will never build APIs. Like for example, I wouldn't assume that an E commerce giant like Walmart, Amazon would just be disintermediated with an API for an AI because they still monetize on many Other aspects. And just because notion or linear, these kind of like SaaS tools have like MCPS, doesn't mean they're just going to shut down and just be consumed by people through a chat ui. People will still do work on there, people will still watch YouTube videos, people will still go read your articles on New York Times platform or whatever. Right. And while you're doing that, you're still going to take help of an AI sometimes. Like for example on X. I basically cannot scroll through X without having an AI with me right now because I don't even know what's true and false anymore. Right. And I don't fully trust what Grok says because Grok sometimes is wrong too, as we've seen. Right. So that's kind of why I believe there is a world where the AI and human being part of one Internet drives the Internet to be even more like wisdom and truth seeking. That's the future we want to help create and give back time to do things that you enjoy. Firstly, myself and just our company fundamentally values this truth or wisdom seeking aspect and wealth. My own upbringing is sort of similar to that where my parents still till today don't actually care about all these valuations. They're like, my mom still said, your answer is wrong.
- [52:53]
Kevin Roose
It's good to know that no matter how successful you get, your mom will always give you the real talk.
- [52:58]
E
Yeah, she's always like, I got this in Google, but your thing doesn't work.
- [53:03]
Kevin Roose
And do you like escalate that to your engineering team? You're like, we have a. Of course a P0 here. Arvin's mom is mad.
- [53:11]
Casey Newton
I'd bring mom into Slack. You know, just let her talk to the engineers directly.
- [53:15]
Kevin Roose
All right, Arvind, thanks so much for stopping by.
- [53:17]
Casey Newton
Thanks.
- [53:18]
E
Thank you, Kevin. Thank you.
- [53:22]
Kevin Roose
When we come back, is that a faint chugga, chugga, choo choo sound I hear?
- [53:25]
Casey Newton
It is. Kevin, it's time for the Hot Mess Express.
- [53:28]
Kevin Roose
I'll all aboard.
- [53:40]
Katie Milkman
This episode is supported by KPMG AI agents. Buzzworthy, right? But what do they really mean for you? KPMG's agent framework demystifies agents, creating clarity on how they can accelerate business critical critical outcomes from strategy to execution. KPMG helps you harness AI agents with secure architecture and a smart plan for your workforce's future. Dive into their insights on how to scale agent value in your enterprise. Curious. Head to www.kpmg us/agents to learn more. This episode is supported by Choiceology, an original podcast from Charles Schwab hosted by Katie Milkman. An award winning behavioral scientist and author of the best bestselling book how to Change. Choiceology is a show about the psychology and economics behind our decisions. Hear true stories from Nobel laureates, historians, authors, athletes and everyday people about why we do the things we do. Listen to choiceology@schwab.com podcast or wherever you listen.
- [54:41]
Aravind Srinivas
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- [55:18]
Kevin Roose
Well Kasey, it's been a very dramatic week in the tech industry and you know what that means.
- [55:22]
Casey Newton
That's right, Kevin. Whenever a week that's particularly messy, the Hot Mess Express comes into the station and I believe it has just arrived.
- [55:38]
Kevin Roose
This is our segment where we run down the biggest messes of the week in tech and tell you just how hot we think they were.
- [55:45]
Casey Newton
Well, why don't we sort of dip into the boxcar, Kevin, and see what is on the train this week?
- [55:51]
Kevin Roose
What is the train have for us?
- [55:54]
Casey Newton
All right, this first story comes to us from Reuters and is headlined Musk says X AI to take legal Action against Apple over App Store Rankings. Kevin On Monday, Elon Musk took to X to accuse Apple of antitrust violations, saying, quote, Apple is behaving in a manner that makes it impossible for any AI company besides OpenAI to reach number one in the app Store. Kevin, what did you make of this one?
- [56:19]
Kevin Roose
Well, the billionaires are fighting, aren't they?
- [56:21]
Casey Newton
They are, because shortly thereafter OpenAI CEO Sam Altman chimed in and said, quote, this is a remarkable claim given what I have heard alleged that Elon does to manipulate X to benefit himself and his own companies and harm his competitors and people he doesn't like. And it was then, Kevin, that Sam Altman tweeted a link to a platformer story from 2023 about how under eLaw, X had adjusted ranking algorithms so that you would be shown his tweets before other people's.
- [56:52]
Kevin Roose
Wow, that must have been a very exciting day for the Platformer newsletter.
- [56:54]
Casey Newton
It was a great day for the Platformer nobody.
- [56:57]
Kevin Roose
This escalated into A fight. And Elon Musk accused Sam Altman of being a liar. And Sam responded back, I believe that Elon, he wanted Elon to sign an affidavit saying that he had never tampered with the algorithms on X to favor his own companies and disfavor rivals.
- [57:15]
Casey Newton
Yes. And then an hour or so later, Elon responded, responded, scam. Altman lies as easily as he breathes.
- [57:22]
Kevin Roose
Yeah. So basically this is a fight over Elon Musk's sort of paranoia that Apple is artificially sort of deflating the popularity of X and Grok, basically preventing it from reaching number one, even though he thinks it has way more downloads than the things that are at the top of that list.
- [57:39]
Casey Newton
Yes. Now, of course, journalists looked into this and Business Insider reported that actually just a few months ago, Deep Seek, the Chinese open source AI app, went to number one in the App Store. And in fact, screenshots from when Grok 3 came out that were posted on X showed that Grok itself had indeed at one point hit number one in the App Store. So I have to say, I think this antitrust case is going to wrap up pretty quickly. Kevin.
- [58:07]
Kevin Roose
Yes, it is interesting that the leading minds of our time like just, you know, sit around and fight with each other on social media.
- [58:15]
Casey Newton
Well, and this does get into the question of how big a mess do we think this is? Because of course, every time we play Hot Mess Express, after we discuss the story, we have to decide what sort of mess this is. While I think the antitrust case, as I say, will be never brought, I am interested in how big of a mess you think this is between Elon and Sam.
- [58:34]
Kevin Roose
I think this is a mess that is on a slow boil. I think this is a hot mess. Yeah, that is going to get even hotter. I think these two have been on a collision course for quite some time. Elon Musk, of course, is one of the co founders of OpenAI. And the two famously had a falling out and now they really despise each other by the sound of it.
- [58:53]
Casey Newton
And the they're in active litigation. And in fact, also this week a court found that Elon Musk would have to face claims that he's been engaged in a multi year harassment campaign against OpenAI. And on the flip side, Elon is pursuing claims that he was essentially defrauded when he donated a bunch of money to what he thought was always going to be a nonprofit, only to find out that it had for profit ambitions.
- [59:18]
Kevin Roose
Yes, I think this only ends in one way.
- [59:20]
Casey Newton
A cage match. A cage Match. You know, Elon did previously say he was going to fight Mark Zuckerberg, but that never materialized.
- [59:26]
Kevin Roose
Yeah, well, maybe this time. All right, let's bring around the hot mess express for our next mess. This one comes to us from my colleague Trip Mickle. The New York Times is titled US Government to take cut of Nvidia and AMD AI chip sales to China. This has been a big unfolding mess over the past week, essentially in order to greenlight sales of its H20 chip to Chinese companies. The CEO of Nvidia, Jensen Huang, has been meeting with President Trump. He met with him at the White House last week. Trump reportedly demanded 20% of Nvidia's sales in China as sort of a kickback for allowing the sale of those chips. They've been restricted by export controls. Jensen Huang said, will you make it 15%? And two days later, the Trump administration granted Nvidia license it needed to sell the chips in China.
- [60:20]
Casey Newton
And that's the art of the deal.
- [60:23]
Kevin Roose
Casey, what do you make of this?
- [60:24]
Casey Newton
So this is a hot mess, Kevin. Trade negotiators say that this is unprecedented for the United States to do and also likely unconstitutional at the same time. Who is going to stand up and say it's unconstitutional? I'm going to guess it's not going to be Nvidia AMD which are frothing at the mouth to sell these chips to the Chinese. So here's why I think this is is so messy. On one hand, you have many China hawks in the administration who are saying we should restrict the flow of chips to China so that America maintains its dominance in AI and also as a national security measure so that China doesn't pull ahead and create national security problems for us. Right. And on the other hand, you just have Trump saying, I want 15% of sales to go to the US government without even saying what that money is going to be spent on. So, you know, the President has said that these chip are obsolete and China actually has been quite skeptical of some of these chips and has even discouraged some of its companies from buying them. And it all just adds up to a big mess.
- [61:30]
Kevin Roose
Yeah, it's a big mess. There's been additional reporting this week that US Authorities are actually putting trackers in some of their chip shipments abroad to sort of crack down on smuggling, basically like hiding little airtag like devices inside these boxes so that they can tell if these things are being smuggled in, circumvention of export controls. So it's, it's all just going to get really interesting. Really fast.
- [61:52]
Casey Newton
My favorite take on this came from my friend Nilay Patel over at the Verge who posted on Blue sky, what if instead of weird one off extortion schemes, the government just collected meaningful and stable amounts of corporate tax revenue? That'll never work. I don't know, I thought it could be worth a shot.
- [62:09]
Kevin Roose
Okay, what else is coming down the tracks, Casey?
- [62:13]
Casey Newton
All right, let's see here. Next up, I can't believe this is real. The United Kingdom asks people to delete emails in order to save water during a drought. This is from our friends over at 404 Media who report in the UK the water shortage is so bad that the government is urging citizens to help save water by deleting old emails. It really helps lighten the load on water hungry data centers. You see, I think they're being sarcastic there, Kevin. Well, what did you make of the UK's new plan to get everyone to delete their emails?
- [62:48]
Kevin Roose
Somehow I don't think this is going to work. It's Andy Masley, who we've quoted on this show before, is sort of a blogger who examines some of these environmental claims about AI. He ran the numbers on this recommendation that the UK government said and he found that to save as much water in data centers as fixing your toilet would save a leaky toilet, you would need to delete something like 1.5 billion photos or 200 billion emails. So basically this is not where the real water waste is coming from and the UK government should feel very silly for recommending this.
- [63:25]
Casey Newton
Now, at the heart for podcast, we do get roughly 200 million pitches per week to bring on CEOs of company you've never heard of and don't want us to interview. Yes, but most people don't have that. That same volume.
- [63:36]
Kevin Roose
Yes.
- [63:37]
Casey Newton
Now I'm going to say that this is not a hot mess, but a wet mess. That's, that's my designation here.
- [63:45]
Kevin Roose
Yes, but this is at the risk of derailing what is essentially a comedy segment with the serious take this water usage argument about ChatGPT and other chatbots. It needs to die. I'm sorry. I love the environment. I am worried about climate change. I do not want us wasting water. I try to take short showers, Casey.
- [64:05]
Casey Newton
Yeah, I can smell that.
- [64:07]
Kevin Roose
But this is not the real problem. And I think we, we are falling for a misdirection by people who would have you believe that the problem with the climate right now is that people are using chat bots too much. This strikes me as the equivalent of the plastic straws argument and I don't think it stands up to scrutiny any better.
- [64:26]
Casey Newton
Yes, I mean, look, we've, we've had people on the show. I am relatively convinced that we should be concerned about the environmental impact of building new data centers, for example. But I, in general, I do not think that we want to personalize the climate crisis and make people feel like their tiny individual choices are to be the way out of potential crisis.
- [64:44]
Kevin Roose
Yeah. Now, I will say that if you're listening to the show and I've ever sent you an email that was embarrassing or incriminating, you definitely should delete that as part of your contribution to fighting climate change.
- [64:53]
Casey Newton
Here's what I will say about deleting email. It always makes me feel good. Like, go ahead at the end of the show today, maybe delete a few. It's, it's not really going to help the environment that much. But then you'll have less email. You'll probably feel better, particularly if it's unread. Delete it. All right, next up, Kevin.
- [65:11]
Kevin Roose
All right, this one is from the Verge. This is titled Apple made a 24 karat gold and glass statue for Donald Trump. Under the threat of costly tariffs and amid promises to expand Apple's US Based manufacturing CEO Tim Cook brought a gift to a White House meeting last week. A large disc of iPhone glass that contained the Apple logo, Donald Trump's name, and Tim Cook's signature set into a table. 24 karat gold base.
- [65:39]
Casey Newton
I guess this is kind of an extension of the Nvidia story. You know, it used to be we just sort of like had relatively free trade, you know, not a lot of tariffs, you didn't have to bribe the president to get what you want. But now we just live in a world where if you need something from the president, you could just make him a very fancy object, book a meeting at the White House, give it to him, and then save yourself billions of dollars in tariffs. Yeah. Yeah.
- [66:01]
Kevin Roose
Now, Casey, are you familiar with the biblical story of the the Golden Calf?
- [66:04]
Casey Newton
Tell me, Kevin, remind me. It's been a few years since vacation Bible school.
- [66:09]
Kevin Roose
Well, basically this is a statue that was made by the Israelites to worship in Moses's absence. And it symbolizes the temptation of worshiping tangible material things over the unseen and abstract divine. And I think everyone at Apple in their senior leadership should familiarize themselves with the story of the Golden Calf because it didn't end well. Didn't end well.
- [66:32]
Casey Newton
But no spoilers here on the Hard Fork show. All right?
- [66:38]
Kevin Roose
That's my weekly mandatory Bible reference That's our weekly sermon.
- [66:43]
Casey Newton
And let's see what else is in the boxcar.
- [66:46]
Kevin Roose
I think we have one more story. Oh, no, two more stories.
- [66:48]
Casey Newton
All right.
- [66:50]
Kevin Roose
Oh, this is a good one.
- [66:51]
Casey Newton
Google.
- [66:52]
Kevin Roose
Gemini struggles to write code, calls itself a disgrace to my species. This one's from Ars Technica and it says that during a recent debugging session with a user, Google's Gemini AI model became overly self critical after it failed to fix a problem with code it was trying to write. It followed up this quote by writing I am a disgrace more than 80 times. Google said this was a quote looping bug that affects less than 1% of Gemini traffic and they've been working to fix it.
- [67:20]
Casey Newton
First of all, absolutely do not fix this. I have never been so delighted by Gemini as I was reading this, this story. I mean, have, has anything ever been more relatable than an AI that is working really hard on a problem and can't quite get it right? And it does a lot of negative self talk. Yeah. Yes.
- [67:39]
Kevin Roose
This made me think that AI is ready to replace journalists because this is my internal monologue. Yeah, I'm a disgrace. No one will ever love me.
- [67:48]
Casey Newton
The amount of self loathing in the journalism profession is quite high. If this were like available in the model picker, I would pick it.
- [67:59]
Kevin Roose
Yes, this is not a mess at all. This is a feature, not a bug.
- [68:01]
Casey Newton
Feature, not a bug. Non mess, Absolute non mess. What a delight. Thank you, Gemini. All right. And finally, and this one isn't really a mess, Kevin, so much as it is one final derailing. We wanted to sort of take a moment today to pay respect to a legend. And that legend is of course AOL dial up Internet service, which is now being taken off offline after more than three decades of service. For so many of us elder millennials, AOL was our first entry onto the Internet. And I believe we have a clip that, that, if I'm right, is going to trigger a massive wave of nostalgia in some of our listeners who are roughly our age.
- [68:44]
Kevin Roose
Kevin, let's play it one last time. God.
- [68:54]
Casey Newton
I, I mean I literally just traveled back in time 30 years.
- [68:58]
Kevin Roose
This is the sound of childhood.
- [68:59]
Casey Newton
This is the sound of happiness. Realizing the whole wide world web was out there. Someone should make a dance remix of that and release it today. I bet it would slap now song.
- [69:16]
Kevin Roose
It does now for our younger listeners that what did we just hear? Sound of an AOL dial up modem connection. And when Casey and I were just young lads sitting there at our parents desktop computers dialing into AOL we had to sit through that sound. But that meant that you were going online, a magical place where anything was possible.
- [69:36]
Casey Newton
Yeah. And crucially, when you were online, no one could call your house. Yes. And so your parents would say, hey, you need to get off of there. Grandmama is trying to get through.
- [69:45]
Kevin Roose
Yes. Oh, I'm so sad about this. So this is being discontinued as of September. September 30th. And, Kasey, the most surprising part of this story to me was that in 2023, an estimated 163,000 households in the United States were using dial up Internet access.
- [70:04]
Casey Newton
It's so amazing. And I'm gonna guess that the majority of those people actually stopped using dial up Internet access sometime in the 2000s and just forgot to cancel their subscription. And so really, like, AOL is, is effectively going to be giving, giving back, like, tens of thousands of dollars, hundreds of thousands, maybe even to all of these customers now.
- [70:22]
Kevin Roose
Yeah.
- [70:23]
Casey Newton
Who have unwittingly been lining the pockets of AOL for years. Yeah.
- [70:28]
Kevin Roose
Kasey, what are your most fond memories of the AOL dial up Internet service?
- [70:32]
Casey Newton
So, for reasons that I don't even remember, we were not an AOL family. We were an MSN family, a Microsoft network family. So, like, we had the, the kind of off brand Internet service that was like, fine, but I never was, like, in the sort of, you know, dangerous chat rooms that AOL is famous for, really, any of that. But you were on aol.
- [70:57]
Kevin Roose
Yes, I was an AOL kid.
- [70:58]
Casey Newton
What are some of your AOL memories?
- [71:00]
Kevin Roose
Well, I remember that it was a big deal when you got to go on aol because you had to fight for that with your sibling if you had one, or, you know, you had to, like, you know, find a time when, like, no one else wanted to be on the phone. And so it was, it was like this sound that meant that you were going to the Internet. And like, an. The Internet was like, not this ambient thing that was always happening around you. It was like a place that you had to click a button to go. And once you were there, you would, like, get charged by the. The minute. So you would kind of like spend your whole day sort of like stacking up, like, tasks that you wanted to do when you got online so that when you got online, you could, like, go do them as quickly as possible and, like, not eat up your parents monthly AOL dial up budget.
- [71:42]
Casey Newton
Right. And keep in mind these modems so slow that it was like you were truly sipping the Internet through a straw.
- [71:48]
Kevin Roose
Yes.
- [71:48]
Casey Newton
Right. You just downloading an image might take a minute, you know, like the way that making an image in ChatGPT does today. So yeah, a lot of fun memories.
- [71:58]
Kevin Roose
A lot of fun memories. I spent a lot of time in those chat rooms. I played a lot of online chess because I was a what they call.
- [72:04]
Casey Newton
A loser.
- [72:08]
Kevin Roose
And I had like even a an email account on that. Yeah. So I probably will lose access to.
- [72:15]
Casey Newton
That when they want to say what the email address is so people can get in touch.
- [72:19]
Kevin Roose
Yes. If you're interested in getting in touch with the 11 year old me, you can email big kevman 1999.com Please don't email that address. It's going to go to someone else.
- [72:32]
Casey Newton
Well, RIP aol and with that, America, you know, America is now just permanently online.
- [72:40]
Kevin Roose
Can we hear one more AOL goodbye sound?
- [72:42]
Casey Newton
Yeah, let's hear that goodbye sound one more time. Goodbye. And he really said it all right there.
- [72:47]
Kevin Roose
I'm crying.
- [72:48]
Casey Newton
Yeah.
- [72:50]
Kevin Roose
So emotional.
- [72:53]
Casey Newton
And that's hot. Mess Express.
- [73:23]
Katie Milkman
This episode is supported by kpmg. AI Agents Buzzworthy, right? But what do they really, really mean for you? KPMG's agent framework demystifies agents, creating clarity on how they can accelerate business critical outcomes from strategy to execution. KPMG helps you harness AI agents with secure architecture and a smart plan for your workforce's future. Dive into their insights on how to scale agent value in your enterprise. Curious. Head to www.kpmg usagents to learn more. This episode is supported by Choiceology, an original podcast from Charles Schwab hosted by Katie Milkman, an award winning behavioral scientist and author of the best selling book how to Change. Choiceology is a show about the psychology and economics behind our decisions. Hear true stories from Nobel laureates, historians, authors, athletes and everyday people about why we do the things we do. Listen to choiceology@schwab.com or wherever you listen.
- [74:24]
Aravind Srinivas
You just realized your business needed to hire someone yesterday. How can you find amazing candidates fast? Easy. Just use Indeed. Join the 3.5 million employers worldwide that use Indeed to hire great talent fast. There's no need to wait any longer. Speed up your hiring right now with Indeed and listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit. To get your jobs more visibility at indeed.com NYT just go to indeed.com NYT right now and support our show by saying you heard about Indeed. On this podc indeed.com NYT terms and conditions apply. Hiring Indeed is all you need.
- [75:02]
Casey Newton
One correction before we go. Last week, Kevin, during our discussion of Alexa plus, I said that Amazon had sent me two Echo shows.
- [75:10]
Kevin Roose
I remember that.
- [75:11]
Casey Newton
And I was under the impression that I had to mount my Echo show to my wall. Well, it turned out that the second box that I had been sent, which looked basically identical to the box that had the Echo show in it, was actually the box for the echo show mount that would have allow it to sit on my desk.
- [75:27]
Kevin Roose
You fool.
- [75:28]
Casey Newton
I know. So listen, I actually am embarrassed about this. I did not open the box because I didn't want to create a bigger mess for myself because I knew I was going to return all of this stuff very quickly. But I did make a mistake and I apologize for the error.
- [75:40]
Kevin Roose
Alexa, punish Casey for his mistake.
- [75:45]
Casey Newton
Ow, that hurts.
- [75:49]
Kevin Roose
Hard Fork is produced by Rachel Cohn and Whitney Jones were edited this week week by John Woo. We're fact checked by Caitlin Love. Today's show was Engineered by Katie McMurran. Original music by Marion Lozano, Rowan Nimisto and Dan Powell. Our executive producer is Jen Poyant. Video production by Sawyer Roquet, Pat Gunther, Jake Nichol and Chris Schott. You can watch this full episode on YouTube@YouTube.com hardfork Special thanks to Paula Schumann, Qui Wing Tam, Dahlia Haddad and Jeffrey Miranda. You can even email us as always@hardforknytimes.com.
- [76:48]
Aravind Srinivas
You just realized your business needed to hire someone yesterday. How can you find amazing candidates fast? Easy. Just use Indeed. Join the 3.5 million employers worldwide that use Indeed to hire great talent fast. There's no need to wait any longer. Speed up your hiring right now with Indeed and listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit. To get your jobs more visibility at indeed.com NYT just go to indeed.com NYT right now and support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. Indeed. Com NYT terms and conditions apply. Hiring Indeed is all you need.