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On the podcast today, OpenAI is hiring a Clinton crisis veteran to rebuild AI's public image. We want to talk about what that means, why I think we have this bad public image and what we can do about it, what the truth to it is, and what some of the overblown areas of it are. Trump is also canceling the AI testing executive order. A bunch of CEOs declined to come to an Oval Office event. There's a bunch of drama there. But this something we were reporting on, that he delayed it. Now it feels like it's actually canceled. SpaceX is saying that there is a $26.5 trillion AI market and this is all happening as Grok is falling behind OpenAI and Anthropic in usage. Google is now shifting their AI science strategy, moving it more towards agentic research systems. We'll talk about what that means for science. And the literary world has been pretty much unprepared for AI generated fiction. There was a huge prize scandal and it exposed a bunch of the kind of AI generated detection gaps. I actually have probably a contrarian take on all of that. But let's get into the podcast today. The first thing I want to cover is the open AI kind of AI crisis public image scandal thing that's going on right now, where essentially they've hired Chris Lane, who is a Clint era. He's a, he's called the crisis fixer. But basically what he does is he leads their global affairs and their communications. Right now the company is fighting with a whole bunch of different organizations and there's lawsuits. There's a lot going on, especially in the fact that they're, they're kind of fighting with this negative public sentiment towards AI. I think it's something like 60% or 70% of people have a negative view of AI when they poll the general public. So Lee Han, his goal right now is to basically rebuild trust. He also has to lobby the states to pass AI laws that aren't going to constrain OpenAI's growth. And this is a balancing act that is pretty complicated for OpenAI, but honestly for anyone. And he has a lot of work on, on messaging and, you know, he's got to talk about job loss and AI safety. There's a lot going on there. So the thing that I do think is really important is that he actually helped launch Leading the Future super PAC last summer that secured over $100 million in funding commitments from OpenAI co founder Greg Brockman and a bunch of other tech figures. OpenAI also recently backed an Illinois liability shield bill for AI labs causing catastrophic harm. They then kind of distance themselves after. There was a lot of criticism from that, but that was what they, what they recently were lobbying for. So that's another crisis that he's going to have to try and talk to. And also another crisis he's going to be dealing with is that a bunch of former members of OpenAI's Economic Research Unit, they quit. And they all said that they were quitting because that particular team became an advocacy arm. And they're saying that it was basically downplaying a lot of OpenAI's negative economic impacts. And, you know, like, if it was kind of inconvenient to the leadership, then they would just say, like, look, everything about AI is good. Trump is officially canceling the AI testing executive order. A whole bunch of CEOs declined to come to an off or kind of an Oval Office event. This is getting scrapped. Before it was going to be, you know, AI models had up to 90 days that they had to give, you know, their model to the government to go test, make sure it was safe before public release. A lot of the top labs, AI CEOs declined this kind of last minute Oval Office event about this. And the order essentially they were saying was going to slow down AI launches in the US China obviously is accelerating its own AI governance framework. And a lot of people were saying, look, China might be 30 to 60 days behind us with a lot of their models if we're going to have to, you know, delay all of our model releases by 90 days for the government to do a review, which honestly probably isn't going to come up with a verdict that's any different than the red teaming offices at all the AI labs. I mean, I think we saw anthropic pretty responsibly say, look, our Mythos model has a lot of issues. They gave it to a lot of big organizations to go fix bugs, they gave it to the government to fix code vulnerabilities and other things. And so it feels like these, you know, the top labs are doing a good job of trying to get all of the, all of the testing done, all the safety stuff done. And so added another 90 days on top of that. Felt like it might, it might basically push us. So China could perhaps accelerate and have their models be better than us. That was kind of the reason for why a lot of this was canceled. OpenAI supported this particular order that Trump was working, working on. Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, both were telling Trump to cancel it. Something that's Interesting is there was this whole event where all of these CEOs were supposed to talk about it. A bunch of them weren't going to be able to make it. And ultimately Trump decided to cancel it and just say, look, I'm canceling this whole executive order. But apparently there's a bunch of executives that were in the air flying to the White House when the event got canceled, decided to, you know, turn around. So a bunch of the AI labs were trying to say, hey, look, give us like a 14 day testing window instead of the original proposed 90 day testing window. And that was just going to be more competitive against China. So people like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg are both saying this is a big win for the AI industry. But this isn't the only news we're getting from Elon Musk and his companies. SpaceX right now is currently pitching that there is going to be a $26.5 trillion AI market opportunity. They're saying this in their IPO filing. They're saying this is nearly as large as the US gdp. Now all of this is also happening while their own Grok chatbot has a relatively small portion of the corporate AI user kind of user base. So there was a research done by Enterprise Technology Research and what they found is that Claude among companies jumped from about 21% in 2025 to 48% in 2026 of, you know, people using Claude inside their organization. Gemini rose from 27% to 40%. And I mean, honestly, almost everyone in the world that's going to be using Google is using Gemini at this point. So there is a massive percentage of the population that Gemini is going to see in Grok. On the other hand, their corporate usage grew from 4% to 7% in a year. This is definitely a smaller absolute gain. And the paid consumer usage of GROK is also really small. So of that, you know, let's say 7% of the over AI overall AI market that's using Grok, only 0.2% in the second quarter of this year according to App Magic survey of 260,000 US consumers are actually paying for it. So SpaceX is making a big pitch that the market is huge, but GROK is not the biggest one. There's also another report that came out that said of the government's like 400 deployments of different AI systems, a vast majority of those were Cloud and OpenAI and Grok was only deployed four times in government systems for things that are actually happening. So, you know, I think it's an Important thing to note as we go into this big SpaceX IPO is that I think there's a ton of opportunity. We know that Anthropics paying $1.5 billion I think a month to OpenAI or sorry, not to OpenAI, to SpaceX to lease their Colossus 1 data center. So they're making a lot of money from kind of from that, but there's not an insane amount of money being made from the actual GROK AI model. Okay, let's talk about what's going on with Google. They're shifting their AI science strategy from building specialized tools like AlphaFold towards general purpose agentic systems that can autonomously conduct research. Kind of sounds like a mouthful and some people are saying this is a pivot, but the Nobel laureate John Jumper who co created Alpha, he actually just moved to coding work. This is, this is kind of big because I think it's kind of showing that Google is betting that general reasoning models can actually outpace domain specific tools. So you know, if we're really making a model that's super good at doing science well, it turns out maybe just making the general Gemini model better better or the code model better, that's actually how we're going to accelerate science, not a domain specific model. This is a big shift, especially for frontier model like Google and Gemini. Now what makes this pretty striking is the fact that AlphaFold is still the most popular tool for researchers worldwide. There's about 3 million researchers that are using it. Isomorphic Labs, which is Google's drug development unit, they actually raised $2 billion in a series B funding for agentic drug discovery. I'll also say that Google isn't the only one really chasing this. OpenAI had their general purpose GPT5.5 model and it recently disproved a mathematics conjuncture without any sort of specialized training. So I think there's a lot of these frontier models that are doing some really incredible work in science, math and other areas. As the models get better, we're able to just get better results out of them. But yeah, Google isn't the only one that's really going hard here. OpenAI is also trying to push this. Next up, I want to talk about the scandal in the literary world. Apparently there was a big contest and they were not prepared for AI generated fiction. What happened is that Granta actually published one of the Commonwealth Prize winning short stories. And then a software run called Penguin Graham detected that there was about 100% chance of that short story being AI generated. The prize foundation, which is a Commonwealth Prize said that they rely 100% on writers words that they didn't use AI. It kind of disqualifies you if you use AI for this. There's no technical verification process. So people just submit their stories, they publish them if they like them. And then because of this whole scandal, a lot of people are just asking, like, how do these literary institutes reliably catch AI submissions? Of course you can ask the writers, like, did you use AI? But they. They're also. People are also pointing out that it's sort of ironic that right now, in order to detect AI Granta, for example, they use Claude to detect AI. And then it's like AI detects AI. Anyways, it's kind of funny in my opinion. I actually don't think this is a big deal. I think you should be allowed to use AI to write work and win prizes for it. I think you can be an incredibly creative person. You could still ask AI to help you tighten up a sentence or think a new adjective or et cetera, et cetera. There's a lot of ways you can use AI in creativity. So it's really hard to know when using AI is too much AI. It's like using CGI in a movie. And you know, because the Grammys and Oscars are saying, like, if you use AI disqualifies your film for certain things. And so it's, you know, like, what is AI? What is computer generated? What? Where is the line that a lot of these art institutions are trying to draw? And I think personally, if you make something beautiful that resonates with a lot of people, it should still qualify. It's actually interesting how they caught this in particular, though. Apparently Jamir Nazur's essay or article, which was called the Serpent in the Grove, it used the word stubborn six times more than human writers. And it also used the phrase as if it had. That's something that AI uses a lot. And it had said that five times more, which statistically tells that cluster in the lll that there, you know, this is an output from an LLM model, but it also appears in weak human writing. So it's really hard because. And quote, unquote, weak human writing. This is how they grade it anyways, right? Because it's these. AI detection is so hard. And someone could write something that technically, like someone could just, you know, say as if it had. They could say that a lot. Or they could just love the word stubborn and put it in all the time. And you know, this AI detection is like, oh, look, statistically speaking, they're not writing like normal people. Well, maybe it's not an AI model. Maybe that's just how that person writes. So it's kind of hard to pull that. But Pangram actually scanned all of the Commonwealth Prize winners. They found two of the 2026 awardees and the 2025 winner. They say all of them appear to use AI generated content. And the director of the foundation confirmed that any writers that were submitting said that they didn't use AI, but there was no way they verified this with all of this going on. Olga to Katsuk, who is a normal Nobel laureate, she also admitted she posted online, said that she uses AI. She uses prompts like she says, quote, darling, how could we beautifully elaborate this for developing ideas? That apparently triggered a ton of backlash and she had to make this big huge 3 point public clarification about her creative process, which I just think it's so, I don't know, it's so funny. Like no one, I guess, wants to have one shot AI slop being written for stuff, but at the same time, there's so many great ways to use AI to help in your creative process. So I think it's. It can be a little bit ridiculous sometimes. If you want to get access to over 80 different AI models for 8,99amonth, go check out AI Box AI. That's my own startup and I give you access to all of the top text, image, audio and video models in one place in one chat thread. You're going to get access to everything. I built this so that it could save people money, but also so you can consolidate all of your logins into one place. If you want to check that out, there's a link in the description to AI Box AI and also go check out aichatdaily. Com. That's my website that is kind of partnered or aligned with this podcast. It generates deep dive articles on everything I cover in the show and it also has a newsletter where I'll send you all of this into your inbox every day so you can go check that out. There's also a link in the description. Thanks so much everyone for tuning in and I'll catch you in the next episode.