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- [00:00]
Adam Fleming
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- [01:38]
Adam Fleming
Hello. Just after we'd published the previous episode of Newscast on Wednesday, there was a massive news story broke in California on the west coast of the usa, where a jury found that Meta, the parent company of Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook and and Google, or at least the part of Google that's responsible for YouTube, had created social media platforms that were addictive and had harmed the mental health of one American female user who's now in her 20s. And this has got people asking if this is a watershed moment for the regulation and the business model of social media. With of course the big caveat that actually the regulation of these platforms in the UK and in Europe is different from America. So we thought we would spend the whole of this episode of Newscast chewing over the implications implications of this court case with the BBC's technology editor, Zoe Kleiman and Faisal Islam, our economics editor. So that is what you'll hear on this episode of Newscast Newscast Newscast from the BBC Fat Boy Slim and me in the classroom doing our violin lessons.
- [02:39]
Faisal Islam
I was the tattletale in the classroom. Can I have an apology, please?
- [02:42]
Adam Fleming
I trust almost nobody that daddy has to sometimes use strong language.
- [02:46]
Zoe Kleinman
Next time in Moscow I feel Delulu with no Salulu. Take me down the Downing Street.
- [02:52]
Adam Fleming
Let's go have a tour. Blimey. Hello, it's Adam in the newscast studio. And joining us here in person, I think actually for the first time ever, is our technology editor, Zoe Kleinman. Hello, Zoe.
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Zoe Kleinman
Thank you for having me.
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Adam Fleming
Welcome to the fake living room.
- [03:06]
Zoe Kleinman
I've never been here before. It's lovely.
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Adam Fleming
Although we've been on newscast hundreds of times.
- [03:10]
Zoe Kleinman
I have, but never in the same
- [03:11]
Adam Fleming
room and perhaps never with such a landmark court case to discuss. Indeed, we'll see. And Faisal is here, too. Hello, Faisal.
- [03:17]
Faisal Islam
Hello.
- [03:18]
Adam Fleming
Right, so, Zoe, this verdict was in a court in California. It happened on Wednesday. Take us back to sort of the start of this case and who brought it and why. And why why was in court in the first place.
- [03:30]
Zoe Kleinman
At the heart of this case is a woman who is now 20 years old, who is being called Cali. We don't know her full name. And she says that she was excessively using social media when she was younger. She said she discovered YouTube at 6 and Instagram at 9. And at some points she was online for up to 16 hours a day. So a lot of time on social platforms. And she says she had a mental health crisis. She was diagnosed with depression, with body dysmorphia and with suicidal thoughts. And she blamed her social media use for those conditions. There were originally four companies in this court case. They were Meta, Google, TikTok and Snap, which owns Snapchat. TikTok and Snap chose to settle. Meta and Google chose to fight. And their line was no single app can be responsible for a teen mental health crisis. It's a very complicated thing. This young lady had a lot going on in her life. She'd already had a difficult childhood by the time she discovered social media and that, you know, she was coming to the platforms to get away from her problems and they were not the cause of them. However, the jury found that the social networks had been, in their words, negligent in failing to protect her from harm on their platforms. And that the interestingly, that the platforms themselves were, because of the design features in within them, addictive.
- [05:03]
Adam Fleming
And what sort of features are we talking about then?
- [05:05]
Zoe Kleinman
So you'll know them really well. So this is, you know, auto scrolling, right? The fact that you never run out of content it's autoplay. So you, a video lands and it just starts playing straight away to sort of suck you in. It's the algorithmic recommendations that are so good, aren't they, most of the time at serving up that thing that you didn't know you wanted to watch next. Those are the kind of design features that are very deliberately there to keep you engaged. Because what these platforms need are lots of people there for as long as possible, so that when they're adults, they see as many adverts as possible and that's how the companies make money.
- [05:42]
Adam Fleming
And was, was the court just looking at the features that we can all see when we use these platforms ourselves, or was there other evidence that was, that was brought forward that, that the judge and the jury were looking at?
- [05:52]
Zoe Kleinman
So I, those particular features were specifically brought up because, you know, the, the heart of the trial was really, was she addicted? And it's a term that we use lightly, isn't it? You know, oh, I, I'm just addicted to Instagram or whatever. People say it all the time. But addiction is actually a clinical term. And so for a court to investigate that and, and, and decide whether or not, you know, it truly was an addictive platform because of the way it was built, is, is a new era, I suppose it moves it on from that casual. Yeah, I'm addicted to actually. This is addictive.
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Adam Fleming
Yeah. And what sort of remedies did the court find? Because I know they, they've awarded her some damages. Is it, is it just money?
- [06:35]
Zoe Kleinman
Well, they haven't finished yet. So initially there are damages which total six million dollars. It's about four and a half million pounds. And they have said that Meta has to pay 70 and Google has to pay 30% of those damages. But what we don't know is, is whether there will be further remedies to come. And also, Azam, you've got to bear in mind that this is only the second case of its type in the us. There are loads of these coming down the track. We've got a whole year of these coming through the courts, unless, of course, the companies decide to settle. So we're going to see a lot more of it. And already in the two that we've had, Meta has lost Faisal.
- [07:12]
Adam Fleming
Does this seem like a new era for these businesses?
- [07:16]
Faisal Islam
Well, what Zoe's just described is the core business model, is it not, of many of these kind of offerings, of these forums, of these ways in which to connect people, but people with businesses and increasingly young people. And at the absolute heart of Them was engagement and keeping people stuck on those platforms. And that is what made it good for advertisers. So, you know, you kind of wonder where this goes, you know, and it's one person, right? And you know, we know, we know the numbers and it kind of like it's a very human example of some of the studies that have been done across, you know, populations of 15 year olds. There's kind of quite famous charts showing, you know, around the time when social media kind of burst onto the scene, levels of happiness amongst young people going down. And you know, we have, as journalists said, well, it's not, is it cause is it relation, is it accident? But. And I think intuitively many of us, many of us who are parents are just like, you know. Yeah, well, it seems, seems obvious really. But now we're getting a kind of legal sort of pathway. I mean, clearly their share prices have been hit. Like what. Where does the business model go if they're being held accountable in this way? You know, it's a fascinating.
- [08:37]
Adam Fleming
Yeah, well, Zoe, let's brainstorm that because I can, I can see a pathway, as Faisal puts it, where, okay, this has cost the companies a little bit of money as, as far as they're concerned, a little bit of reputational damage, but they can maybe withstand that or as the, a different pathway where actually they re engineer these products as a result of this court case. And there was a different, a different court case in New Mexico the day before as well, wasn't there?
- [08:59]
Zoe Kleinman
Yeah. So some people are describing this as big tech's big tobacco moment. And if we look at that path, what might we see? Are we going to get health warnings on screens? Are we going to see restrictions on advertising and on sponsorship and partnerships that these companies are able to. Are we going to see these addictive features disappear? But as Faisal says, that's kind of what makes them fun. Right. If you go on a, on a social network and there isn't really anything to do, you're not going to be there for very long. Will that be the nail in the coffin? Will it just fizzle out?
- [09:34]
Adam Fleming
Because there was an era of Facebook where you could get to the end of your newsfeed, couldn't you? And that was it. You're like, oh, well, I'll just shut it down and go and do something else now.
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Zoe Kleinman
Exactly. And because I'm really old, I remember friends reunited and how exciting that was going, oh, here are all my school friends. And then I found my school friends and said hello. And then I was like, well, I'm done now, you know, what else do I do here? It just got boring very quickly. And without those engagement features, arguably, you're not really left with a lot to do, are you?
- [10:00]
Faisal Islam
And I think though it may be the case that what will seem to be the aberration is the fact that we allowed a wild west of this type in particular to be foisted upon children. You know, so this is where we take one case. We look at it through a business angle, by the way, because you want to know, Snap share price is down 9%, Meta's is down 6%, Google's is down 2%. Because actually this part of, this is not the hugest part of Google's business. YouTube, you know, it's always a massive part of their business, but they do a whole load of other stuff too. So this just shows you, you know, people are questioning these stars, these tech stars of the US economy. How much are they actually worth? How can we actually price what they're worth if they can't do this into the, into the future? So yeah, you know, as we look back on this and you think, wow, if they were addictive and then people start to draw analogies with other addictive substances. Yeah, well, what tobacco, but then alcohol, drugs, whatever. Is that now how we treat this if it causes illness? Actually what I didn't, what I don't know is from the court case, was there any sense of internal documents that showed that they knew that this was happening, you know, or you know, you one hears from whistleblowers, There have been various books about this.
- [11:19]
Adam Fleming
Well, I was covering this on five Live Breakfast this morning with Rachel. And we spoke to one of the lawyers who was involved in it and he was talking about this document that had come from Meta. So the, the people that own, own Facebook and Instagram, that was about beauty filters. And basically they'd been. Mark Zuckerberg personally had been presented with this sort of dilemma about beauty filters. Oh, we, internal research at Meta suggests this could be bad for people's body image. But equally, introducing this feature and keeping it will be good for our business. And Mark Zuckerberg took the business side of that equation rather than the, the, the mental health side. So there were documents, weren't they? The whole discovery process meant that they had to deliver internal stuff.
- [11:59]
Zoe Kleinman
And sometimes I think, you know, we are kind of surprised when these multibillion dollar companies act like multibillion dollar companies. But that's what it is. You know, Meta might present itself as, oh, we want to, we Just want to un everybody to be friends and love each other. But you know, it is a business and at the heart of that business is the bottom line.
- [12:17]
Adam Fleming
Is there a jurisdictional thing here, to use a very pretentious word? Because actually regulation of companies and social media and the media generally is very different in America than it is in Europe. I just wonder if actually we're already in a different regulatory environment here.
- [12:32]
Faisal Islam
Well, I mean, there has been a lot of complaints from the White House that it's in Europe. European Union and the United Kingdom have been treating these companies badly. And I think the, I think where, where this goes is it does clearly open the floodgates if they were holding back in any way, shape or form to kind of give these companies a massive kicking. And so this was done through this. What happens, tends to happen in America is it's done through the court process. And what tends to happen in Europe, including the uk is it's kind of done by governments and regulators and occasionally some bureaucrats. And we've already heard already from the Prime Minister sort of, sort of piling on the back of this about regulatory solutions. I, I'm not sure about the extent of any court cases here, but that has been in trying to regulate tech across a whole stream of areas, copyright and things like that, the US goes down the legal kind of route and the Europe goes down the sort of governmental sort of route.
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Adam Fleming
Yeah.
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Faisal Islam
And so they're quite different from. This will greatly encourage those people in Europe that want to give a bloody nose to the US tech companies. There's no doubt about it.
- [13:39]
Zoe Kleinman
The US companies have this incredibly powerful shield in America, which is this thing called section 230. Sorry, clause 230. And basically what it does is protects them from liability for what is published on their platforms. So that means if you stick something on Instagram that is illegal or whatever, the Instagram is not liable for it. Whereas if you did that here on the BBC, the BBC would very much be responsible. Media companies do not have this, this protection. And the argument in favor of it is that the tech companies couldn't survive without it because they've got billions of people uploading billions of things in real time all the time around the world. And you know, obviously we're in an AI era now, but we weren't. And it was just impossible to manage that level of content. But there are questions being asked about whether they deserve that protection. Right, yeah.
- [14:36]
Adam Fleming
And that, that bit of law comes from the Bill Clinton era, doesn't it? When Internet was very new and we didn't really know where it was going to go, so we just. In terms of what the companies have said. So Snapchat and Tick Tock, they settled in advance. Do we know anything about their settlement?
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Zoe Kleinman
No, they have not.
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Adam Fleming
Super secret American court case style. And then you, you hinted at what Meta had said, saying that they, they thought there's lots of other factors that you've got to take into account when you're looking at somebody's mental health. What, what did Google say?
- [15:03]
Zoe Kleinman
Well, Google also disagrees with the verdict and actually it says that it does not consider YouTube to be a social network. It feels that the platform has been sort of misunderstood, I suppose, in, in this case.
- [15:16]
Adam Fleming
And the lawyer was saying this morning on five Live that this is, this is the tip of the iceberg and that there will be many, many more cases. Is that what's going to happen?
- [15:24]
Zoe Kleinman
Well, there are, there are lots of cases already in the pipeline in the US And I suspect, as Faisal says, everyone is watching this and thinking, well, okay, I'm going now, because, you know, there's a chink in the armor here. I mean, these companies are so mighty that the fees that they've spent defending this one case are eye watering, totally out of the scope of most people, especially, you know, an ordinary family or, or indeed an individual. Nobody has that kind of money. But they've lost. Even with, you know, that mighty defense behind them and the seemingly bottomless resources. I mean, some tech contacts of mine were saying to me quietly that they think the reason Tick Tock and Snap settled was because they couldn't afford to fight it.
- [16:07]
Adam Fleming
All right? Because the legal fees are going to be so huge.
- [16:10]
Faisal Islam
And obviously there's a social movement now. And, and we know about it in the uk it's, you know, it's pretty clear that schools are now saying secondary school. You've got to have a sort of dumb phone, I guess, or like an old school burner phone. I don't. That's probably wrong as well, because the wrong connotation. We don't want to do that. Yeah, a phone that doesn't have access to social media, you know what I'm talking about? And so that's becoming the norm now. And this is about social norms as well. Like, it's extremely hard for any parent to try and wean their kids off this stuff if it's given to them at any point. So what you're seeing is the school system, education system that's not mandated by the government. I think it, you know, is in Some other areas, and we can discuss in a minute about whether the ban is going to come. But, you know, school level, it's happening, and then you set a social norm and then you find out that kids find other ways to communicate one on one, instead of, like en masse, instead of, you know, in this way, sort of showing pictures of themselves. You know, I think pet parents in general are becoming a little bit more savvy to what you want to expose a kid going through the travails of, you know, early teenhood. You know, how much do you want them to have to, like. Like, how much is too much? Information, connection, contact, you know, what is real about all this stuff? And then we haven't got on to, like, there's all this stuff going on with social media. That's a little bit rear view mirror now, isn't it? They're all sort of becoming friends with their AIs now, and who knows where that goes.
- [17:41]
Zoe Kleinman
But also look at, look at their role models, their examples. Look at us. You know, I. I've again, yeah, that's
- [17:47]
Adam Fleming
Faisal Watch strikes again.
- [17:51]
Zoe Kleinman
Look at. Look at the rest of us in their lives. Right. I was on the Eurostar this morning coming back from Brussels. Every person in the carriage was on their phone almost the whole time. All the adults are on their phones the whole time. You know, whether they're chatting to a chatbot or whatever they're doing, I don't know, but nobody had a book or a paper. We're all doing it. So I think on. On the other hand, it's quite difficult to give this message to children when you're sitting there on your phone yourself, you know, and I am as guilty of that as anybody else.
- [18:17]
Adam Fleming
Very honest of you. Right. Oh, and I'm glad you got a trip to Brussels. I'm jealous. Let's talk about, talk about what is happening in the UK then. So the Online Safety act finally was passed a little while ago after years and years and years of going through Parliament. But then it's had various phases of implementation and it's only sort of in the last six months, the last year, that kind of ofcom have got the full powers to actually use it. But now the government's doing a consultation about doing even more. What are the options that they're looking at?
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Zoe Kleinman
Just remind us, the public consultation that's underway at the moment is. Is looking officially at various ways of safeguarding children. And I can't remember the technical phra, but something like children's well, being online and one of those options the one that of course is dominating the conversation is should we consider a ban on social media for under 16s like they've done in Australia? And that is the one that's generating all the headlines. But there are others and actually, interestingly, one of them is should these design features, the auto scrolling, the, you know, the autoplay, should all of that be banned for children? And another one is about, I mean, there are various ones. There's one about VPNs, should, should children have access to VP'? Ends? Now, these are things that mask where in the world you are. Yeah, they're useful tools for lots of people and they're very sort of vital privacy tools. Why do kids need them or do they need them? You know, it's one of the things that's up for discussion and I saw
- [19:40]
Adam Fleming
that this week the government's now launched some, some pilots with, with actual families where they're going to try out different options that are contained in the consultation. So they've got a bit of data about what happens when you implement these things.
- [19:50]
Zoe Kleinman
Yeah, I bet those kids are delighted, aren't they? Yeah.
- [19:52]
Adam Fleming
Who gets to be in the no change group?
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Faisal Islam
Can I just ask one thing then? In, in theory, if this has shown damage, it's not necessarily limited to kids, is it? I mean the, the, the, the, the, the lady here, she's now an adult. Like, there's no theoretical reason why this may not have had a similar impact on some people who just happen on many millions more people. I guess I'm just throwing that out there, but is this, you know, we, in this conversation we're focusing on children? I mean, it's obviously obvious why, you know, I, I, it was, who was, it was the former Twitter exec Bruce Daisley said, said on, on air to the BBC today, something like, if this actually was applied around the world, some of these social media companies would all be, would be worthless. And I, so since I've told you that snap was 8% down, it's now 9 1/2% down.
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Adam Fleming
Right. And actually you can have no views about social media, but if you've got a pension, probably a big chunk of your pension fund is invested in these firms.
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Faisal Islam
Yeah, yeah, well, in probably Meta, which is one of the magnificent seven less magnificent as it occurs just now. But yeah, you know, these are, these are seriously. I do wonder though if in this case the courts are just catching up with where society has moved.
- [21:09]
Adam Fleming
Just so we on there on the UK pilots and consultations point again from being on five Live this week, I'VE had a few conversations with people about this and it's interesting because today, when Keir Starmer was on his way to Finland for this defence summit with his Nordic allies and he was asked about the court case that we started off the episode talking about, and he then said, oh, we're doing this consultation which includes looking at a potential ban for under 16 year olds, sort of sending out the signal of like, the government already knows what they want the answer to be from this consultation. But then yesterday I was chatting to the AI and the Safety Minister who was on air, and he was being much more open minded about what the options are. So I wonder if actually, is the government truly open minded about where they end up in the summer once they've looked at everyone's responses and they've done these pilot studies, or actually, are they getting on and thinking about just doing a ban? What's your take?
- [21:59]
Zoe Kleinman
It's kind of weird, isn't it? Because on the one hand, it's definitely, as Faisal said, if you read the room, this seems to be what people want, but they can't really be seen to be jumping the gun. They've committed to this consultation. I don't even think we're a month into it yet. They can't start saying, right, well, we think we know what you're going to say. And the other thing is there's a ping pong situation going on at the moment between the House of Lords and the Commons. And this is over an amendment to a different bill. This is the Children's Schools and well being bill that is primarily focused on education, but also includes safeguarding children. And the Lords wants to add an amendment which basically gives ministers a year to decide which platforms to ban for under 16s. And the Commons has kicked it out, they've rejected it. It went back to the Lords yesterday, they've pushed it again. So it's going back to the Commons, actually, currently, as things stand, Parliament's divided over it.
- [22:54]
Adam Fleming
Well, and this consultation that they, that they launched a few weeks ago was the initial response to the first time the Lords did that.
- [23:00]
Zoe Kleinman
So, yeah, yeah, the Lord has strong feelings about it, I think, and the Government is trying to be open minded.
- [23:09]
Faisal Islam
I think you could probably separate out this dilemma of the UK trying to be kind of home to as many tech companies as possible and be the most attractive place from this issue of social media and children. Indeed, what you hear when you hear these companies is that they want clear regulation. Right. It's the direction of travel. I don't Think the UK is, is massively. The future of the UK would be massively specialist in social media.
- [23:35]
Adam Fleming
Yeah.
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Faisal Islam
Probably more like AI and quantum computing and things like that. So I think that, that where in other areas there's a more straightforward dilemma. If you want to host all the AI companies in the data centers, want them to invest in their best possible kit in the uk, you may have a conversation about copyright, you may have a conversation about energy policy.
- [23:56]
Adam Fleming
Yeah.
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Faisal Islam
I don't think too many of them are going to sort of run for the hills if there's a. Under 60.
- [24:01]
Adam Fleming
Yeah. Because this was a court case involving YouTube, which is part of Google's parent company. It wasn't a court case involving DeepMind, which is the AI bit that's based in the UK of Google's parent company.
- [24:11]
Faisal Islam
So, yeah, that's, that's, that's a pretty clear way.
- [24:14]
Adam Fleming
Oh, here we go again.
- [24:14]
Faisal Islam
Here we go again. That's one person. One person in my life has the ability to get through my.
- [24:19]
Adam Fleming
Through your firewall.
- [24:20]
Faisal Islam
Yeah.
- [24:21]
Adam Fleming
Right, can we talk about a few other sidebar tech stories? So, Zoe, one that really intrigued me yesterday was OpenAI, who run ChatGPT, they had this tool that was available in North America called Sora, which is their video generating tool. And if you're on social media, you will have seen hundreds and hundreds of Sora videos of, like, cats playing violins and things like that, which are not real. It sounds like they're turning it off.
- [24:44]
Zoe Kleinman
Yeah. So they launched an app for people to do their own AI generated videos via Sora. It had enormous fanfare. They also did a big partnership thing with Disney.
- [24:54]
Adam Fleming
Yeah.
- [24:55]
Zoe Kleinman
With the idea of creating content for Disney. And, yeah, they've shutted it. They've said, we're closing it down. I read somewhere that it didn't take off as much as they thought. And. And the other thing you've got to think is, oh, it must be costing them an absolute fortune. You know, Sam Altman has said, stop saying please and thank you to Chat GPT, because it costs money to process those extra words and we don't need it.
- [25:18]
Adam Fleming
A thimble of water is used in a day.
- [25:21]
Faisal Islam
Please.
- [25:22]
Zoe Kleinman
Yeah, please stop. But, but imagine, you know, how much of the earth you're scorching to create your clip of your cat playing the violin. But, you know, in terms of the, the money that it's costing this company, Open AI is one of these. Well, you. You'll probably have a view on this, Faisal. I think it's one of these companies that's Incredibly big and incredib powerful but isn't actually making any money. Wants to IPO we believe and really needs to start generating a bit of cash. It's burned through astonishing amounts of money. It's not making any. And now you know, it feels a bit like a company that's starting to tighten the belt straps the belt a bit, doesn't it? You know, it's like it's, it's cutting that, it's cutting the sort of the, the nice to haves and perhaps the AI generated video app is one of
- [26:07]
Adam Fleming
those economics are getting real.
- [26:08]
Zoe Kleinman
Yeah, it's focusing on enterprise. It's it said that, hasn't it? It's focusing on its business.
- [26:13]
Faisal Islam
Quite boring stuff like coding which is actually quite useful. But I think it very specifically that the constraint on the growth of these companies is on compute power now which in the in term in turn is about energy. So they just, they so so if you look at something like Sora, I'm going to imagine here that as amusing as some of those videos were, it isn't making any money, if any money probably. I don't know, I don't know how to make any money at all.
- [26:42]
Adam Fleming
Never sure how they were going to make the Disney was going to make money out of me making it.
- [26:45]
Faisal Islam
Well, they were going to take a share, a share stake worth a billion which they would hope would be worth 10 billion in a few years time I imagine. And you get, you know, you can see how, why they wanted to do that. But like this time last year every company was trying to do anything that involved open AI or chat GPT and every time they made these announcements their share price was went up. Now we're a world away from that. Almost like reality hit I would say November, December, chat GPT also facing like serious competition for example from Google with Gemini but also from Anthropic with Claude for certain use cases whereas CHP is a bit more generalist. So they are, they are. I, I think it's about the rationing of compute power and in turn about energy and therefore you deploy it exactly as Zoe says to where actually you're making revenues in time for the ipo. So it's incredibly interesting. And so that means it's going to be tougher for some of the fun but like vaguely pointless use cases of generative AI. It's going to be tougher because you'll be charged for it. Amazing. I mean I don't know what the numbers are sometimes you know how many trees were burned in order for you to make that video of the elephant dancing on Strictly. Right. I do. I don't know. So I haven't made that. I think I probably should make that video.
- [28:06]
Adam Fleming
Well, you can't, though. It's never available in the UK anyway. You'll have to use another. Another provider's platform and then last one. And this is going to sound maybe a bit niche to a lot of listeners, but it's a big deal in. In business and tech. Faisal, you were very excited about ARM Holdings.
- [28:20]
Faisal Islam
Oh, yes, yeah.
- [28:21]
Adam Fleming
Just explain who ARM holdings are.
- [28:22]
Faisal Islam
Well, they are the granddad. They're the granddaddy of uktech.com era they. So this is very interesting, Right. They used to. They rooted out of Cambridge acorn, they contributed 350 billion devices. IPhones, most famously, cars use their imprints. So they designed the chip, the chips, core, but they never made it. Yeah, Right. And they've started the creation of their own chips for the first time. The manufacturing will be done in Taiwan, I think, but there's a BBC angle here. So ARM is fabulously successful. Born in Cambridge, and part of its success story was something called the BBC Micro, which was, you know, and so it is now this globe global company. Their roots are a bit more mixed now. They were sold to the Japanese around Brexit time.
- [29:14]
Zoe Kleinman
Controversially, yes.
- [29:15]
Faisal Islam
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And now they're floated, but they're still headquartered out of Cambridge. So there are interesting questions here about, you know, could they have built this sort of chip factory in the uk? And the answer is that we probably missed that boat.
- [29:28]
Adam Fleming
Yeah, well, because it's interesting, isn't it, Zoe? Because you feel a sort of bit of national pride when you talk about it, because, like, oh, it was British people that invented it, but it was also British people sort of let it go and it's now in the hands of people who are not British. So it's. It's a kind of like nostalgia story. It's a heritage story rather than a, like a thrusting British business story.
- [29:46]
Zoe Kleinman
They won't like you saying that, but I kind of agree. And I think this is just symbolic of what happens in this country. We're good at ideas and we're good at startups and we're terrible at scaling up. You know, whenever I meet small businesses, medium sized businesses, I always say to them, like, what's. What's the game plan here? You know, what do you. What do you want to get out of this? And they almost always say, I want to be bought by Microsoft or Google or Amazon. You know, they all they never say, I want to be Google or Microsoft. There's just that, that ambition isn't there. And I remember speaking to Mustafa Suleiman, who deliberately decided to go to the US to set up his company. And I asked him why. He's a British AI guy. And I asked him why. And he said, well, he said, firstly, there's just not the money here. You know, we think we're doing well if we give, if we get 100 grand. Right. And in, in the States, you're talking about $100 million. You know, it's just a completely different set of values in terms of how much money you can get. And he also said, and I think this is really interesting that we, we just, we have such a different culture here. We don't tolerate failure. You said in the us, if you meet a business professional who hasn't ever failed, then you kind of don't trust them because you think, well, right, how are you going to know what to
- [31:02]
Adam Fleming
do when they've not been blooded?
- [31:03]
Zoe Kleinman
Exactly. How are you going to know what to do when, you know, it hits the fan because you've never lived it, Whereas here it's toxic, isn't it? And you don't want to be near the person that's failed because they might make you fail. We have a totally different mindset. And, and he argued, and people argue that that just, you know, means that we don't push up.
- [31:21]
Faisal Islam
But this is, this is why Cabinet ministers are, I mean, privately kind of almost thankful for Demis Sudemis. Sorry. At DeepMind for having. Because Google kept on trying to get him to go over to America. So the fact that he kept things going in the uk and he's quite open about this in the documentary that he was done quite well over the. Over Christmas.
- [31:46]
Zoe Kleinman
I have a cameo in them.
- [31:47]
Faisal Islam
Yes. Oh, right. No, yes, you do, yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [31:50]
Zoe Kleinman
I'll have to watch it.
- [31:51]
Adam Fleming
You ask him a really, like, probing question.
- [31:52]
Zoe Kleinman
No, I think I'd nod. You got to start somewhere. But it's reviewed like 400 million times on YouTube. It's massive.
- [32:00]
Faisal Islam
Anyway, there's a love affair with Britain there, which I think a lot of people don't really realize the centrality of the UK, but, like, although DeepMind was sold to Google for half a billion, which seems like the bargain of the century now, like, you could argue, argue that it's worth within the Google empire. I don't know, half a trillion now. A trillion. You could argue, just to park that there, the fact that it's in UK and then the ecosystem that's now been built around this. We've talked about this before, I don't know if it's real or not, but this London maxing thing, right? And then on top of that, when I spoke to the Chancellor a couple of weeks ago with a maze lecture, they were trying to make this case. And I'd be interested to know what Zoe thinks about how realistic this is, that for the next generation of super tech tech, the quantum computers, we can persuade them to stay in the UK because we, again, we are killing it in terms of the tech. But can we create the billion and trillion dollar quantum?
- [32:53]
Adam Fleming
You can have the last word, but it has to be quite a short word because you've got lots of other things to go into.
- [32:59]
Zoe Kleinman
Can we, can we be the quantum champions? Well, we're again, we're good at it. We've got the talent, we've got the ideas, we've kind of getting the infrastructure. I mean it would be nice. But already the US companies are fishing here, you know, they're buying up our successful companies and, and they're waving big checkbooks and we're all human, you know, wave a big enough check and of course you're going to say, apart from
- [33:24]
Faisal Islam
five, we should have a BBC micro quantum computer. It wouldn't work.
- [33:29]
Adam Fleming
I mean, I think it was based on BBC micro technology. From my memories of playing Chucky Egg in the computer lab In Glasgow in 1988, I did a lot of Pac
- [33:37]
Zoe Kleinman
man on a BBC microphone.
- [33:38]
Adam Fleming
Loved it. BBC Micro. Right, Zoe, you've got to go. Thank you very much.
- [33:41]
Zoe Kleinman
Thank you.
- [33:42]
Adam Fleming
And Faisal, thanks to you too.
- [33:43]
Faisal Islam
Thank you.
- [33:54]
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- [36:04]
Adam Fleming
And that's all for this episode of Newscast, but a reminder if you would like to see this podcast being made along with lots of other fellow podcasts at the BBC's legendary Maida Vale Studios in west London on 25 April. Well, you can, because we're launching Cast Fest, our big podcasting jamboree and we need you to come and be there. And if you'd like to apply for tickets, the deadline is approaching, so get your skates on. Which seems like a very sort of old tech actually. No, that's like BBC Micro, isn't it? Get your skates on. The details of how to get your skates on are in the episode description of this episode of Newscast and we will be back with another episode very soon. Bye bye Newscast.
- [36:45]
Zoe Kleinman
Newscast from the BBC from one newscaster to another, thank you so much for making it to the end of this episode. You clearly do, in the words of Chris Mason, ooze stamina. Can I also gently encourage you to subscribe to us on BBC Sounds? Tell everyone you know and don't forget, you can email us anytime@newscastbc.co.uk or if you're that way inclined, send us a WhatsApp on +4403301239480. Be assured, I promise we listen to everyone.
- [37:32]
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