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- [00:01]
Ian Mitchell
Support for the show comes from the new season of Crucible Moments, a podcast from Sequoia Capital. What is a Crucible Moment? It's a turning point where we face a tough decision and our response can shape the rest of our lives. These decisions happen in business too, and Sequoia Capital's podcast Crucible Moments gives you a behind the scenes look, asking founders of some of the world's most important tech companies like YouTube, DoorDash, Reddit and more, to reflect on those critical junctures that defined who they are today. Tune into season two of Crucible Moments today. You can also catch up on season one at cruciblemoments.com or wherever you listen to podcasts.
- [00:47]
Kara Swisher
Hi everyone, this is Pivot from New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network. I'm Kara Swisher. And I'm Scott Galloway and you're listening to our special series on AI. We talk a lot about the business of AI, but today we want to focus on the ways we can actually be using it in our day to day lives. But here to chat with us about some of the AI basics is Kylie Robison. Kylie is a senior AI reporter for the Verge. Welcome Kylie. It's good to talk to you.
- [01:12]
Kylie Robison
Yeah, thank you for having me.
- [01:14]
Kara Swisher
So first of all, talk a little bit about how you personally use AI in your day to day life and why are you covering it.
- [01:20]
Kylie Robison
Yeah, you know, before this I was covering Twitter at Fortune magazine, which is run by Kara's favorite person. And that wasn't, you know, easy to cover. And I thought AI showed a lot of promise and was just such an interesting area to tackle for a young reporter. I mean, who doesn't want to be covering the biggest technology to hit the scene. And I live in San Francisco, so it just seemed perfect. But it is perhaps the most stressful beat I've ever had because it's so large and so nuanced and people argue about it all day about using AI in my day to day life, I would say it's not something I use heavily. I do use it for like I upload a document for instance. OpenAI will release these safety cards for their models that show like this is how safe it is. So I can upload that PDF to GPT 4.0 and say okay, and ask questions based off that PDF. Do they mention this? Can you expand on what this means? So like really heavily technical documents or white papers, I can ask questions and like simplify it in a way that's more helpful and it's quicker for me to understand than going to a bunch of researchers, making a bunch of calls to get them to explain it. I think that's been really helpful for me. Uh, I know Scott uses it for writing. Uh, I think I've, I've noticed Claude can be a kind of a helpful writing assistant, but in terms of actually using it to write, I don't, I don't use that because I don't think it's helpful yet. But just as a partner, as Scott has mentioned on the podcast, as a partner, to be like, okay, here are some of my rambling thoughts. Can you streamline what I'm trying to say and like, you know, edit it for me?
- [03:02]
Kara Swisher
Right, absolutely. So give us a few tips for someone who's looking to implement AI in their lives, like daily tasks that could be made easier when you're, when people ask you this question. Obviously Google is integrated into writing emails, for example, which I don't find useful. But bills, resumes, and much of what the average person knows of AI is ChatGPT and related tools. Try to expand on that. What other tools are useful for them?
- [03:25]
Kylie Robison
Yeah, there's so many different AI tools now. I think, you know, a lot of people use Grammarly so they can check your grammar in your browser, which is really helpful. I think, you know, when you want to use AI, I think you should consider it for low stakes tasks. You have to imagine your data privacy because often these models will use what you input to train the model so you don't want it someday spitting back, you know, your bank account information. Which is really funny because I'm a big listener of pivot and hard fork, which Kevin, the one of the hosts there, had uploaded his bank statements to Notebook LM so they could create a podcast to help him with his financial information, which is, it was a really interesting thing that I think people want, you know, AI to be capable of right now is like, can you help me budget? Which, you know, I think again, low stakes tasks, thinking of the data you upload, Try not to upload sensitive information. I think, just like I said with the PDF, that was really helpful, I think, you know, I used it, I just turned 26, so I used it to compare health insurance. These are my needs, these are the options I have. Here's a PDF of what they offer. Which one should I choose was really helpful stuff like that.
- [04:38]
Scott Galloway
Nice to meet you, Kylie, by the way, I used it this morning. I asked AI why am I so broke? And it immediately sent me a copy of an email confirmation from Amazon that my Mexican cat costume will be delivered tomorrow. That's a little AI humor, Kylie.
- [04:55]
Kara Swisher
Oh my God.
- [04:55]
Scott Galloway
Little AI humor.
- [04:56]
Kara Swisher
I'm so sor. As a young woman you needn't endure this, but here you are.
- [05:02]
Scott Galloway
Go ahead or I'll say how can I feel better about myself? And then I'll just come back with good morning you fucking stack of sunshine. So it has.
- [05:09]
Kara Swisher
Oh my God.
- [05:10]
Scott Galloway
Anyway, a lot of people use AI. A lot of people haven't even started. What would you suggest someone does to get start? Which one or two LLMs would you suggest? They download the free version even. And how do they, like, how do they start to try and unlock the potential and just understand it more? And I'll, of course I'll, I'll start with an answer. The first time I really interfaced with AI was trying to figure out fun stuff for me and my 14 year old son to do in London and it kind of went from there. What two or three things would you suggest to help people get started?
- [05:41]
Kylie Robison
Yeah, I think that's a really helpful example and something I think the makers of these models want people to be using it for. Rather than highlighting any nefarious ways to use AI, they're hoping people use it to write, you know, a story their young child set with pictures. You can use ChatGPT for that or Grok and you can use it to book, trap or like to plan your travel, which is really cool. And I used it just when I went to Spain I was like, what should I go see? So I think those are really helpful examples. Again, these are all low stick tasks that you can use. Any, really any chatbot on the market that's capable enough to use creatively. I think you have to check to see if these places are open and exist because it can hallucinate very confidently. But yeah, any, any model right now they're all kind of on par with each other. A lot of them are because they're all working towards the same thing. So you know, you can use it to decide what hair color you want to do next. Anything that's just fun and low stakes I think is easy, those things.
- [06:49]
Kara Swisher
So you did mention privacy. Now we do put a lot of privacy online that my, my bank statements are online, everything else. But I really limit what I use here because of that because I'm like very worried and I'm someone who's very aware of privacy. I'm like Scott, when you said you put your record, your medical records, I'm like, I'm not putting my into open AI. No way.
- [07:09]
Scott Galloway
They Already know. Kara, your privacy is gone.
- [07:12]
Kara Swisher
Yeah, I guess, but I just don't want to help them along to like put all things together. And so I just. They definitely don't have my, my heart surgery stuff. They don't. They don't.
- [07:22]
Scott Galloway
And so are you worried about the ccp, like scaring you to give you a heart attack?
- [07:26]
Kara Swisher
I don't know. I just, I'm just telling you the feeling I had.
- [07:29]
Scott Galloway
Kylie. This is what I deal with.
- [07:31]
Kara Swisher
This is what I deal with. This is my feeling like I don't want to give them too much personal information. I don't mind it on writing things and like there are low stakes. But how do you. But then now we put lots of stuff on the regular Internet. When do you imagine that crossover for the. How should the average person feel about that? Because we don't know where what this stuff is being used for. Correct. Like there's not as much transparency as there needs to be.
- [07:54]
Kylie Robison
No, there is not as much transparency and they claim that it's because of like Scott said, the CCP or you know, anti competitive reasons. I think, you know, they've already hoovered up the entire Internet. There's no going back from there. All these models have hoovered up the entire Internet. It's something I've kind of reckoned with. When they said, you know, Photo Bucket signed over all of its data to train large language models, I was like, dang, like whatever I put on Photo Bucket that was stupid when I was 11 is now gonna be used to train large language models. And 11 year old me wouldn't have known that. So I think it's kind of, it's, it's a really tough position. People on Instagram celebrities were like, you know, meta does not have the right to use my photos if I post this story. I think people are really protective over, you know, the lives that they have shared with the Internet that they have been encouraged by these large companies to share with the Internet. And it's just, I think they feel like it's being taken away from them and you know, used to train these black box models. I think people have different opinions on it. I personally feel I have the heebie jeebies about it because I have, you know, I grew up with the Internet with Facebook launching when I was a young teen. So I think it's a very tough position. I think some people are like, I don't care.
- [09:11]
Kara Swisher
So do you think that people are more wary? Because a recent study found that 1 in 9Americans use AI every day in the Work. That's a very small number. Like at this point. Right. Where are we in that? Do you think everyone's just going to do it? Like not do it? It's going to be done to them that'll just be foisted upon them by Apple Intelligence or whatever. Do you want to get an Uber? You have your Airport. That seems like a good thing, for example.
- [09:33]
Kylie Robison
Totally. I think automating rote tasks is not a bad thing when it comes to the workplace. I think a lot of workplaces are well aware of the data privacy issues and they're like, please don't upload our internal documents to OpenAI. That's been a problem. It's trained in a lot of workplaces. So one in nine doesn't surprise me. I think it's going to continue to grow. I just published a story today about AI agents which is just like the new next thing. So sort of an AI assistant. And where I'm seeing this a lot is in SaaS products like Salesforce released a CRM agent. Microsoft has copilot stuff that they believe will increase efficiency amongst their staff. But I think it's going to be hard for that number to grow so long as there's transparency issues and that trust has to grow.
- [10:20]
Kara Swisher
Okay, let's take a quick break. We come back, we'll talk about where we're already using AI without realizing it and what we should not be using it for.
- [10:34]
Scott Galloway
Fox Creative.
- [10:36]
Ian Mitchell
This is advertiser content from Zelle. When you picture an online scammer, what do you see?
- [10:44]
Unknown
For the longest time, we have these images of somebody sitting crouched over their computer with a hoodie on, just kind of typing away in the middle of the night. And honestly, that's not what it is anymore.
- [10:54]
Ian Mitchell
That's Ian Mitchell, a banker turned fraud fighter. These days, online scams look more like crime syndicates than individual con artists. And they're making bank. Last year, scammers made off with more than $10 billion.
- [11:09]
Unknown
It's mind blowing to see the kind of infrastructure that's been built to facilitate scamming at scale. There are hundreds, if not thousands of scam centers all around the world. These are very savvy business people. These are organized criminal rings. And so once we understand the magnitude of this problem, we can protect people better.
- [11:30]
Ian Mitchell
One challenge that fraud fighters like Ian face is that scam victims sometimes feel too ashamed to discuss what happened to them. But Ian says one of our best defenses is simple. We need to talk to each other.
- [11:44]
Unknown
We need to have those awkward conversations around. What do you do if you have text messages you don't recognize. What do you do if you start getting asked to send information that's more sensitive? Even my own father fell victim to a, thank goodness, a smaller dollar scam. But he fell victim and we have these conversations all the time. So we are all at risk and we all need to work together to protect each other.
- [12:06]
Ian Mitchell
Learn more about how to protect yourself@vox.com Zelle and when using digital payment platforms, remember to only send money to people you know and trust.
- [12:18]
Scott Galloway
Support for this episode comes from aws. AWS Generative AI gives you the tools to power your business forward with the security and speed of the world's most experienced cloud.
- [12:35]
Kara Swisher
SCOTT we're back with our special series on AI. We're talking to a senior AI reporter for the Verge, Kylie Robison. Huge leaps have been made in AI over the last couple of years. Talk about how we're using it without realizing it. It's also been around for a while, right? Where. Where are people not realizing they're using it today?
- [12:53]
Kylie Robison
Totally. I think in your career, Cara, you've probably covered AI. It's been around forever. I think. You know your Netflix algorithm, that's AI aut self driving cars. Waymos. I live in San Francisco. Waymos are everywhere. That's AI. It is used in, you know, TikTok algorithms. That's AI. It's, it's everywhere and it has been working in the background quite a bit, I think. You know, you'll hear companies, especially as a reporter, they're like, we've been in the AI business for two decades, which is, you know, it's not facetious, but it is different than the frontier models. We're seeing OpenAI and anthropic release. But it is those algorithms you're used to using.
- [13:35]
Scott Galloway
So break down or do a quick kind of J.D. powers review of the biggest LLMs, from your favorite to your least favorite favorites to least favorites.
- [13:44]
Kara Swisher
Scott likes Claude.
- [13:46]
Scott Galloway
Just so you know, I do like Claude.
- [13:47]
Kylie Robison
Claude is really good. It's surprisingly good. I just started using it recently and I messaged a coworker. I was like, I'm a bad AI reporter because this is way better than I anticipated. It's. And it also has, I don't know if you've noticed, it's got like kind of intense guardrails. I asked, you know, some questions about AI. It's like, well, as an AI, I can't exactly answer these questions, whereas ChatGPT would have just spit it out.
- [14:09]
Kara Swisher
Just so people know it's by Anthropic, which was a group of people who thought OpenAI was not safe enough and started Anthropic.
- [14:17]
Kylie Robison
Exactly.
- [14:18]
Kara Swisher
And it's backed by Amazon.
- [14:19]
Kylie Robison
Exactly, yes. And Google has a smaller cloud share for Anthropic, but yes. So Anthropic is a competitor to OpenAI. OpenAI has GPT4.O is their latest frontier model. They've also released a reasoning model called O1, but they consider that, for lack of a better word, kind of dumber than their frontier model. And Frontier models are basically the biggest, the best, you know, models that are out there. So frontier models are like the next one is like the next iPhone, basically. So I would say Claude is amazing. Claude, Opus is amazing. I think, I think the thing is they're all building the same thing with the same training data, which is the entire Internet. So they're going to continue just leapfrogging over each other. So it's hard to compare because it's, you know, five major companies with some of the best researchers in the world with all of the same training data, all building the same thing.
- [15:11]
Kara Swisher
Do you use Grok?
- [15:13]
Kylie Robison
Don't laugh. Do you use Groq?
- [15:17]
Kara Swisher
I've. I'm not getting in any of the new, whatever cyber taxis get. I'm not getting in and I'm not putting any information into any of his properties. I don't trust him personally.
- [15:26]
Kylie Robison
I used Grok when it first came out to. I think I made, you know, Kamala with a gun is, you know, the Verge put out a story because they have Grok for the listener is available on X, formerly Twitter, which is owned by Elon Musk and he owns xai, which created this chatbot and it has what it feels like, no guardrails. So you can make a lot of photos that, you know, break all sorts of copyright laws. No, I don't use Grok and I don't necessarily find it to be top of the line. If I were to rank models, they're not at the top.
- [16:02]
Scott Galloway
So I'll go back to my question. What's your favorite LLM?
- [16:05]
Kylie Robison
I would say Opus, Claude. It's really intelligent and incredible. I think it's enviable from other labs, what they've built.
- [16:14]
Scott Galloway
And then can you name some long tail LLM or AI apps that are sort of fun that people that maybe haven't gotten, gotten very much attention, that are kind of fun? Any sort of undiscovered gems out there?
- [16:26]
Kylie Robison
Undiscovered gems? I mean, if you go to hugging face, if you're into open Source. There are hundreds of thousands of open source LLMs that people can mess with. I mean, that's. That's the cool part about open source LLMs, which is a very hot debate. But, you know, developers are creating all sorts of cool shit with the open source LLMs available on hugging Face. So there's almost too many to choose from. But none of them are mainstream in the way because it costs so much money. Hence why OpenAI just raised the most money that anyone's ever raised, ever. It's a lot of money.
- [17:02]
Kara Swisher
Yeah. It's just for people that are hugging faces. An AI community where it's a platform where they collaborate and they do different things. And this will be very much like the early app days or the early Internet days where there was suddenly websites and things and then there was Yahoo that compiled them into yet another hierarchical, officious oratory.
- [17:20]
Scott Galloway
I have a follow up. I find that AI is very politically correct, that it will say, to answer this question, make sure that you check with law enforcement. Or.
- [17:31]
Kara Swisher
That's not politically correct.
- [17:33]
Scott Galloway
Oh, I find it very politically correct.
- [17:36]
Kara Swisher
Please don't steal from the jewelry store. All right.
- [17:39]
Scott Galloway
No, but it'll come back and say, while this might reflect bias or you should. I just find it's very. I'm looking for an AI that'll say that's a stupid fucking question. Or your question. I want it as a friend.
- [17:52]
Kara Swisher
He wants to shame AI. Shame AI.
- [17:56]
Kylie Robison
Makes sense.
- [17:56]
Scott Galloway
Hit me harder. Call me daddy, you bitch. Anyways.
- [18:00]
Kara Swisher
Oh, my God.
- [18:01]
Scott Galloway
No. But I do find it's very. That they've put it. They're so worried about it going weird places that it.
- [18:07]
Kara Swisher
It has gone weird places.
- [18:08]
Scott Galloway
It's constantly preconditioning and qualifying all its answers and being very gentle. And I find it's very overly sensitive and quite frankly, politically correct. So I'll start with Kylie. Do you find that to be the case or do you think that's just they're putting in appropriate guardrails?
- [18:22]
Kylie Robison
I think they're putting in their appropriate guardrails because it's so nascent. I mean, why start off crazy? Like, I feel like we can work our way up. I feel like we can work our way up to getting you a sadistic chatbot, but for now, it's so.
- [18:34]
Scott Galloway
Go on.
- [18:37]
Kylie Robison
It's just such a nascent technology. So I think being overly safe and correct and nervous about what it's going to output to millions of people, I think that's. I think that's a good move.
- [18:48]
Kara Swisher
Yeah, Scott, come on. I think that I'M going to answer something I know you want to please bitch AI, but one of the things that's really important is it doesn't sexually harass people. It doesn't like start.
- [18:59]
Scott Galloway
Okay, you're taking this to an even darker place than I would go.
- [19:02]
Kara Swisher
That is what I'm saying. It has, it's been. The original ones were racist.
- [19:06]
Scott Galloway
If you ask it a simple question, it'll start conditioning everything and telling you to check with this and make sure that you talk. And it's just sort of just give me the goddamn answer.
- [19:16]
Kara Swisher
I get that. But that's. They're never going to do that because they literally. The first time they put out some Microsoft stuff, it was racist. Right? It started to say racist things. So they really can't have. One of the things that I think I tell a lot of people is I met these two guys on the street yesterday and they were creating an AI. They just ran up to me. They love pivot. They're creating an AI that goes on. Speaking of odd, unusual things, that goes on top of 911 calls that they'll be selling into cities and it'll translate, say Spanish immediately because not every person, there's a delay there because the person who's taking the call is not Spanish and they have to go get a Spanish speaking dispatcher. And so it's doing all kinds of things that groxit and sends things out really quick. I thought it was great idea. I thought it was a really interesting use of AI And I said, but you know what? Something is, you can't make a mistake even if human dispatchers do. So I think they have to be unusually careful with all these things as this AI is shoving us around the planet. I don't know, I just feel like that's okay, you can take it, Scott. But I'm going to make. I'm going to get someone to make you a mean AI overlord or please bitch or something like that.
- [20:22]
Scott Galloway
I learned this morning from AI that a group of flamingos is called a flamboyance. That's true. And I love that. How awesome is that?
- [20:31]
Kara Swisher
That's also in the dictionary, a flamboyance. You're a flamboyance. Anyway, last question. We just sort of covered the idea of what things we should not use it for. It's going to be used for everything, just FYI. But any predictions? Last question on things AI can't do yet, but we'll be able to do for us in the next three years. Use your, you know, imagination hat here or things you're seeing or hearing, I.
- [20:52]
Kylie Robison
Think in the next three years. Again, these are so hard to tell because you need so much money and so much compute. So if we just continue on that exponential curve that these companies are hoping for, I see, you know, probably more accurate and natural voice interactions. That's something that they're building that they really want. You know, the her movie style reality. I do think that that will get better, especially as they release all of this to the public and people test it and they train on people using. I think those will naturally get better. Advanced code generation and debugging, that's something they're already really good at. And if these Reasoning models from OpenAI and others continue to get better, it's going to be better at coding and debugging, which will be really cool. And they're all building agents, which again are like little AI assistants. That's sort of the high stakes tasks that they want to access, hence why all these guardrails are so tough, because they want, they want these high stakes tasks like running your life and booking you flights and, you know, having access to all of this. So I do see them building out agents, but it would require so much compute and so much money to get there. So, you know, I'd be curious what you guys think, because I get asked all the time, like, is the bubble going to pop? Is OpenAI just going to crash? Which I think, you know, it's so hard for me to tell you guys have been doing this for so long.
- [22:11]
Kara Swisher
It will, but no, no, no, no. It's when, like when the Internet crashed. This is a big deal. This is a change in computing. It's yet another great change in computing. This is not crypto. This is not some of the little bubbles, a bubble, I guess, but it's directionally correct. It's directionally. And it's going to be huge and encompass everything. Scott?
- [22:31]
Scott Galloway
Well, there's two things. There's the valuation of these companies and then there's the real impact they have on the economy. I think the latter is just getting started. There's going to be a lot, what I would say in terms of valuations, there's just going to be a lot of volatility. We've talked about this. We think that relative to its size and leadership position, OpenAI, in my view is actually at 12 times revenues, is actually probably the best value because some of the long tail ones you talked about, who have almost no revenues and no real visible business model, yet still get 2, 10, 20, $50 billion valuations. So it's going to be a wild ride. I would describe it as late 90s Internet. We don't know if it's 97 or 99. No, but we know that by 2005 it's going to be much bigger than it is now. That's a long winded way, Kylie, of saying I have no idea.
- [23:23]
Kara Swisher
Yeah, he does. It's up and to the right eventually. Anyway, thank you Kylie. We really appreciate it. You can read Kylie on the Verge does amazing work on this topic and breaks a lot of stories. She's a scoopster. She's a scoopster and she's a great one at it. Anyway. Okay Scott, that's it for our AI Basics episode. Please read us out.
- [23:47]
Scott Galloway
Today's show was produced by Lara Naman, Zoe Marcus and Taylor Griffin. Ernie Inter Todd engineered this episode. Thanks also to Drew Burroughs and Mia Silverio. Nishat Karat is Vox Media's Executive producer of Audio. Make sure you subscribe to the show wherever you listen to the podcast. Thanks for listening to Pivot from New York Magazine and Vox Media. You can subscribe to the magazine@nymag.com pod we'll be back next week for another breakdown of all things tech and business.
- [24:20]
Kylie Robison
Food insecurity still affects millions of individuals around the globe, and Nestle, a global leader in nutrition, health and wellness, understands the importance of working together to create lasting change. Nestle's partnerships extend beyond just financial support, from building urban hoop houses to producing custom seasoning for food banks. Nestle and their partners actively engage with local communities, listening to their needs and working together to find innovative solutions. Nestle is committed to helping support thriving, resilient communities today and for generations to come. Together, we can help to build stronger, healthier communities. Learn more@nestle.com.