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- [00:01]
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- [00:34]
Victoria Craig
Welcome to Tech News briefing. It's Wednesday, March 19th. I'm Victoria Craig for the Wall Street Journal. Google's $32 billion bet leveraging cybersecurity to lure new customers to the cloud Our reporter in San Francisco explains why cloud security is so important for the tech titan Ben when we think of artificial intelligence, we often think of the ways it makes our lives easier. Chatbot casual conversationalist on a smart speaker. Problem solver. But students have learned to use it to cheat on their homework. We'll find out how educators and policymakers are thinking about how to stay one step ahead of the robots. But first, it's hard to imagine search engine giant Google lagging in any arena it competes. But the company is hoping a $32 billion deal to buy Wiz, one of the fastest growing startups of all time, will help bolster Google's standing in the world of cloud computing through Enhan cybersecurity. The Wall Street Journal's Berber Jin breaks down the strategy. So Berber, this deal is Google's biggest ever. It's more than double what it paid for Motorola mobility back in 2012, which means that cybersecurity for the cloud must be really important for Google. Why is that?
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Berber Jin
So I think we have to zoom back to the pandemic. You had a lot of businesses basically moving all of their data and operations onto the cloud. People were staying at home. We entered into a remote first, and a lot of companies, including Wiz, rode off the coattails of that change in the market. There are a lot of great cybersecurity companies, but Wiz really distinguished itself for building a cybersecurity tool that businesses could really easily use to protect their data stored in any cloud. So Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Oracle, what have you. Wiz works with all sorts of companies ranging from startups to large enterprises. They work with Morgan Stanley, Siemens, Slack, DocuSign, LVMH, and that's a really big market that venture capitalists have tried to tap into over the past few years. And where Wiz has been the clear Winner. Google's acquisition here is essentially a way for them to bring in house a very hot cybersecurity product. And you can imagine them integrating it into their own suite of cloud services. But it's also a way for them to capture the growth that Wiz is seeing, not just with Google Cloud, but with cloud providers in general. $32 billion is a lot of money, even for Google, and it's a way for them to try and capture this very rapidly growing market in cybersecurity.
- [03:18]
Victoria Craig
This whole deal process has really taken lots of twists and turns. Last July, Wiz's boss told employees that he was aiming to take the company public. What's changed?
- [03:28]
Berber Jin
There's a certain element of deal making where you can't show all your cards. But I think if you zoom out and you look at the sort of macro level environment, the IPO market is still largely shut for tech companies. We reported that Wiz was last valued at around $16 billion in an employee tender offer late last year. So that's effectively doubling Wiz's value in a matter of just a few months. And so I think if you're a founder, it's hard to say no to a price tag like that.
- [03:57]
Victoria Craig
There's still a big hurdle, though, to get to the end of this whole process. Google and Wiz obviously are on board with this deal, but the Federal Trade Commission has to sign off for that. And they have a new chief that has vowed to continue vigorous reviews on mergers and acquisitions. How likely is it that the FTC is going to sign off on this?
- [04:15]
Berber Jin
That is the $32 billion question at hand right now. Because after Trump took office, there was a lot of enthusiasm amongst investors that his administration would take a lighter touch on antitrust regulation. And that actually hasn't been the case. The new regulatory regime has signaled that they do want to take a close look and regulate big tech companies in particular. And they have taken a more expansive view on antitrust than I think some people may have expected just a few months ago. So it's really unclear whether they're going to ultimately approve it. If Wiz entered into a deal with Google, they have to be feeling optimistic because there is a very hefty breakup fee that Google has to pay Wiz if it doesn't go through. Either way, be a really important litmus test for whether or not M and A will really take off under the Trump administration. A lot of startup founders, bankers, venture capitalists, big tech companies, they're going to be looking very carefully at whether or not this deal is able to go through and how fast?
- [05:17]
Victoria Craig
That's WSJ's Berber Gin in San Francisco. Coming up Students are using AI to make homework assignments faster and easier, but their teachers don't approve. We'll dive into the messy world of tech in and out of the classroom after the break.
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Victoria Craig
Students finding ways to cheat on homework assignments is nothing new, but AI has allowed students to take that cheating to a whole new level. Platforms like OpenAI's ChatGPT make it tantalizingly easy for teens to type in a prompt and get back a whole essay with citations. OpenAI says of the 400 million people who use ChatGPT, each students are the most common users. But parents and educators are increasingly worried that this process short circuits the learning process and can stymie development of critical thinking skills. WSJ education reporter Matt Barnum has been looking into this trend. So Matt, we often talk about AI and all of the benefits that it provides us on a daily basis, making research easier, solving problems, giving us ideas for things. But when it comes to the classroom, as you've been finding out, AI has become fairly problem because it's now allowing students to basically outsource their homework.
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Matt Barnum
Tell us about that. So it depends on who you ask, because for students, they see it as a benefit to get away with not learning, to use it to cheat, essentially. I talked to one 17 year old high school student in New Jersey who described how she used AI to do a lot of her schoolwork last year. She used it to complete a math take home quiz, she used it on a science, she used it to write a tricky section of an essay. Of course, for harried students who are trying to pass all their classes, it's a great innovation. But it's an innovation in cheating. And for teachers and researchers and even some students themselves, they're worried that students are not learning.
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Victoria Craig
And I was surprised to learn just how prevalent AI is in the classrooms. How is this tech integrated more broadly throughout the education system?
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Matt Barnum
We don't have perfect data on how AI is being used in the classroom because we have a handful of surveys that are just self reports. And when you ask people, are you using it to cheat? You may not get perfectly honest answers. And I should say there are people, including teachers, who are using it for good reasons and who say, I'm using it to enhance my lesson plans and it's going great. But one survey that I found asked students who were using AI in some way, did you ever use it without teachers authorization or permission? About 40% of middle and high school students said they had used it to complete classroom assignments, assignments without teacher permission. And in college the number was a bit higher, about 50%.
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Victoria Craig
That's a staggering number. How are educators responding to students really testing those limits? Are they trying to put guardrails up to prevent students from bypassing learning?
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Matt Barnum
This depends a lot from teacher to teacher. There are some teachers who maybe are not aware of how prevalent it is and who maybe are not able to fully combat it. Other teachers I talk to say, you know what the best defense against AI is my common sense. Because if I see a student who is not doing well in class and then they come back the next day with a perfect essay or an essay that uses words that if I ask them what this word means, they have no idea what it means. That is a big red flag that they're using AI. And then there are also detection systems that exist that you can put in a text and say, was this AI generated? And it's pretty common that teachers are using that. These detection systems can help, but they're definitely not perfect.
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Victoria Craig
And it's also really throwing up a lot of big questions for teachers and Educators too. Right? Because the question also is, can I assign homework for students or do I need to make everything classroom based? How are teachers navigating that?
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Matt Barnum
I've talked to some teachers who say, look, I cannot trust anything that is outside the four walls of my classroom. So I'm not assigning essays, I'm not assigning homework. What I am doing is having students write in class, maybe by hand or maybe on a computer, but in a way that I know that I can monitor. They're not able to use AI at all, and I'm able to ensure the integrity of their work. And that's kind of an extreme solution, but more and more teachers are turning to that.
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Victoria Craig
What has OpenAI said about all of these concerns?
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Matt Barnum
OpenAI has generally said that cheating has always existed, it always will exist. And yes, their tool, ChatGPT may be a new tool to do cheating, but it's not like they invented cheating. They've also suggested that that teachers can get students to avoid using it to cheat by incorporating ChatGPT or AI in the classroom more generally. So students are more comfortable with it and know how they should use it and how they should not be using it.
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Victoria Craig
One of the biggest concerns seems to be that this isn't just like us using a calculator to solve a big math problem, for example. This is really students bypassing the entire learning process to learn things like critical thinking skills that they're going to need later in life. Is there a solution to that? Or is that something that the companies and educators and parents are really just trying to get to grips with?
- [11:51]
Matt Barnum
That speaks to the larger debate. There are people who say, no, this is just like the calculator, and we need to find ways to adapt our education system so students are able to use it and take advantage of it. And maybe the learning that they traditionally have done without AI is not as relevant as it used to be. And maybe it's okay if students use AI to generate essays. Now there are a lot of educators and some researchers I talk to who are very skeptical of that and who say, you know what, even if AI is great at generating essays, the process of writing is very helpful for student learning. There is this bigger question of, like, what AI means for education, what it means for the job market, and how, if at all, schools need to adapt.
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Victoria Craig
Because you don't want to disadvantage students from learning AI by taking it completely out of the class classroom.
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Matt Barnum
Right. And so if we do the calculator analogy, you could say, do you want the calculator to help first graders learn to add? Well, typically, we teach first graders to add without a calculator. And it would be very unusual to say, oh, don't worry about adding, here's the calculator. Just type the numbers in. But then the question for AI is, well, when does that happen if we think that AI is going to be very useful? Like, when do we start introducing AI to students? And you know where the line is. I think that's a really interesting question.
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Victoria Craig
That was WSJ education reporter Matt Barnum. And that's it for Tech News Briefing. Today's show was produced by Julie Chang and Jess Jupiter with supervising producer Matthew Walls. I'm Victoria Craig for the Wall Street Journal. We'll be back this afternoon with TNB Tech Minute. Thanks for listening.